By Calvin Biesecker
Over the next three years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expects to make “substantial reductions” in its contractor workforce as it seeks to find the best mix of federal employees to perform inherently governmental work, a department official told a Senate panel yesterday.
DHS last year began its effort to in-source critical government work and more recently completed a pilot project that examined whether there were enough federal workers within its Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). The result of the pilot, which concluded at the end of April, was “OCIO identified 158 contractor work-year equivalents to be converted to federal positions in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 to ensure the department maintains control of its mission and operations,” Jeffrey Neal, chief Human Capital Officer at DHS, said in his prepared remarks to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management and the Federal Workforce.
Neal says that the CIO’s office has already more than doubled its federal workforce to more than 2000 full-time equivalent personnel.
The assessment of critical and core functions that could be converted to federal jobs is ongoing, Neal said. He said that the department’s Balanced Workforce Strategy is in its final review phase and that it has a three-part implementation plan.
First is establishing communications and management to institute the changes, Neal said. His office has already created a program management office to issue direction and guidance to DHS components as well as report on, and track, progress.
Second is ensuring that the processes to implement the changes are repeatable and that risk management principles are used in determining the balance of federal and contractor positions, Neal said.
Finally, reporting and measuring progress toward achieving the goals must become part of the plan, he said.
In March the White House Office of Management and Budget, Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP), published a policy letter to begin the process of clarifying the functions that must be carried out by federal employees and when certain work can be performed by either federal employees or contractors. Public comments on the policy letter are due by the end of this month.
The policy letter establishes a single definition for inherently governmental work and includes long-standing examples of common inherent functions such as determining agency policy and the awarding of contracts.
Many federal workers believe the contractors are much closer to the policy and decision making processes in their organizations than was the case 15 years ago, Daniel Gordon, the OFPP administrator, told the panel. He said the roles of contractors in the federal workplace is “dramatically different” than it was 15 years ago.
Efforts to inventory the contractor workforce are underway, which will help departments and agencies better understand the current mix of employees, Gordon said.
Without contractors, many agencies currently don’t have the capacity in their federal workforces to adequately get work done. Neal said that having enough federal employees to do the planning for implementing the Balance Workforce Strategy will be a challenge. He noted that only a few years ago the DHS procurement staff was reduced as part of the reliance on contractors, creating an inertia that will be difficult to reverse. He also said that managing the drawdown of contractors and ramp up of federal employees will be a difficult balancing act.