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 was 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.
“Agencies should develop an analytical framework that looks at the alignment of agency activities with the mission and role of the agency and the performance of individual functions. This framework should result in appropriate proposals in four categories: eliminate activities, restructure or merge, improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness, and workforce management,” according to the OMB document.
Mulvaney said Tuesday that the executive branch has discussed such issues with appropriators in Congress, “so they know this is coming.”
He 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. This would add $1.4 billion to the NNSA’s current $12.5 billion in funding, and drop DOE’s funding by $1.7 billion, to a total of $28 billion.
The NNSA’s nuclear weapons activities are expected to take much of the 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.
The administration’s full budget request for fiscal 2018 is expected next month; the budget year begins on Oct. 1.
Mulvaney acknowledged, though, 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.”
Mulvaney was likely referring to the debate in Congress after World War II about whether an atomic program should be under civilian or military control. The Army Corps of Engineers had established a federal research program in the early 1940s to produce the first atomic bomb; the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 then moved the program to civilian control by establishing the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
“The mission, organization, and authorities of NNSA are defined by Congressional statute, specifically the NNSA Act,” agency spokesman Gregory Wolf said by email. “Any change in the placement of NNSA within the Executive Branch would require Congressional approval, as the OMB director pointed out in his briefing.”
