Among the themes of the newly issued President’s Management Agenda is an emphasis on making the federal workforce more “agile” to meet changing needs, saying for example that under current practices it “is extremely difficult to shift employees across jobs and agencies to match skillsets with need in a responsive manner.”
It says that agencies “must critically examine their workforces to determine what jobs they need to accomplish their core missions”–the type of language that federal employee organizations commonly consider as meaning downsizing. However, the management agenda does not set job reduction as a goal–although it does say that planned steps such as consolidating and sharing of common services among agencies would result in “eliminating redundant positions.”
The document puts greater stress on retraining employees and building “agile organizations and processes to quickly respond and align to changing mission needs, innovations, and technological advancements.”
It says agencies will be required “to look at operations through a different lens – one that stresses the importance of recognizing key mission requirements, and aligning the workforce to meet those needs. This requires identifying opportunities to more efficiently use the people we have, through reskilling and redeployment efforts, and matching employees to important and meaningful work,” it adds.
