With the president’s budget set to hit like a cannonball in a swimming pool on May 23, agency leaders wary of the impact may be best served by keeping their heads down.
Though Robert Shea wouldn’t blame them for looking over their shoulders.
“It’s got to be really tough to keep a workforce engaged when the political leadership is gunning for complete elimination,” said Shea, a former Office of Management and Budget associate director and current public sector principal at Grant Thornton, in talking about the senior leaders of offices proposed for closure in the Trump administration’s spending plan.
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Speaking on a panel at the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s Management of Change conference in Cambridge, Maryland, Shea told the story of a friend who is in senior leadership, weighing preparations for certain elimination of their office by OMB versus waiting for possible funding from Congress during the appropriations process.
“You’ve got to deal with them forthrightly,” he said he told the friend. “There’s two scenarios. One is you get bailed out [by Congress]. The second is that you don’t.
“In the former, you don’t want to be bailed out and have [ticked] off OMB. But somehow, if it comes to pass that you are eliminated, you want a responsible amount of money to close down the agency. Transparency and candor are going to serve you well in these times.”
The Trump administration has made reshaping the federal workforce a top priority — including with a pronounced emphasis on restructuring IT modernization and cybersecurity — and the fiscal impacts of the move will be unveiled by the White House on May 23.
But once that budget goes through Congress, it’s anybody’s guess what agency leaders will actually be dealing with.
The panel — which included former Office of E-Government and Information Technology Administrator Mark Forman, ICF International Senior Vice President Jeff Neal and Department of Homeland Security Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer Roland Edwards — tackled the challenges of leading the workforce in an age of uncertainty, including trying to close the talent gap with the private sector.
With the administration’s IT focus and reorganization plans, government leaders will have to balance targeted reductions in some areas, while putting a broader emphasis on tech recruitment.
As agencies move their data to the cloud, Forman — now global head of Unisys’ Public Sector division — said the government will need to entice more engineers to public service to handle web services while retaining the ones that understand the legacy systems from which they will migrate.
“The people that understand the existing applications and the people that have to understand how to migrate them,” he said. “I think we see the cloud computing companies on a tear to get people trained and get that partner in that supply chain development. I think that is one of the most important growing areas in the administration’s push to shared services.”
One way to bring more talent into the fold is civil service reform, which has support on Capitol Hill, but Shea said employees won’t see any impact in the near future with a crowded White House policy agenda that includes health care, tax and infrastructure reform.
“That’s got to get down, probably not this year, maybe next year,” he said. “Then there’s a year or two of regulatory drafting and implementation and then the change that’s going to be needed to implement those in agencies.
“Even in the rosiest scenario of reform, you are looking at years before those benefits hit agencies.”
So senior leaders are best left doing what they have been: doing more with less.
“Keeping your workforce focused on the mission, doing whatever you can to squeeze out every bit of flexibility you can from current law and regulation,” he said.
