With the downsizing of the Department of Defense (DOD) civilian workforce now all but certain, last week the GAO released new congressional testimony to the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Readiness on previous efforts to reduce the workforce and what they can learn from the experience. In the testimony, the GAO examined DOD civilian workforce reviews between March 1992 and June 2012.

The Department of Defense’s last major downsizing of its civilian workforce took place in the 1990s and in its testimony, the GAO reports that the Defense Department made three significant stumbles during that process. First, the DOD’s downsizing efforts “were hampered by incomplete data and the lack of a clear strategy for avoiding the adverse effects of downsizing and minimizing skills imbalances.” These data limitations have included missing or inconsistent information on workload, workers, and the extent of projected force reductions.

Second, previous DOD downsizing efforts have sometimes come with unintended consequences for the workforce’s skillset. For example, the DOD’s previous attempts to reduce their workforce relied heavily on voluntary attrition and various retirement inducements to shrink the number of their civilian employees. The result was significant skills imbalances when employees who elected to leave the organization did not have the skills that the DOD had in excess. In contrast, DOD effort to downsize it’s uniformed workforce maintained an active policy of attempting to “achieve and maintain a degree of balance between its accessions and losses in order to “shape” its uniformed forces in terms of rank, years of service, and specialties.”

Finally, calculating the savings from downsizing efforts is a difficult process. While there are savings from maintaining a smaller payroll, in most cases those workforce reductions efforts — whether through early retirement or termination — did come with real costs.

However, there is hope for future downsizing efforts. “In the past” the testimony notes “the federal government has often acted as if people were costs to be cut rather than assets to be valued. In order to not fall into that trap again, the GAO testimony encouraged the DOD to downsize strategically so as to maintain a proper balance of skillsets in its civilian workforce.

 

Mike Jones is a researcher, writer, and analyst on national and international security. He lives in the DC area.

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Mike Jones is a researcher, writer, and analyst on national and international security. He lives in the DC area.