US Pentagon, Arlington VA: A House committee faulted 'legacy business practices and manpower assumptions' and said use of automation and AI in workforce planning were lacking, especially for civilians. Image: Vacclav/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe Defense Department “must optimize its civilian workforce to meet current and future threats in a fiscally prudent manner,” says a report on a spending bill now ready for a House vote that would provide less than the amount requested for their salaries and would require a review with an eye to “manpower savings.”
“The Committee notes its frustration with the Department’s adherence to legacy business practices and manpower assumptions, particularly with respect to its civilian workforce. While in many cases the civilian workforce provides invaluable contributions to the warfighter, the Department must optimize its workforce by adopting emerging technologies and becoming fiscally sustainable or risk a misalignment of resources to execute the National Defense Strategy,” says the Armed Services Committee report on the bill (HR-4365).
“Capabilities such as automation, artificial intelligence, and other novel business practices—which are readily adopted by the private sector—are often ignored or underutilized across the Department’s business operations,” it says.
Like a separate DoD authorization bill also ready for full House voting (HR-2670) the measure would cut $1.1 billion from the civilian salary account request for DoD, whose roughly 750,000 constitute about a third of federal employees outside the self-funding USPS. However, it would “exclude civilian positions supporting shipyard, depot, health care, and sexual assault and response duties from any reductions.”
It further would order the Pentagon to assess its “total force manpower resources against core missions” and to produce a plan “with specific goals and metrics for measuring the adoption of technologies, such as automation and artificial intelligence, and business process improvements across the Department.” That would have to include a timeline for implementation, “a forecast of manpower savings” and a request for any new authorities needed.
Such information would have to be presented annually in budget requests, along with a “comprehensive budget exhibit outlining the costs of civilian pay to the Department.”
In dissenting comments, Democrats on the committee said that “We believe this is a misguided effort to cut costs in the Department. Unfortunately, past attempts to achieve the same goals have been unable to show any savings and merely shift the work to others—such as military personnel or expensive contractors.”
The bill meanwhile would allow for a return of the type of comparisons of costs of federal jobs with contractor bids that has been blocked by annual appropriations bills for more than a decade. The separate authorization bill further would drop long-standing language barring management of DoD civilian positions by personnel ceilings.
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