The Pentagon has only partially complied with requirements that it better plan and document its workforce needs for both its own civilians and contractor support with an eye to reducing them, GAO has said.
The 2013 DoD authorization bill required DoD to achieve savings in civilian and contractor personnel costs over 2012-2017 at least as large in percentage terms as the savings in military basic pay resulting from reductions in military end strength over the same period—projected to be about 7 percent.
But GAO said, for example, that while DoD has reported on a plan to achieve savings by reducing those workforces, it has not described a process for carrying out such reductions. DoD has merely outlined reductions in in-house full-time equivalent (FTE) positions and did not outline savings in funding for the contractor workforce beyond fiscal year 2015, GAO said. “Without this information, Congress has limited assurance on how the department will achieve required savings and whether the savings will be achieved in a manner that is consistent with workforce-management laws,” it said.
Civilian FTEs by themselves “may not be reliable measures of the cost of the civilian workforce. For instance, GAO’s analysis shows that from fiscal years 2012 through 2016, civilian FTEs declined by 3.3 percent, but civilian personnel costs declined by only 0.9 percent adjusted for inflation. Because DoD’s focus has been on making and reporting on FTE reductions, DoD and Congress lack information on the extent to which the reductions will achieve savings, and DoD may risk falling short of the statutory requirement for cost savings in the civilian workforce,” it said.
In addition, DoD has projected an increase in 2016 spending on the contractor workforce that, if carried out, will mean that about half the reduction to contractor workforce spending that DoD has identified as its goal through fiscal 2017 remains to be achieved, it said.
