The Office of Management and Budget on Wednesday issued guidance directing federal agencies to make workforce reductions in accordance with the White House’s budget blueprint and develop a plan to reform departmental activities in an attempt to right-size their hiring practices.
OMB Director Mick Mulvaney announced a day earlier that the government hiring freeze in place via executive order since January is being lifted in favor of “a more surgical plan” to reform the federal government and its civilian workforce.
Mulvaney’s Wednesday memorandum called for immediate action on workforce reductions and cost savings in line with the president’s fiscal 2018 budget outline and long-term reductions in the federal workforce for federal agencies as part of their fiscal 2019 budget submission. It directed the heads of federal agencies to submit an initial draft of an agency reform plan to this end by June 30, and to develop a plan to maximize employee performance by the same date. The final reform plan should be submitted in September, the memorandum said.”
Mulvaney said the White House expects, for example, the Department of Energy to change its hiring priorities in accordance with the offices and missions that Trump prioritized in his fiscal 2018 budget blueprint released last month.
The blueprint proposed an 11 percent funding increase to the National Nuclear Security Administration alongside a simultaneous 5.6 percent decrease to the Department of Energy overall. The NNSA’s nuclear weapons activities are expected to take much of that boost, while other DOE offices would be reduced to reflect “an increased reliance on the private sector to fund later-stage research, development, and commercialization of energy technologies,” according to the proposal. This indicates the NNSA may soon increase hiring of federal employees, while certain DOE offices cut staff.
Mulvaney noted, however, that funding and mission decisions rest largely on congressional authority. He pointed to the NNSA as an example, noting the agency was created in 2000 as a semiautonomous entity within the Department of Energy
“We may decide – and emphasis on ‘may’ – decide, look, does that really make sense anymore? We know why it happened in the ’40s and the ’50s, but today, would it make sense, maybe, to have that in the Department of Defense?” Mulvaney said. “That would take some type of congressional authority to do that. We’re not trying to ram it down their throats. We try and sell it to them just like we’re trying to sell it to everybody else.”
