Union says past restrictions resulted in shifting work done by civilian federal employees onto active duty military personnel or contractors. Image: Frontpage/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe AFGE union has asked Congress to reject the potential imposition of hiring restrictions of civilian employees at DoD, saying “the problem with this approach is that actual waste is not being cut while cutting the civilian workforce will hollow out the Department’s capabilities, repeating mistakes from the past.”
A letter sent to leaders overseeing the DoD budget follows recent remarks from one of them Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., chair of the House appropriations subcommittee on defense, to achieve savings by reducing DoD civilian staffing by filling only a portion of positions that become vacant.
The letter comes about a week before the expected release of the Biden administration’s fiscal 2024 budget proposal, with Republican leaders in Congress planning to make restrictions on agency spending a key initiative on their part.
“Spending more money on weapon systems or force structure capabilities without the appropriate civilian support for sustainment harms readiness and lethality, increases stress on the force, and incurs additional opportunity costs, detracting from modernization,” said the AFGE. It said that past usage of that approach did not result in substantiated savings, but only resulted in shifting work done by civilian federal employees onto active duty military personnel or contractors.
It said that a recent study by the Defense Business Board found that the department already spends more on contracted services than it does for either military or civilian personnel but that defense budgets do not fully account for those costs even though they do show costs for the civilian workforce. That creates “massive incentives to under-execute civilian hiring projections and shift the funds to contract services,” it said.
Instead of “arbitrarily failing to backfill civilian positions,” it said, Congress and the department should have “full transparency over all requirements, including services contracts, unneeded weapon systems that the warfighters have rejected, and the inefficient use of military” personnel for work that could be done by civilian federal employees.
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