Following Defense News' uncovering of the Department of Defense's civilian hiring freeze, Federal Times reached out to Dave Wennergren, the Professional Service Council's executive vice president for Operations & Technology, to get a sense of what the move means for the defense contracting community.
How does the DoD's move to freeze civilian hiring affect defense contractors in the bigger scheme of things?
I would view this as the second shoe to drop. Throughout the last six of seven years, there's been a lot of push about the reductions in contracts, from the in-sourcing in the beginning of this administration through the Service Contract Review Board work that is looking at reductions now.
So there's been quite a lot of reductions in contracting workforce in DoD. This seems like the next step. The military departments have been working on headquarters reductions and things like this, and now this effort is primarily focused at the OSD staff level, the defense agencies and the field activities—what the often refer to as the Fourth Estate—to actually help them work through reductions in a meaningful way too. It's a continuing thread, but it's now sort of on the government's side. Some of the reductions we have already seen on the contractor side.
So if this is part of continued reductions in the DoD, how does the temporary freeze accomplish those goals?
So, on the one hand, the idea about the temporarily freezing the hiring of folks until the de-layering plans are implemented I would describe as good business practice. If you know you are going to cut some jobs, make sure you are not hiring people into jobs you know you are about to cut. So to temporarily freeze to minimize the average impact on people is a certainly reasonable thing to do. And I guess it will also serve the purpose of helping to ensure that the de-layering plans get done. There is sort of a stick here too, because you don't get to hire anybody until you deliver your plans about what your [Volume 2B: "Budget Formulation and Presentation"] state is going to look like.
In all of these efforts, the thing that you don't want to do is to be arbitrary and resort to salami-slice cuts, that is never a good plan for either the government or the contractor workforce. So our hope is that these de-layering plans will be thoughtfully constructed and really help to reduce levels within the chain of command, flatten out organizations and things like that, in which case, a temporary hiring freeze is a good thing to do.
So is this like a kind of a correction in the market?
Well, that's an interesting way of phrasing it. I might have said we've been watching a lot of reductions go on in the contracting workforce for a while now, so now the attention is being turned to the sort-of total force idea.
This is obviously going to be important to the Department of Defense, because they are working on their Force of the Future plan, which is supposed to be a total force launch. So you have got to figure out what to do with the military personnel, you've got to figure out what to do with your support contractors and you've got to figure out what to do with your civil service workforce. So you've been seeing a lot of talk about two out of the three of those legs of the stool, so this one is starting to address the civilian workforce side of it.
