Hiring Freeze – Another Unintended Consequence

Cut the number of federal workers and the deficit goes down, right? Makes logical sense, until you drill down into the kinds of workers that are let go, not hired or promoted with insufficient experience to fill vacancies or simply slow the hiring process down so that inexperience replaces “know what you are doing.” You can see where not providing judges can slow commercial dispute resolution resulting in delays and cost-increases. Or not having enough folks in the IRS to collect taxes can impact collections.

But the one area where you might be surprised is in the procurement field, where inexperience can engender serious delays, raise costs as newbies require engaging outside experts or require expensive expertise from different divisions to provide advice where seasoned veterans would know better or simply fail to evaluate the project with sufficient detail to support the process accurately. “The number of workers classified as contracting professionals increased 27 percent to 33,274 in 10 years, according to data compiled by the Office of Personnel Management. That growth failed to match the increase in spending on contracts, which more than doubled to $535 billion in the year ended Sept. 30, from $221 billion in fiscal 2001, according to federal procurement data.” Washington Post, July 29^th. Note the new wars and military spending that precisely fit the time period of that increase.

Between the above-noted military expansion, government financial programs, infrastructure projects and simply keeping America’s governmental procurement and acquisition on track as the population expands and crises programs are implemented, the government is obviously much more involved in procurement today than it was a decade or more ago. With our addiction to military spending still raging out of control despite our lack of success in our military expeditions, the Department of Defense is responsible for about 70% of our governmental contracts with outside vendors. And the DOD is one of several federal agencies with just too many inexperienced procurement staff: “The Defense Department had the highest share of contracting employees with less than five years of service, at 34 percent. It was followed by the Department of Veterans Affairs, with 33 percent, and the Department of Homeland Security, at 32 percent…The lowest rates were at the departments of Agriculture and of Housing and Urban Development, both at about 13 percent.” The Post.

Bewildered procurement officers often confront the complex process, replete with lots of rules, regulations and processes, by requesting a battery of lawyers to join a contract negotiation in droves, explaining what must be done along the way. Sometimes contractors, who want to get down to the operational details of the bid – requiring non-legal implementational expertise – face “the lawyers” who are focused on the wording of the document and don’t want their inexperienced procurement officers to open their mouths and say the wrong thing.

Sometimes, the newbies forget an important step : “A vendor [one outside law firm] represented in 2009 filed a protest after the Pentagon excluded it from a multibillion-dollar contract for technology services. The company, which Chierichella declined to identify, objected to the government’s cost analysis. It ended up that acquisition officials had not conducted one, and his client was awarded the contract after the delay… ‘Too often, mistakes are being made that I find surprising,’ [the lawyer] said in a phone interview. ‘They don’t seem to have the experience to know that when you ignore a mandatory requirement, you’re asking for trouble.’” The Post. We are no better than the quality of the civil servants we trust with running the government. But hiring freezes and cutting promotions, bonuses and salaries for the “best and the brightest” can produce less qualified and an inexperienced civil servants being left with jobs too big for them to fill, resulting in cost delays and fiscal waste. And while this is a bad job market, the “best and the brightest” government workers – many stopped from advancement by Congressional mandate – have never been easier for private industry to pick off.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you really want to save money, perhaps we can actually reduce the stuff that we are “procuring,” but that would require an unprecedented assault on the sacred cow we call the “military budget.”