Fort McCoy civilian supervisors participate in the Army Civilian Education System training Jan. 16, 2025, at Fort McCoy, Wis. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. Image: Army Photo by Amanda Clark, Fort McCoy Multimedia-Visual Information Office
By: FEDweek StaffDoD has issued guidance on carrying out the civilian employment-related aspects a late-March directive on that calls for components to conduct a “comprehensive review” of their organizational structures and workforces to be submitted to Secretary Pete Hegseth by May 24.
“Every role must now meet a simple test: If this position didn’t exist today, and we were at war tomorrow, would we create it? If the answer is no, it should be consolidated, restructured, or eliminated,” it says, and roles that do not “enable lethality” should be “reclassified, outsourced, or removed,” says a memo from Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg, who is leading the initiative.
Other guiding principles, it says, include that:
* “We will consider consolidating duplicate functions, overlapping offices, and parallel authorities, and we will right-size manpower to accomplish the mission”;
* “We should eliminate excessive layers of supervision and middle management, empowering decision makers at every level”;
* “Civilian structures should support rapid deployment of capabilities, not delay them. We should eliminate unduly burdensome reviews and legacy coordination rituals that are misaligned with that vision”;
* “Civilian roles that cannot be directly tied to today’ s operational priorities should be consolidated or eliminated, without deference to legacy structures, historical jurisdictions, or institutional memory”;
* “We should modernize or eliminate manual workflows, paper-based processes, and outdated IT platforms and leverage automation and artificial intelligence to power the mission impact of our civilian workforce.”
It gives as examples downgrading or consolidating supervisory or managerial positions that involve oversight of few employees and consolidating offices that “produce separate strategies or policies on the same topic” or that exist “primarily to coordinate between other offices.”
Also, “If a non-research program office has not deployed a new and meaningful capability in the last five years, its functions should be absorbed or shut down,” and “All functions that are not inherently governmental ( e.g., retail sales and recreation) should be prioritized for privatization.”
The memo does not project the potential number of jobs to be cut, but earlier DoD had said it expects to cut between 5 and 8 percent of a workforce numbering about 900,000, including about 100,000 non-appropriated fund employees.
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