Hegseth’s memo follows by days one in which DoD set policies on consolidating and eliminating offices and civilian jobs. Image: Kishore Newton/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffA memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on reducing the department’s spending on contracts stresses using the department’s own employees instead—so-called “contracting in.”
The memo lists several contracts recently terminated including ones with the Defense Health Agency for consulting services “that can be performed by our civilian workforce”; one with the Air Force for cloud IT procurement “which we can already fulfill directly with existing procurement resources”; and a DARPA contract for IT helpdesk services “that are duplicative with service capabilities of our existing DISA workforce.”
“These contracts represent non-essential spending on third party consultants to perform services more efficiently performed by the highly skilled members of our DoD workforce using existing resources,” it says. Those and other contracts canceled since the outset of the Trump administration amount to a $5.1 billion savings, it says.
The memo further directs a 30-day review for how the department can “in-source IT consulting and management services to our civilian workforce.”
Federal unions long have advocated for agencies to examine whether work performed by contractors could be done more efficiently and at less cost by federal employees—the opposite of “contracting-out” in which agencies study in-house costs for comparison against private sector bidders.
Hegseth’s memo follows by days one in which DoD set policies on consolidating and eliminating offices and civilian jobs under a directive telling components to conduct a review of their organizational structures and workforces.
Among numerous other provisions, that guidance says that “all functions that are not inherently governmental ( e.g., retail sales and recreation) should be prioritized for privatization.”
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