It’s unclear whether a State Department effort to increase focus on emerging challenges, decrease bureaucratic inefficiencies, reduce top heavy management, and eliminate overlap among its nonproliferation, arms control, and verification and compliance bureaus has succeeded, GAO has said.
According to GAO-09-738, prepared for the Senate federal workforce subcommittee, State did not completely and clearly define the objectives of its reorganization and lacked metrics to assess them.
The department intended to reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies and top-heavy management and eliminate overlap by creating new offices and roles to address terrorism and counter-proliferation issues.
It also merged three bureaus having 30 offices and functions into two bureaus having 26 offices and functions and freed up staff slots for these new roles, but problems with workload mismatches persisted after the reorganization as State employees noted it left some offices overworked and some offices under-worked, according to GAO.
However, it said State is unable to demonstrate that it reduced top-heavy management because goals for that were not clear.
Although it reduced the number of senior executives from 27 to 20 and reduced office directorships, the overall number of higher-ranking employees increased from 91 to 100 and executive office staff increased from 44 to 50, said GAO, adding that concerns about mission overlap persist, in part because bureau roles remain undefined in the Foreign Affairs Manual.
The department agreed with recommendations to clarify the roles and responsibilities of the two new bureaus created in the 2005-2006 restructuring, as well as to incorporate key transformation practices and processes into subsequent bureau reorganizations.
