[Senate Hearing 108-100]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 108-100
AN OVERLOOKED ASSET: THE DEFENSE CIVILIAN WORKFORCE
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT,
THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
FIELD HEARING HELD AT THE
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, DAYTON, OHIO
__________
MAY 12, 2003
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Governmental Affairs
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman
TED STEVENS, Alaska JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut
GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio CARL LEVIN, Michigan
NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii
ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
PETER G. FITZGERALD, Illinois MARK DAYTON, Minnesota
JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey
RICHARD C. SHELBY, Alabama MARK PRYOR, Arkansas
Michael D. Bopp, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Joyce Rechtschaffen, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Darla D. Cassell, Chief Clerk
------
OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT, THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE AND THE
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE
GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio, Chairman
TED STEVENS, Alaska RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois
NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
PETER G. FITZGERALD, Illinois FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey
JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire MARK PRYOR, Arkansas
Andrew Richardson, Staff Director
Marianne Clifford Upton, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Cynthia Simmons, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
------
Opening statement:
Page
Senator Voinovich............................................ 1
WITNESSES
Monday, May 17, 2003
Hon. David S.C. Chu, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and
Readiness, Department of Defense............................... 4
Hon. David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States,
U.S. General Accounting Office................................. 6
Michael L. Dominguez, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force
Manpower and Reserve Affairs, U.S. Air Force................... 8
General Lester L. Lyles, Commander, Air Force Materiel Command,
U.S. Air Force................................................. 9
Dr. Vincent J. Russo, Executive Director, Aeronautical Systems
Center, U.S. Air Force......................................... 11
Dr. Beth J. Asch, Senior Economist, RAND......................... 29
J. Scott Blanch, President, American Federation of Government
Employees, AFL-CIO Council 214................................. 31
Michael Druand, Deputy Treasurer, American Federation of
Government Employees Local 1138................................ 33
J.P. Nauseef, Vice President, Aerospace Defense Technology,
Dayton Development Coalition on behalf of Ronald D. Wine,
President and CEO, Dayton Development Coalition................ 35
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Asch, Dr. Beth J.:
Testimony.................................................... 29
Prepared statement........................................... 145
Blanch, J. Scott:
Testimony.................................................... 31
Prepared statement........................................... 158
Chu, Hon. David S.C.:
Testimony.................................................... 4
Prepared statement........................................... 51
Dominguez, Michael L.:
Testimony.................................................... 8
Prepared statement........................................... 81
Durand, Michael:
Testimony.................................................... 33
Prepared statement........................................... 175
Lyles, General Lester L.:
Testimony.................................................... 9
Prepared statement with attachments.......................... 92
Nauseef, J.P.:
Testimony.................................................... 35
Prepared statement submitted for Ronald D. Wine.............. 179
Russo, Dr. Vincent J.:
Testimony.................................................... 11
Prepared statement with attachments.......................... 127
Walker, Hon. David M.:
Testimony.................................................... 6
Prepared statement........................................... 62
Appendix
James Mattice, Dayton Ohio, prepared statement................... 182
Letter dated November 19, 2002, to Hon. Donald H. Rumsfeld from
Senator Voinovich.............................................. 185
Letter dated 2 DEC 2002, to Seantor Voinovich from Michael L.
Dominguez, Assistant Secretary (Manpower & Reserve Affairs)
Department of the Air Force.................................... 187
Letter dated December 4, 2002, to Hon. James Roche, Secretary of
the Air Force, U.S. Department of Defense, from Senator
Voinovich...................................................... 189
Letter dated 19 December 2002 to Senator Voinovich from Lester L.
Lyles, General USAF Commander.................................. 191
AN OVERLOOKED ASSET: THE DEFENSE CIVILIAN WORKFORCE
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MONDAY, MAY 12, 2003
U.S. Senate,
Oversight of Government Management, the Federal
Workforce, and the District of Columbia Subcommittee,
of the Committee on Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 12:35 p.m., in
Philip E. Carney Auditorium, U.S. Air Force Museum, Wright-
Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, Hon. George V.
Voinovich, Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senator Voinovich.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH
Senator Voinovich. The Subcommittee on the Oversight of
Government Management and the Federal Workforce will come to
order. Good afternoon, and thank you all for coming.
First, I would like to thank General Charles Metcalf and
the Air Force Museum for hosting this field hearing. I
appreciate your hard work and cooperation. As many of you know,
this hearing was originally scheduled to take place in
February, but inclement weather in Washington and Ohio caused
its postponement. I am pleased that we were able to reschedule
the event for this spring.
It's nice to be back in this facility. I visited many times
when I was Governor of Ohio, and I understand that there is
going to be another wing dedicated. Hopefully, we'll get a
chance to come down for that also.
Today's hearing is entitled ``An Overlooked Asset: The
Defense Civilian Workforce.'' This is the thirteenth hearing
that this Subcommittee has held on the formidable human capital
challenges confronting the Federal Government. I suspect that
13 hearings is unprecedented, and that this Subcommittee has
had more hearings on the Federal workforce since 1999 than it
has at any time since 1978. Nineteen hundred seventy eight was
when Congress really looked at the last comprehensive review of
our personnel system in the Federal Government. And it's a
subject that I made up my mind a long time ago that I was going
to devote my attention to.
One of the reasons I came to the Senate was to change the
culture of the Federal workforce, along with balancing budgets
and reducing the deficit, and I have tried to get a hold of
this like a bull dog and don't intend to let it go. And I know
David Walker, who has been my colleague in this effort, knows
that we've been at it for a while, haven't we, David?
Mr. Walker. We have, Senator.
Senator Voinovich. Today we are examining a significant
element of the Federal Government's 1.8 million employee
workforce: The civilian staff of the Department of Defense, the
almost 700,000 workers who stand behind our men and women in
uniform each and every day. In other words, what we're talking
about is having the right people with the right skills and
knowledge in the right place at the right time.
I mean this literally--in terms of what's happened right
here at Wright-Patterson--in that these employees conduct vital
research and development, administer bases, build and repair
military equipment in arsenals and depots, operate the
commissaries and exchanges that are so important to the morale
of our servicemen and women, and countless other tasks.
And, General Lyles, I remember when I was here when the
President visited a couple weeks ago to meet with you and some
of the others on your team, and how very proud you were of the
role that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the labs had in
our successful operation in Iraq. And I think so often people
take for granted what's happening here and how influential you
have been in terms of the modernization of our Air Force.
General Lyles. Thank you, Senator.
Senator Voinovich. Congress and the administration too
often spend more time examining and trying to ensure the health
of the uniformed services than the Defense civilian workforce.
To some extent this is understandable. Military personnel are
often sent into harm's way, and can expect long separations in
harsh, isolated locations from their homes and families. These
are just two aspects of serving in uniform that the vast
majority of civil servants do not face.
Nevertheless, we must stop overlooking the Defense civilian
workforce, and instead ensure that it has the tools and
resources it needs to perform its absolutely vital missions. We
will ill serve the men and women on the front lines if the
workforce designed to support them is inadequately manned and
trained.
I would note, however, that this year is different. The
Bush Administration is working to address these issues, and
Secretary Rumsfeld and his Defense Department team are to be
commended for those efforts. And, Dr. Chu, we're very happy
that you are here today as the Under Secretary for Personnel
and Readiness.
Mr. Chu. Thank you, sir.
Senator Voinovich. In March 2001, the Subcommittee held a
hearing entitled ``National Security Implications of the Human
Capital Crisis.'' Among our panel of distinguished witnesses
that day were former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who
was a member of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the
21st Century. Secretary Schlesinger discussed a comprehensive
evaluation on national security strategy and structure that was
undertaken by the commission. Regarding human capital, the
commission's final report concluded, and this is very
important, ``As it enters the 21st Century, the United States
finds itself on the brink of an unprecedented crisis of
competence in government. The maintenance of American power in
the world depends on the quality of U.S. Government personnel,
civil and military, at all levels. We must take immediate
action in the personnel area to ensure that the United States
can meet future challenges.''
Secretary Schlesinger added further, ``It is the
Commission's view that fixing the personnel problem is a
precondition for fixing virtually everything else that needs
repair in the institutional edifice of U.S. national security
policy.''
And it's interesting, I think, and in one of the statements
that we're going to hear, that some 320,000 military
individuals today are assigned a task that could be performed
by civilians, and the reason why they are is because there is
so much more flexibility in the military side of the Defense
Department than in the civilian side.
As I mentioned, since 1999 I have worked to express the
urgency of the Federal Government's human capital challenges,
and their impact on critically important government functions,
such as national security, to my colleagues. I have championed
a series of legislative reforms in Congress, which should have
a significant impact on the way the Federal Government manages
its people in the coming years.
In fact, the first legislative solution I authored had its
genesis right here at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. So it's
apropriate that we're having this hearing here today. Three
years ago base leadership shared with me their concerns that
the civilian workforce was not configured properly to achieve
current and projected mission requirements.
Working with my colleagues on the Governmental Affairs and
Armed Services Committees, we drafted a measure to address
these workforce shaping challenges. I was the primary sponsor
of an amendment to the fiscal year 2000 Defense Authorization
Act that authorized 9,000 voluntary early retirement and
voluntary separation incentive payments through this fiscal
year. Of those 9,000 slots, 365 have been used here at Wright-
Patterson Air Force Base, 101 of which were used by the
Aeronautical Systems Center. I am interested in hearing more
about how the Department of Defense, as well as the Air Force
and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, have used those
authorities and what impact the announced cuts of 13,000 will
have on their reshaping effort and the status of the proposed
reductions to the civilian workforce in the coming years and,
quite frankly, what's the rationale behind the reductions. Why
did this come about?
In addition, significant government-wide flexibilities,
which I also authored, were included in the Homeland Security
legislation that became law last year. I hope to learn today
how the Department intends to use these authorities. For
example, the rule of three, a statute which, in order to hire
someone, requires managers to take the top three certified
candidates, and if they don't like those three, to announce the
vacancy again, and so on and so on and so forth. This was
changed in our amendment to the Homeland Security Act. How is
that going to impact on the Air Force's ability to move forward
and get the people they need to get the job done?
Last, but not least, the Department recently presented to
Congress and requested enactment of the Defense Transformation
for the 21st Century Act, which includes a proposed ``National
Security Personnel System,'' NSPS, that would dramatically
overhaul the way DOD manages its people. Although committees in
the House of Representatives have examined and marked up NSPS
in a series of hearings during the past 2 weeks, I am hoping
today that our Senate Subcommittee may learn more of the
details and justifications behind this major reform proposal
and specifically, if possible, how it might impact right here
at Wright-Patterson.
I'm delighted now to introduce today's first panel of
witnesses. Dr. David Chu is the Under Secretary of Defense for
Personnel and Readiness. Dr. Chu and I have met and discussed
the Department's workforce challenges on several occasions
starting, I think, at Harvard University when Kennedy School of
Government Dean Nye made human capital the topic of a series of
executive sessions. I look forward to hearing you tell us about
NSPS.
Michael Dominguez is the Assistant Secretary of the Air
Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. Mr. Dominguez has also
been to my office and we've talked, and we appreciate you being
here.
Of course, my good friend, General Lester Lyles, is the
commander of the Air Force Materiel Command, which is
headquartered here at Wright-Patterson, and he is doing just an
outstanding job.
And probably the person that I have known the longest--I
think the first time I met you was in 1978, when I was running
for Lieutenant Governor of Ohio. Dr. Vince Russo is the
Executive Director of the Aeronautical Systems Center, which is
also based here at Wright-Patterson. We're so lucky to have
people like Dr. Vince Russo in our civilian workforce who
dedicated their lives to their country.
I'd like to note that these four gentlemen will provide us
both with a macro view of the Defense civilian workforce from
the Defense Department and Military Department level, as well
as the perspective from a major command and base activity.
And rounding out our first panel is the Hon. David Walker,
we can call him general too, Comptroller General Walker. He is
a very proud Marine. I have worked closely with GAO on various
issues during my time in the Senate. David, I appreciate, as I
mentioned, your continuing assistance in our examination of the
Federal Government's human capital challenges, and I'm grateful
for your willingness to travel out to Ohio to be with us today.
Thank you all for coming. It is the custom of this
Subcommittee to swear in all witnesses. Therefore, I would ask
you to stand and raise your right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Senator Voinovich. Thank you. We'll start with you, Dr.
Chu.
TESTIMONY OF HON. DAVID S.C. CHU,\1\ UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
FOR PERSONNEL AND READINESS, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Mr. Chu. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's a great privilege to
be here, and I very much value the chance to offer you the
Department's thoughts on the crucial issues you have
identified, and I do have a longer statement for the record,
which I hope I may submit, but I briefly want to summarize some
of its key points.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Chu appears in the Appendix on
page 51.
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Civil servants, as you have already noted, are a crucial
part of the total force that makes the Department of Defense
effective. When I first came to work in this Department in
1981, I was privileged to be associated with some of the people
who came with our government in the great wave of Federal
expansion during the Second World War, when Mike Huran was the
acting general council of the Department of Defense. For a
longer period of time there were more civil servants filling in
for political appointees than they confirmed general office
people in the 1960's when President Kennedy issued his famous
call to public service and who had dedicated themselves to the
business of government.
When I returned to the Department in 2001, I discovered
many of these people had either passed away or had retired or
were in the process of retiring. They are gone. And I regret to
say during the decade of the 1990's, we did not during this
generation have a substitute for these great leaders who leave
and from whom we have benefitted.
You and the Comptroller General Walker have spoken
eloquently on many occasions about the coming human capital
crisis. I would argue that the human capital crisis is upon us,
it has already begun with the departure of these valued civil
servants. And we in the Department, in my judgment, I will come
to arguments in just a second, need new tools if we're going to
succeed in recruiting the replacement generation.
You are probably aware, sir, of the recent review published
by the Merit System Protection Board that takes a sample of
Federal job vacancy job announcements and analyzes them for
their effectiveness, and it gives us a failing grade. It makes
the point that these do not make the positions that we are
seeking filled to sound attractive to young Americans. It does
say, and this may be the heart of the problem, that they do a
great job of meeting legal requirements. Once that's finished,
it's difficult to understand and it's amazing anybody gets
through them.
And indeed, that is a point that is made also by the survey
that the Brookings Institution has just completed with the 2002
college seniors who are graduating this year. They were asked
about their career aspirations, and specifically about their
views of public service. Students asked to describe the hiring
process in each of the government, non-profit community and the
private sector. They ranked the government first in confusion,
first in slowness, and first in unfairness. Non-profits were
seen the simplest and fairest while the private sector was seen
as the fastest.
It is not just the students who complain. The commander of
tactical motor command recently provided me with a report from
one of his program executive officers who said, ``We've
encountered this problem when recruiting professional engineers
at the GS-12 level and secretaries at the GS-6 and GS-7 levels.
Generally, we have to sit the applicant down and explain
exactly what to do in order to give them a chance of appearing
on a certificate, because left on their own, they have no idea
what to do and either apply incorrectly or give up.''
And we see that, I think, going back to the Brookings
survey just completed, in the attitude of the students
graduating from America's colleges torn where they see the
chance to offer public service. They see volunteering 82
percent as being about public service, voting as being about
public service, working for a non-profit being involved in
public service, but working for the government, only 29 percent
of the students see that as public service. And that is an
image we need to change.
That's one of the key reasons the Secretary of Defense
developed the proposal for a National Security Personnel
System. It is a set of proposals that benefits from more than
two decades of experimental powers the Congress has given this
department, which it expanded substantially during the decade
of the 1990's.
Although we have China Lake, which began around 1980, the
Department was joined in this by my colleague, Mr. Dominguez,
over the last year, really since March 2002, and has been
engaged in a major review of the lessons we've learned from
those demonstrations, which currently embrace about 30,000
Department of Defense employees.
And we do have authority within the Federal Government
within the Department of Defense to expand those best practices
to the laboratory and acquisition workforces, and first in the
beginning that expansion was published in April 2000.
The proposal for a National Security Personnel System would
indeed take these same ideas and apply them to the Department's
civilian workforce as a whole, and there are three key features
that I would like to emphasize in my summary today.
First, much more expeditious hiring practices so that we
are seen as one of the best, not one of the worst, to apply to
for young Americans. It takes the Department of Defense an
average of about 90 days to hire someone. Today that's far too
slow in competition with the private sector.
Second, we would like to move to pay banding for our
workforce as a whole, which includes a variety of important
attributes, including emphasized work performance in
determining someone's pay.
And third, we would like to move to national bargaining
with our union partners when it comes to human resource issues
that cut across the Department, which currently under the
present statute it has been bargained at the local level. It is
to solve these hiring problems, it is to be able to convert
some of the 320,000 positions we've identified as being
possibly those which civilians could undertake to civil service
status.
Those are the important reasons for presenting this
proposal at this time this year and for urging the Congress to
consider this favorably. We look forward to working with you,
Mr. Chairman, on this proposal and on your questions this
afternoon.
Senator Voinovich. Our next witness is Comptroller General
Walker.
TESTIMONY OF HON. DAVID M. WALKER,\1\ COMPTROLLER GENERAL OF
THE UNITED STATES, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE
Mr. Walker. Thank you, Senator. It's a pleasure to be here.
I must say that this is very impressive that you were able to
get four presidential appointees with Senate confirmation to
come to a field hearing. It's probably unprecedented, as far as
I know. And I can say that I'm here for two reasons, first, the
importance of the topic at hand, namely the human capital issue
and, second, out of abundance out of respect for you and your
ability, because I believe that you're one of the most
outstanding members of the U.S. Senate, and it's a pleasure to
be here to talk about this important topic.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Walker appears in the Appendix on
page 62.
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As you know, Senator, I've been a long-standing supporter
of government transformation, and human capital reform in
particular. I've also had the privilege of being an observer,
and still being an observer, on the Department of the Defense's
business practices implementation board, so I know firsthand of
Secretary Rumsfeld's, Secretary Chu's, and others at DOD's top
leadership commitment to the need to transform the way the
Department of Defense does business, and agree that fundamental
change is necessary.
At the same time DOD has 9 of 25 high-risk areas on GAO's
high-risk list. DOD is No. 1 in the world for the standard of
excellence in fighting and winning armed conflicts. It's an A
plus. It's a D on economy, efficiency, transparency, and
accountability. Part of that is the need for more
administrative actions. Part of that is a need for some
legislative flexibility. It's clear that management needs
reasonable flexibility to deliver results with available
resources. At the same time, it's also important that
appropriate safeguards should be in place in order to maximize
the chance for success and to minimize the chance of abuse.
Current Federal hiring classification pay systems are
outdated and in need of fundamental reform. Many of these
challenges exist at DOD, and many, quite frankly, are
government-wide challenges and not solely those experienced at
DOD.
Several of DOD's proposals are agency specific and merit
serious consideration such as the military reforms and selected
civilian reforms. Others are much broader with significant
potential implications for the civil service system in general,
and OPM in particular, the Office of Personnel Management, such
as broad banding pay for performance and re-employment
provisions.
In our view, in GAO's view, it would be prudent and
appropriate to consider these on a government-wide basis, not
to slow down DOD reforms, but to broaden the opportunity for
these reforms to be available to other parts of the government
who can demonstrate that they are deserving and have an ability
to properly implement these reforms.
Irrespective of whether these reforms are pursued on a
single agency or on a government-wide basis, we believe it is
critically important to include appropriate safeguards to
minimize the chance of abuse and to maximize the chance of
success. This is particularly critical in connection with pay
for performance and reduction in force provisions.
In my statement I outline a number of suggested safeguards
for consideration by you and the Congress, Mr. Chairman. I
would respectfully ask that my statement be included in the
record, although I may want to make a few minor modifications
for the final version. I would also----
Senator Voinovich. OK. It's without objection.
Mr. Walker. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would also note the
importance that DOD take a more comprehensive and integrated
approach to strategic workforce planning. When I say
integrated, I mean the uniformed workforce, the civilian
workforce, and the contracting corps. All three are critically
important to achieve the mission, and all too frequently, as
has been noted before, the Federal Government has viewed its
civilian workforce as a cost to be cut rather than an asset to
be valued.
In addition, I note the importance of giving consideration
to adopting a chief operating officer concept, which I note in
my testimony, and I won't elaborate on it at this point in time
other than to say if we want to make transformation happen, and
if we want it to stick, then I believe that this concept has
particular merit at DOD in order to ensure continuity and
continued effort, not only within this administration, but
between administrations.
In closing, GAO strongly supports both governmentwide and
DOD transformation efforts and human capital reform
initiatives. A number of DOD's proposals have merit and deserve
serious consideration. Others have merit, but need additional
safeguards. And still others have merit, but possibly should be
considered on a broader basis. Doing so would help to
accelerate overall progress in the human capital area
governmentwide, while not slowing down DOD. It would maximize
the chance of success, minimize the possibility of abuse, and
avoid the further bulkenization of the civil service within the
Executive Branch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you. Mr. Dominguez.
TESTIMONY OF MICHAEL L. DOMINGUEZ,\1\ ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF
THE AIR FORCE MANPOWER AND RESERVE AFFAIRS, U.S. AIR FORCE
Mr. Dominguez. Yes, sir, Senator. Thank you for inviting me
to this hearing. I also have a prepared statement, which I'd
like to be inserted into the record, and then I'll follow with
these oral comments.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Dominguez appears in the Appendix
on page 81.
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Senator Voinovich. All of your statements will be inserted
into the record.
Mr. Dominguez. Thank you. I want to also----
Senator Voinovich. It's very important that they do because
my colleagues aren't here, and I want to make sure--and also
the testimony of this will be shared with the staff and my
colleagues on this Subcommittee so that they get the benefit of
the testimony here today.
Mr. Dominguez. Yes, sir. I want to say a special thank you
to you for affording me an opportunity to return to Dayton,
Ohio. I attended as an Air Force brat junior and much of senior
high school here in Dayton, and it's a real joy to be back with
the people of this city and this air base. I also want to thank
you for the opportunity to participate in this important
discussion of the challenges facing the Federal civilian
workforce.
My comments to you today, and my approach to the
responsibilities of my office, have been and will be informed
by my dual status as a presidential appointee and a career
Federal civil servant. Like my colleagues on this panel, I
share a deep and abiding respect for the contributions civil
servants have made and will yet make to the DOD mission and the
security of the Nation.
Air Force people face two-entwined challenges. First, the
workload since September 11 has grown enormously, and the
second is demand for a different mix of skills than those we
now possess. Both challenges must be faced simultaneously on
five axes.
First, DOD must adopt modern management practices, and I
speak here of results-based government focused on performance
outcomes, not resource inputs, and on replacing pay for
longevity with pay for performance. We must also understand our
core competencies and learn how that understanding ought to
affect our management decisionmaking.
The second, DOD must deploy modern IT systems organized
around enterprise-wide information architectures. The DOD
personnel community led by Dr. Chu is making good progress in
this direction, and the DOD comptroller is spear heading the
creation of the DOD enterprise architecture.
Third, we have to re-engineer practices, processes, and
organizations to take advantage of those modern management
concepts and those modern IT systems. Re-engineering will strip
work out of organizations, streamline staff, flatten
hierarchies, compress cycle times and improve results, and no
question about it, fundamentally alter jobs, which leads to the
fourth axis. We have to invest in educating and developing our
workforce to prepare them for these challenges. It may not be
rocket science, but it is hard.
Now, finally, the fifth axis is that the legislation
enacted by the Congress must enable this transformation. The
proposed changes to the civilian and military, both active and
reserve, personnel systems submitted this spring by the
Department, in my view, when matched with the advances along
these other axes, will create a fast, flexible, agile workforce
partnered and aligned with their military and civilian leaders;
and to fast, flexible organizations pursuing specifically
designed and precisely identified national security outcomes.
In doing so, move at a pace of innovation and change that
eviscerates any enemy's ability to threaten us. Thank you once
again for this opportunity, and I look forward to your
questions.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you, Mr. Dominguez. General Lyles.
TESTIMONY OF GENERAL LESTER L. LYLES,\1\ COMMANDER, AIR FORCE
MATERIEL COMMAND, U.S. AIR FORCE
General Lyles. Mr. Chairman, Senator Voinovich, thank you
again for the opportunity to address the state of the Air Force
Materiel Command's civilian workforce before your Subcommittee.
And as the hearing reaffirms, human capital strategic
management is a critical aspect of our many transformation
efforts. And, Senator, I'd like to let you know that I greatly
appreciate the considerable support that you personally have
given and provided in this arena, from your successful
introduction of legislation to allow the Department of Defense
to use separation incentives as a force shaping tool, to the
personnel flexibilities you added to the bill creating the new
Department of Homeland Security. All of us have benefitted from
your tremendous efforts and those of your colleagues.
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\1\ The prepared statement of General Lyles appears in the Appendix
on page 92.
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I'm pleased to report, Mr. Chairman, that the current state
of our civilian workforce of 56,000 men and women strong in Air
Force Materiel Command is first-rate, which allowed us to
superbly provide the capabilities that were needed by our
warfighters in size and technology, acquisition and
development, logistics, maintenance and sustained testing.
However, our real concern is not just with the current state.
Our concern is with the future and whether or not the civilian
workforce is properly shaped to meet the mission requirements
and imperatives for the 21st Century.
Let me call your attention, if I could, to a chart. I would
like to illustrate the first chart, if someone could put that
up, please.\1\ Next chart please. Today the average age of our
civilian workforce is 46 years old, which is significantly
above that of private industry. They average closer to the late
30's. An older workforce, of course, is an experienced force,
and that's helpful in the short term, however, we're concerned
that 23 percent of our civilian employees are eligible to
retire this year.
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\1\ Charts referred to appears in the Appendix on page 119.
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If you consider the employees eligible for early
retirement, the figure jumps to more like 49 percent, and in 4
years 67 percent of our force will be eligible for regular or
early retirement. And our figures reflect that somewhere
between 25 and 35 percent of employees retire within 1 year of
that eligibility, and an additional 15 to 20 percent separate
the following year. Hence, you can see one of the major
concerns we have about managing the workforce that's so
critically needed to meet our national security objectives.
Clearly we foresee a great deal of employee turmoil over
the next several years as seasoned employees retire and
replacement candidates are hired.
I might add, Mr. Chairman, that demographically 33 percent
of our civilian force is female, 67 percent is male, while
minority members represent 21.1 percent of our total force. And
we are, in addition to everything else, committed to ensuring
we have a diverse workforce, and that we have implemented a
number of initiatives, including centralized engineer diversity
recruitment programs for our command to help us to achieve this
objective.
Next chart, please. So, Mr. Chairman, we talked and are
going to talk a lot about workforce shaping, the separation
incentives that we currently have available, and those we may
need for the future. Our command is extremely appreciative of
the opportunity that you and others have afforded us and our
centers to reshape our workforce with the passage of these
workforce shaping separation incentives and initiatives.
The need for this authority was a key element in our
ground-breaking workforce study findings. And it has been
particularly valuable to our product and test centers, Air
Force research laboratories and in the past, when we closed two
of our air logistics centers, to allow us to shape that
workforce and shape it appropriately for the missions we have
at hand today.
Next chart, please. This chart documents the usage of the
authorities that you provided us. In fiscal year 2001, the
authority could only be used to incentivize employees currently
eligible for optional retirement. This command used 147 of the
total 175 allocations that the Air Force executed.
In fiscal year 2002 we were given authority to use a daisy
chain and to offer incentives to employees eligible for early
and optional retirement and resignations. This command used 362
quotas of the total Air Force allocation of 450.
For fiscal year 2003, this fiscal year, we're authorized
750 incentive authorizations. However, due to the unplanned
reductions that our centers must absorb this year, it is
unlikely that they will be able to use all of these
authorizations. To date we've used 270, and I know for sure we
will not be able to use the full 750 that are available to us.
Mr. Chairman, these proposed reductions are affecting all
of us in Air Force Materiel Command, just like the rest of the
commands within the U.S. Air Force. There is no doubt that
these workforce reductions are incompatible with workforce
shaping for the most part.
We're experiencing some setbacks in our objectives here,
but we feel optimistic that we will still be able to make
workforce shaping work for us and work for our command. As we
become more efficient through transforming our processes, we're
attempting to develop an attrition strategy that balances the
need to realign and reduce the workforce with the need to
ensure that adequate headroom exists for opportunity for
replacement and replenishment strategies to meet the future.
Mr. Chairman, there are lots of things that are currently
under way to allow us to better align our workforce. The things
that are being done through the proposed legislation and
policies, what you've done through the Homeland Security Act,
your proposed Federal Workforce Flexibility Act of 2003, and
now the National Security Personnel System, we think, will
allow us the kinds of attention and actions that are necessary
to properly align and shape our workforce for the future.
Mr. Chairman, I will close here, and I look forward to your
questions and comments about these and other things we are
doing today. Thank you very much.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you, General Lyles. Dr. Russo.
TESTIMONY OF DR. VINCENT J. RUSSO,\1\ EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
AERONAUTICAL SYSTEMS CENTER, U.S. AIR FORCE
Dr. Russo. Mr. Chairman, let me welcome you to Wright-
Patterson Air Force Base. As you know, we call ourselves the
birthplace, the home and the future of aerospace. As you also
know, we could never say that without the people of the past,
present, and the future of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The
creed of Wright-Patterson was written in 1942, and it states
that we will carry on the splendid vision and unswerving power
of those great leaders and innovators, Orville and Wilbur
Wright, so I'm here today to tell you we still believe in that
creed. As a matter of fact, we have a book we give our
distinguished visitors, and I believe I've given you one, has
that as our title, is sharing that vision of the Wright
brothers is our creed for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Dr. Russo appears in the Appendix on
page 127.
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Now, let me take some of the demographics that you've heard
about in my written testimony and bring them down to the base
level. Can I have my first chart, please. Next please. Sir,
this is Wright-Patterson Air Force Base's age demographics, and
I would like to call your attention first to the green bars.
Just look across there at the green bars. This was our
demographics in the late 1980's. You notice they were fairly
well evenly distributed, the kind of just demographics, I
think, we would like to see.
I call your attention to the first two green bars in
particular. If you add the height of those two bars, you will
note that 31 percent of our workforce was under the age of 35.
If you now look forward to those light bars, which is our
projection for 2007, you'll find our hope today is to exceed 7
percent, which is a tremendously dramatic reduction from the 31
percent under the age of 35 to a projection of maybe only 7
percent.
Now, a lot of people have asked me, sir, why do I do this
with pessimism versus optimism, and my answer is it's a mixed
bag. I am optimistic because it does give us the opportunity to
bring on a new workforce trained in different ideas, trained
with different skills than a person like myself may have, so it
is a tremendous opportunity for us to revitalize our workforce.
But I also temper that with a little pessimism because unless
we do this quickly, we are going to lose this incredible wealth
of experience.
We are not here dealing with running a Wal-Mart or running
a data processing center. We are dealing here at Wright-
Patterson with things that are a matter of safety of flight and
safety of life. Those things are based on experience. A lot of
experience, as we learn from one airplane to another, we pass
that experience down to our people.
As you notice, back in the 1980's we had a workforce that
allowed us to do that. As we project it in the future, I've
become increasingly concerned of our ability to pass that
experience base to a new workforce. There are things that you
just never learn in college, you have to learn through
experience.
May I have the next chart, please. The next chart just
gives you the same data with regard to years of service. Next
chart, please. So you asked us to talk a little bit about how
we use the workforce shaping legislation we've had already.
Here's the Wright-Patterson statistics. I broke it down one
level below that for you to show the ASC statistics.
The low numbers for fiscal year 2001 are very
understandable to me. By the time we got all the implementing
criteria it was pretty late. I actually remember getting phone
calls at home on Christmas Eve from people asking me should I
do this, Vince, or shouldn't I do this. So it's understandable
we had a little trouble in the first year.
The second year when we had plenty of notice, you notice
the numbers went up dramatically. As General Walker pointed
out, we also have that here, the ability to use the daisy
chain. When we got to 2003, you see the numbers have fallen
again. I think again that's most likely due to our inability to
use the daisy chain for backfill of senior leaders.
Next chart, please. So you heard a lot already about the
legislation for bringing new workforce on. I would like to say
something else. I would like to talk a minute about retention,
because not only is it an issue of bringing people on, it's
also an issue of keeping them here, so we have put a lot of
attention in the last couple of years on the subject of
retention. And with your permission, I would just like to
highlight a few things just to show you that we believe it's
not just bringing people here, but once you get them here, you
got to keep them here.
We have established something called a unified retention
center where we have a single office for all of our junior
enlisted, our officers and our civilians that could go to one
place to get issues dealing with the junior workforce. We even
gave our junior workforce their own communication devices,
their own web pages, their own E-mail distributors, all managed
by our own junior workforce.
The sheer issues of that generation, which are clearly
different than the issues of our generation. We're doing
something I'm particularly proud of, providing probably for the
first time that I can ever recall, a diversity training for
22,000 people at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. All 22,000 of
us will go through the same diversity training put together by
probably the greatest mind in that business in this country, a
guy by the name of Dr. Samuel Papasis. It's an incredible
ability to get our people more sensitive to the workforces of
the future, which the demographics will be significantly
different than those of the past.
And finally, something we focused on is our supervisors.
You can go to any HR organization in this country, and they
will tell you people do not leave their company, they leave
their supervisors. And so we have put an incredible increased
attention on getting our supervisors properly trained and
properly sensitive to the workforces of the future.
Next chart, please. We have taken on abilities to try to
train our leaders. I have a favorite saying of mine, I like to
move a workforce from very efficient managers to very effective
leaders of the future. So we have our senior leaders. I'm
teaching leadership principles to our workforce.
And finally, something that I think I'm equally proud of is
our ability to have our workforce get master's degrees right
here on base. We have had that capability in engineering
through AFIT, and through DAGSI, the Dayton Area Graduate
Studies Institute for quite a while. And University of Dayton
has recently come on base to help provide lunchtime master's
degrees for the engineering workforce.
But just this year we have done the same thing for business
people together with the University of Cincinnati, we have
brought on board here an MBA program that you could get without
ever leaving the base, all done at lunchtime.
So I emphasize for my particular part of my verbal the
retention issue. Now, all the issues that were talked about in
terms of legislation we fully support. I think that every one
of them will make life better for us. I am particularly
interested in the ability to speed up the hiring process. I
think that is critical.
I also think that contribution compensation is the way to
go. I've seen it work in the laboratory based on my laboratory
experiences, and it works, it's a wonderful tool, and I really
encourage us to do that.
And so, Mr. Chairman, I hope you share with me the
tremendous pride of accomplishment of all the employees here at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Every day we strive to make
major contributions and do our best for our U.S. Air Force. We
are powered by our mission statement that says we bring a
warrior spirit to this operation. Thank you for this
opportunity to express my views.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you very much. I'd like to thank
all the witnesses for their testimony. Dr. Russo, I really was
pleased with the last comments that you made in terms of some
of the things that you're doing to have a better workforce and
the importance of providing employees additional training to
help keep them on board.
I kind of smiled because when I was Mayor of the City of
Cleveland, all of my employees went to diversity training. When
I was governor we trained three-quarters of the State
workforce, and we found that was one of the best things that we
could possibly do to improve our workforce. It helped them
become better workers, it improved management and it aided in
the workforce understanding each other.
I think many of those employees go home to their own
families and take the lessons they learned in diversity
training back into their own households. Many of those
households had never had diversity training.
And we started DAGSI while I was governor. And I don't
know, David, if you know about this or not, DAGSI, The Dayton
Area Graduate Studies Institute, and this base were very
concerned about whether or not they were going to be able to
keep up with AFIT, Air Force Institute of Technology, because
they were saying they wanted to be able to reach out to other
places to get education.
So as an economic development tool, we put together DAGSI,
which allowed employees to use AFIT, Wright State University,
the University of Cincinnati, the Ohio State University, and
many graduate schools throughout the area so that at one same
price people could go out and pick the courses that they
wanted. And that was not only important to the people here on
the base, but it was also important to the businesses in this
area who were looking for graduates, for Ph.D. recipients to
work for them. And, of course, we were pleased that the
Secretary has re-emphasized the importance of the Air Force
Institute of Technology.
I'd like to start off my questions by addressing a local
situation, then maybe move up to the big picture. General
Lyles, in your testimony you indicated that this announcement
on the number of people that you can hire is going to impact on
this great challenge you have to reshape your workforce to take
on the challenges of this century. That flexibility who granted
and you used it. Now it's kind of in limbo.
And I'd like to ask Mr. Dominguez or even you, Under
Secretary Chu, on this whole issue of being able to have the
workforce that we need, has the Air Force taken that into
consideration? Here we are, we want to reshape the workforce,
and one of the problems of that mindless downsizing in the
1990's was that once the people left, they never were replaced.
And the object of early separation and early retirement was to
make those slots available so that the Department could bring
in new people, even at the mid level, that had the necessary
skills.
Now I would ask you to comment on what can be done to make
sure that we don't end up at the same time granting all kinds
of new flexibilities and cutting our nose off to spite our
face.
Mr. Chu. I think here at Wright-Patterson you have a
specific issue, particularly in this command, Mr. Dominguez'
comment in terms of the civilian workforce size, is relatively
one in which difficulty is being described for the Department
as a whole, we plan to reallocate as many of the buyout spaces
Congress has provided us to others who can use them in a
particular installation when we cannot use them. That's one way
we came very close to a 100 percent, in terms of the buyout
usage in fiscal 2000.
I think the challenge that you, however, identified cuts
across the entire department, and that is that you've got
several developments occurring at the same time. You have
reconsideration of which functions are core in the Department
of Defense and should be, therefore, performed by duty
personnel, either military or civilian, or some mix of the
same, as opposed to functions that ought to the performed by
the private sector, and that's going to affect our workforce.
We are at the same time, as you've noted, attempting to
move from military to civilian status a large fraction of
320,000 slots now in uniform that we believe could be performed
by civilians, some by civil servants in particular.
We need a more flexible set of rules under which to employ
these new people, and I know for any individual command and
individual installation, managing all those moving parts at the
same time is going to be a significant task. We do think it's
doable, however. I think we can make this come together in a
way that's effective. I don't know if Mr. Dominguez wants to
comment on Wright-Patterson.
Senator Voinovich. The question I have is whether anybody
has asked you to do an analysis of what is needed to reshape
your workforce. What we decide to do is going to impact you, so
how can we accommodate you to help get the people on board that
you're going to need. These are frightening statistics here.
And you're basically saying that it's frozen and you're going
to lose these people from attrition and you're not going to be
able to bring in these new people to take their place. Where
will we be in 2007? We're in pretty bad shape if they don't
have that ability to bring these folks in.
Mr. Dominguez. Yes, sir. There is no question about it. And
this issue for this year is actually now getting to the level
where I can get engaged with Dr. Chu and his staff. I mean our
approach in the Air Force has been to try to allow the person
with the most knowledge and the clearest vision about where the
problem is and where the solution lies to organize his attack,
and that's General Les Lyles.
And our approach also has been to try and enable them to
use all of the policy tools that were enacted by the Congress
to shape that workforce without second guessing or putting in
rules that the Congress had not contemplated. Where we run into
problems is from others' interpretations of those rules that
infringe on General Lyles' ability to do something like allow
early retirement for GS-15, promote some of those older people
in the 55 and up demographics, and then restructure
fundamentally an entry level position at the GS-12 to get in
somebody from the private sector or right out of college. That
seems to me to be an appropriate use of the kinds of
authorities that the Congress provided us. That's the daisy
chain that Vince spoke about.
As you know, there are other views in the DOD, and we'll
need to sort those out. I believe General Lyles knows best
about how to shape this or how to deal with the problem and
where he needs to go with it. And to the degree that I can, I
will be his ally and advocate in creating the flexibility he
needs to get this job done.
Senator Voinovich. Well, I would specifically like, and I
say this in front of Dr. Chu, to have in writing just exactly
how this is all going to work out starting here at Wright-
Patterson and going through the other Air Force facilities.
When I authorized the workforce reshaping legislation in the
first place, we wanted to make it specific to Wright-Patterson,
and I couldn't get the votes. So I talked to Senator Inhofe and
a few other people who had the same kind of problem in their
respective places, and we made these 9,000 slots available. I'd
like to know now that everybody is under way, what's the plan
in order to deal with the respective responsibilities they
have.
Are you going to, for example, reduce the workload or the
challenges and restructure like Dr. Russo is doing or will you
continue to have this challenge of not having the manpower or
the flexibility to accomplish your mission? And I think that's
the old business of dotting the I's and crossing the T's and
really getting down into the guts of some of these issues to
try and make sure that we can continue to shape this workforce
and to deal with this problem that's looming in the Air Force
and with these facilities.
Mr. Chu. We would be delighted to provide that.
General Lyles. Mr. Chairman, if I can add, the current
reductions that we're looking at right now for our command,
this is for the entire Air Force Materiel Command, not just
Wright-Patterson, is 2,260 positions by fiscal year 2009.
That's a thousand military and 1,260 civilians.
And Secretary Dominguez is correct, we tried to use all the
tools available to us by both Congress, OSD and the Air Force
to ensure that we smartly try to address this problem.
I was able to, with the great help of our tremendous
personnel, people, some of whom are on the stage behind me that
you've met, some who are in the audience, to figure out if we
can use an attrition strategy for this fiscal year so we
wouldn't have to send people out the door with a reduction in
force sort of prospect. We're probably not going to be able to
do that for all fiscal years between now and 2009. We're
looking at a wide variety of things that might be available to
us to try to address the problem.
One of the initiatives in very simple terminology that Dr.
Russo, General Reynolds, myself and all of my commanders are
doing is looking at the issue of divestiture. We know there are
tasks and jobs and things that we do today that perhaps are not
value added, but yet they add to the workload and burdens of
our people to be able to get the job done.
So we're trying to get rid of unnecessary policies,
procedures, paperwork, documentation, reporting, all of those
things so that we can take workload that is of no value off our
plates so they can do the many things that we're asking them to
do as part of our mission and our national security objectives,
those types of things, along with trying to work with the
various tools in ways in which we're trying to address the
manpower situation that we're in. And we look forward, of
course, in the future, to having the additional legislation
provided by you proposed by NSPS to give us even more
flexibility to deal with the problems.
Senator Voinovich. Well, I think the issue of getting rid
of some of that stuff is part of what you ought to be doing
anyway.
General Lyles. Sometimes it's much harder than you might
think, Senator.
Senator Voinovich. I believe it was 2 years ago that I was
here when we had a little session with college students.
General, I'm not sure you were here for that, but I met with
about a dozen students and asked them to share with me whether
or not they were interested in going to work for the Department
of Defense. It was very interesting. Some weren't interested at
all, and others said they didn't know where to get information
on it. It was just incredible how little they knew about what
was available. And I'll never forget one of the young men, I
think he was an electrical engineer, and I think, Dr. Russo,
you have some kind of an internship or part-time work or
something----
Dr. Russo. Right.
Senator Voinovich. And I recall the military official who
was there that day told the student we need you and I want to
have you come on board and so on and we want to talk to you.
And I turned to him and he said, how long will it take for this
young man to find out whether or not he can come to work here
in this program that you have, and he said 6 months. And the
bright smile on the student's face disappeared.
And I just wonder with the changes that we put in the
Homeland Security legislation eliminating the rule of three and
going to categorical hiring, is that going to be able to be
reduced down to some reasonable time frame.
Mr. Chu. Yes, sir, I think it can. That's why we've
included some of the provisions in the National Security
Personnel System legislation. We have attempted to enlarge on
them modestly relative to what you did in the Homeland Security
Act for the government as a whole. We're very keen on getting
exactly what you were hinting at, which is on-the-spot
authority for situations like the college job fair.
Obviously you have due diligence like this, checking their
references and so on and so forth, but as we've started to do
what I would congratulate Wright-Patterson doing at its level,
which is reaching out to the colleges, to go to the campuses to
recruit young people to tell them about these opportunities.
We must solve the problem you've identified, which is it
takes too long to give them an answer. And at that stage in
their careers I can understand why they're going to take the
offer from our competitor, whether it is General Electric or
one that's a State or local government or one that's a non-
profit organization because it's here and now. We're going to
put them through a several month process. We need to get beyond
that. Categorical hiring will help, but we do need, as the
national security personnel legislation proposes, expanded on-
the-spot hiring authority for certain situations like the
college job market.
Senator Voinovich. Well, the categorical hiring procedures
should have an impact.
Dr. Russo. Yes, we have to abide by the rule.
Senator Voinovich. But you have the rule of three.
Dr. Russo. Right.
Senator Voinovich. I think the regs still haven't been
published on that.
Mr. Chu. That's correct, sir. Government regulations have
not been written by OPM. We are in the process, however, of
applying categorical ranking to elements of the defense
workforce, where we currently possess legal authority, those
are specifically the entire laboratory community and the
acquisition workforce, which will eventually benefit Wright-
Patterson as well.
We're big believers in categorical ranking. I think it
speeds up the process. It also gives the manager a better
ability to solve his or her problem. As you know, sir, it's
very much modeled on the way military promotes junior officers
to the next grade. There is a best qualified pool, which is
what is first considered, then a highly qualified pool, a
qualified pool, not qualified. You need to take each pool in
sequence. It gives more range.
The current system, the reason it takes so long, in my
judgment, there is a tedious process of going down these small
lists and deciding in excruciating detail whether you have met
the mark or not. The practice that you've permitted the Federal
Government to adopt that we are in the process of using at the
Department of Defense will, I think, substantially improve
that, but we still do need, I think, sir, broader on-the-spot
hiring authority to deal with the college kind of situation you
described.
Senator Voinovich. And I would like to say we do have
agencies today that are able to hire people with a 3.5 average
on the spot, but when you pierce the veil and look into it,
it's not what they say it is. Yes, I can hire you, and by the
way, I will submit your name up to so-and-so to look at it and
then the place you are interested in going looks at you and
they also go through this interview process, and you lose a lot
of applicants because it's too cumbersome of a process.
Mr. Walker.
Mr. Walker. Mr. Chairman, GAO prides itself of being in the
vanguard of transformation, including in the human capital
area. And some of the things that we've done that could be
helpful here, some are administrative and some are legislative.
On the administrative front, we've really used internships
as a strategic recruiting device whereby we've tried to
identify top talent, we've tried to hire people for
internships. And what we've been able to do is by keeping them
in a position for a minimum of 9 weeks, we can hire them
competitively on a full-time basis when they come out.
In addition to that, one of the things that, Senator, you
may want to consider is, one of the things we have at GAO is we
always have the ability to hire a certain number of critical
occupations for--it's limited to number and it's limited to
period of time on a non-competitive basis on the authority of
the comptroller general to meet critical needs. That concept,
frankly, may have merit in situations where you're dealing with
critical occupations and you're dealing with critical needs.
The last comment I would make is the Congress has provided
additional authority for realignment authority, for buyouts and
for voluntary early retirement. I would hope that much of that
is being used based upon strategic workforce planning concepts
to deal with some of the issues that the general mentioned,
rather than position by position because in many cases it's
trying to realign the overall workforce to deal with skills and
balances, shaping issues and succession planning challenges,
which is a broader perspective rather than a position by
position basis because you're not going to be able to make a
whole lot of progress if you look at it just on a position by
position basis.
Senator Voinovich. One other thing that came up at that
student roundtable was from one of the young men. He was an
engineering student from Poland, and because he wasn't a U.S.
citizen could not go to work for one of these agencies.
And it seems to me that if you look at the crisis we have
in recruiting scientists and others, and if you go to the
graduate schools today and look at the countries from where
these young people come, you realize we're not producing them
here in this country. It seems to me that the Defense
Department ought to be looking at ways to attract these people
because if you get someone really interested and they have a
good background, we should put them to work. There is a good
possibility they may decide to stay. And we need them.
Mr. Chu. Absolutely. In fact, the issue has come up in
terms of reconstruction of Iraq in which we would like to use
individuals who have green card status. The irony as you know,
sir, we could enlist them in the armed services of the United
States as a non-citizen, they could even be appointed as a
reserve officer as a non-citizen, but we cannot, at least under
the rule we received from OPM, appoint them as a non-citizen
without first going through a long competitive process to
demonstrate that there were no American citizens available to
take those positions. That's exactly the kind of flexibility
that we're seeking in the National Security Personnel System,
so we can deal in a common sense way with these urgent needs.
Mr. Dominguez. Sir, if I may make one last point on this, I
want to reiterate our support for the flexibility envisioned in
the National Security Personnel System, but we're not waiting
for that to happen. The Secretary of the Air Force about 2
weeks ago directed a re-engineering of the civilian fill
process across the U.S. Air Force with the objective of
dramatically reducing cycle time, so we'll move whatever that
we have to move to get this thing to work faster. That could
envision technology, new ways of working, eliminating layers of
review, deregulating classification authorities and those, so
lots of things we're looking at to re-engineer that process
within the next couple of months.
Senator Voinovich. Mr. Dominguez, you're a career employee,
aren't you?
Mr. Dominguez. Yes, sir.
Senator Voinovich. Can you go back into your career
position after this administration? Are you allowed to do that?
Mr. Dominguez. I am allowed to do that, yes, sir.
Senator Voinovich. That's good. That gets back to what
Comptroller General Walker was talking about. You have this
terrific work that Dr. Chu is doing, and you're doing, and so
forth, and we're reviewing personnel flexibilities, but the
continuity of the career workforce is very important.
So often a new group comes in and reinvents the wheel, and
this concept of having a COO--like Comptroller General Walker
has suggested, should be something we may want to consider.
The other thing is, I think, it would lend itself to better
recruiting if they knew what they were going to have. There has
to be some certainty where people can look down the road and
say these people are really committed and serious.
And part of the problem that we identified at Harvard in
talking to some of the students was that some would rather go
to work for a non-profit or private firm than to go work for
the government because, you know, who knows next year or the
year after that they're going to outsource the work. If I were
in their position, I would want some continuity at the agency
I'm going to go to work for.
Dr. Russo. Yes, sir. Last year when you had the first
potential layoffs at Wright-Patterson, we did lose some people
who were on the hook, so to speak, to come work for us, but the
uncertainty did change their minds for us. So stability would
be something I certainly would like to see, the ability to tell
people what to expect. They may not all stay with us, that's
OK, but at least they know what they bought into. And sometimes
it's hard for us to do that. So stability is one of my issues.
Mr. Dominguez. Sir, one of the things we're doing, we're
very early in the stages of the dialog within the Department of
Defense about this, but this is an area where thinking about
core competencies can add some stability. There are things
we're doing in the Department of Defense, that we have Federal
employees doing, both military and civilian, that we really are
not the world's greatest experts at. And the advantage of doing
it is marginal at best, and maybe negative.
If we can shift our workforce into those areas and those
specialties where we have demonstrated competencies, and those
competencies are clearly linked to where we're going
strategically in the future, and our workforce moves into those
areas, the areas we leave behind are the appropriate venues for
the marketplace to deliver these services to us in a variety of
different ways.
Now, we will still need to put the heat on to stay on the
step, innovating and delivering the products and services in
our core competencies, faster, better, cheaper, but that's a
wholly different thing. You know you're going to be in that
business, you're going to be doing these things. Why? Because
this is what we are and it's the Air Force.
Senator Voinovich. It gets back to why I asked you to just
take a look at these organizations like the one Dr. Russo heads
up to see what is the plan, what is the vision.
Mr. Dominguez. Right.
Senator Voinovich. Can you say to them this is where we're
going, this is what we want, and you have a career here.
Mr. Dominguez. Yes, sir.
Senator Voinovich. That's one aspect of going to work for
the Federal Government today that is attractive to applicants.
You know, there are not very many places you can go where they
say you have a future. It's one of the things we have available
to us that some other places do not.
Mr. Dominguez. Right.
Senator Voinovich. I think it's something that we should
take advantage of. We should say to applicants one thing we can
offer you is the opportunity to work your way up to Russo's job
while doing exciting work and so forth. That's what it's all
about, and do something for your country at the same time. And
I know that you have the capability of being in the military
and geting master's degree that the government pays for, and
maybe going on to get a doctorate degree. You do that in the
military.
Mr. Chu. That's one of the reasons in the proposed National
Security Personnel System we would like to have the authority
to waive the current Title 5 restrictions on training. The
irony, as you know, for civilians, unlike the military where we
can pay to train you if you're a military person for a post,
you don't now have that if you're a civilian. It's a much more
highly constricted situation. And basically we're not supposed
to be paying for civilians to be trained for a job they don't
have, which is almost backwards in a way, if you think about
it. If you have the job already, we can train you. If you don't
have the job, we won't advance you to the next position. That's
the place we can go.
Senator Voinovich. OK. I think we've kind of exhausted
that. I know that there is a great deal of emphasis on broad
banding and on performance orientated compensation. And the
President initially talked about $500 million to go to a
performance-based pay system. And I'm not going to argue about
the amount of money, I think it's unrealistic if you look back
to see what Congress has done. But the real question, and it's
one that I'd like you to comment on, and it's one that
Comptroller General Walker and I have talked about on several
occasions, is the capacity to do performance evaluations. That
is a very time-consuming process. The people who do it need to
be trained in writing performance evaluations.
And one of my concerns is that if we go to broad banding,
as suggested, and we don't make an effort to qualify people who
have the capability of doing the performance evaluation, it
could end up being a real detriment. In other words, it will
not be successful. And I can tell you for sure when you get
started with it, there are those who will say this is
arbitrary, capricious, and personal bias gets involved in this,
and so forth. And when we start this process, it must be done
the right way.
The question I have for you, Dr. Russo, is, do you think
that you have the system in place in your shop to have pay-for-
performance?
Dr. Russo. Not at ASC. We do have it in the laboratory.
You're right on with your point. I lived through the first year
of lab demonstrations here at Wright-Patterson. I was part of
the first team that did this.
Senator Voinovich. You did what?
Dr. Russo. The first time we went to a compensation based,
contribution based compensation in the laboratory.
Senator Voinovich. How long ago was that?
Dr. Russo. Five years, I think.
Senator Voinovich. About 5 years ago?
Dr. Russo. Five years ago. I was in the lab for the first
year. You're right on. It was a tremendous education program
for the workforce. It was hard. It took a lot of effort, but we
did it, and I think it was well worth it. As a matter of fact,
as I look back on it, I tell a lot of people I think the
employees are better served by that system. It's more people
looking at the evaluation, not just the supervisor in the
chain. Our experience with that has been just tremendous.
And too many people, I think, concentrate on the high end
of that, how much is somebody going to be compensated for how
much he is contributing. But we found one of the real values is
with poorer performers who clearly understood what was expected
of them because of the evaluation system; is that they either
improved their performance or in some cases they left. And so
it didn't matter. We were better off for it. So I'm a real
advocate of it. But you are right, it takes a lot of training,
it's not easy, especially the first couple years.
But the lab has been in it 5 years, it's more routine, and
I think it's broadly accepted. So I'm a strong advocate of
that.
General Lyles. Mr. Chairman, if I can add to that. As Vince
said, we started off a little rough with the lab demo and
acquisition demo, a similar thing we did at Edwards Air Force
Base, but after the first brunt of concerns, it's worked very
well. And I think we now have the process down that we can
train people properly to do those performance evaluations, and
we can't say enough about how much we like what we have in the
lab demo, and I'm hoping NSPS will allow us to do that and more
in terms of flexibility.
Senator Voinovich. Well, the real issue is, don't you
think, it would be wise to make sure that the agencies are in a
position to do what it is that we're asking them to do. And one
of the things, Dr. Chu, that bothers me is that the NSPS
removes the Defense Department from the oversight of the Office
of Personnel Management. There are some of us that are very
concerned about that. Is there some compromise that could be
worked out so that we know that the people who are going to be
implementing this new system are ready? I mean I've heard
testimony that if you tie the money in with it, if you go to
pay banding then all of a sudden managers will engage in
performance management and the reason why they don't do it
today and the reason why they don't do it as well as they
should is because there is no money connected with the process.
And I can't believe that. I think that's not the case.
Mr. Chu. Well, let me speak to the first issue you raised,
which is the issue of OPM. For the President's proposed
performance fund for fiscal 2004, that each agency must submit
to OPM for its approval of the first National Security
Personnel System that the policies and regulations would be
jointly developed with OPM. So OPM is our partner in moving
this forward.
Many of our ideas, and what makes sense here, to come out
of OPM's research and OPM's white papers, but I do think across
the board, it's exactly what General Lyles and Dr. Russo have
described, the advent of pay banding requires each component
part of the defense to look at that type of evaluation system
and restructure it, which includes re-educating everyone as to
what their responsibilities are so, in fact, it can be
successful.
And I do think the fact the Department has done this in
these various demonstrations, which now encompasses 30,000 of
our employees, is some of the evidence you're looking for about
our competence to do so. The other competence I will point to
is what we do in the military side, it is the same department,
while we have different kinds of construct in their promotion
system, it is again one where the supervisor is charged with
important authority, and the institution exercises significant
authority about the advancement of people's careers that we
have brought to a high state. And we saw some payoff just
recently with the operations concluded in Iraq, so I think the
competence is there.
The challenge that both the President's performance fund
and National Security Personnel System gives to the civil part
of the Department is to bring that across the board to the same
level. I think we've shown it in demonstration projects and I'm
confident over the 2 years or so it would take actually to
apply the National Security Personnel System to the entire
department that we would indeed meet the kind of standards that
you are describing, that I know David Walker is concerned with,
be met as a precursor for gaining such discretion.
Senator Voinovich. Comptroller General Walker.
Mr. Walker. Well, first let me be clear that I individually
and we institutionally at GAO strongly support broad band and
pay for performance and government transformation, and a lot of
conceptually what DOD is talking about. We've had broad banding
for over 20 years. We've had pay for performance for about 20
years, so we have real live experience. And we're making a
number of changes to continuously improve that.
There is no question that the demonstration projects that
DOD has undertaken in the past can provide valuable lessons to
help it go forward. At the same point in time I think we have
to recognize there is a scale issue. Less than 5 percent of
DOD's workforce has been involved in these demonstration
projects, so you're going from 5 percent to a 100 percent, and
obviously that's not something that's going to happen in one
fell swoop or overnight.
There is no question in my mind that the leadership at DOD
has the commitment and that the Department has the ability for
implementing broad banding and pay for performance on a broad
basis. At the same point in time I think it's very important
that before any such authority be operationalized now, that's
different from authorized, one can authorize this authority, I
would argue, not just for DOD, but potentially for many others
as well, but before that authority would be operationalized,
then I think that's when it's important to make sure they have
certain systems and safeguards in place to maximize the chance
of success, to minimize the possibility of abuse, to hopefully
prevent a further bulkenization of the Executive Branch in this
critical area.
So I think there is a way, there is a sensible center that
can, A, allow the Department of Defense to accomplish what it
wants to accomplish but, quite frankly, could leap frog us to
the future a lot quicker, a lot safer and a lot more
consistently.
Mr. Dominguez. I want to pick up on that point on the leap
frog because at this same time while we're talking about
expanding the pay-for-performance paradigm to the broader
civilian workforce, the President and Secretary of Defense have
been pushing very hard on changing our organizational
management paradigm to a performance-based, results-based
paradigm. So you begin to change the organizational focus and
what leaders manage towards, and how they're evaluated at the
same time. Then give them a personnel system that aligns and
maps to that new form of management, and now you get some
really powerful synergy to change the culture that you've
talked about very early in this hearing.
Senator Voinovich. I know we're probably going to be
talking about this in a lot more detail in the next couple of
weeks when the defense authorization bill is on the floor, but
I'd like to talk about some compromise in this area or some
type of standards that have to be met before this system
becomes operational. Secretary Rumsfeld has been in the
business world, but I can tell you that as someone who has been
involved with government employees for a long time that if you
want a new system like this one to be successful, you need to
cascade it. I mean you just can't whip it into shape and expect
it to happen because if you do, the thing will blow up right in
your face. It will.
When the State of Ohio implemented total quality
management, it took us 5 years to go through over 50,000
employees, and there were cultural things that needed to be
changed. It's amazing how much of a challenge this is going to
be at DOD. And I'd suggest that maybe even if you picked out
certain portions of the proposal and looked at them, the
Department might be better able to do it and move from there
and learn from some of those experiences. Because to do it
overnight or even in a year and a half or 2-year period, that's
a mouthful.
Mr. Chu. We recognize those challenges, we look forward to
those conversations, sir. It is one of the reasons that we are
so pleased we've gotten consistent ideas from the Department on
how to proceed for the laboratories and acquisition workforce
as a whole. Because that, as I indicated, is something which
we're starting to publish Federal notices on, and this is a
leading edge of this change, and will give us some of the
experience that you're correctly pointing to.
Senator Voinovich. OK. I know we're running out of time
here because we have the other witnesses. This is great to be
the only Senator to be asking questions. And under Senate
hearings in Washington, as you know, the witness has 5 minutes,
then we have 5 minutes and you just keep moving along.
Dr. Chu, the proposed National Security Personnel System
would waive significant portions of Title 5 for the Department
of Defense. In some cases it seems DOD has requested waivers
that are significantly broader than necessary to make the
decided reforms to its personnel system.
For example, the Department would like to be able to
bargain collectively with unions at the national level, yet
NSPS proposes to waive all of Chapter 71 of Title 5 which
governs labor management relations. I'd like you to explain the
Department's thinking behind these broad proposed waivers. And
the reason I ask the question is I was very involved in the
creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the
legislation that waived major areas of Title 5.
And in working with Congressman Rob Portman and others,
they restored a lot of Title 5 to Homeland Security and then
left out six areas to be negotiated, and at the present time
those negotiations are under way. And we provided in those
negotiations that, first of all, the unions would be involved,
and when a 30-day period starts they can lay out the changes
that they are going to make at the end of the 30-day period,
then they must publish the differences of opinion in the next
30 days and then the new system goes into place.
And with that as a backdrop, to just move in the direction
that DOD is going just ignores the fact that the DHS system is
still being created, and I must tell you that one of the
reasons why the unions were so concerned about it is they
understood that what came out of those negotiations probably
would be a model perhaps for the rest of the Federal
Government. And I know that I'm concerned about that, I know
that the Chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, Susan
Collins, is also concerned about it in terms of the breadth of
your moving out of Title 5 and coming up with a whole new
system.
Mr. Chu. Let me address that, sir, because, in fact, the
actual proposed legislation of language very much takes
Homeland Security as a template and then enlarges upon it. A
number of the waivers are the same as Homeland Security, some
are different, and let me specifically speak to the ones that
are different.
We do propose to waive Chapter 31, which is the authority
for employment except for that section that deals with the
senior executive service, that is specifically to deal with the
speed of hiring issue. And I think that's one of the reasons,
in our judgment, this will improve the kind of system we can
construct if you were to give us that authority.
Both legislative proposals waive Chapter 51 and Chapters
53, we do propose to waive Chapters 55, 57, 59, which are not
waived in the Homeland Security Act, but particularly Chapter
55 on pay administration. And the reason for that is, I think,
and your colleague, Joanne Davis, in the House has
acknowledged, Homeland Security may ask for similar authority,
is that the premium pay system in the government, including
overtime pay, is so complex that, in fact, it is no longer
having the kind of incentive effects that it was intended to
create when the Congress and various other authorities are
constructed over the years. It's a patchwork quilt.
Among other ironies, if you are a higher grade employee,
you actually make less on overtime than you do on straight time
because of the limit in the law that says you cannot be a GS-10
step one. Moreover, it's sufficiently complex that supervisors
are making well-intentioned mistakes in terms of what people
are being offered, and that also means that people are not
feeling the kind of incentives that were intended. If no one
can explain to them in a straight forward way what am I going
to earn if I work on Sunday or work on a holiday or if I do
this job under difficult conditions, so it's difficult to
rationalize the reason behind the Chapter 55 waiver.
We have requested, as I mentioned earlier, we do want the
bridges for training, for which reasons I describe, in my
judgment, we have the training machine backwards. It is not the
same as the military model. I think the military model has been
very successful. I think Mr. Dominguez spoke eloquently, we
need to invest in our civil servants. We do not do the job we
should in investing in human capital of our human personnel. We
view the military outcome--not necessarily the way we do it--
but the outcome it produces as the model we want to follow, and
we would like to be privileged to make those kinds of
investments.
Chapter 33 is waived by both bills, which has to do with
competitive examinations that are conducted. Chapter 75 is
waived by both bills, as is Chapter 43 by both bills.
We do model our labor relations section on the Homeland
Security model, but whereas Homeland Security models see it as
something that is waived, we do have in our proposal
specifically how we would propose to proceed as far as the
beginning is concerned, and there would be a period of
notification to Congress. If an impasse is reached, during
which time mediation is to be invited to give the Congress a
chance to comment that if, indeed, there is a difference of
opinion between the Department and its employees.
Senator Voinovich. And you're going to waive all of the
Chapter 75?
Mr. Chu. That is also, if I understand it correctly, a
waiver that's in the Homeland Security law. The Homeland
Security Act does have language concerning rights of employees
to preserve collaboration and union relations, etc., and we
have a somewhat different construct of how that's handled in
this proposed statute, but the spirit is to see if we can get
agreement to change the current situation, which is one more
issue for the Department of Defense. It is all local union
bargaining units.
We have 1,366 locals, if I remember correctly. That means
for department-wide human resources issues it can take a long
time to reach a resolution. My favorite example is the issue of
garnishing someone's wages. If he or she does not pay the
travel card bill, the last administration, if I understand this
correctly, began this negotiation procedure, it is 2\1/2\ years
later, we still have 200 locals to go through, and in my
judgment it's a very straight forward issue. I recognize how
individual local leaders would like to bargain over it, but I
think that's the kind of thing we should not bargain----
Senator Voinovich. I can understand that. And we got into
that too with Homeland Security in terms of how to go about
doing these things, and we have a lot of people who are not in
unions that are going to be affected.
Mr. Chu. That's a very fair point. Half the workforce is
union, half is not unionized.
Senator Voinovich. Well, would anyone like to make a last
comment or comment on anything that anyone else had to say? I
really appreciate it. This has been a good day, and I think
from the dialogue here I've learned a lot and I am looking
forward to hearing from you about some of the information I've
requested.
Mr. Walker.
Mr. Walker. In summary, Mr. Chairman, I think one of the
things we have to keep in mind is that while there is probably
broad based consensus on this panel of the need to transform,
not only the Department of Defense, but also the government,
and the critical element of the human capital, the people
strategy has, as part of that, I think you have to recognize
the difference between institutions and individuals. And by
that I mean there is no question that Secretary Rumsfeld, Dr.
Chu, and others are dedicated to doing the right thing here. I
think we have to recognize, however, that whatever laws are
passed are for all time until Congress decides to change them.
Not just for the players that are here today, but the next
Secretary of Defense, the next Under Secretary of Defense for
Manpower Readiness.
That leads me back to the issue that I mentioned before
that you touched on with the chief operating officer, DOD has 9
of 25 high-risk areas. I believe the primary reason that it has
9 of 25 high-risk areas is because you don't have enough
continuity of attention on the basic management issues that it
takes to solve them over the average tenure of a typical
political appointee.
And I believe that whatever Congress decides to do with
regard to legislative authority, that if the Department of
Defense really wants to transform itself, it needs to consider
a level two position, something like a 7-year term appointee
who can be responsible for strategic planning and integration
with the key players within the Department to focus on these
basic management challenges to help transform the Department,
no matter who the secretary is, no matter which administration
is in charge.
I think that's going to be critically important because,
frankly, I don't know that you're ever going to solve these
problems unless there is more continuity. This person could
either be a civil servant who has a contract for 7 years, it
could come from the private sector. It should be performance
based. I think the time has come for that, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chu. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for holding this
hearing. I want to thank you for your leadership you've shown
over many years, even often when an issue was unpopular and
uninteresting to most, and for highlighting it. I do think that
you and David Walker have repeatedly said we do face a crisis
in human capital in the Department of Defense. We welcome to
work with you on legislation to help with the crisis. I'm
confident we can produce a good result.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you. If I can make one comment
about truth in lending, if you will, it perhaps relates to Mr.
Walker's comment about the chief operating officer, the
proposed legislation, acts and laws and authorizations are very
much needed besides the ones that we have today.
One of the continuing challenges we're always going to have
is funding, to actually enact some of the flexibilities that
are currently provided to us in statutory authorities or that
will be provided in the future. That will continue to be a
challenge for us. We're hoping, at least within the Air Force,
that we can always make a balance between physical capital
investments and human capital investments, and to make sure we
don't overlook one at the expense of the other.
Well, I'd like to suggest that the human capital has been
neglected, and we have a great football coach, Woody Hayes, and
I think Jim Tressel would probably confirm what Woody said, is
that you win with people. And we must continue to make sure we
got the very best people to get the job done. It gets to
Secretary Schlesinger's report, and what you're doing came out
of that report.
Mr. Chu. Yes, sir.
Senator Voinovich. Dr. Chu, that was the Hart-Rudman report
that looked down the road and said the area where the Federal
Government really has not done the work is in the area of
personnel. It's been neglected, if we don't do something about
it, we're going to have a tough time doing a lot of other
things that need to be done to make sure that we guarantee our
national security.
Dr. Russo. Sir, we spent a lot of time this afternoon
talking about the things we need to make it better. I would
like to end by assuring you the workforce we have here today,
at least within Wright-Patterson, and I believe within the Air
Force and the DOD is still one of a bunch of marvelous,
dedicated civilians, they go beyond the call of duty day in and
day out.
I think the things we witnessed over the last couple years
in our Air Force's ability to support our country is a
testament to a lot of civilians, as well as military that work
with us, I'm pleased even though we have problems, we still
survive pretty well.
Senator Voinovich. They've done a good job because we have
a lot of people like you, Vincent, that really care. You're
dedicated people that really care about what you're doing and
you care about your country, and I thank you and I thank the
others that are here.
Dr. Russo. There are a lot of us.
Senator Voinovich. They all are back behind you and we
thank you for what you do.
Dr. Russo. Thank you, sir.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you. I'm going to call a recess
for about 5 minutes until the next panel can come in.
[Recess.]
Senator Voinovich. We're going to continue our hearing and
hear from our second panel of witnesses that will offer us an
outside perspective on the issues that we're considering here
today. Dr. Beth Asch is a senior economist with RAND, who has
conducted extensive research on Defense workforce reshaping
authorities.
Scott Blanch is the president of AFGE Council 214. And I'd
like to say to you, Mr. Blanch, that we hear a lot from Bobby
Harnage, who is a good friend of mine, and we spend a lot of
time together. He is going to be in my office, I think,
tomorrow morning.
Mr. Blanch. Very good. It's very important.
Senator Voinovich. Michael Durand, who is pitching in for
Pamela McGinnis. Mr. Durand is the deputy treasurer of AFGE
Local 1138 based here in Dayton.
And J.P. Nauseef who is vice president of Aerospace Defense
Technology of the Dayton Development Corporation, and he is
pinch hitting here for Ron Wine who has a medical family
situation that he is trying to take care of for his mom and
dad. Please give Ron our very best and we appreciate your
sharing the situation. As was the case with the other
witnesses, I'd like you to stand and raise your right hand.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Senator Voinovich. Let the record show that all of the
witnesses answered in the affirmative. Our first witness is Dr.
Beth Asch, who is a senior economist with RAND. Again, thank
you for being here, Dr. Asch.
TESTIMONY OF DR. BETH J. ASCH,\1\ SENIOR ECONOMIST, RAND
Dr. Asch. Mr. Chairman, thank you for this opportunity to
provide input to DOD on civilian workforce management. I've
prepared a written statement that's been submitted for the
record, and at this time I'll just make a short statement and
answer any questions you might have. In my statement this
afternoon I'll briefly summarize RAND's research results on the
effects of workforce shaping tools on the retirement behavior
of Defense civilian employees.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Dr. Asch appears in the Appendix on
page 145.
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Our research estimated the effects on the probability of
retirement of the Voluntary Separation Incentive Program or
VSIP, of the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority or VERA, and
the retention allowance.
The first two programs are intended to increase the
financial incentives to voluntarily leave, while the third is
intended to increase the financial incentives to stay in the
civil service.
Both VSIP and VERA were used during the 1990's by Federal
agencies to reduce employment, but recently both have been
identified as tools to help Federal managers shape the
experience and skill mixes of their workforces. By providing
Federal workers with an incentive to retire early or separate,
it is hoped that managers will be better able to hire and
possibly outsource replacement workers with different skills
and experience levels.
A key question is whether these flexibility-related tools
are effective. Our study finds that if used, these tools could
be highly effective in changing retirement behavior among
Defense civilian employees.
Our study focused on Defense civilians age 50 and older who
participate in the civil service retirement system or CSRS. We
found a large effect of retention allowances, offering an older
employee the maximum retention allowance of 25 percent of pay
over the rest of his or her career would reduce the probability
of retirement by about 20 percent. VERA was estimated to more
than double the separation and retirement rates for the civil
service among those who would be eligible for that benefit.
VSIP was estimated to increase separation retirement by about
30 to 40 percent, depending on age.
These estimated effects are very sizable, but at the same
time are quite consistent with studies of private sector
retirement behavior. There are two points that are noteworthy.
First, these estimates are not an assessment of the past
success of VERA and VSIP as tools to accomplish downsizing in
the aftermath of the cold war. Rather they represent
predictions of their effects on retirement behavior based on
estimates of how Defense civilians generally respond to the
financial incentives embedded in CSRS.
Second, our study didn't consider the costs of offering
these workforce shaping incentives, and so we can't draw any
conclusion at this time about relative cost effectiveness.
Now, so far the authority for VSIP and VERA for workforce
shaping purposes has been limited in DOD. Currently, DOD has
authorization for 9,000 VERA and/or VSIP payments. Given that
the DOD has about 400,000 employees who would be eligible for
either early or optional retirement, these authorities are
really quite small relative to the size of the Defense civilian
workforce that would be the target population for these tools.
Available evidence also suggests that retention allowances
have not been widely used in the past. The OPM estimated that
retention allowances were given to less than 1 percent of all
Executive Branch employees in 1998.
So why don't civil service managers use the flexibility-
related pays that are available to them? One reason that's been
put forward by the OPM is excessive bureaucracy in the approval
process. Another reason put forward in the context of the
Defense laboratories by the Naval Research Advisory Committee
on Personnel Management in the Defense science and technology
community was the absence of leadership. The committee stated
in its report that in the absence of a sustained commitment to
use flexibility-related tools aggressively in the Defense
laboratories, most tools were unused or underutilized.
Successful management of the Defense civilian workforce has
become even more important in recent years, not only because of
the changing national security environment and the war on
terrorism, but also because of the aging of the Defense
civilian workforce. Successfully responding to this aging will
require that DOD actively manage the departure of retiring
employees and the hiring of new workers or contractors to
replace them, and must define its workforce requirements, and
then develop a plan that coordinates the timing of retirements
with the replacements.
Importantly, it will also need to aggressively use
workforce shaping tools to successfully implement the plan.
Because of the potentially important role of these tools, the
personnel managers in the DOD should be given expanded
authority and expanded resources to use the flexibility-related
policies extensively. Our estimates show that such policies
would be effective if they were used.
This concludes my oral statements here, but I'll say that
in my written testimony I also talk about evidence on how the
civil service personnel system has worked in the past in terms
of workforce outcome, summarize some of the research on the
effectiveness of the waiver programs, talk about what factors
are related to the successful civilian personnel management. So
I just wanted to let you know there are other topics, but I
didn't want to take up too much time today. In any case, I'm
happy to answer any questions that you have.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you very much. Mr. Blanch.
TESTIMONY OF J. SCOTT BLANCH,\1\ PRESIDENT, AMERICAN FEDERATION
OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, COUNCIL 214, AFL-CIO
Mr. Blanch. Senator Voinovich, my name is Jon Scott Blanch.
I'm the president of the American Federation of Government
Employees Council 214 AFL-CIO. Council 214 is the national
consolidated bargaining unit that represents by far the
majority of the bargaining employees employed by the U.S. Air
Force in the Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC). Council 214
consists of ten AFGE local unions at the following Air Force
Materiel Command Air Force bases, Wright-Patterson; AFMETCAL
Department in Heath, Ohio; Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma;
Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia; Hill Air Force Base in
Utah; Edwards Air Force Base in California; Kirtland Air Force
Base in New Mexico; Eglin Air Force Base in Florida; Brooks Air
Force Base in Texas; and Logistics Support Office in Michigan.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Blanch appears in the Appendix on
page 158.
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In all, the Council 214 bargaining unit totals
approximately 36,000 AFMC workers across the command. It is
Council 214's role to address issues that have command-wide
impact on bargaining unit employees the council represents.
This is accomplished through negotiations and collaboration at
the AFMC Council 214 level.
For example, the master labor bargaining agreement between
AFMC and AFGE Council 214 was negotiated at this level and is
applied command-wide to Council 214's bargaining unit. Other
examples of what we do here are Air Force instructions, DOD
manuals, Air Force supplements to AFI's or DOD manuals, and
AFMC policies that affect the working conditions of the 214
unit command-wide or multiple bases over the command.
With that in mind, I deeply appreciate the opportunity to
testify on behalf of the thousands and thousands of AFMC
bargaining unit employees AFGE Council 214 is proud of and
proud to represent. They're a vital, skilled and dedicated
national asset focused on one mission, that being to support
this Nation's warfighters through developing, modifying,
testing, maintaining, and delivering the best weapon systems
the world has ever known in the past, now, and in the future.
What AFMC does is a team effort, and the leadership of the
AFMC team is exemplary. It is my opinion, and the opinion of
AFGE national president, Bobby Harnage, that General Lester
Lyles and his senior staff are the best there are in taking
care of their employees, so they, the employees, can take care
of the AFMC mission, military and civilian alike. When we say
the best, we mean the best in the entire Federal sector.
In that spirit, AFGE Council 214 and AFMC work in
partnership. Together we have committed to develop and advocate
the means to fully implement our labor/management partnership
and to make AFMC an exciting, but productive and rewarding
place for people to live and work. AFMC is a huge, diversified
and complex command, as is the Council 214 bargaining unit
structure. But we, AFMC and AFGE have been and will continue to
work in collaboration to meet our challenges now and in the
future, both internal challenges and external challenges, where
appropriate.
AFMC may be able to do things independently, AFGE may be
able to do things independently, but the parties recognize that
working together when we have mutual interests that there is
probably not much of anything we cannot accomplish. That is our
race strategy, and we are committed to going the distance.
The instructions I received Friday in my invitation was it
asked me to testify on five issues. The first three issues
refer to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base specifically. I will
defer my testimony to the specifics at Wright-Patterson to
Deputy Treasurer of AFGE Local 1138, Deputy Treasurer Michael
Durand. I will testify to the same issues from an AFMC command-
wide perspective with your permission.
Senator Voinovich. Sure.
Mr. Blanch. I base this perspective on my personal
knowledge and experience in the AFMC/AFGE partnership
activities and face-to-face discussions with bargaining unit
employees and local union leadership. As an original charter
member of the AFMC/AFGE partnership council, I am now co-chair
of that council, it has been my privilege to visit every AFMC
base that is represented by AFGE Council----
Senator Voinovich. Tell me again your--the council is made
up of who again?
Mr. Blanch. The AFMC, the AFGE Council 214 or the AFMC
partnership council?
Senator Voinovich. The partnership council.
Mr. Blanch. The partnership council is made up of--we have
a local and a base manager from the air logistics center,
product center, and a test center, then we have the chairman of
the council, two co-chairs of the council, and then we have
personnel and the vice president of the council.
Senator Voinovich. So it's a labor/management council for
better labor relations, is that it?
Mr. Blanch. Yes. It's like a center director, a director
from the logistics center, a director from the test center, a
center director from the product center, then you have union
leaders the same way. That's the command partnership council.
Senator Voinovich. OK.
Mr. Blanch. That's how it's made up. Where was I?
Senator Voinovich. I'm sorry.
Mr. Blanch. That's OK. I base this perspective on my
personal knowledge and experience gained through the AFMC/AFGE
partnership activities and face-to-face discussions with
bargaining unit employees and local union leadership.
As an original charter member of the AFMC/AFGE partnership
council and now co-chair of that council, it has been my
privilege to visit every AFMC base that is represented by AFGE
Council 214. Not only does our partnership council con-ops
require the council to rotate bases, but they also require that
the partnership council be provided a mission briefing at every
base before we visit. I've received this briefing at every
base.
The partnership council is also provided a tour of each
base to allow us to see up close and personal on what exactly
the employees of that particular base do, how they do it, how
they are working to improve the way they do it, and tell us how
they feel about the work they do. A valuable experience.
In my day-to-day dealings I also receive the rest of the
story through conversing with local union leadership and
disgruntled employees who may not feel comfortable airing their
frustrations and complaints during the partnership council
tours. I am also frequently approached by management officials
to share concerns. If something is going on, either good or
bad, that pertains to the bargaining unit, I hear about it
sooner or later, one way or the other. Based on the above, my
testimony is submitted, and we'll be happy to address any
questions you have.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you. Mr. Durand.
TESTIMONY OF MICHAEL DURAND,\1\ DEPUTY TREASURER, AMERICAN
FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES LOCAL 1138
Mr. Durand. Yes, sir. Good afternoon to everybody, Senator.
I'm here on behalf of Pamela McGinnis, president of Local 1138,
who due to family illness could not attend. My name is Michael
Durand. I'm deputy treasurer of Local 1138 of the American
Federation of Government Employees AFL-CIO. Senator Voinovich,
on behalf of the members of Local 1138 I would like to thank
you for the opportunity to make a statement today to you and
the Members of the oversight Subcommittee.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Durand appears in the Appendix on
page 175.
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First I would like to address four major concerns that you
outlined in your letter of April 21. And I would like to offer
solutions to these personnel challenges for your consideration.
First, it is my opinion that the civilian workforce at the
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has been severely demoralized
because of the continuing reduction in force which we have been
subjected to nearly every year for the past decade. This is
especially true among the younger population who no longer see
employment at Wright-Patterson as a long-term option.
This continuing downsizing affects how they view their
future. It affects how they perform their jobs. It affects
their motivation because opportunities for advancement become
fewer with each surplus action. And in better times they would
be on a fast track. Today their government careers are dying on
the vine.
Second, it is my perception that the DOD 2001-2002 fiscal
year authorization bill which offered early retirement and
separation incentives gutted the civilian workforce of its
knowledge base. Furthermore, in conjunction with the
downsizing, the remaining employees have been stressed by the
additional workload imposed on them and upset once again by the
lack of promotional opportunity and mobility in their careers.
Third, the proposed reduction for fiscal year 2003 and 2004
will continue this cycle of despair. This is the worst time, as
we ponder our fate, before the first wave of notices are sent
out. The question begins will I lose my job this round or just
transfer again. Will I be downgraded this time. Managers and
supervisors worry about losing their key employees, the ones
with the most knowledge, the most dedication. They also face
the possibility of being displaced, downgraded, or laid off
themselves.
Every reduction in force I have witnessed has created an
atmosphere of complete turmoil and confusion in spite of the
fact that it has become an annual ritual at Wright-Patterson.
It just gets worse, not better.
In a memorandum dated October 25, 2002, the Air Force
Materiel Command announced the new reductions, with the caveat
that there is virtually no chance that the projections will
decrease, but decisions by the Air Force may very well increase
the command's total share of the 2004 reduction mandate as well
as those of the out years. That's hardly encouraging news for
the workforce here.
Fourth, possible changes in the law that would enhance the
Department of Defense's ability to manage its civilian
workforce should include the following: A, require agencies to
identify what happens to the workload from positions subject to
proposed surplus action. For example, will the work be
distributed to other persons of like kind and grade? If not,
what effect will eliminating the workload have on the mission
of this organization?
B, required payoffs and voluntary retirement incentives to
be separate from the downsizing process. Vacancies resulting
from incentives, usually targeted for the older population near
retirement age, will provide promotional opportunity for the
remaining workforce. This would have a positive effect on
morale and offset negative impact of surplus action. If surplus
actions are deemed necessary, they should be determined by
factors other than the fact that a position was voluntarily
vacated by the incumbent.
I would like to discuss a collateral issue that is directly
related to workforce morale and stability for your
consideration. It is the issue of contract services. During the
past decade, the Pentagon has decreased its civilian workforce
by nearly 300,000 while increasing its cost of contract
services by 40 percent.
I would like to propose the following legislation to
provide a level playing field for the civilian workforce when
our jobs are on the chopping block. One, place a moratorium on
contracting out jobs traditionally performed by civilians until
an accounting is complete which identifies the number of
contract employees which have been hired to replace civilian
employees, the cost of such contracts, and the work being
performed. Statistics from this database should be accessible
to the public as well as other governmental agencies, labor
organizations, the media, etc. The civilian workforce should be
allowed to bid on these contracts as they are renewed.
Two, free agencies from privatization quotas, whether self-
imposed or imposed by the Office of Management and Budget. This
will take the pressure off of agency managers to contract out
services that are more efficiently performed in-house by
knowledgeable career employees.
Three, allow Federal employees to compete for their own
jobs as well as for the new work in order to save money for
taxpayers. This will eliminate the discretion by DOD managers
to simply give most work of contractors without--to
contractors, excuse me, without any private or public
competition.
Four, make the competition process more equitable and more
accountable by providing Federal employees with the same legal
standing enjoyed by contractors.
In closing, I believe the Air Force should slow down its
downsizing in view of what is happening nationally with all the
challenges facing our country, the constant threat of more
terrorist attacks, and a possible pre-emptive attack on Iraq by
our military forces. It defies reason for the Air Force to
carry out its arbitrary manpower reductions for the current
fiscal year and beyond. During this time of uncertainty and
insecurity, downsizing the civilian workforce should be put on
hold.
Furthermore, more than 5,000 Federal employees have been
called into active duty and deployed to overseas locations. How
many of these 5,000 civilians work at Wright-Patterson? Who
will do their job while they are gone? Will the absence from
the workplace be considered in the current downsizing equation?
These questions need to be addressed before any further
manpower reductions are even considered.
For now, I thank you for listening and giving me the
opportunity to make this statement on behalf of the members of
AFGE Local 1138. I hope we can do this again. Thank you, sir.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you, Mr. Durand. Mr. Nauseef.
TESTIMONY OF J.P. NAUSEEF, VICE PRESIDENT, AEROSPACE DEFENSE
TECHNOLOGY, DAYTON DEVELOPMENT COALITION ON BEHALF OF RONALD D.
WINE, PRESIDENT & CEO, DAYTON DEVELOPMENT COALITION
Mr. Nauseef. Mr. Chairman, I'm presenting testimony on
behalf of Ronald Wine, president and CEO of the coalition who
was scheduled to speak, but, unfortunately, due to some family
health concerns Ron is attending to those issues with his
family right now. Ron very much wanted to be here to present
his testimony personally, and he sends his sincere regrets, Mr.
Chairman. I ask that Ron's full statement be included in the
record in its entirety, and I will summarize his remarks for
you.\1\
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ronald D. Wine, President and CEO,
Dayton Development Coalition submitted by Mr. Nauseef appears in the
Appendix on page 179.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Senator Voinovich, on behalf of the coalition and the
entire Dayton business community and the 12-county area that we
serve, we would like to welcome you back to Wright-Patterson
Air Force and the Dayton region. It is an honor for us to have
you here holding these hearings in our community. Thank you
very much.
Ron wanted to extend his personal thank you to you, Senator
Voinovich, for holding this hearing on the topic of the Defense
civilian workforce. The coalition is deeply grateful for your
consistent leadership in looking out for Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base and the thousands of talented and dedicated men and
women who work here.
This is a wonderful time to visit Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base and the Air Force Museum as we make final
preparations for our celebration of the 100th anniversary of
the Wright brothers first flight.
So great is the magnitude of this base on our region's
economy that statistics barely tell the story. Over 20,000
civil service, military, and contract employees work on the
base. Putting it another way, about one out every 18 jobs in
the entire metropolitan area is physically located within the
fence of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The base is by far
the largest employer in the metropolitan area. In fact, it is
almost three times larger than the second largest employer.
Wright-Patterson is more than just a national defense asset
and an economic engine to this region. It represents a solid
base of citizens in our community. Its workers contribute to
local charities through the combined Federal campaign, they are
Boy Scout troop leaders, hospital volunteers, and school
tutors. And because of Wright-Patterson, the Dayton area has
one of the highest concentrations of Federal civil service
workers outside of the Washington, DC area.
The workforce of the base is very special. It's a highly
stable, educated and active group of motivated people. They are
the kind of workers every community wants. Few places are as
lucky as the Dayton region to have these workers. That is why
we care so much about Wright-Patterson and its people,
especially its civilian workforce.
Not only are civil service employees at Wright-Patterson
large in number, they are diverse in function. That means that
if there is a problem with any aspects of civil service law or
regulation, that problem may show up here. In fact, Wright-
Patterson may be a microcosm of many of the challenges that
face civil service reform.
We are proud that Wright-Patterson probably has more
employees in science and engineer classifications than any
other single Federal installation. Recent pilot programs
authorized by Congress, again with your help, Mr. Chairman,
have made important contributions to workforce flexibility in
these important areas.
A large challenge in our community is the sheer decline in
workers. Through the 1980's the workforce at Wright-Patterson
increased slowly, hitting a peak of 30,000 civilian and
military employees in 1989. We have seen a steep, steady
decline since then.
We understand that Dayton's loss is largely the result of
America winning the Cold War and facing a requirement for a
smaller military. This is good for our Nation, and we embrace
the change.
Still, we are concerned that the cuts might be too deep.
Hiring freezes and last-hired, first-fired rules have created
an aging workforce. We risk losing enormous institutional
memory when large groups of our senior employees leave at once.
Managers need the flexibility to give workers a healthy balance
of a combination of young vigor and senior wisdom.
Thanks to your efforts, Mr. Chairman, Congress began to
tackle this problem a few years ago, and some progress has been
made. Mr. Chairman, the title of this hearing, An Overlooked
Asset: The Defense Civilian Workforce, is all too appropriate
from a national perspective. However, I can assure you that
here in the Dayton area we are proud of our civilian workers'
unselfish contributions they make to our national defense. They
are not overlooked by our local leaders, nor by our
representatives in Washington.
Thank you again for giving the coalition the opportunity to
express our support for you and for these important issues.
Thank you for your leadership and dedicated service, especially
for holding this important hearing here at Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base, the birthplace and future of aviation.
Senator Voinovich. Thank you very much. As you may know,
one of my concerns has been what I refer to as mindless
downsizing. And what I'm picking up from you, Mr. Durand, is
that the downsizing continues. Do you have any members that
work in Dr. Russo's shop?
Dr. Russo. The air base wing.
Mr. Durand. The air base wing.
Senator Voinovich. Are you familiar with what's going on in
Dr. Russo's shop in terms of taking advantage of the
legislation that we provided? The purpose of it was to allow
him to shape his workforce, meaning that he could provide
voluntary early retirement or voluntary early separation
payments, but that rather than having less people, those slots
would remain open so that he could bring in new people to deal
with the challenges that he has and to get, in some instances,
some expertise that he needs that he doesn't have in his
current workforce, but it wasn't meant to have less people. Is
that your observation?
Mr. Durand. I would like to say that mostly what I've seen
in the last couple years a reduction has occurred, but it has
come in and is slow in coming, but most of the positions that
have been reduced by employees leaving the workforce has not
been filled at the moment and people that are staying there are
right now gathering and doing the job of those vacancies, and
it's kind of a morale issue at this point.
Senator Voinovich. So your impression is that they're still
losing people and they're not bringing new people in?
Mr. Durand. They're trying to get people in, but, sir, at
the moment it's not that quick. The turnover is a little bit
more. We have lost more folks than we have brought in at the
time, and I'm talking about my organization at the moment.
Senator Voinovich. Yes. Some of the people that you're
losing occurs through attrition. Many of them are retiring,
correct?
Mr. Durand. That's correct.
Senator Voinovich. Do you sense a crisis in retirement and
loss of institutional knowledge?
Mr. Durand. Yes, we do. We do sense that there is a crisis
of knowledgeable people walking out the door and not passing
that information on to the younger generation walking in.
Senator Voinovich. Mr. Blanch, you're familiar with what's
going on at various places your council represents. I notice
you had some very complimentary words for General Lyles and his
operation here. I know that Bobby Harnage has a lot of respect
for General Lyles, and I've talked with him about it. He
challenged me one of these days to come out here and spend some
time with him and with General Lyles. But I like your
observation. What we're trying to do is reshape, not downsize.
And does it look to you like it's downsizing and not reshaping?
Mr. Blanch. Well, we went through the decade of downsizing
in the 1990's and then we went through the fiasco with the
privatization in place, and we got all that behind us, we got
that done, that was a lot of work to make that happen, so a lot
of----
Senator Voinovich. That was the challenge the previous
administration cited, you had to get rid of 57,000 people and
outsource or downsize.
Mr. Blanch. Right. Specifically the ALC's were only running
60 percent capacity. It was killing us on labor rates. We went
through all that, and my observation command-wide is we're at
the point now where we've kind of stabilized. I'm talking a
command-wide look here. What I see, especially in the Air
Logistics Centers, we are in a hiring mode out there.
Senator Voinovich. What?
Mr. Blanch. Hiring people. We're having trouble, AFGE, and
this is one thing that we agree on in this partnership, we
agree the hiring process needs to be fixed. And we're seeing it
out there in the air logistics centers. They need people
desperately and they can't get them. And if they do get them,
it takes way too long, it's just way too hard. As far as I see
that, we're at the point now where we're kind of stabilized,
we're looking more at right sizing more command-wide.
Senator Voinovich. And has your union done any
calculation--were you here for the first panel's testimony?
Mr. Blanch. No, sir.
Senator Voinovich. OK. We got into the announcement that
they made to get rid of 13,000 people throughout the Air Force.
And has your observation been that since that's been announced
that it's impacting on your membership at these various
facilities that you're responsible for?
Mr. Blanch. Well, that gets into just the arbitrary
manpower cuts just announced recently.
Senator Voinovich. Yes.
Mr. Blanch. The manpower cuts that were announced, that's
what you're talking about. When I was first briefed on that I
was told the only base that was going to lose positions or lose
jobs was Wright-Patterson. And the reason being the air
logistics centers which we were in a hiring mode, I was told
Hill Air Force Base at that time was sitting on 800 vacancies
they needed to fill and couldn't fill.
We've got a new modern personnel system that just came on
board, it has got a lot of bugs in it, they're doing a lot of
work-arounds, it's just real hard. And I was informed that
Wright-Patterson would be the only base that would actually
take any cuts. Everybody else would do it through attritions
and by absorbing vacancies.
My position was that we need to take these vacancies
because I assumed that if Hill Air Force Base had vacancies,
the other ALC's would have had vacancies, so it was my position
to absorb those and to use vacancies that we have at other
ALC's so we don't lose people. It didn't make sense to me to
let people at one AFMC base with years of service out of the
gate while we're trying to hire other people off the street at
other bases.
And my understanding is that's what we did in 2003, that's
the approach we took, and so there wouldn't be any cuts in
2003. We have 2004 and beyond coming up.
Senator Voinovich. Are you familiar with the level of
employment here in the last couple of years in terms of your
membership? Have you lost members or have you gained members?
Mr. Blanch. I would say as far as potential members in the
last couple of years----
Senator Voinovich. Yes.
Mr. Blanch. I would say we've probably been pretty stable.
A lot of what Dr. Russo said about the workforce shaping
initiatives and stuff, these are professional series employees.
I understand the challenges they have in getting these folks.
We don't represent those folks. They're not in the bargaining
unit. But we talk about them a lot in the partnership council
activities and things like that. I see the challenges they have
to get these college graduates on board. But as far as the
bargaining unit, like I said, I'm not as familiar with it
probably as much as Mike would be because I have the whole
command. I might defer that specifically to Wright-Patterson to
him.
Senator Voinovich. Dr. Asch, you've been observing it. What
is your appraisal?
Dr. Asch. It being?
Senator Voinovich. In terms of they have these new
authorities that we granted them, 9,000 slots, and they started
to utilize them. Is it working out as we envisioned, that is
providing early retirement, early separation and are we
reshaping, in your opinion?
Dr. Asch. I don't know if we're reshaping to the extent
that there is a requirement--some people are going out the door
and they're being replaced with skilled people who--or with
people who have more appropriate skills, which is my impression
of the intent of having workforce shaping tools. What we know
is that these incentives are effective in getting them out.
Whether or not they're achieving the workforce that's going to
make the mission by hiring or whatever, that I don't know.
Senator Voinovich. So you haven't decided. You know that
the tools do work though?
Dr. Asch. That they do work?
Senator Voinovich. That people do take advantage of them.
If I recall from your testimony, you said that a lot of it had
to do with people just figured out they're financially better
off taking advantage of it and do it.
Dr. Asch. Not everybody who was offered it takes it because
obviously people make these decisions for a range of reasons,
but there is a marked change in their behavior as a result of
financial incentives.
Senator Voinovich. There is always the argument--we did
early retirement when I was mayor and as governor, and you're
supposed to end up with less cost. But if I'm not mistaken,
it's not that much less and you have to weigh that against the
institutional knowledge that's going out the door, so you got
to do it very carefully----
Dr. Asch. That's right.
Senator Voinovich [continuing]. So you make sure that you
don't leave yourself without the people that you need to get
the job done.
Dr. Asch. Or conversely, there will be separation
incentives towards maybe mid career, even more junior workers
sometimes--for example, I'm thinking of the separation
incentive for military personnel. And if you do that, you can
change the mix that way too. So I agree with your point, which
is you can lose the productivity of those people, but at the
same time--the way you do it will affect the age mix as well,
so you have to be sensitive to that.
Senator Voinovich. Was it Mr. Blanch or Mr. Durand that
commented on the fact that downsizing has impacted on the
current workforce, that they're a little demoralized because of
it?
Mr. Durand. Yes, I did, sir.
Senator Voinovich. And from your observation, has that
impacted on the ability to recruit? We were talking at the last
hearing about the fact that when people come to work for an
outfit, they would like to have some idea of where they're
starting and where they could end up and the kind of work
that's there and so forth because that's something to which
they're going to devote a lot of their life. And have you
observed that there is a lot more uncertainty? How long have
you been with the Federal service, Mr. Durand?
Mr. Durand. Twenty-three years.
Senator Voinovich. Twenty-three years. And this downsizing
really took place during the 1990's?
Mr. Durand. Yes, sir.
Senator Voinovich. Do you want to comment again in terms of
recruiting new people, on the effect of this downsizing on the
government's ability to get new people to come to work for
them?
Mr. Durand. No, not in recruiting new people, I'm not
saying that it is affecting it. I'm just saying they do bring
new tools, and Dr. Russo has done a very good job in promoting
some of those, and to come up with tools they also have to meet
organizational goals. The organizational goals are kind of
molded into us when we come here and we have years of
experience of what the goals are. When the tools are brought
in, a new generation is brought in, they have to be taught
these goals, these are the directions we are going to. That's
all I'm saying.
All the generations are here, and they're almost out the
door, probably in retirement age. What I'm saying, those are
here and they're saying, OK, the tools are here, but they're
more oriented to the younger generation, what about me, what am
I going to contribute, I'm contributing here, I'm still here,
I'm not dead. That's what they're looking at. They want to
contribute. But the offer sometimes either doesn't get to them,
the information, like Dr. Asch said, is not disseminated to
them. But that's basically what I'm referring to.
Senator Voinovich. You observe that it's a problem. Do you
think that the hiring process is archaic in terms of bringing
people in?
Mr. Durand. I apologize, what was archaic?
Senator Voinovich. Well, that it's very slow. Are people
frustrated?
Mr. Durand. Yes.
Senator Voinovich. Let's just start off, you have people
who want to come to work for the Federal Government, for
instance here, they go to the Web site. Do you hear any
comments about why it takes so long for approvals to come
through----
Mr. Durand. Yes.
Senator Voinovich [continuing]. Or it took so long for me
to get my approval after I actually got the offer? Any of that?
Mr. Durand. I've heard some situations where people have
said I got hired, but I haven't seen the paperwork, they're
still waiting for the paperwork. It doesn't occur until several
weeks or months probably. I've heard that situation, sir.
Senator Voinovich. Mr. Blanch, do you want to comment on
that?
Mr. Blanch. Sure. What I've seen is like we just came into
this new personnel system, it's called the modern personnel
system and we talked a lot about it before it happened, they
kicked it around on the smaller AFMC bases, and it was working
pretty good, so they wanted to try it at a big AFMC base, Hill
Air Force Base. They turned that system on, and it has just
caused a lot of problems.
What I'm seeing out there is, and I'm getting this from the
SES's on down, the system is really hurting the mission. It's
really we need to hire people, we can't hire people.
So what they're doing is they're going out and hiring a
contractor to work for us to subsidize it. These contracts are
coming on board working about 5 or 6 months, they get up to
speed on systems, whatever the systems are they're working on,
they're told go apply and they are getting hired as Federal
employees.
It's interesting that I was told these contractors are
costing $8 more than the hourly rate of pay over the long run,
but that's the problem I'm seeing out there at those centers.
It is like I said, these are not engineering and scientist
jobs. These are actually just blue collar type people. And
that's a big issue out there. But interesting enough, these
contract employees, while they make a little more money with
the contractor, they are jumping to Federal service. They want
to work for Uncle Sam.
Senator Voinovich. I've talked to Bobby Harnage a little
bit about this, but it seems to me, first of all, one of our
witnesses, I think it was Mr. Chu, Under Secretary of Defense
for Personnel and Readiness, indicated DOD has about 320,000
military people doing jobs that civilians should be doing. And
the reason they're doing them is the flexibilities that are
connected with the military side are so much broader and better
than what you have on the civilian side.
Second of all, I've heard that because of the frustration
that many of these people have with the system, many times the
temptation is just to try and outsource the jobs because it's
too much of a hassle to try and get the civilians on board to
do them. So they say, I just can't hire them, so I'm going to
look around and outsource the work because it's a lot easier to
do that than to try to go through this complex system of trying
to bring people on. Do you want to comment on that?
Mr. Blanch. That's one thing, like I said, we've talked
about. We've identified that at AFMC-AFGE Council 214 as a
mutual interest. That's something we want to work together on.
We agree that that's a problem, that's one of the issues we've
set. Yes, we agree there has got to be a better way to get
these people on board and up to speed. It's nice to agree with
management.
Senator Voinovich. Do you believe there are governmental
jobs that are being outsourced that should remain? And there is
a big question about outsourcing, I didn't get into it with Mr.
Dominguez, but the whole issue of outsourcing these jobs, is
it----
Mr. Blanch. It's my concern with outsourcing the jobs, I've
heard core for the last 10 years, core workload. Nobody can
tell me what core workload is. I have real concerns with
national security. You start outsourcing these weapons systems
to who knows who or where, they have foreign ownership, they're
subject to labor strikes, they're subject to go broke. There
are just all kinds of things. AFGE believes that national
security, these major weapons systems should be maintained by
Federal employees on Federal installations because we just
can't afford the risk.
Senator Voinovich. In other words, you believe they should
be more conservative in their definition of core
responsibilities and that in too many instances activities that
should be defined as core--is there a definition that is used
commonly in the civil service?
Mr. Blanch. I've never heard a definition of what is core.
When we were doing authorizations in places like McClelland,
people were calling and asking me what is core. I said I don't
know where you draw the line at core workload. To me core
workload is workload that national security focuses on.
Senator Voinovich. So we need a better definition of core.
Would you agree with that?
Mr. Blanch. Yes, sir.
Senator Voinovich. OK. Second of all, if an agency is
thinking about outsourcing work, what kind of competition do
they have? For example, when I was governor, we gave our unions
the opportunity to bid for jobs that we considered to be not
core or not governmental in nature, such as security and
cleaning. But we did give our State employees an opportunity to
bid for them to show that they could do them better.
Are you given an opportunity to compete for this type of
work? And if you are, do you think you're getting a fair shake?
Mr. Blanch. I spoke with Jim Hansen, he was on the Armed
Services Committee before he retired, and we talked about Hill
Air Force Base where I came out of, and that was his thing. We
could do this in, I believe, the Federal sector, Federal DOD
workers could go in there and not only compete for the work to
do, but compete for outside work. I think we could go compete
at Delta Airline for their landing gear corps. But those things
are not out there to allow us to do that.
Senator Voinovich. So you're telling me you think your guys
should be able to compete for work that somebody is doing in
the private sector, and that you could bring it back in and do
as good a job or better?
Mr. Blanch. Yes, I think we can do that. As far as for
competition, I think it hurts us. We have so many rules and
things we have to account for that. It makes it real hard. We
have MEO's. The MEO's, you got MEO, it just really hurts you,
trying to do what you've already got to do. Once you got it on
the table, you mention these MEO things, they say hey, you're
good, we're going through a war here, we really got to get into
this right now.
So like I said, like Michael said, the stress, the stress,
the stress, to put in for that job, we got to, I think we can
go in, and if we had the equal opportunity to compete with
these jobs, we got a fair shot. We're ready, willing and able,
especially AFMC employees.
Senator Voinovich. From my experience I've seen it both
ways. When I was Mayor of Cleveland that we outsourced our data
processing. They did a disastrous job, and we were way behind
because they billed us for their cost of developing new
systems.
So I had a private sector firm conduct a management study,
and they said you ought to take this work back in-house. We did
and it was one of the best things that we ever did. So it works
both ways. But you think that overall we should have more
fairness than we have?
Mr. Blanch. Yes, I do.
Senator Voinovich. Yes. Are any of you familiar with the
new NSPS, the new National Security Personnel System that's
been promoted by the Defense Department?
Dr. Asch. Some of it.
Senator Voinovich. I would be interested in your comments
on it.
Dr. Asch. I think what I would say, like everything you
said, the devil is in the details. I think there are things
that work very well in the civil service, and some have worked
in the past, but it's not fully effective.
Senator Voinovich. It's what?
Dr. Asch. It's not fully effective or as effective as it
could be. Especially when one considers all of the factors that
define a successful human resource system. The current system
doesn't have all those areas.
For example, there are the issues of whether managers have
discretion over resources, are there incentives for
performance, are there adequate resources for policies that
could make a difference? These are areas where the civil
service isn't quite where it should be. But, of course, there
are also things that have been done well.
And I think there has been so much attention by such a
diverse array of groups. So many commissions and study groups
of all sorts have looked at the system and consistently said
there are some serious problems with the civil service system.
So looking at the DOD proposal, I think it has the
potential to be terrific and provide the flexibility that is
needed--the ability to introduce innovative methods, be quicker
at hiring, those things. The plan would have those potentials.
But that said, when you look at past examples of, for example,
the demonstration projects and so forth, one of the
conclusions, and I would recommend reading the Naval Research
Advisory Committee for the science technology community, the
conclusion is that the flexibilities were underutilized, it
didn't meet its potential.
And some of the reasons for why that was the case was
excessive bureaucracy, the need to get approval from OPM, and
OPM having concerns about some of the more radical ideas. They
felt that they did not have a system that was supporting the
efforts. And so looking at the DOD proposal, it certainly is
focused on many of the areas that commissions consistently
identify as problem areas. But it needs to recognize that if
not implemented well, it could be a real disaster and attention
needs to be put to such things as including the employees,
making sure they're not going to be hurt by the process, that's
critical, not having arrangements with OPM so that not
everything has to be approved. On the other hand, OPM needs to
have oversight.
Senator Voinovich. So you think it goes too far in zapping
out OPM?
Dr. Asch. I don't know that.
Senator Voinovich. Are you familiar with it?
Dr. Asch. In general terms.
Senator Voinovich. There is some criticism that they're
really trying to get out from OPM.
Dr. Asch. I think what I'll respond to is that commissions
consistently find that the need for approval by OPM has
hindered real progress in many initiatives that have the
potential to be very positive. And so it's a fine line between
giving people the authority to make decisions without having to
go to OPM, and yet at the same time recognize that oversight is
important, clarity is important, transparency, all those things
need to be there too. So I think there is a fine line that
needs to be walked there.
Senator Voinovich. I've been working on this issue for over
4 years. Last Congress I drafted the Federal Workforce
Improvement Act, and included about half of it in the Homeland
Security Act. That legislation called for elevating the
importance of human resources management.
A question I have is, if you don't have good human resource
people already in the Department, then how can you outsource
the personnel function?
When I was governor we did outsource it because the
Department of State services, frankly, got in the way, so we
let them go ahead and do it and they had to follow certain
guidelines. So if you take this on, I think you will agree, you
really have to do some work in this area to make it work well.
A question I asked the other witnesses that were here was about
going to a pay banding system with performance pay. I'm going
to ask you this question as well. Tell me if you're not
familiar with it and I'll understand, but if you've observed
that aspect of the Federal workforce, do you think that they're
capable of doing pay for performance.
Dr. Asch. How many of the human resource managers?
Senator Voinovich. Yes. One of the concerns that we have is
if you go to pay for performance, the people that do the
performance evaluations really have to know what they're doing.
Dr. Asch. That's correct.
Senator Voinovich. That is hard work. You have to be
trained for the issue. Is the infrastructure in place in order
to get that done inside the Federal Government or in the
Department of Defense?
Dr. Asch. I'm more familiar with the Department of Defense
civil service, but I think that it is possible to go to that
system. It could be very costly. It's very costly in terms of
people's time to do a meaningful performance review, especially
in the kind of work that people do in the civil service because
much of it is difficult to quantify. How do you quantify good
ideas? It's very difficult.
So my position is that it is possible to have a pay for
performance system. It won't necessarily be in the form of you
did a good job this year, I'm going to give you a raise. It
could be in the form of--I'm not recommending this, but just to
give an example of a system that does work pretty well is the
military pay system where promotion is very important? It's
essentially pay for performance.
So you can structure pay and compensation in a way that
provides incentives for performance that doesn't--maybe where
you're reviewing performance not every year, but maybe every
few years. I'm not recommending the military system. I'm saying
it is possible to design meaningful performance incentives in a
governmental situation.
Senator Voinovich. Well, I think probably one of the
reasons why they want to do it is that they've had some good
experience with the uniformed service, and they think we can
maybe transfer it over.
Dr. Asch. But it will take work. My sense is that
infrastructure isn't there today. I think that given the lack
of incentives right now for performance, basically where the
performance incentives exist in the civil service is that the
civil service hires really good people who are motivated and
want to work in the public service. But it would be nice also
to reward them when they do perform well, and that is missing.
And so the infrastructure isn't quite there, but maybe it
should be. In fact, I think it should be.
Senator Voinovich. You would have to get on with that
before you just go full blown with it.
Dr. Asch. I think it's important to have a meaningful plan
and then be willing to tweak the plan. I do a lot of research
on the active military. When you consider what happened in the
move from the draft to the all volunteer force, what a radical
change in personnel policy that was. And, yes, it was rocky at
first, but with attention to pay raises, introduction of
bonuses, revamping----
Senator Voinovich. Where is this again?
Dr. Asch. I'm talking about the active duty military in the
uniformed service.
Senator Voinovich. OK.
Dr. Asch. We moved from the draft to an all volunteer force
in the 1970's. My point is exactly an example of a radical
change in personnel policy that wasn't done successfully at
first, it was rocky, but it evolved and it improved, and so I
think it's important to have a good plan in place and then have
the willingness to come back. And I think that's an important
role for Congress is to say, OK, how is this working, and
actually in the legislation include data collection, and say
we're going to have evaluations. It's interesting going back to
the military example, the institutionalized quadrennial review
of military compensation that occurs every 4 years. DOD has to
review its compensation system. So institutions were put in
place in the 1970's so that it wasn't like we're changing the
law and off it goes. Rather we're going to monitor this very
carefully and make changes.
Senator Voinovich. My complaint, General Lyles, and it's
too often, 3 years----
Dr. Asch. Is not enough.
Senator Voinovich. They ought to look at giving him a
little more time. Mike, would you want to comment on this?
Mr. Blanch. I can tell you from the bargaining unit
perspective one of the most controversial issues we have out
there is performance appraisals. I mean probably half the
grievances filed in this command every year are over
performance appraisals. We have Chapter 43 in place now. We
have a system in place that generates so many complaints.
Senator Voinovich. What is it again?
Mr. Blanch. Chapter 43, the performance appraisal system.
That's something they want to get rid of in the new personnel
system. They would get rid of that. We have that in place. That
is something----
Senator Voinovich. I'm sorry, maybe I should know more
about it. Is that one of the waivers that one of the agencies
received and they're doing it?
Mr. Blanch. That's what's waived in the Homeland Security
Act. DOD is going for the same thing to get rid of that that
people go through.
Senator Voinovich. In other words, you have some members
where they've waived that and you have performance evaluations.
Mr. Blanch. No. We have that in place now, and we use that.
That's a tool that the employees have to make sure they get a
fair appraisal, they have to use that system and the collective
bargaining agreement and if you take that, that takes away from
employees and you give that sole authority to the supervisors
to determine if he or she moves up or down or anything else.
Senator Voinovich. Well, let me just ask you this, do you
think the supervisors that you deal with are trained enough
to----
Mr. Blanch. That's exactly my point. That system now is a
good objective system in place, and they have a lot of trouble
administrating this system, which I think because it's right
there in the same place, and like I said, it's one of the
hardest things is the supervisor, and I feel for them because
no matter what they do it's not good enough, so it's like----
Senator Voinovich. The real question----
Mr. Blanch. What we have now is they have a real hard time
with what we're looking to replace. They're going to have a
harder time with it.
Senator Voinovich. Does the union have any information
about training people in doing performance evaluations?
Mr. Blanch. No. We think the problem is in our line of
business, the Council 214 people--you're a good employee and
stuff, and we've talked about this again--it's a partnership
council issue, we're working this thing, OK, you're a good
mechanic or you're a good whatever you are, and tomorrow you're
a supervisor and that's how it happens. You might get a 1 week
training course, but supervision is--it's an art, it's not----
Senator Voinovich. I'll tell you something, I really would
like you to go back and get additional information on this. I'm
going to see Bobby Harnage tomorrow, I would really like to get
into the issue of how much training people actually receive in
the civilian side on doing performance evaluations.
Mr. Blanch. I think we could probably answer this from this
command because we've been working that at the partnership
council. I think we can probably get you that from this command
real soon.
Senator Voinovich. I know that when I spoke to you about a
year ago, you said you were working on something like that, but
I would really like to know how you're going about getting it
done and the time it takes to get it done.
General Lyles. We'll provide that information to you, sir.
Senator Voinovich. Great.
Mr. Blanch. The next biggest issue in AFMC would be
disciplinary type actions. We are really concerned with waiving
Chapter 75. We have real big concerns there because we are very
active with locals and in processing disciplinary actions, and
sometimes they're warranted, sometimes they're not.
Senator Voinovich. Is the process expedited?
Mr. Blanch. To my understanding it pretty much goes away.
You lose your right.
Senator Voinovich. I see, but it goes away.
Mr. Blanch. Right. We have an expedited procedure in place
at AFMC.
Senator Voinovich. For hearing grievances.
Mr. Blanch. We worked our grievance procedure, we've
shortened that up substantially. We've stressed to people here
for grievances to move them fast, let's get these things out of
our way. To freshen everybody's minds, in the old days it would
take months and months and months to get through the grievance
procedure and we've taken it through collaboration, we know,
let's get these problems behind us and let people get back to
work because the longer this goes on the worse it gets.
Senator Voinovich. Right. Let me ask you another question
on the grievance procedure.
Mr. Blanch. Right.
Senator Voinovich. How familiar do you think the
supervisors are with the grievance procedure? We regularly hear
from people that you have poor performers and can't get rid of
them.
Mr. Blanch. That's just amazing to me. I've been a union
steward for a long time, and I can tell you in this command and
I get into that----
Senator Voinovich. Do what?
Mr. Blanch [continuing]. With the OPM director. I don't
know where this came from because I represent literally
hundreds and I know lots and lots of people just like me. If
you are not--if you are unacceptable in your performance on any
one critical element on your performance plan, you are
unacceptable and you are given 90 days to get up to speed or
you're out the gate or downgraded seriously. My experience is
you're out the gate. I mean, we just don't mess around with
that. And I don't know where this old wives' tale comes from
that it takes 5 years or whatever to fire a Federal employee.
Senator Voinovich. Yes.
Mr. Blanch. If you do something wrong at AFMC, you are held
accountable, so why do we need this flexibility. You've got it
right there. And, if you violate a security regulation, you're
out the gate, just like that. It happens. I don't know where
these things come from.
Senator Voinovich. So your observation is that at the Air
Force Materiel Command the people who are in supervisory
positions are pretty knowledgeable about how the system works,
they follow the procedures, and if somebody is not doing what
they're supposed to do, you think they're gone?
Mr. Blanch. My observation of the Air Force Materiel
Command is sometimes they're a little overzealous.
Senator Voinovich. They're what?
Mr. Blanch. They're a little overboard. I would say the
person needs some discipline, but you don't need to fire him.
But I would say, yes, AFMC is very aggressive.
Senator Voinovich. It would be interesting to see the
number of grievances, some statistical evidence on the
grievances and appeals here versus some other parts of the
Defense Department.
Mr. Blanch. Yes.
Senator Voinovich. That's good to hear. I'm not glad that
they're running people out, but that they are familiar with the
procedure. My experience as mayor was that the city directors
often complained that they couldn't get rid of poor performers.
So I talked to the person that ran the civil service and the
appeals process, and it turned out they didn't follow the
rules. They have to follow the rules and if they do what
they're supposed to do it would work out. You know what, they
went back and trained them, they started following the rules
and the frustration ended. But the problem was that most of
them didn't know the system and in some instances they were
just too lazy to use the system. But you think the system we
have in place is fair?
Mr. Blanch. I think it's a real fair system. I'll be frank
with you, I'll have a new supervisor come in, an employee will
do something wrong, I'll bring the employee over afterwards and
say maybe your boss screwed up procedurally here, but let me
tell you something, you got a job to do, so does that
supervisor, and he is not going to make the same mistake twice,
and, I mean that's the way it goes down. And, yes, all the
protections they need are out there, all the tools they need
are out there, they use them, and so I just don't understand
why they need more.
Senator Voinovich. Does anyone else want to make a comment
on anything? Mr. Durand, you're where the rubber meets the
road. Do you share his observations?
Mr. Durand. Yes, I do share his observation. There is
times, and I haven't been a union treasurer for a long time, so
I apologize a little bit of my ignorance on it, I do share his
observation. I do realize that there is training to be involved
and it all boils down to that, both from the management side
and both from the employee sides. They both have to know what
the advantages are, what the disadvantages are, what you can
do, what you cannot do. And once they're educated in the
system, Dr. Asch was talking about the system you were
referring to earlier, you have to learn both, it has to be
training, it has to be uniform, it has to be disbursed to the
people so that they know what to expect.
Senator Voinovich. And do you think that that training, for
the most part, is going on so that people are trained for their
responsibilities?
Mr. Durand. Yes. I think the training is occurring.
Senator Voinovich. OK.
Dr. Asch. Can I make one last suggestion? In addition to
training, there also has to be an incentive for supervisors to
give poor evaluations when necessary and feel that they're
going to be backed up when they give poor evaluations. So it's
partial--I mean it's the typical argument there are lot of
policies on the books that are the right policies, but for some
reason they're pointing to the training issue, which is, of
course, critical, but another possibility is what's the
incentive for them to use it?
I am an economist, there is big literature on how
organizations, particularly public organizations because it's
not a profit maximizing type of thing, the incentive of a
supervisor is to make sure the workers like them, and so they
might not do things that a private sector supervisor would do.
I'm not saying that's the case here. I'm just saying there is
an incentive for supervisors not to give poor evaluations or to
follow through with them.
Senator Voinovich. Well, it's interesting. David Walker,
who is comptroller general, has commented that in their studies
on the performance evaluations, most of the time it's always
very good.
Dr. Asch. Everybody is above average, yes.
Senator Voinovich. And it's either because it's easier or
you don't want to----
Dr. Asch. I think that's very telling.
Senator Voinovich [continuing]. Have the discomfort of
saying to somebody what you're doing. Then, of course, there
are some that are arguing for a flexible pay band, or broad
banding. This is particularly important in the senior executive
service where 70 percent of the people earn the same amount of
money.
Dr. Asch. Right. And actually what's to prevent them from
going to the top of the pay band. I mean what incentive does a
supervisor have to control costs? So the incentives of the
managers and the supervisors in this process are pretty
critical, especially when you're in a public organization where
it's harder to measure productivity. There is no cost bottom
line, like you would have in a private sector concern.
Senator Voinovich. I'm going to ask you one last question,
it's for Mr. Blanch and Mr. Durand, do you know what total
quality management is? Do you know what that term means?
Mr. Blanch. I worked on that a few years ago. Yes, I'm
familiar with the term.
Senator Voinovich. It's primarily about demonstrating
principles of empowering your workers to become involved in
decisionmaking and developing self-improvement teams of
excellence and continuous improvement. Do you have any
experience?
Mr. Blanch. Yes. I've had a lot of experience in that. In
fact, AFMC is working on basically TQM. It's lean logistics.
Senator Voinovich. Lean what?
Mr. Blanch. Lean logistics. It's a new program that's come
on board. It started down in Warner Robins Air Force Base.
They've gone to the people with all these crazy things, all
these things--get these things out of my way, it's just
basically a common sense thing, but it's going to the people,
the people are like the customer, to know what that customer
wants and they know how to get it though now, to get it fast to
them. I believe AFMC, we've been kind of practicing that one
way or another. Sometimes I don't think we get through with one
situation or before we start another one. It was like there was
always something going on in this command. Somebody is always
looking for a better way to do it.
Senator Voinovich. Yes. Do you think overall that your
members are involved in decisionmaking and asked how they think
they can do their jobs better?
Mr. Blanch. That depends on the leadership at like General
Lyles' leadership. He put the word out, but you get this
impermeable layer, you get the word out, you have to go through
all the layers of management before it gets down. Sometimes I
see it working great, at some bases they'll push back on it,
but it's been endorsed at this level.
Senator Voinovich. I'd be really interested if you would
share with me from your perspective where you think you have
some good information because my next project, if we get all
these personnel reforms completed in this next couple of years,
is to see if we can start moving on total quality management.
It's been my experience in the city and in the State Government
that when you empower people and you give them the tools and
the training and you do the performance evaluation properly you
will have a very motivated workforce.
And I think the problem that I've observed is that this
whole area of personnel has been neglected for so long in so
many places that we must get the fundamentals in operation
before we can start going----
Mr. Blanch. It sounds so easy.
Senator Voinovich [continuing]. Where we move on to
something else.
Thanks for being here. Thank you, Mr. Durand and Mr.
Nauseef. I know you're listening intently. Thank you for your
nice words. We enjoy working with you and we understand how
important this base is to you.
Mr. Nauseef. Thank you, Senator.
Senator Voinovich. We want to make sure you have the best
workforce you can possibly have here.
Mr. Nauseef. Yes, sir.
Senator Voinovich. Again, thank you very much.
Dr. Asch. Thank you.
Senator Voinovich. The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:36 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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