Advisory board urges DoD civilian staff cuts

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Advisory board urges DoD civilian staff cuts
By John T. Bennett - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Jul 23, 2010 9:58:01 EDT

An influential Pentagon advisory board will recommend that Defense Department Secretary Robert Gates slash the civilian work force by more than 111,000 people and drastically pare the military’s combatant command structure as ways to save billions of dollars.

The Defense Business Board task force also will urge Gates to initiate a hiring freeze for the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD), all Joint Staff directorates and all combatant commands. It also is calling for DoD to shut down OSD’s Networks and Information Integration (NII) directorate and the contractor-heavy U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM).

Those are some of the preliminary recommendations the task force unanimously approved July 22. The board expects to submit these initial findings to Gates soon in an informational memo, followed in October by a broader set of longer-term cost-cutting proposals.

The study group will advise Gates to either shrink the DoD civilian work force to 2003 levels or by 15 percent, whichever is greater. The greater reduction would be a 15 percent cut, which would amount to 111,508 personnel, based on the 743,388 employees DoD had in March, according to the Office of Personnel Management’s online database, Fedscope. DoD had 654,287 civilian employees in September 2003.

The task force also will advise Gates to eliminate organizational duplication and overlap across the department.