Slashing Manpower: The Wrong Place to Start in Government Reform

Efficiency in the Federal Government is a hot topic since the Election.  Without weighing in on politics, I do have a concern that I think we need to keep in mind.

Especially those of the “doing more with less” philosophy that I’ve heard for my entire career in Acquisition. Maybe we should be “doing less with less”?

Hear me out, and maybe we can find a better way to approach this.

One I have, in fact, been advocating for since the last century and, if you read my content often, will sound familiar to you.

A few former colleagues have said recently that the answer to “efficiency” is simply to cut the workforce. Drastically. That only the most important work will be done if there aren’t enough people to do all the things. That only the best and brightest will step up and find innovative ways to get the work done. That it’s a very simple problem to solve.

The Reality of Burnout and Overload

Now, I don’t have a dog in this fight anymore.  I don’t depend on a DoD salary to keep the lights on, and I intentionally don’t answer to any contractor employer or board of directors.  I don’t have a conflict of interest in what I discuss here, but I do have decades of experience and observation in innovation and efficiency.  And burnout. Loads of burnout and recuperation and burnout. And then warning current Govvies in my network about burnout.

Those assumptions about drastically cutting the workforce sure sound a lot better if you haven’t lived it.

I do hear those assumptions more from my engineer and program manager friends because when their staffing was cut about 30 years ago and many times since, they could fill those gaps with SETA contractors and FFRDCs.

Those of us in Contracting?  Not so much.   Especially those of us who were warranted Contracting Officers buying the next generation of weapon systems, bleeding-edge technologies, and quick-turns for the guys on the front lines and behind them. Given our legal function, our particular workload was “inherently Governmental,” which meant we couldn’t subcontract out the work or have a different pot of money pay for other someones to do the work when our personnel positions went away through attrition and RIFs.

We in Contracting did without people.

It hurt.  It hurt a lot.

Physically, personally, mental health-wise. Family-wise. I can’t tell you how many vacations my ex-husband went on without me because after a year of planning, I was denied leave or guilted into not taking a whole week off, even with three weeks of promised comp time I would never be allowed to take.   I rocked babies to sleep at night with notebook in hand to finish work I’d had to bring home.  I was asked to forgo my beloved grandfather’s funeral because I was needed in the office.   I was told I should get my priorities straight when I rushed to sit with my dad in ICU. I was verbally reprimanded for not being able to fly to headquarters with my program manager after I’d spent the evening in the emergency room and the doctor warned me that I’d miscarry if I didn’t stop working 8-hour days in source selection with another 8 hours handling my regular workload at night—and absolutely NO flying. Although I was supposed to be working only 40 hours a week, I constantly had to set boundaries because I was expected to take on the workload of those who had left or been cut.

I’ve been “double-hatted” (carrying 2 full workloads) and I’ve been “triple-hatted” (carrying 3 or more full workloads) for years at a time.  I’ve been given a minimum weekly workload of 120 hours of GS-14 work—for 4 years—and assured that everyone understood that I couldn’t work that many hours and no one expected me to do all 3 jobs perfectly until they could fill those vacancies…until something fell through the cracks after months of 80-hour work weeks, and then, THEN I was slammed for not being superhuman.

Don’t tell me how innovative people will step up and get it all done anyway.  Innovative people are tired!

So yes, not having enough personnel to do the job hurt.  You would know more about how much it hurt had so many of us not absorbed that hurt ourselves to keep our warfighters from feeling it.

Workload Increases, Processes Multiply, and Expertise Erodes

Keep this in mind: As the staffing count decreased, the workload never went down; the processes rarely went down, seldom enough that I can count them on one hand—with only 2 fingers.

I would have loved to have left the Government then, but I had a mortgage and I didn’t have many choices. Meanwhile, more of my coworkers abandoned ship, and their work got divvied up among those of us who didn’t have options. Lest you think I was lazy, slow, or didn’t carry enough work to keep me gainfully employed, no.  Most of my program managers and customers alike were exceedingly happy to have me on their team.

As far I as could tell, this level of pain was unique to Contracting and Legal organizations in the Government because of the nature of our expertise and the nature of our responsibility to negotiate on behalf of the Government and sign binding contracts. My program managers had a lot more room to make up the difference in personnel cuts. They more easily hired co-located contractors to do the work when they lost personnel slots or weren’t allowed to fill vacancies after attrition.  Sometimes the Government folks jumped to a SETA contractor’s payroll, which was increasingly more lucrative between 1995 and 2005, while doing the same work; they were less lucrative and more problematic between 2005 and 2015 when those manpower support contracts were selected using Lowest Price Technically Acceptable competitions that lost some of the best and brightest who, again, had options to move or work elsewhere rather than take pay cuts.

Ever wonder why we have so many contractors doing butts-in-seat work instead of Government employees? I remember it well.  It’s been around 25 to 30 years ago that the politicians du jour bragged about cutting the Government workforce. I don’t even remember which politicians now, but that also meant cutting the organic expertise, so the expertise had to come from somewhere.   I was in Program Offices that had the same number of people as the previous years, but now significant chunks of manpower came from prior Govvies with contractor badges, sitting at their old desks, doing very, very similar work. But yay, we cut the size of the Government while shifting to a different pot of money.

Over the years, we lost a lot of the long-time expertise and the continuity needed for some of the larger programs, so eventually the best place to find that expertise wasn’t in the Government but with contractors who could recruit and retain it, including prior military on that program.  It was such a shift that we had to change from not allowing SETA employees to have access to anything in a source selection to not having the expertise to evaluate proposals and being forced to bring in SETA employees as “advisors” rather than “evaluators” who signed off on whatever evaluation the advisor prepared but couldn’t legally sign off on as a representative of the Government.

Does that make your head hurt?  Me, too. I had an expert support guy who used to send his evaluations (advisories?)  to an inexperienced second lieutenant who wrote “Concur” on the email he forwarded to me.  All of us rolled our eyes every time we had to do this, but we were following the rules that would have dunked us otherwise. We’d lost our expertise within the Government, and—bless my lieutenant’s heart—this is where we ended up so we could get stuff done.

But these are the kinds of things that happen when you slash manpower. Not the next day.  Maybe not the next month.  But it’s just a matter of time, and I’ve seen it in multiple organizations where the after-effects were not fully considered.

Cutting manpower is the wrong place to start, in my opinion.  There’s a better place to start.

As someone who’s suffered through increased workload, decreased personnel, and both at the same time, I realize the problems that are coming when you try to force efficiency by starting with cutting personnel slots but not considering the work or the processes to accomplish that work.  I had many years were personnel slots around me were cut 10% every year.  The work never went down 10%. If it went up 10%, I was thrilled it wasn’t more.  I had several years where the personnel losses were 40 to 45%, the workload increased by 40 to 45%, and one year where both happened.

Guess what didn’t happen?  The processes weren’t reduced. At all.  If anything, the processes seemed to double down on those of us left behind. Someone suggested more processes were needed to make sure those of us who were overworked didn’t make any mistakes.

Guess what did happen?  The policies and added reviews and “vector checks” went waaaaay up. You know, to keep us from making mistakes.

And every day—every day—we were told to do more with less.  Work smarter.  And we didn’t really have the option to ignore some added policy or “guidance” without suffering the consequences. Trust me on that. Renegades are not usually rewarded with promotions, bonuses, plum assignments.

Anyone remember sequestration back in 2013?  I was already working 70+ hours a week.  Yes, yes, I know.  I was in all sorts of violations working more than 40 hours a week, but it was the only way I could get everything done that needed to be done to support my warfighters.  It was interesting to be forced to work only 32 hours a week with the same workload—and super stressful because I couldn’t defy time and physics enough to fit the highest priorities in my workload into so few hours and neither time travel nor cloning were available courses of action for me. And in the midst of all that stress, we were getting demands for reports on our work and how sequestration affected us while taking care of my customers and still doing all the infinite laws, regulations, and policies.   I distinctly remember one of the civilian bosses showing up at my office door when I was frantic to get something wrapped up for a SOCOM customer before I turned into a pumpkin, and asking me why I was late with my report.

“Yeah, not happening,” I told him.  “We’ve been told to divest of everything but the most important stuff and I can’t get that done in 32 hours, so I’m not going to expend effort on a report that won’t change anything. And oops, look at the time!  No choice! Bye!”

I’m pretty sure he wrote the report for me, but I didn’t. He stopped coming around after that. I’m easy-going until you’ve pushed me too far, so…wise move.

Did only my most important work get done?  Yes.  Because I had an attitude no one wanted to deal with, probably, and railed against all the stupid stuff we had to put up with while just trying to do our jobs. And my bosses liked me enough not to fire me or bury me for pushing back. Or maybe they were just scared I’d call in sick until sequestration was done and didn’t want to chance it.

Did all my most important work get done?  Not on your life.

But I also didn’t get a reprieve.

Nobody cut any of the policies I had to live by or any of the processes.

I was still required to do all the things.

If you start trying to be more efficient by cutting the workforce, and still require those left to do all the things—all the processes, all the policies, all the paperwork—then this is never going to end well.   Best case, you burn out the employees who are left or the best ones leave because they have other options.

If you start by cutting the work (weapon systems, for example), then the workforce, that may be more efficient for large-scale cuts, but you may also end up behind your peers and near-peers.  Can the U.S. take that risk? Which weapons programs will you cut out?  If you cut programs, then yes, you should be able to reduce the workforce, but they may also need to be shifted to different programs just starting up or ones that need to be accelerated.

You can’t keep increasing workload and processes/policies and reducing the number of people carrying the workload and processes/policies without the machine breaking down. And then does efficiency and effectiveness align at all?  Are you efficient in no longer having a workforce or a larger workforce but not being able to get any work done?

A Better Approach to Efficiency

Here’s where I’d start, as someone who’s seen this play out a few times over the last three decades:

Are you keeping the work? As in the programs, whether weapons systems, new technology, services, IT? If you’re cutting entire programs, then those employees can likely shift elsewhere or be RIF’d (Reduction in Force). Of course, you still need to consider whether those programs are being replaced, realigned, combined, or deleted entirely. Once you know that, you can move on to the next step, cutting processes and policies.

Cut unnecessary processes and policies first, then realign personnel slots to the work to be done and actually treat employees like they have brains to make good decisions about the work they do, based on their expertise and experience with that work.  Stop squashing them with more oppressive processes. Turn them loose to do good work. Most of them can handle that just fine and don’t need forty layers of oversight.

But how do you know what processes and policies (or regs or statutes) to get rid of to be more efficient?

One of the few times (counting on those 2 fingers now) that I did see unimportant, inefficient processes cut was around 2002. Our Weapons PEO, General Chedister –ChedBob, if you remember him—told all his Program Offices to give him a list of 15? 50? things each that we could divest of.  Most of them were…duplicate reports?  Things like that.   I vaguely recall that some were big and time-consuming.

Here’s the funny part:  I can’t tell you what we cut. Not specifically.  We must’ve given him thousands of ideas, many of them duplicates, of where to cut the things that didn’t matter but took up our time or expanded our workload when it didn’t need to. I was in the Acquisition Center of Excellence at the time, and a year later, several of us were straining to remember anything we put on the divestiture list.  If anything tells you that you made the right choice to cut something that’s inefficient, it’s not being able to remember what was cut because you haven’t needed it in a year or ten or twenty.

So it can be done.  You may be able to cut unnecessary processes at lower levels without many people noticing, but scaling that kind of cut has to come from someone with the authority to divest and the willingness to change policy, regulation, and even statutes to have that kind of win.

What if we had a list of potential divestitures?  Recommended by people in the trenches, at mid-level management, and at upper leadership?  Why can’t we start there?  Is anyone doing that?   If we lessen the process burden while still staying legal and ethical, then we don’t need as many workhours to get the job done.

If you plan for efficiency poorly, if you execute a plan for efficiency poorly, then is the result really efficiency?  Are we just repeating how we moved from Government employees to SETA contractors?

If you can’t cut unnecessary processes first, cutting workforce isn’t even a temporary solution—it’s just kicking the can down the road and having no idea how much clean-up will be necessary after you’ve gone on to new adventures.

Once again, my suggested order: 1. Cutting/realigning the programs/systems; 2. Cutting the processes, policies, and, if needed, the regs and statutes; and 3. Cutting/realigning the workforce. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be, and don’t leave a mess for others to clean up. Review past hiccups where the same was attempted, and then think ahead.