Six months ago the Defense Information Systems Agency embarked on its second reorganization in about five years, now the organization in charge of the Defense Department’s IT says it’s seeing results.

“It’s been largely positive, the workforce for one has embraced the change,” Christopher Barnhurst, DISA deputy director, told Federal News Network. “I think we see a renewed emphasis on innovation. Our chief technology officer, Steve Wallace, is more heavily engaged, in various development efforts and defining the ‘to-be’ architecture state for the agency. We also have seen some of that flattening of the organization that we’re striving for where we’ve got a new leadership team in place.”

DISA announced its reorganization last October with an effort of aligning strategy, resources, structure and design around the same priorities from 2022 to 2024.

Those include prioritizing command and control, driving readiness through innovation, leveraging data as a center of gravity, harmonizing cybersecurity and user experience and empowering the workforce.

“We face a great global power competition, a changing cyber landscape with increasing risks and threats from state and non-state actors that together create an imperative for DISA to accelerate our efforts to connect and protect the warfighter in cyberspace,” DISA Director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner wrote in the plan. “This strategic plan focuses our efforts toward a shared transparency of understanding so that we can achieve the velocity of action needed to win.”

Barnhurst said DISA is seeing early returns from the changes.

“I personally lead what we call a set of a mission analysis groups,” he said. “There’s five different stakeholder groups that we’ve defined across the agency. They may be our culture- and trust-type organizations, they may be our field commands, our senior leadership team. We define these different groups. I meet with them periodically.”

Those groups keep leaders updated on what the workforce is thinking and what needs to be tweaked.

DISA also tried to cut back the bureaucracy within the agency in trying to balance what is too slow and where the organization wasn’t communicating and where things were too loose.

Barnhurst said the changes are helping to enable things like DevSecOps and zero trust.

“I’ve challenged all of our mid- to senior-level managers, those below the executive level, to think about culture and communication within their teams, and to foster an environment where change is accepted and expected,” he said. “We need to be constantly innovating and moving forward. That’s been a central theme of the agency. When it comes to new development efforts, one of the first questions the leadership’s going to ask is, ‘Are we using agile development methodologies?’ And if not, there has to be a real, real good reason why not for us to buy into that.”

To help with that the agency increased the number of main centers it has from two to four. One center focuses on security and enterprise. Another focuses on innovation. One drills in on infrastructure and operations  and the final looks at cloud.

“Early returns are positive. But that’s something that Lt. Gen. Skinner and I certainly check in on,” Barnhurst said. “We ask if we need to make tweaks, we view it very much as a continuous improvement type effort.”

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The federal government is so big, it’s hard to get your arms around it. But the Deloitte Center for Government Insights has given it a try. Its latest “government trends for 2022” observations are definitely worth reading.  Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked to Bill Eggers, the center’s executive director.

Interview transcript:

Bill Eggers: It’s great to be back with you again, Tom.

Tom Temin: And before we get into some of the observations that Deloitte has made here, just briefly, give us the methodology by which you arrive at what do you consider the top trends for the government?

Bill Eggers: Sure, and this is our third edition of our annual government trends report where we focus on what are the most transformative trends in government that we’re seeing all over the world. And it’s a kind of a massive research process that usually starts about nine, 10 months before the report comes out. And we crowdsource from colleagues all over the world, in terms of what are the big things that they’re seeing in their jurisdictions. And we also do interviews with dozens of different government officials. And this year, we teamed up with Apolitical, which is an organization of over 150,000, government officials from all over the world, a lot of senior government executives, and then we take all of that which often times will be over 100 different trends, and we consolidated into what we see as the 10 most transformative ones of the year. And this year, we grouped them under three themes, building resilience, where we’re focusing on long term resiliency to future shocks, connected for greater value, which really looks at the overhaul and integration of structures, systems, data sharing, to drive greater impact. And then lastly, government for all the people; making programs and services truly equitable and inclusive. So the trends are grouped into those three major categories.

Tom Temin: Alright, and would you say that looking at this, especially in the resilience area, that the pandemic has exerted, what you might call permanent gravitational force on the way governments operate and the way they think about things?

Bill Eggers: Oh, absolutely. And some of our two last trends reports really focused on that, which was all of the acceleration of everything digital, government and the use of AI and customer experience, and cloud, and so on. For government, of course, hybrid workplaces, and a lot of that being very permanent. So it really catapulted us into the future of government in a way that, you know, I’ve been doing this for over three decades, I hadn’t seen that sort of progress made so quickly any other time.

Tom Temin: And in some ways, the different buckets that you mentioned, are interrelated, because we had a lot of resilience in the way Congress and agencies could react over the couple of years of the pandemic. Sudden, new programs popping up for all sorts of things. But the connection for value may not quite have been in place for some of those given what we’re finding now about fraud, waste, abuse, improper spending, and the oversight of those in the U.S. government’s case, trillions of dollars.

Bill Eggers: Yeah, and I think that one of the big, broad themes we see across all these areas in the trends is this real big focus on public-private integration, and the fact that so much of what government does, right now, it does through partners, it does through NGOs, private companies, state and local governments, and so on and so forth. And that really rising in importance in terms of doing it well, and so much of COVID, of course, was that sort of integration and working across sectors. So that’s another theme that goes across all of the trends and major themes. And it really highlights the importance of government, really focusing on that as a core capability right now for senior government officials.

Tom Temin: All right, I wanted to delve into a few of the areas that look into well, they all look interesting, but a few that we can have time for today. One is reshoring. And friend shoring supply chains. Now, the government in the United States, and I guess this is the true of most normal, democratic type of open governments tend to source in country as much as possible to begin with. So tell us more about reshoring and friend shoring supply chains.

Bill Eggers: Yeah, and reshoring and friend shoring goes well beyond what government is purchasing. So looking at the overall supply chain in our country and other countries, and of course, we’ve all seen during COVID and then certainly now of these external shocks, which had created some real issues in terms of the supply chain. And so in response, governments are encouraging reshoring which is boosting domestic production capabilities, especially in really essential sectors, such as semiconductors through a mix of policies, incentives and orders, but reshoring, while popular, has a lot of limitations. Some supply chains simply can’t be fully reshored because the critical resources may exist globally in only one or two locations. And also the cost of replicating some of these supply chains domestically is likely to be larger than the entire global industry might be worth. An example is semiconductor manufacturing where of course there was a bill before Congress to invest in this. But establishing fully domestic semiconductor manufacturing supply chains in the US could cost up to a trillion dollars, which is more than double the value of the entire semiconductor market. So policymakers are increasingly looking to pair reshoring with friend shoring, which is a network of trusted suppliers from friendly countries that offer multiple independent supply pass. So friend shoring offers a clear path to improving both resilience of key industries while also supporting important international relationships with friendly countries like Australia, Canada, the UK and so on.

Tom Temin: Yeah, too bad. We can’t drag Taiwan, the whole island and move it in between New Zealand and Australia. But for the time being, that’s a good friend shoring supply. We’re speaking with Bill Eggers. He is the executive director of the Deloitte Center for Government Insights. And linked-up government because there is statutory again in the United States, and I imagine elsewhere, statutory mandates to link up government through the DATA Act and different laws to try to assimilate and make sense of all of the information the government has.

Bill Eggers: Well, you know, the notion of linked-up government, or sometimes called joined-up government, originally out of the Blair administration in the UK, is simply around trying to arrange agency structures around problems rather than simply departmental boundaries, and allows governments to better respond to complex societal challenges. And of course, as you mentioned, data sharing plays a crucial role in the silo hacking effort by becoming a really connected thread between agencies. And when you look at a lot of the daunting challenges our society is facing, from unemployment, to climate change, poverty, public health, homelessness, no single agency can address these alone. So the solution really does lie in collaborating across governmental departments and linking up through these joint efforts across multiple levels of government that have common missions and programs. And from a federal perspective, you know, a big example of this is the movement where around having more life event- based service delivery. Right now, which was part of the CX executive order and saying that there are certain life events that people have that require going through a lot of government hoops. And if you can link them up and make that much easier, you can really improve people’s lives, make them easier. And that’s everything from birth to early childhood development, to death, to starting a business, to retirement, and so on. So I see that as a really crucial thing, it’s really hard to do well across multiple levels of government that, but that’s what it requires. And we see that as one of the biggest trends right now in digital government is that focus on life events, which Singapore originally came up with that idea about 20 years ago, Tom, all the way back in the dotcom era. And we’re finally now seeing over the last few years, a lot of traction all over the world in that space.

Tom Temin: And that relates, in some sense to the ‘no wrong front door’ idea that is in the CX of the US government trend right now.

Bill Eggers: Yeah. And it goes even more saying when you have a death in the family, it’s very, very traumatic, obviously, but it can also take a lot of time to navigate through all the government agencies, and how do you do that in a way where that navigation becomes very easy. And you offer up that information once and it’s been shared to a lot of other government agencies. The UK, Singapore, and a number of countries have done a really good job of taking all of those different transactions and putting them into one life event.

Tom Temin: Sure, maybe someday we’ll have a digital death certificate that would make families lives a lot easier. And government is catalyst for innovation. We’ve seen this deeply in the defense sector, as a nation seeks to regain the strategic edge and so forth, but also an energy, and a lot of other domains that agencies are in to try to jumpstart these new areas, almost like back in the 1950s. A return to.

Bill Eggers: Well, I mean, if you think about some of our government’s greatest achievements over the decades, it’s been through playing this catalyst role rather than attempting to do all the heavy lifting on some. Think about DARPA and the internet. Think about GPS. Even going back, as you mentioned, the 1950s the emergence of the nuclear industry was heavily facilitated by the Department of Energy and a variety of funding things and regulatory things that they put in place. And what we’re seeing now is this notion of government serving as catalysts, assembling, and enabling multi-sector efforts to cope with the flood of COVID cases and create vaccines was a really good example of that. And so we’re seeing this movement for government playing a catalytic role in innovation move past simply Department of Defense, Department of Energy to many other areas. NASA is a great example of doing this. They have people who are focused on looking at some of the most important critical technologies that NASA needs and to what extent then NASA can catalyze and help the development of those technologies. And NASA also uses its procurements to help scale and sustain companies that can help them deliver on their mission through their SBIR, their small business innovation research program, and a number of other areas. So we see this government as a catalyst role being really, really important. It’s also important as more and more innovation happens in the private sector with so much even basic r&d now being done outside of government grants, that it’s increasingly important for government to be able to spin in innovation from the private sector, which is a big part of what the Defense Innovation Board, of course, is all about.

Tom Temin: Alright. And then the final one I wanted to ask you about is reimagining social care. Pretty soon it’s going to be a century of Social Security, if the solvency can hold up that long, and we’re just on the doorstep of that landmark and Deloitte is talking about reimagining social care as a major trend.

Bill Eggers: Yeah, we’ve put out several studies recently looking all over the world that some of the biggest developments we see right now around social care, the pandemic put enormous pressure on social care systems, from unemployment insurance to mental health. And it’s really compelled governments to re examine how they provide equitable, seamless and effective social care services. And so they’re looking at doing a variety of different things, embracing much more integrated care, holistic, all-in-one supports around this. We’re also seeing a big movement to eliminate what Cass Sunstein is called the “”sludge from government benefit programs where how do you take a 50-page food stamp application and reduce it down to a page? And how do you make it easier to apply for earned-income tax credit programs? Or what we’re seeing with the Medicaid program is they’ve used human-centered design to consider what are all the factors that keep members from renewing their benefits and thus losing their health coverage? And can we also use human-centered design to better understand in child support why some parents struggle to meet their support obligations and to create opportunities to help them but we see a real reimagining of social care bringing in a lot of these concepts of human-centered design and digital access that’s much more equitable, and trying to just reduce a lot of those barriers, both benefits and to independence.

Tom Temin: Bill Eggers as executive director of the Deloitte center for government insights. Thanks so much for joining me.

Bill Eggers: Thanks so much for having me here.

Data and science are at the center of the mission of the Food and Drug Administration.

This is why the agency created the new Office of Digital Transformation. It is the final step in a two-year effort to reorganize how the FDA uses data and technology to protect and promote public health.

Vid Desai, FDA’s chief information officer, said the Office of Digital Transformation (ODT) will drive change down to the individual centers and offices to improve their mission delivery.

“Science and data are at the heart of everything we do as an agency. So this reorganization basically recognizes the importance and the strategic role that IT plays in all aspects of the agency’s operations. Good IT and data management will fundamentally improve and help scale what FDA does as part of its work, and we’re taking an integrated approach to enterprise technology, data and cybersecurity,” Desai said on Ask the CIO. “We needed to elevate the stature of the IT organization. That was one of the primary reasons for announcing the reorganization. It elevates the agency’s IT, data and cybersecurity to the agency level, which was something that we’ve never had within the FDA. It improves our ability to govern more effectively, reduce the duplication and the fragmentation that occurs when we work in more of an organizational siloed manner.”

The FDA announced this reorganization in September, which included naming Desai as its new CIO, making him the leader of ODT and bringing all the CIO functions under the new organization.

Through ODT, Desai, who joined the FDA in 2019 as its chief technology officer after spending his entire career in the private sector, will have more authority and responsibility to improve and consolidate enterprisewide technology. He said one of his main goals in 2022 is to reduce fragmentation and duplications across the offices and centers.

“When you’re driving change, it’s important to be able to do that from a place where you can govern more effectively. When you’re buried several levels down in the organization, it’s harder to impose that governance, and that’s the reason why it was important for it to be elevated,” he said. “We have a full seat at the table where we can be part of the discussion that formulates the strategic direction of the agency, and then we can look at how IT can support those strategies and the priorities we are establishing at the executive level.”

The other big change is how the FDA will apply technology to mission challenges. Desai said too often in the past efforts were not focused enough on the outcomes or what the agency was trying to achieve.

“We’re now taking an approach where we’re starting with the data, what can we do from a technology perspective to create good usable data because, frankly, when we put data to use, great things happen from a business process perspective, from an operations perspective, so our fundamental principle behind everything we do in IT is to start looking at things from the perspective of how can we create, process and use data in the most effective manner,” he said. “The other area that we’re also prioritizing is too often in IT we do things that are not very well aligned with business priorities or business processes. Given the elevation of the organization and having representation at the very top, we are now making sure that everything we do in IT is very tightly aligned with our business priorities and that IT helps us eliminate waste.”

Enterprise business strategy

That waste came, in part, from the fragmentation and lack of standardization across the agency. Desai said he’s not pushing for a one-size-fits-all approach for the entire agency, especially around mission-focused technology efforts.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to do those common things in a fragmented siloed manner. It’s a lot more efficient for us to pull those at the enterprise level and do them in a consistent common manner, which is what we’re trying to do through the governance approach. We want to take this very balanced approach,” he said. “Where we have to be unique, either because of regulations or statutory requirements, we will continue doing those in the center specific ways. But the activities that we can and do in a more common way across the enterprise, we want to do that in a very consistent, standardized, efficient way.”

One way Desai is creating that efficient and standardized approach to enterprise IT services is through a new enterprise business strategy. He said it’s a way for operational offices and his office to align their priorities to create a strategic plan and work through a business transformation team.

“The one point that I keep emphasizing is really having a tight alignment between what IT does and what the business needs. This enterprise transformation operation team that we’re kicking off is an area that supplements or supports much of what we’re trying to drive from an IT strategy side to bring the business alignment and the IT alignment tightly together,” he said. “As part of the business transformation team, we’ve got a business leader leading that activity, reporting directly to the commissioner. They’re working across all of our centers to start identifying the set of priorities, helping pull what business processes may be common across those business needs and then working with IT to see how we can help support those common enterprise business processes. It needs to be something completely independent of IT, and should have a full representation from the business side.”

This way, Desai said, the business priorities and processes aren’t looked at from only a technology perspective, but the focus is mainly on what makes sense from the business perspective and how can IT support those goals.

24 different cloud instances

Of course, underlying this business-first focus is the network that these applications will run on. Desai said the FDA is taking a cloud-first, cloud-smart approach to modernization, and plans to either move on-premise applications to the cloud or develop new ones so they are not lifting-and-shifting legacy applications that may or may not work well in the cloud.

“The other area that I just want to put some color too is if you think about the changes that are happening within the technology area from a cybersecurity and network perspective, primarily driven by the cloud, as well as changes are happening in the cybersecurity area, they fundamentally require us to rethink everything,” he said. “It literally requires us to rethink the way we do over networks. The way we do our data centers, and the way we implement the cybersecurity without a hard perimeter. All of that requires a very different approach. In the technology world, we hear a lot of talk around the zero trust, which I think is absolutely the right model. But when you look at the details behind that, it is completely different to how we’ve done cybersecurity in the past.”

Currently, the FDA is managing about 75 applications across 24 different cloud environments ranging from the big platforms like Microsoft Azure, Salesforce or Amazon Web Services to smaller ones that meet individual office’s needs.

“We’ve embarked on what we call a cloud forward strategy where any new activity that we initiate the first question we ask is ‘why shouldn’t this be done in the cloud? Or what are the barriers to doing this in the cloud?’ In fact, I would say that in the last 12-to-18 months, I cannot think of any application that we have embarked on were we basically chose to do that,” he said. “We are now increasingly and primarily leveraging the cloud as our preferred environment. As we rethink over legacy environment and we modernize the legacy applications over a progression, the cloud will continue to accelerate.”

The Trump administration moved the BLM headquarters to Grand Junction last year as part of a plan to relocate more than 300 positions to Colorado and other western states.

Few employees actually moved as part of the BLM relocation; close to 90% left the agency, retired or found other jobs. Of the 328 positions moved out of Washington, 41 of the employees ordered to relocate to new sites did so, including three employees who moved to Grand Junction, Interior said Friday.

Moving forward, Interior will maintain its Grand Junction office as BLM’s “western headquarters.” The BLM director and a few other leadership positions will move to Washington, putting them in closer proximity to Interior officials, Congress, other agencies and stakeholders who visit the nation’s capital, the department said.

“It is imperative that the bureau have the appropriate structure and resources to serve the American public,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said Friday in a statement. “There’s no doubt that the BLM should have a leadership presence in Washington, D.C. — like all the other land management agencies — to endure that it has access to the policy, budget and decision-making levers to best carry out its mission.”

Some 95% of the bureau’s workforce already worked outside of Washington before the BLM relocation, and some of those employees will operate out of the Grand Junction office, Interior said.

Notably, BLM doesn’t plan to require employees, outside of the core group of senior leaders, to move to Washington, Interior said.

“The past several years have been incredibly disruptive to the organization, to our public servants and to their families,” Haaland said. “As we move forward, my priority is to revitalize and rebuild the BLM so that it can meet the pressing challenges of our time, and to look out for our employees’ well-being.”

Interior said it reached this decision after speaking with employees, tribes, Congress and other elected leaders in Colorado. Haaland told BLM employees about her decision on Friday.

The department said the changes will “provide clarity” for BLM’s workforce. Expanding the bureau’s presence in Grand Junction will improve access for western stakeholders, Interior said.

“While I am disappointed that the national headquarters will be in Washington, I believe establishing and growing a permanent BLM Western Headquarters in Grand Junction should be a very positive development,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said Friday in a statement. “I’ve spoken to DOI leadership about the importance of both staffing up the office to fill current vacancies and continuing to grow the BLM’s presence in Grand Junction —  in number of employees and significance.”

Interior has spent the last several months reevaluating the BLM relocation. In the Biden administration’s 2022 budget request, the department cited plans to assess “the impact of the significant loss of experience.”

The BLM relocation received pushback from some employees and former BLM executives at the time, as well as members of Congress in the National Capital Region. They viewed the BLM relocation, as well as a separate move of a few hundred Agriculture Department economists from Washington to Kansas City, Missouri as a plan to unnecessarily move federal employees from their homes.

Like the BLM relocation, few USDA employees actually moved and the agency is struggling to rebuild. About 40% and 60% of employees targeted for the relocation left USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, respectively.

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Presidential transitions can be tense when the party in power is changing. The car ride with Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt was famously icy. Toughest in memory, though, may be the last transition: Trump to Biden. Mary Gibert handled it all on behalf of the General Services Administration, and for her aplomb, is a finalist in this year’s Service to America Medals program. She’s GSA’s federal transition coordinator and associate administrator for the Office of Civil Rights, and she spoke more about her work to Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Ms. Gibert, good to have you on.

Mary Gibert: It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Tom Temin: Let’s begin with what actually GSA does in presidential transitions, because it’s outside of the realm of politics and you just make sure that people have what they need to get the job done basically – correct?

Mary Gibert: Well, in a nutshell, but it’s a little more than that. We actually manage the transition for the federal government. So in addition to providing the space and services during the pre-elect the post-elect and supporting the inauguration, we actually coordinate transition activities for the entire federal government. So one of the key roles is the setting up of the council’s so there is a statute presidential transition act statute that lays out all of this. But one of the things that the statute requires is that there is an agency transition directors council, and that is comprised of all the major organizations and departments department State Department of fence, the big players on that particular council. And that Council is co chaired by myself, and the deputy director of OMB management. And so we chair and provide guidance out to the federal community through that council. We also, although not required by statute, because we want to make sure all government is ready, also hold a separate council for everyone else. We are guided by the White House Transition Coordinating Council, which is chaired by a person designated by the White House and in this case was Mark Meadows, and his deputy Chris Liddell was our primary point of contact.

Tom Temin: Got it. So this White House then, or the former White House, didn’t totally walk away from the whole thing.

Mary Gibert: Oh, no. And I would say the White House Transition Coordinating Council through Chris Liddell was key in how it ran as smooth as it ran, despite all the challenges that we faced. And those members are designated by the White House. And I was the only career member on that council. And my role was to bring the guidance back from the White House to the agency transition directors council.

Tom Temin: And while this is going on, does it become full time for you for a period?

Mary Gibert: Yes. So I would say from May till Inauguration Day, it is full time. Prior to that starting, oh I would say October-December timeframe, 18-to-24 months, it’s part time. And then after inauguration, it’s part time again. But the big bulk of the effort is from May timeframe up to Inauguration Day.

Tom Temin: Sure. And how does this happen to be in the Office of Civil Rights of all places?

Mary Gibert: So that just happens to be where I was working. So the position is designated by the GSA administrator. And the statute requires a senior career official, so a member of the Senior Executive Service, and it can be from anywhere within GSA. And it happened that I was working in the Office of Civil Rights at the time, this particular cycle.

Tom Temin: So basically, for a while you’ve got two hats, as they say,

Mary Gibert: When I was full time, I delegated to my deputy because, as you might imagine, with this one, as well as anyone during the peak period, it is full time.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Mary Gilbert, she was Federal Transition Coordinator, and is Associate Administrator for the Office of Civil Rights at the General Services Administration. And in pulling all of this together, and you’re dealing with the incoming team and the outgoing team, and there wasn’t much love lost there – let’s put it that way. What skills of your own Do you feel that you draw on to be able to have this happen in a way that’s good for the government, good for the public, and the politicians will have to take care of themselves?

Mary Gibert: So I think it’s a testament to our democracy and the Presidential Transition Act that my position is apolitical. So it is career, the agency transition directors and every agency our career folks. So having said that, I would say probably one of the most important skills, his political savvy, and also the ability to establish relationships, trust, communicate, because everybody had to trust me, in order for this to work and believe that I was an honest broker. And this all had to be done in an environment a COVID environment, where in past years you would have met in person and in person helps speed up that relationship building. And in many cases, we did not meet each other folks. I worked with every single day, some days, 15-20 hours a day, we did not meet in person. So I would say that those are the skills of managing and balancing.

Tom Temin: And have you had the chance, by the way to go back and meet some of the incoming people in person now that they might have had jobs in the government now as part of the administration?

Mary Gibert: Yes. And we still have a couple of items that we’re working through with them that there is entitlement for so there’s a million dollars in training funds that we’re working with the current administration on. And we also for our own internal, always looking to do better and improve the process is we did an after action review, and we spoke with them all after words.

Tom Temin: And have you had any feedback from the people that were coming in at this point?

Mary Gibert: I think in general, the feedback was good, I would ask them, the Sammies has quotes from them. So I’ll let them speak for themselves on how they felt. In general, I think the thought was, in spite of it went off remarkably well, with all the challenges that we had related to COVID delayed ascertain action, all the things that were happening in the world, and it still went off.

Tom Temin: Yes, it sure did. And this is something I asked a lot of Sammies awardees and just briefly describe your own career, how did you come to this type of work, and you’ve done pretty well being an Associate Administrator?

Mary Gibert: Well, I started my federal career. So I spent most of my career in federal service as a private in the US Army. So I did seven years in the Army. And then I joined the federal service working for Department of Defense IRS, Department of Navy and ended up at GSA. And GSA is a great place to work because I think we provide services to the government, what you need to deliver the mission. So in addition, I started doing leases in the public builder service. And then the highlight, I wanted to highlight, I think of my career in the Public Building Service, I got to be a zone executive during the era, the Recovery Act, so I got to help spend GSA is $5 billion. That was very exciting. And then I ended my time in the public building service as the regional Commissioner for the National Capital Region, which is the largest region 100 million square feet of leased and own space, $3 billion in revenue, 1,200 people, and 1/3 of the PBS inventory. So I’ve had great opportunities to do great things.

Tom Temin: And I imagine that seven years in the Army taught you that when facing some kind of a crisis or seeming crisis or roadblock, you say to yourself, yeah, well we can get through this too.

Mary Gibert: Yeah. And I think that’s kind of you just do it. And when you think back on it, I think that’s when it kind of hits you. But I think I would be remiss if I didn’t mention I didn’t do this by myself. So I had three folks that I heavily relied on that were my leadership team, Dorsy Yoffie, she was my deputy. Liz Kane was the director of pre and post election services. So she was directly involved in and ran that piece of it. And then Kathy Geyser ran the inaugural and the post elect. And then on the federal entity side, the coordination and the core team that worked a federal government, we had OPM. So that was Steve Hickman. We had NARA that was Chris Naylor. We had OGE, Shelby, Finlayson. And then DOJ was Lee Loftus. And then Jim Smith from the intelligence community. So we were kind of the core group, that kind of organized things and a lot of the policies and things came out of So none of this happens by yourself. You got to have great people, great colleagues, great team, and it doesn’t work without it.

Tom Temin: Mary Gibert was the Federal Presidential Transition Coordinator, and now the Associate Administrator for the Office of Civil Rights at the GSA – and a finalist in this year’s Service to America Medals program. Thanks so much for joining me.

Mary Gibert: My pleasure, thank you.

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A change in parent organizations is coming to the National Intelligence University. It’s about to move from under the Defense Intelligence Agency and become a part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. With what this means, plus a bit of history, the NIU president, J. Scott Cameron spoke to Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Dr. Cameron, good to have you on.

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: Thanks, Tom, great to be with you.

Tom Temin: Let’s begin with the organizational change. It seems more like a change of ownership than any reorganization of NIU itself. What’s exactly going on here?

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: Great question. This is a really big watershed moment for the institution. The institution’s got an almost 60 year history, most of it under the Department of Defense as a military intelligence college. And over the past 10 years was reinstated as a university serving the broader intelligence enterprise. So our executive agency under DIA, began back in 2010. And for the last 10 years that stewardship has been in partnership with the director of national intelligence. And in 2017, Congress commissioned the study to kind of look to see what the future of the institution looked like with ODNI – and it was advised that having that more direct relationship with our stakeholders, and we’re deeply integrated into the intelligence enterprise was what would give us the strength of our mission for the future. And that’s exactly where we are today.

Tom Temin: Yes, because in the ODNI then all of the intelligence components then become, maybe, have equal input into what the needs, they have are that could be expressed by NIU offerings.

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: Exactly. However, you look at the intelligence enterprise, the intelligence cycle, you see statutory authorities, you see functional disciplines, you see intellectual capital residing in all of these different components. And what we do is we bring all of them together, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. And then our students experience that integrated view and study in depth to look at that. And our research programs are driven by that intellectual capital that we bank from all of those different agencies and departments.

Tom Temin: And tell us more about NIU. It’s not simply a training center for people in the IC, it’s a full degree granting institution with .edu. Tell us more about it and the types of degrees it offers.

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: So as a federal university, like the other federal universities under DoD, our programs are approved by the US Department of Education. The Hill then authorizes me to confer degrees as a federal institution to our students. And then the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which is the accrediting body for most of the regional institutions here, then make sure that we are delivering education at the standard at which we need to be accredited. And so all of those things kind of come together for us in a way that allows our students to be at a university in a closed community so all communities bank knowledge to survive and be successful. And for those parts of us as a classified institution, we’re able to bank that intellectual capital and work at that level, at the top secret level, with our students reflecting the requirements and needs of our stakeholders. And that’s actually the big part of this change, is being able to be in a close partnership with our stakeholders that way, be accountable to them, and then actually then be accountable to us to send those students for the programs that they believe those knowledge, skills and abilities reflect the future workforce.

Tom Temin: And so you can give master’s degrees and what sort of offerings are there? Give us a few specifics.

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: So we have an undergraduate degree, Bachelor of Science in Intelligence – which essentially is if you have 90 credits, if you’ve gotten most of the way through your degree in a year, we will finish that degree with you. You’ll do it as a cohort of individuals with a capstone experience, which is, in my estimation, very close to a graduate experience. That degree does a lot to change people’s lives in terms of giving them that degree that they’ve long sought – and then it changes their posture in the workforce. It’s just been there’s great stories that come out of watching our students kind of get that, maybe they’re the first person in their family to achieve a degree in higher education. We have two master’s degree, a Master of Science in Strategic Intelligence, and we have a Master of Science in Technology Intelligence. And we offer a couple of certificate programs in which the topics through that, whether they be regional topics, functional topics, people can come in and pick those up. So we are one step on the journey of lifelong learning in the IC. So training and education cycles, we’re one step – but we’re that step often when we have people in their 30s coming in at that point in their career, when we can really make a difference and give them that infusion of education, awaken those leadership skills and get them ready to go back and make the changes for the future that they’re gonna lead.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with J. Scott Cameron and he is president of National Intelligence University. And who can attend because I imagine, I’m just making this up, but suppose I’m a third year poly sigh student somewhere, and I’m watching TV the other day and there’s old Vlad Putin there extolling and yakking away at the press there and It occurs to me, this is really interesting stuff, and this small country punches way above its weight – I’d like to get into the field of understanding what’s going on internationally, and maybe helping my country in some way. Can someone like that find a way into NIU to, as you say, finish with an intelligence degree?

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: So I’ll talk to you right now as a third year policy student at one of our regional universities and within the consortium of universities here in the Washington Metro area. So we’ve met, we’re talking, and you just expressed that interest, and I’m going to say, wow great to hear that, I love to see that inspiration of what you want to do and make a difference for your country. So there are different ways to get in the intelligence community, we kind of walk through all those opportunities, kind of maybe you refine where your interests, your talents, and abilities might lie. And then we become a perk after you’ve been hired into the government. So you can look forward to a tuition free educational experience with us after you’ve been employed, cleared top secret SCI as a federal employee, and that’s who our students are.

Tom Temin: Do you also accept people that are federal employees with clearance not from the IC? For example, maybe from the State Department.

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: Absolutely. That’s actually one of the strengths of the institution is that we have the intelligence community, the broader intelligence enterprise. If you think about after 9/11, I was at USDA early on in my career. So I mean, there skiffs there. HHS, the non Title 50 elements that actually have incredibly important roles in defending infrastructure and health and welfare of the US. So yeah, the the breadth of people who are driven by intelligence, but may not be collectors and analyzers of intelligence are still impacted by the policies, the international relations of the country. So we get their perspectives mixed into the classroom. 100% of our students will tell you, that is exactly one of the big strengths of their education.

Tom Temin: And at a given time, how many students are enrolled in do they live there, because not everyone lives in the D.C. area that might want to attend?

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: Yeah, we’re a small institution, we’re not a resident institution. Although people for many years, our students in uniform will PCS here, so people will come. We are destination location on people’s educational journeys, but we are the resident institution. But at the same time, our full time program, I think, in the hundreds – and then our part time program, so if we have two to 300, full time students will be twice as many part time students. And 75% of our students do come part time on their own time, nights and weekends.

Tom Temin: And tell us about your own background briefly. You said you started at USDA, I’m trying to imagine what happens in a skiff at USDA, maybe a new form of cattle that eats carbon dioxide instead of produces it, wouldn’t that be revolutionary. But tell us how you came to this position.

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: So my journey was as an academic in the 80s and 90s. Actually, my background is in plant physiological genetics. I was actually a bit of an Indiana Jones plant explorer for a while, looking at photosynthesis, basically trying to feed the Third World. The second half of my career is trying to protect the entire world, and that high consequence science and high consequence national security. So that’s been kind of my theme. I came to DC in 2000, right before 9/11. And then after 9/11 was recruited over when there was an influx of science going into the IC after 9/11, after Iraq, WMD. Basically, the idea was, let’s broaden the DNA of our science component. I came in for a sabbatical from USDA working for the secretary of agriculture as his national security adviser and briefer, started at CIA and moved over to the National Counterterrorism Center and spent 13 years kind of looking at counter WMD issues there.

Tom Temin: Wow. And what kind of reaction do you get at college president types of meetings and forums?

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: It’s great. The local consortium here – we’re a small institution, we’re a bit unique. But all of my colleagues here – and a shout out to the consortium of Washington Metro agency universities here and the other presidents – we meet on a regular basis. And I learned so much from those, it’s really humbling to be with Georgetown, American, GW – all of them sitting in one room talking about the challenges that we do have in common. We all care deeply about education and the future of education.

Tom Temin: But then you’re lucky on one hand, you don’t have to deal with something like the Harvard General Studies faculty.

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: Okay. So the beauty of what we do as an institution is we are very, very focused on national security in a way that gives our students breath to go back to the mission, and they study the way they perform in their mission day to day.

Tom Temin: J. Scott Cameron is president of National Intelligence University. Thanks so much for joining me.

Dr. J. Scott Cameron: Tom, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

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• Top Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee asked inspectors general at 10 agencies to find out if increased telework during the COVID-19 pandemic worsened or created new cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Lawmakers want the IGs to conduct these reviews at agencies that include the departments of State, Defense and Homeland Security. The lawmakers are basing their concerns on a 2016 report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology that found major security concerns associated with telework.

• The Postal Service’s regulator takes a closer look at how the agency handled a difficult year. The Postal Regulatory Commission finds the Postal Service failed to meet annual performance goals for on-time delivery of mail and packages in 2020. The PRC says the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with a surge in mail from the 2020 census and election mail imposed significant challenges on the agency. USPS only met half of its benchmarks for providing a high level of customer service, and fell short of its response rate goal for an agencywide survey.

• Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) introduced a bill to strengthen the cybersecurity of government contractors. The legislation would require vendors to publish vulnerability disclosure policies, or VDPs, letting ethical hackers detect security risks and report them to the company. The Department of Homeland Security last September mandated agencies create a VDP program and disclose vulnerabilities. Vendors, however, do not have the same requirement. Lieu believes requiring vendors to have a VDP program would go further to help contractors protect their networks and data.

• Agencies that saw their workforces shrink or relocate in recent years are due for a hiring spree. The Biden administration wants staffing boosts at several civilian cabinet agencies in 2022. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and Environmental Protection Agency plan to add more staff under the president’s budget proposal. The Interior Department does too. All agencies say their workforces have declined in recent years. Interior is also reviewing the previous administration’s relocation of the Bureau of Land Management. The department says 80% of impacted BLM employees didn’t relocate. (Federal News Network)

• A bipartisan group of lawmakers are pushing for a commission to study whether agencies should be relocated outside the Washington, D.C. metro area. Congressman Tim Ryan’s (D-Ohio) bill would establish a commission within the General Services Administration to examine this idea. The commission would consist of 10 members appointed by congressional leaders and will have two years to submit to a plan to Congress. The study will also prioritize low-income communities or other areas that are best suited for the agency.

• Agencies will soon have new small business goals that would increase acquisition spending with small disadvantaged businesses by 50% over the next five years. President Joe Biden said he will raise the governmentwide SDB goal to 15% from 10%, which would mean agencies would spend an extra $100 billion with economically disadvantaged firms by 2026. The increase in SDB goals are part of the administration’s new actions to build Black wealth and narrow the racial wealth gap.

• GSA moves into the next step in the process to create a new services multiple award contract. Three months after releasing the first request for information for a new governmentwide services contract, the General Services Administration is back with new questions for industry. GSA released a second query focused on identifying contractor capabilities and their alignment with anticipated requirements. In addition to the RFIs, GSA has briefed industry groups and participated in panel discussions in an effort to design the new contract. Responses to the second RFI are due June 21 and GSA is planning another industry day in late July to discuss the responses.

• A federal judge sides with Amazon in a dispute over how to move ahead in the saga of litigation over DoD’s multibillion dollar JEDI Cloud contract. The Pentagon wanted the court to order Amazon to file its demands for additional documents in the case, and to depose senior Trump Administration officials, all at the same time. Amazon wanted a more sequential approach, leaving a schedule for those possible depositions up in the air. Judge Patricia-Campbell Smith took Amazon’s side in a ruling this week. DoD has argued that schedule will only drag out a case that’s already lasted 18 months. But even the Pentagon’s proposed schedule would have pushed the litigation into October at the very earliest.

• A total of 90% of military installations have now eased COVID travel restrictions. The milestone is the highest number since the COVID pandemic began. The restrictions prohibited military service members from traveling between bases without a waiver or from traveling far from a base. There are still 23 installations with some restrictions. Those bases range from Alaska to Japan to Florida. (Department of Defense)

• The Defense Department is responding to service members hungry for more curbside grocery pickup. All military commissaries in the United States will offer online ordering and curbside pickup by the end of the year. The Pentagon plans to expand that to overseas commissaries soon afterward. During COVID, the Defense Department improved its CLICK2GO program, which makes online grocery shopping easier. The new features on the program’s portal include improved site navigation, recipe features and enhanced product information. Currently only 11 commissaries offer the service.

• A veterans hospital in Arkansas missed thousands of errors made by a former VA pathologist. Robert Morris Levy pleaded guilty last year to voluntary manslaughter in the death of a patient he misdiagnosed. VA fired Levy back in 2018. But the VA inspector general said the hospital itself contributed to Levy’s errors. Outside pathologists reviewed 34,000 of Levy’s cases. They found over three-thousand errors or misdiagnoses. Nearly 600 of them were major mistakes. The IG said the VA medical center didn’t have a culture of accountability that would have encouraged employees to come forward to report these mistakes.

• The Office of Personnel Management is gearing up for the next Combined Federal Campaign. It’s asking agency leaders to start planning for 2021, and encouraging them to take on active roles in the campaign. OPM said employees are more likely to participate if they’re asked. Participating in the campaign as a coordinator or local leader is another way for employees to build professional development skills. The 2021 CFC will run from September 1 through January 15, 2022. Federal employees and retirees raised nearly $84 million during last year’s campaign.

The Pentagon is preparing for its future without a chief management officer position, a role Congress eliminated in this year’s defense authorization act.

Michael McCord, the nominee to be the next Defense Department comptroller, said if he’s confirmed, part of his job will be to flesh out how his position and a handful of other top DoD roles will absorb the CMO’s duties.

“One of my earliest tasks would be to sit down with Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and others as they are confirmed in that space,” McCord told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation director who’s been nominated and the chief information officer, I believe, has not been nominated yet; all those players would have a role in the structure that former Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist left.”

McCord, who served as comptroller under President Barack Obama as well, said his focus would be making sure that the duties that remain with the comptroller make the department more effective.

“We have doubled down to the point of maybe overdoing it over the last decade on trying to make it focused only on efficiency and cutting billets,” McCord said. “We need to focus more on outcomes and effectiveness and if that role stays with comptroller, I would need to hire a somewhat different type of workforce and move them over if they haven’t left the department from the CMO office.”

Norquist directed a plan to dissolve and redistribute the CMO’s functions a week before the end of the Trump Administration. It strengthened the comptroller’s office to take on business process issues as well as financial issues, and also made the comptroller into DoD’s performance improvement officer.

“Building on the gains we have made with the financial statement audit and development of Advanced Analytics for Executives tool, [the department will] expand the role of the undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller) to improve accountability and performance in DoD business operations,” Norquist wrote.

Since taking office Hicks has not said if she will continue Norquist’s plan or distribute responsibilities differently. McCord made it seem like there would be a meeting of the minds on the issue once more nominees were in office.

Congress got rid of the CMO position because it was disappointed in its efforts to fundamentally change the business practices of DoD.

The Defense Business Board gave Congress a handful of options to replace the CMO, including vesting more power in the deputy defense secretary position or creating a second deputy defense secretary, but ultimately Congress decided to simply dissolve the position and gave DoD a large amount of discretion on how it would go forward. — SM

DoD can’t calculate improper payments to workforce because of ‘unreliable’ methods at DFAS

In this space last November, Federal News Network noted that DoD had just reported a massive increase in improper payments to its civilian workforce for 2020, owing mostly to what Pentagon financial officials called a “new sampling plan and testing methodology.” But as it turns out, the latest estimate — $5 billion — is really more of a guess, because the new methodology itself is unreliable.

That’s according to the DoD Inspector General’s latest review of the Pentagon’s improper payments, which found the department is failing to comply with federal improper payment reporting requirements for the ninth year in a row.

The IG found the Defense Finance Accounting Service DFAS was using ill-conceived methods to detect error rates for both its civilian and military employees. But the civilian area is where the department reported the biggest year-over-year increase in 2020. It estimated 8% of payments to civilians were either too high or too low last year — a massive jump from the 0.14% estimated improper payment rate for 2019.

But auditors now say those numbers are untrustworthy for at least two reasons. First, DFAS used garbled data to calculate the error rates for both military and civilian employees.

“By using an unreliable methodology to calculate the gross pay amounts for the population, DFAS personnel recognized the amounts did not match the [leave and earnings statements] and modified the amounts in the sample results population, creating variances in the gross pay amounts used to calculate the improper payment estimates,” according to a report the IG issued last week.

Another problem happened when the department, apparently by mistake, left its civilian mariner workforce completely out of its calculations for the civilian pay accounts; those paychecks alone account for $538 million. And the oversight happened in spite of the fact that the IG noticed the same problem two years ago, and in spite of the fact that DoD agreed to correct the error at the time.

The department told auditors it really has fixed the problems this time, and the revised methodologies will be reflected in its 2021 financial statement later this year.

Overall, the IG found the department is falling short on two out of the six requirements in the Payment Integrity Information Act. The employee pay issues caused it to fail the requirement to publish reliable estimates of its improper payments.

The second failure came about because the department didn’t meet its improper payment reduction target of 0.76% for military health benefits. DoD said the majority of those problems happened because one of its TRICARE contractors didn’t process health claims accurately. —JS

DoD fighting an uphill battle with service member vaccinations

The Defense Department is concerned about the number of service members who are willing to get the coronavirus vaccine, as many still refuse to get the shot.

With just 27% of military personnel fully vaccinated, DoD said it does not have any issues with supplying the vaccine, only with getting troops to take the vaccination.

In response to a question from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), during a Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee hearing about whether the president should mandate the vaccine, Dr. Terry Adirim, acting assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said:

“I appreciate that question. I never thought I’d have those words come out of my mouth. But this is something that’s been a concern for us in how do we encourage and engage with our service members for them to accept vaccination. It’s been tough and I think those who want vaccination have been able to get it.”

Adirim said DoD is using every avenue available from the installation level up to engage with those who are hesitant about the vaccine.

“What we’re finding is that even those who were in the earlier tiers of the prioritization scheme are slowly starting to accept vaccination,” Adirim said. “It’s now four-five months after we started vaccinating and I think a large proportion of our service members as well as other DoD beneficiaries have said, ‘You know what, I’d like to wait and see what happens.’”

DoD has done multiple townhalls with senior leaders explaining the effectiveness and safety of the shot.

Service members are not mandated to take the shot because it is only approved those emergency-use authorization.

Adirim said DoD is not at this time considering making the vaccine mandatory.

DoD has said in the past that about one-third of service members have been declining to get the vaccine. — SM

Nearly two years after the National Guard confirmed it was working on a Space Guard, the military component is still not in place. However, a top military official said a plan for the newest part of the total force is near completion.

National Guard Bureau Chief Gen. Daniel Hokanson said Tuesday that the formation of a Space National Guard is currently one of his top priorities.

Hokanson said the Guard is “fairly close” to making a recommendation to Congress on how it would go about creating a Space National Guard.

“I’ll meet with the secretary of the Air Force tomorrow and the chief of space operations,” Hokanson said during a House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing. “We’ve had an opportunity to brief the deputy secretary of Defense already.”

The Guard is in its final preparations to brief Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin before sending the recommendations to Congress.

“Both the secretary of the Air Force and the chief of space operations are in agreement with us on a two-component construct that has an active and reserve combined component, and then a Space National Guard,” Hokanson said.

Congress would need to legally create the Space National Guard if it goes along with the plan.

Military officials have been pushing for the component since before the creation of the Space Force.

“I don’t see how we have a Space Force without a Space Guard,” Lt. Gen. Michael Loh, chief of the Air National Guard, said last year when he was the adjutant general of the Colorado National Guard. “The organize, train and equip is going to come from that Space Force side. Otherwise, you are delinking the parent service with those forces that are supporting it.”

The National Guard has 1,500 space forces — 1,100 in the Air National Guard and the rest in the Army National Guard.

Previous details on the plan signified that the Space National Guard would be small and only operate in states that conduct space missions.

Those areas are Colorado, California, Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Arkansas, Ohio, New York and Guam.

“We are not looking to stand up 54 Space National Guards to cover every state and territory,” Brig. Gen. Patrick Cobb, deputy director of space operations for the National Guard, said. “We only see there being some additional overhead in the particular states that participate in the mission. The concern that this would be creating this huge bureaucratic overhead is really not what we envision.”

Proponents of the Space National Guard said it would help bring in talent to a highly specialized force, without making those people quit their day jobs.

The Postal Service is moving ahead with a non-voluntary reduction in force of non-bargaining unit employees after sending voluntary early retirement offers to its eligible management workforce.

Ahead of the layoffs and reassignments, USPS will send a second round of Voluntary Early Retirement offers to eligible employees working at its headquarters, headquarters-related facilities, area offices and district offices.

The agency, meanwhile, is lifting a hiring freeze that’s been in place since last summer and will post job offers “to facilitate placement opportunities for impacted employees,” according to a memo obtained by Federal News Network.

The RIF announcement, sent Monday, marks the third and final part of an administrative restructuring USPS started last fall.

Chief Human Resources Officer Doug Tulino said in the memo that USPS will walk employees through the details of its final organizational structure and staffing in a series of town-hall meetings it will hold the week of May 17.

“Managers should schedule follow-up discussion with individuals impacted by the changes,” Tulino wrote, adding that his office would provide additional information to assist with these sessions.

Employees affected by the RIF will receive a Specific RIF Notice (SRN) in the mail and via email on May 21. The SRN will outline employees’ prospects for reassignment or demotion, or next steps in their separation from the agency.

Employees affected by the RIF must separate from the agency on Oct. 8, but employees who accept a reassignment or demotion will start their new positions Oct. 9.

Eligible employees will receive their second voluntary early retirement offer this Friday, and must decide whether to take the offer no later than July 16. Employees who do take the offer must leave the agency effective July 30.

The second-round voluntary early retirement offers won’t come with any monetary incentive. Eligible employees will receive their VER offers in the mail and via email.

While USPS billed its first round of early retirement offers as part of its “reduction-in-force avoidance activities,” Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told Federal News Network last month that USPS didn’t have immediate plans to conduct a RIF, but didn’t rule it out either.

“We’re going to use every tool in our toolbox to create a viable entity that serves the American people, so nothing is ever off the table. But at this time, that’s not anything that I’m particularly focused on,” DeJoy said during the April 5 interview.

National Association of Postal Supervisors (NAPS) President Brian Wagner said last month USPS had notified employees of their eligibility for a second round of voluntary early retirements in mid-March, if the agency decided to go ahead with a RIF.

Wagner also said USPS, by lifting the hiring freeze, would create “landing spots” that would give RIF-ed employees a shot at another agency job instead of a layoff.

USPS lifted its hiring freeze on management positions Monday, and will start posting new job listings for management-level positions on May 25.

USPS will post available positions in three waves. In phases 1 and 2, USPS will accept applications from impacted and non-impacted employees in affected competitive areas. In phase 3, USPS will run a five-day posting available only to impacted employees.

These jobs will include openings at USPS headquarters, area and district offices, as well as customer service field positions and mail-and-package processing plants on a “case-by-case basis.”

In phase one of the restructuring, announced last August, DeJoy reshuffled USPS executives and realigned the agency to focus on three lines of effort — retail and delivery operations, logistics and processing, and commerce and business solutions.

This March, in rolling out phase two, USPS announced its first wave of early retirement offers and its plans to consolidate its 67 districts into 50 districts that more closely align with state boundaries.

As part of its third and final phase of the agency restructuring, USPS will centralize address management and support functions for its post office operations and delivery program into the office of its chief retail and delivery officer. This will ensure all USPS support functions are centralized at its headquarters.

The service, which is less than 18 months old, will soon have three component offices under its purview: Space Operations Command (SpOC), Space Systems Command (SSC) and Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM).

Space Systems Command was set up earlier this month, and works on acquisition, development and research of space systems.

However, many of the offices that fulfill those duties legally report to the chief of space operations and not to SSC. Those offices include the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office (Space RCO).

The Space Force says it would like to change that and it needs Congress’ help.

“In the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress specified that the Space Rapid Capabilities Office reports the chief space operations, and in 2021 Congress specified that when Space Development Agency transitions into the Space Force that it will report to the chief of space operations,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David Thompson said Wednesday at the C4ISRNet Conference. “We have to comply with the law.”

Thompson said the Space Force is looking for ways to evolve and it thinks transitioning those offices over to SSC will be the best move for the future.

“We’d like to continue to work with Congress on options to evolve SSC in the future to what we believe will continue to be a responsible organization to meet the needs,” he said.

The SDA will be moving into the Space Force in 2022, and it’s already working on its mission to put tranches of cheap satellites into close-Earth orbit to enhance weapons systems and extend surveillance.

SDA is currently in the process of buying satellites for Tranche 0, which will be in orbit by 2022. About 150 satellites will belong to Tranche One and SDA plans to put out requests for proposal this August; SDA wants the satellites in space by 2024.

The agency noted that it was able to procure the 30 satellites for Tranche 0 at an average price of $14.1 million. The companies working on those products include L3Harris, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems.

SDA Director Derek Tournear said his organization is working with the Space Force to ensure a unity of effort so that all those satellites will be compatible with future systems.

In the meantime, SSC will have plenty to do.

“Space Systems Command’s organizational structure was purpose-built to anticipate and be responsive to the challenges presented by a contested space domain,” said Gen. Jay Raymond, chief of space operations earlier this month. “We took the Space and Missile Center 2.0 transformation of 2019 to the next level, aligning missions and organizations, and pushing authorities down from the three-star level to lower echelons in order to reduce cost and go fast. This will allow us to move at speed in delivering the resilient space capabilities necessary to stay ahead of a growing threat.”

It will be in charge of the Space and Missile Systems Center, the Commercial Satellite Communications Office and two space wings. There are also discussions underway to bring in the Army and Navy’s space components to SSC as well.

With the Commercial Satellite Communications Office, Thompson said the SSC is looking to expand responsibilities beyond commercial satellites and use private companies for remote sensing, and intelligence capabilities.

SSC will also inherit the Space Enterprise Consortium, a group of companies working together with government on space contracts and ideas.

“The consortium allows us a connection to innovate with small business all the way up to the major defense contractors on very specific technology and very specific capabilities of interest,” Thompson said. “We’re talking now about billions of dollars versus hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of companies.”

Thompson said the Space Force is working on a handful of legislative changes for Congress and hopes to have the SSC request and others in for this legislative cycle.

The National Academy of Public Administration recently offered up a 114-page roadmap for the Office of Personnel Management, detailing years of leadership instability, funding obstacles and conflicting attitudes on the agency’s mission and role.

Past OPM directors and executives, as well as federal employee groups, are pleased NAPA focused on empowering the agency as the federal government’s human capital leader and laid out a path to achieve that broad goal.

But getting there is an incredibly complex feat, and it’ll take time, funding and attention to untangle the actions of several administrations that put OPM on its current footing.

Those ingredients are all in short supply today, and those with a long memory of past civil service changes worry the academy’s recommendations will sit on a shelf and collect dust — as many past reform efforts have.

“It’s déjà vu all over all again. It’s not just déjà vu all over again once, twice or three times — we have been down this path innumerable times,” said Ron Sanders, a former Federal Salary Council chairman, OPM executive and intelligence community chief human capital officer. “One has to wonder will this make any difference? That’s the question I have.”

Sanders now leads the Florida Center for Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida.

The report stemmed from the Trump administration’s proposal to merge part of OPM with the General Services Administration and the Office of Management and Budget, but NAPA’s focus was much broader.

It offered up 23 recommendations for Congress and the new administration. They range from clarifying OPM’s mission in statute and eliminating the agency’s fee-for-service model to setting up a new IT working capital fund.

“OPM is going to need partners to move forward,” said Janice Lachance, a former OPM director during the Clinton administration. “First of all, any kind of recommendation such as improving technology or improving the way you give advice to agencies and not expecting reimbursement, that’s going to cost money. You need friends within the administration that you’re operating in, but you also need very, very strong partners on Capitol Hill who are willing to advocate and speak up for OPM.”

The National Active and Retired Federal Employees (NARFE) Association is reviewing the NAPA report and determining which recommendations the administration could accomplish on its own and which ones need help from Congress.

“There are a number of recommendations that would require the support of Congress through funding, a bit less that require revision of current laws, and even several that OPM can do on its own right now,” said John Hatton, NARFE’s legislative and political affairs director. “But I worry that the charge of a big report like this is too much to take on at once, and after a short review, the report is filed away and forgotten.”

OPM’s funding challenges top the priority list

Hatton and others said they hoped OPM and the Biden administration focused first on building congressional support for additional funding.

Moving the National Background Investigations Bureau and the governmentwide security clearance, as OPM quietly warned years ago, created a significant funding shortfall for the agency in recent years.

For 2021, OPM covered the funding shortfall through a buyback services agreement with the Defense Department, a bump in appropriations and a series of operational cost cutting measures, according to the NAPA report.

OPM mostly relies on appropriations and fees, which it collects by providing certain HR services and training to other agencies. And while the Trump administration did secure more appropriated funding for OPM during the last two years, the agency needs sustained resources to modernize and keep operations afloat, NAPA said.

Additional funding is especially critical if, as the academy suggested, OPM wants to make real progress on longstanding IT modernization efforts and offer more HR services to other agencies at no cost.

Lachance, the Clinton-era OPM director, sees the budget as a good starting point for the Biden administration and the new director. The president nominated Kiran Ahuja, a former chief of staff for the agency, for the role.

“The new director has a tremendous opportunity to go in there, do a very effective assessment of the situation and make a reasonable request that covers all of the things that need to be done — and that we want to do,” said Lachance, who currently serves as an executive vice president for the American Geophysical Union. “The NAPA report is very aspirational. What is it going to take to get OPM from where it is today to this desired state that’s articulated in the NAPA report over how many years?”

The new director, Lachance added, will need to make the case why an empowered OPM will help resolve the federal government’s talent problems.

“There’s no doubt there are needs across the government when it comes to staffing and bringing expertise into help with these very serious issues that we’re contending with today like the pandemic, the economic fallout and climate change,” she said. “We have all of these priorities. Is the federal workforce prepared and does it have the people on board to starting working on those issues?”

Does Congress have the time and attention span to focus on OPM?

Some are more optimistic than others that OPM has willing partners ready to devote time and attention to the agency’s funding challenges, not to mention the statutory changes that, for example, might reaffirm the agency’s mission or give it more authority over all federal personnel systems.

Several former OPM executives said Congress lacks the bandwidth and drive to focus on civil service issues, especially when headlines on the pandemic, economy and border drive the agenda.

Dan Blair, a former OPM deputy director, said the current congressional committee structure isn’t designed to take on a big project like the one NAPA mapped out in its recommendations. When Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act back in 1978, it had a dedicated panel — the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee — ready to conduct hearings and mark up legislation to send to the House floor.

Today, the NAPA report naturally falls to the House Oversight and Reform Government Operations Subcommittee, which has broad jurisdiction and a full plate of oversight activities.

Many former OPM executives pointed to past attempts in Congress at civil service change, like the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which they argue was never fully realized, or the National Security Personnel System — repealed after a few years — that were especially long and grueling initiatives on the Hill.

“That fatigue has morphed into a malaise,” said Blair, who also worked for the former Post Office and Civil Service Committee. “How do you address this malaise? How do you reinvigorate Congress and the administration to say we think this is extremely important, understanding that such an undertaking requires a significant commitment of staff and members’ time, resources and energy to address the reforms recommended in the report?”

OPM itself rarely appears before Congress in a public forum, NAPA said. The agency testified once before Congress in recent years on the former administration’s proposed merger with GSA.

“We see the most action from Congress when we’re in a crisis,” said Jessica Klement, NARFE’s staff vice president for policy and programs. “Unless we can get the point across that federal human capital is in crisis, which GAO has been saying for the last two decades, it’s never going to be addressed. Everyone agrees this is a problem, but no one seems to agree it’s a problem enough to fix it.”

Culture change needed inside and out of OPM

Even if it does manage to collect enough support, attention and focus from partners in the administration and Congress, former agency executives say the new director will need to make a concerted effort to transform OPM into an innovative, data-driven, strategic leader on human capital issues as NAPA suggested.

For Sanders, it’ll take more than new legislation and extra funding to meet those goals. OPM needs to demonstrate leadership, and the departments need to build or reestablish trust with the federal government’s human capital agency.

Sanders said building that trust will become especially critical if Congress changes the law so that OPM oversees all federal personnel systems, not just Title 5.

“As a person that oversaw a major subset of that, the personnel systems that cover the intelligence community, I would be fighting that tooth and nail,” he said. “OPM has to earn that trust. Right now they’re met with suspicion by agencies. The culture needs to change. If you change the culture then agencies are going to be more willing to look to OPM for leadership, but you can’t put the cart before the horse and try to mandate that leadership by law.”

Mark Robbins, a former agency general counsel, said OPM has shown organizational flexibility on multiple occasions, once when Congress tasked it with providing security clearances back in the mid-2000s and again today as the Pentagon has taken the business back. The agency has gone through other transitions before, including its initial transformation from the Civil Service Commission to OPM back in 1979.

“OPM is quite capable of shifting on a dime when it comes to culture change,” said Robbins, who also served on the Merit Systems Protection Board for seven years. “It needs the money to do that, and I just don’t think they’ve got it.”

OPM will struggle to transform, however, if the agency is hamstrung by OMB, Robbins and others said.

The Civil Service Reform Act set the OPM director as the president’s top adviser on federal human capital, but the position’s status has become “diluted over the years,” with the creation of the deputy director for management position within OMB.

OPM and OMB officials in the Biden administration have said on multiple occasions they’re working together, though neither agency has top leadership confirmed yet.

Three acting OPM directors also served as deputy director for management during the Trump and Obama administrations. Those dual-hatted arrangements hindered OPM and its independence, and over time, the agency director became more of a subordinate to the OMB deputy director for management, NAPA said.

“A dual monarchy didn’t work for Austria and Hungary, and here it was dumb and short-cited,” Robbins said.

It’s been more than a year since the Agriculture Department gave some 550 employees at two of its major research bureaus an ultimatum: Move to Kansas City, Missouri, or leave the agency.

Many employees at the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — between 40% and 60%, respectively — did leave, data from USDA shows.

And while ERS and NIFA have onboarded new people since the relocation occurred in October 2019, both agencies have struggled to rebuild their workforces and hire new people in the days since.

They’re both operating with roughly 30% fewer employees today than they were before the USDA relocation, according to recent data from the department.

As of Jan. 16, ERS had a total of 213 permanent employees on board, including 67 employees stationed in Washington. The agency has 115 vacant positions today, said Matt Herrick, a USDA spokesman.

At NIFA, the story is similar. The agency also has 213 permanent employees on board, including 16 stationed in Washington. A total of 130 NIFA positions are vacant, the department said.

“USDA has an outstanding workforce, but we lost some of the nation’s best economists and agricultural scientists in the previous administration,” Herrick said in a statement to Federal News Network. “It will take time for the new administration to rebuild USDA’s scientific and research agencies and restore their confidence and morale. That means beginning to fill open positions and building a scientific and research workforce for the future. The new team is committed to making USDA a place where bright, talented people want to work and where scientific integrity is safeguarded.”

For now, the agencies are, in many ways, running without the institutional knowledge that made ERS and NIFA special places to work, current and former employees said.

Of NIFA’s Kansas City workforce of approximately 200 people, just 20% are employees who made the move from Washington.

At ERS, just 13% of the Kansas City workforce are employees from Washington, USDA said.

“It’s still really difficult. We lost a ton of people and with that we lost a ton of expertise,” said Laura Dodson, president of the American Federation of Government Employees local that represents much of the ERS workforce. “A new employee can’t replace the expertise of an old employee. Yes, we’ve done a lot of hiring , but that doesn’t mean that we’re able to get our jobs done the same way we would have before this relocation. A lot of us are still struggling with overwork and overburdening and the ability to finish all our projects from employees who no longer work here.”

Of NIFA employees stationed in Kansas City, approximately 80% are new hires who joined the agency after the fall 2019 relocation, USDA said.

At ERS, 85% of the 145 permanent employees in Kansas City are new hires, the department said.

The number of new hires has created stress for the more seasoned employees.

“Economists are not interchangeable,” Dodson said. “There is a specialized knowledge that each position requires at ERS, and that specialized knowledge would be acquired over the course of a career. This relocation has caused all of the experienced and mid-level employees to leave the agency, leaving junior staffers to fill the roles of experienced staffers. It means that it’s going to be more difficult to complete all the projects that we had.”

Some employees, for example, are new supervisors learning how to manage at a federal research agency for the first time.

The situation has a created two camps of morale, where the seasoned employees are frustrated, overwhelmed, overworked and disillusioned with the agency, Dodson said. New hires, on the other hand, are learning to navigate a new job and are more comfortable with the way things are.

For some, Kansas City is a good fit, but others had a difficult time with the move and are waiting for an opportunity to move back to Washington, Dodson added.

The positions themselves are difficult to fill regardless of their location, said Kitty Smith Evans, a former ERS administrator and current government relations director for the American Economic Association.

“The universe of qualified people is not that huge,” she said. “There are very few PhD agricultural economists and the market for general economists is competitive, and I don’t think ERS is competitive in that market anymore.”

Before the relocation, economists came to ERS knowing they could spend a long career collecting and analyzing statistics, which USDA decision-makers used to inform policy. These were things ERS used to sell the agency to prospective candidates, Smith Evans said.

“You can really make a difference,” she said. “It’s exciting to people. I don’t know that you can do that as well in Kansas City. Of course nobody can walk up the block and do anything in person now, but you used to be able to go talk with important policy makers within the department. You’re right there, doing it in person and having the opportunity to answer questions rather than sending a report, [which] is really important.”

Employees looking to new leadership to ‘undo the damage’

ERS has hired employees on a remote basis who have worked from various locations across the country during the pandemic, but the previous administration said those arrangements were temporary, Dodson said.

Employees were frustrated with the uncertainty, as it was unclear how long the department would allow them to continue teleworking on a full-time basis — and what the health and safety precautions would look like once they returned to the office.

Full-time remote work could solve a lot of recruitment challenges at ERS and USDA, and more broadly across the federal government, Dodson said.

“It’s a huge draw to be able to work and live from wherever you are, and it opens the door to talent who may not otherwise be able to live in certain areas,” she said. “But that’s way beyond my pay grade to be able to push for that.”

Dodson said employees are anxious to see how the incoming USDA leadership team will approach telework in a post-pandemic world. Tom Vilsack, who led the department for eight years during the Obama administration, was supportive of telework during his tenure, at least more so than former USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue, who cut back on remote work before the pandemic.

The Senate is expected to confirm Vilsack again to be USDA secretary in the coming days.

If telework is permitted beyond the pandemic, Dodson hopes employees will have some assurances of how often they’ll be able to work remotely. She said she was encouraged by a message USDA acting leadership sent to employees in the days following the inauguration.

“I got the first email from our acting secretary saying, ‘We appreciate you. We want you to be safe, and we’re going to be following the science.’ I just started crying,” Dodson said. “I was like, ‘It’s a new day. I can take a breath. I don’t have to fight every moment.'”

In the meantime, Dodson and her colleagues are also curious how new leadership will handle the dual Washington and Kansas City locations. ERS and NIFA employees moved to a new leased space in Kansas City back in November, USDA told Federal News Network.

The General Services Administration signed a 15-year, $25.6 million lease for that space back in October 2019, which may complicate matters.

Dodson said the incoming USDA leadership team has to undo the damage from the relocation and find ways to support existing employees and attract new ones.

“It’s going to take a long time,” Smith Evans, the former ERS administrator, said. “Whether it’s done well or badly, or whether it’s in D.C. or spread in two locations, it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be easier in D.C. It’ll be easier with experienced managers and leadership and with an improved reputation, but it’s going to be a long haul in any case.”

Ultimately, Dobson hopes the department will give employees the choice of working in either Kansas City or Washington, which she acknowledged is a tricky and complex logistical question.

“It’s become an incredibly messy situation where there is no clear path forward, but our current path is unsustainable,” Dodson said. “We need to be able to bring in experienced staffers. We need to be able to maintain a high quality of life for our current staffers. Part of the only way I really see forward with this is expanding the amount of staffers we’re allowed to have in D.C. and hiring people back into D.C. who may not have otherwise made the move to Kansas City.”

In most cases, career federal employees are ready — or at least accustomed to — the steady stream of executive orders, memos and policy directives that come at the beginning of most new administrations.

But the deluge does often put more pressure on career executives who have to ensure their employees in the field aren’t experiencing an acute case of policy whiplash.

During his first two weeks in office, President Joe Biden has out-signed his last four predecessors, at least, signing 28 different executive orders since Jan. 20.

The orders task agencies with a seemingly never-ending list of new activities, from rescinding previous policies and creating new ones, to standing up new task forces or preparing recommendations.

On his first day in office, Biden also identified more than 100 pieces of guidance, regulations and other actions for agencies to review and reconsider in accordance with new climate actions.

The preparation for these new policies starts often during the presidential transition, said Don Bice, a former deputy assistant secretary for administration at the Agriculture Department and a current director at BDO Public Sector.

Bice worked with landing teams and served as an acting USDA official during previous presidential transitions. He said the transition teams begin communicating priorities from the incoming president with career employees well before Inauguration Day.

Transition officials often set goals for the first 30, 60 and 90 days of the new administration, and it’s up to career employees to implement them.

“During the transition, the transition teams are looking at the regulatory actions that the department has or that are ongoing or recently finalized,” Bice said. “They’re looking at internal guidance and other documents. Oftentimes you may see an executive order that says, do X, Y and Z. But every agency needs to do an inventory of their programs and guidance documents and regulations that are related to that executive order. There’s a whole host of things that happen that go beyond just meeting the deadline.”

Seasoned career employees know and understand the priorities an incoming administration has and how they differ from the previous or current team, Bice said. If they’re not aware, they’ll quickly get up to speed during the transition.

“We had a pretty good idea of what was going to come out,” said David Grant, a partner at Potomac Ridge Consulting and a longtime executive at FEMA and the IRS. “We were pretty much ready for it. The more communication you have up front, the easier it is to implement.”

In some cases, Biden’s executive actions rescinded policies from the prior administration and directed agencies to stop the activities they had been doing and take completely new actions.

A Jan. 20 executive order, for example, paused wall construction along the southern border and directed the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to revisit existing contracts and find ways to repurpose them.

Other memos placed temporary moratoriums on oil and natural gas leases, stopped the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization, repealed prior travel bans and ordered a governmentwide pause in most regulatory activity.

“Anyone who’s spent time in D.C. will say you learn not to take things personally,” said Greg Giddens, a partner at Potomac Ridge Consulting and a former executive who spent several years at the departments of Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security. “We’re in a role where we advise and make sure there’s a well-informed policy, and then we implement the policy.”

Bice recalled a time at USDA when he spent a year working to implement a new regulation. The interim rule was set to go into effect near the end of an administration.

“I had worked really quite hard to get it in place and got some recognition from the administration at the time,” he said. “We went through a transition and the very first question that a new policy official in that particular area asked me was, ‘How do I get rid of that rule?’ I spent a year getting rid of the rule that I spent a year putting in place. But that is something that most career employees are used to.”

Former executives like Giddens and Bice all described a process of “running through the tape,” where agencies would hurry to implement the policies and program directives of the current administration before a new team takes its place.

The Trump administration — and others before it —rolled out a series of last-minute regulations, memos and policy directives in the final days of the presidency.

During the presidential transitions Bice, Giddens and Grant worked on, agencies often paused current activities to give the incoming administration the time and space to roll out their own activities.

“Career officials are used to that change, running through the tape and also at the beginning of the administration pausing what they’re working on to make sure that they give the incoming administration all of the ability to see what is being produced so they’re comfortable with what gets produced,” Bice said.

The current situation may be different, they all acknowledged, since some agencies didn’t begin traditional transition activities until mid-to-late November.

It’s ultimately up to career executives to balance the work of the current administration with the planning and preparation that the incoming team expects to accomplish during the transition.

“Most administrations want to finish strong, but the next group is going to want to sprint out of the gate,” said Giddens. It’s also important for career leaders to ensure their employees aren’t feeling run down by the process, he added.

The process of readjusting to new priorities and policy goals isn’t unique to presidential transitions either, Grant added. Career employees are relatively accustomed to those changes, in part, because few political appointees stay at their agencies for a full four-year term.

Giddens recalled working at the VA when former Secretary Bob McDonald came in to lead the department halfway through the second term of the Obama administration. The new secretary, he said, brought a lot of change very quickly into the department.

New policy directives have ‘ripple effect’ across an agency

Though career employees may be accustomed to deluge of new executive orders and policy directives at the start of a new administration, there are other factors that might complicate their efforts to quickly implement them.

The volume of new directives coming from the Biden administration during its first two weeks in office is higher than the last four administrations combined.

And some agencies have fewer career employees on board today than they did four-to-five years ago. The size of the USDA workforce, for example, dropped by more than 4,800 employees between September 2016 and September 2020, according to the most recent data from the Office of Personnel Management.

“This may be a particularly difficult time. In terms of federal staffing we’re lower than we’ve been in many years in most of the departments,” Bice said. “It will require even more to be done than previously because I think we have fewer people who are in those roles. The smart managers in government, the career people, understand that they have a limited capacity to do everything.”

Career executives and others who interact closely with current and incoming political appointees feel the transition policy sprint the most intensely — at least at first.

“For the most part government works pretty slowly,” Bice said. “Those changes happen over time. It’s not necessarily a light switch that goes on and off.”

New policy directives usually reach the executive level first before slowly rippling throughout the rest of the organization to employees in the field.

“It wouldn’t be healthy for an organization; you can’t have your people feeling whip-sawed by new policy in the field,” said Grant, who spent the first 11 months of the Trump administration as FEMA’s acting deputy administrator.

But it’s up to senior career executives to bridge the gap between the political appointees and their new policy directives and the staff in the field who may eventually implement those changes at the programmatic level.

“They translate those new executive orders or policies into the language of the organization,” Grant said. “It filters out, and there’s a well worn process to get that done.”

It’s also up to the career executives to steer their employees through sudden policy changes — and explain to the new political appointees what it’ll take to implement a new directive and the consequences of eliminating the old ones.

Grant said the the most successful appointees take time to learn about the organization they’re entering, or, as may be the case for some Biden appointees, to learn about what’s changed at the agency they’re rejoining. It goes both ways for the career staff.

“All these folks need to learn as much about the agency as the agency needs to learn about them,” he said.

The Defense Department is relieving members of dozens of its advisory committees and conducting a review of their continued necessity in the Pentagon.

After a fair amount of drama over Defense advisory boards in the past few months, the Pentagon is starting completely fresh by relieving hundreds of board members.

“The secretary directed that all members currently serving on DoD advisory committees and subcommittees to conclude their service no later than Feb. 16,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday.

The mass firing is subject to all committees where a DoD civilian or active duty employee is the approval authority. Members must leave no later than Feb. 16.

DoD will conduct a review on at least 40 committees like the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Science Board and the Defense Business Board to determine the need for efficiencies and possibility for opportunities. The result could end up with the elimination of some boards.

The firings and review come after former President Donald Trump removed a slew of members from the Defense Policy and Business Boards, as well as others. He then installed new members to those boards, some of whom were considered politically divisive, like campaign managers Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie.

“There is no question that the frenetic activity that occurred to the composition of so many boards in just the period of November to January deeply concerned the secretary and certainly helped drive him to this decision,” Kirby said. “This review will allow him now to quickly get his arms around the purpose of these boards and to make sure the advisory committees are in fact providing the best possible advice to department leadership.”

The interim director of administration and management and the general counsel will lead the review. Each DoD component head that sponsors a Defense committee will conduct a business case analysis on their respective boards.

“These sponsors will also consider each committee’s mission and function as it relates to the national defense strategy and to our own strategic priorities,” Kirby said. “They’ll look at potential functional realignments to create a single cross functional advisory committee when it’s appropriate. They’ll also look at potential legislative changes to non-discretionary advisory committees to align their missions and functions.”

Component heads will submit their business cases by April 30. Final recommendations will be made to the Defense secretary by June 1.

“The secretary expects recommendations will include retention realignment, termination, changes to mission of functions, membership balance, membership size, and possible legislative changes,” Kirby said.