Members of the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Incident Management Team (IMT) facilitated delivery of emergency life-saving blood products and medications. HHS currently has deployed over 45 emergency responders to support the public health and medical response for Guam, in May 2023. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. Image: Photo by (ASPR) Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response
The GAO has called on HHS to improve the personnel planning for an office involved in emergency response, noting that it placed HHS’s leadership and coordination of public health emergencies on its high-risk list in 2022 in part because of that issue.
GAO noted that staffing at the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response nearly doubled to about 2,000 over 2019-2022 during the pandemic but that most of that growth was in contractor employees, not in-house employees. The ASPR is “developing an in-house hiring office with the aim of improving its hiring capabilities” that it expects to be fully operational by October 2025, focusing on hiring costs, time-to-hire, service quality, and unique workforce needs, the report said.
“However, ASPR does not have specific goals and performance measures to use for the office, once operational, to help ensure these areas of concern will be addressed,” it said. For example, it said that no specific goals have been set for time-to-hire or how the office “will improve on the status quo”; and while the office plans to beef up its HR staff, “it does not have tailored recruitment and hiring strategies that account for government-wide shortages of these staff.”
Also, the ASPR “has not identified critical areas in the agency that need workforce assessments nor developed a plan to conduct them. It also has not conducted an agency-wide workforce assessment to prioritize the skills and competencies of greatest need to achieve the agency’s goals and mission,” it said.
The GAO said HHS agreed with recommendations regarding workforce assessments and neither agreed nor disagreed with recommendations regarding goal setting for hiring.
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