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.

“Although the restrictions are no longer in place, in keeping with the strategic direction established by Executive Order 13871, the OMB memorandum and ongoing Departmental organizational reviews mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2017, I expect components to scrutinize carefully all recruitment and hiring actions and undertake to recruit or hire only when such are wholly consistent with the principles, requirements and actions set forth in the OMB memorandum,” the memo said.

The memo outlined that future recruitment actions had to take into account:

• Whether the duties of the position, qualifications and skills or the organizational placement reflect mission needs

• Whether the duties can be assigned to lower organizational levels

• Whether appropriate changes to the position can be accomplished in a timely and efficient manner

Agency components are instructed to review the 2017 NDAA for direction on resources for recruitment, but also operate within the funding limits and full-time equivalent authorization set up by the president’s fiscal 2017 budget.

The Trump administration began the governmentwide hiring freeze on Jan. 23, shortly after taking office. OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said that agencies would have to submit their draft agency reform plans by June 30, with plans to implement them in September.

“This would be the first time the government has executed cuts of this magnitude — and all at once — since the drawdown following World War II,” the story said.

Economic analysts told the Post that the projected agency layoffs would reduce employment in the Washington metro area by 1.8 percent.

Speculation over the projected cuts’ impact on the workforce has abounded since the Office of Management and Budget released topline numbers on Feb. 27, calling for a $54 billion increase in defense spending, which would be offset by $462 billion in domestic spending.

The numbers portend double-digit cuts at numerous agencies — with EPA’s budget projected to be slashed as much as 25 percent — but agencies won’t get a sense of the exact figures until the Trump administration releases its spending budget this week.

Federal employee unions have railed against the proposed cuts ever since the Feb. 27 budget disclosure and have sought to mobilize a massive grassroots effort to sway Congress to kill the spending plan.

“Cutting the size of the federal government’s civilian workforce won’t make federal programs run better, erase our national debt or save taxpayers any money,” American Federation of Government Employees National President J. David Cox said in a statement.

“All it will do is increase our dependence on more expensive and less regulated private-sector contractors, and push more of the burden onto state and local governments that are struggling under the weight of unfunded mandates.”

The National Treasury Employees Union President Tony Reardon said in a statement that the cuts will drastically impact the government’s ability to provide essential services.

“Reports that the new administration will propose deep and indiscriminate budget cuts across multiple federal agencies should be alarming not just to those in the civil service but to taxpayers everywhere,” he said.

“Federal workers we represent are worried about their jobs and about the ability of their agencies to carry out their missions under such austere conditions: making sure our air and water are clean; inspecting new foods and medicines; shutting down financial scams that prey on consumers; maintaining our national parks; and safeguarding nuclear materials, just to name a few.”

Reardon reiterated NTEU’s earlier call for its membership to rally Congress to reject the White House’s spending plan.

Executive of the Year: James “Hondo” Geurts

The Executive of the Year award is given to a single person that, through their vision and strength of will, pushes the boundaries of government to deliver solutions to critical problems.

In doing our due diligence on this year’s winner, Federal Times spoke with a number of colleagues who said, to a person, that we had the right man for the inaugural award.

As the leadership behind programs like SOFWERX — an incubator successfully fostering collaboration between the government and private sector to solve tough problems — and the “Ghost Program,” also known as “Top Gun for acquisition,” Special Operations Forces Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (SOF AT&L) Director James Geurts is “reinventing how USSOCOM invents,” as one acquisition official put it.

Through these programs and other initiatives, Geurts and his teams delivered in the last year 116 aircraft/systems, 1,014 vehicles, nine maritime craft, 42,334 weapons/accessories, 235,116 operator survival items and 4,909 radios/equip — all with a permanent staff of fewer than 500 people.

Unsung Hero of the Year: Ryan Wells

In starting this awards program, Federal Times sought to ensure it was highlighting the people on the ground who are making a difference — the ones who see a problem and don’t linger, don’t wait to be asked, but act and in the process change lives.

While the other recipients of the inaugural Vanguard Awards are certainly deserving, Ryan Wells, laboratory information manager for a VA medical center in Missouri, perfectly exemplifies the true nature of this award: the ability to see a problem, identify a solution and forge ahead to get things done.

When Wells realized a colleague was forced to waste time with repetitive, rote tasks, he took it upon himself to write a program in his spare time to automate this task. That program is now being used throughout the medical center and at nearby hospitals.

“Mr. Wells was not requested to create this database,” according to the nominator. “He simply recognized an opportunity to improve care provided to the veterans in southeast Missouri and the surrounding areas through utilization of technology.”

Special thanks to the Federal Times Advisory Board: Dan Blair, president and CEO of the National Academy of Public Administration, former deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management; Robert Carey, vice president of Navy and Marine Corps Programs at Vencore, former principal deputy CIO at the Department of Defense; Karen Evans, national director of the US Cyber Challenge, former administrator of the Office of Electronic Government and IT, Office of Management and Budget; Beth McGrath, director of federal sector at Deloitte Consulting, former deputy chief management officer at the Department of Defense; Paul Posner, director of the Graduate Public Administration Program at George Mason University, former Government Accountability Office director of intergovernmental programs; Franklin Reeder, founder of the Center for Internet Security, former director of the White House Office of Administration; Stan Soloway, president and CEO at Celero Strategies, LLC, former Professional Services Council CEO, former deputy undersecretary of defense; Linda Springer, former Office of Personnel Management director; Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, former deputy general counsel for litigation at the Department of Housing and Urban Development; Robert Tobias, director of business development for American University’s Key Executive Leadership Programs, former president of the National Treasury Employees Union; and Steve Watkins, founder and president of Watkins Communications, former editor of Federal Times.

James Clapper has long said he planned to retire at the end of the Obama administration, and he told the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday that he submitted his letter of resignation on Wednesday evening.

Committee members jokingly asked him to stay on for perhaps four more years. Clapper said his wife probably would have a problem with that.

Clapper has held the job since August 2010. He was previously a lieutenant general in the Air Force and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Clapper also told the committee Russia curtailed its election-related cyber activity after the Obama administration accused Moscow of trying to interfere with the presidential election. He said Russia’s information warfare is still likely to continue.

Hacked emails from Democratic Party officials were released by Wikileaks during the presidential campaign, revealing details embarrassing to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The intelligence director and the Department of Homeland Security said in October that based on the “scope and sensitivity” of the hacking efforts, only Russia’s “senior-most officials” could have authorized the hacking. Russia has denied involvement.

Clapper told the House intelligence committee on Thursday that Russia will probably continue to conduct information warfare. Clapper said the intelligence community has less insight into how Wikileaks obtained the emails.

For his part, President-elect Donald Trump was unambiguous about his stance on cybersecurity.

“As a deterrent against attacks on our critical resources, the United States must possess — and has to — the unquestioned capacity to launch crippling cyber counterattacks. And I mean crippling,” Trump told a veterans group on Oct. 3. “America’s dominance in the arena must be unquestioned. Today, it’s totally questioned. People don’t even know if we have the capability that we are supposed to have.”

Along with a more aggressive offensive stance in cyberspace, Trump also called for a cyber review team — made up of military and civilian government experts, as well as from the private sector — to conduct a holistic assessment of the federal government’s cybersecurity posture, presumably with an eye toward bolstering that posture.

Trump “is specifically committed to fixing our cyber capabilities or improving them,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., a leading candidate for secretary of defense, said in an interview with Defense News, a sister publication of Federal Times. “We have got to both have a defensive plan and an offensive plan. You simply can’t allow yourself to be vulnerable all of the time to cyberattacks and not have a response.”

While Trump has pledged to be more aggressive in cyberspace, the realities of building strong defensive and offensive capabilities will be a long haul, according to Greg Garcia, executive vice president at Signal Group and the first Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for cybersecurity. Moreover, a more aggressive America will lead to more aggressive adversaries, he said.

“The Donald talks tough … but the reality is that cybersecurity policy movement is by its nature incremental,” Garcia said. “Its technological complexity coupled with a wide and disparate network of users, vendors and service providers means that the law of unintended consequences is guaranteed to come into play against any combination of those players with promulgation of aggressive policy or regulatory initiatives.”

“Reacting and calling for security best practices are easy to do,” former National Security Agency computer scientist Ben Johnson, now chief security strategist at Carbon Black, said. “It gets to be a lot harder when we’re talking about doing these things in practice, though.”

The specifics will be the hardest to pin down, according to Johnson.

“[Is] Donald suggesting that we, as a country, make it a policy to hack back? Should individual businesses have the right to retaliate? Who should be conducting attribution? Should we even focus on attribution?” he wondered. “Attribution and retaliation seem to be on everyone’s minds in Washington right now — from policymakers to military leadership to the media to private experts involved in discussions with the former. These are necessary topics, but let’s not forget how poorly our private companies and our government agencies are doing at defense — we need to improve our capabilities in defending our sensitive data, our infrastructure and our digital credentials.”

Outgoing Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., a potential candidate for secretary of the Navy, said cyber-watchers could expect to see important changes immediately after Trump is sworn in in January, including de-politicization of the nation’s cybersecurity policy.

“I think that with a President Trump, you’ll see him coming out literally within the first few days saying that we are going to have an international defense strategy that is driven by the Pentagon and not by the political National Security Council,” he said. “That’s a clear game-changer. Because if you look around the globe, over the last eight years, the National Security Council has been writing that. And find one country anywhere that we are better off than we were eight years [ago], you cannot find it.”