The Government Accountability Office unveiled its annual report on reducing agency duplication and overlap on April 26 with a few ideas on how to streamline hiring.
The report noted that out of 105 hiring authorities available to agencies in fiscal 2014, 20 of those authorities were used in 91 percent of the hiring decisions.
Related: Read the report
GAO comptroller Gene Dodaro said in a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing that the Office of Personnel Management should streamline those authorities — which are defined as any law, regulation or executive order that allows an agency to hire a civil service worker.
“Our suggestion to OPM is [to see] why aren’t these other authorities helpful,” he said. “If [they are] not, maybe we should eliminate them, refine them, see which ones are effective and have they communicated that across the agencies.”
GAO first examined the hiring authority issue in August 2016, offering three recommendations, including assessing the state of the hiring authorities, reforming the seldom used ones and providing more information for agencies about how OPM’s Hiring Excellence campaign could be used to attract top talent.
The hiring authority recommendations remain open, though OPM concurred with them and said that it would produce research conducted in fiscal 2017 assessing the effectiveness of the hiring authorities by next year.
“In a lot of cases, there may be a need to give some additional authority, but there’s plenty of authority available and agencies aren’t using it fully and the question is why not,” Dodaro said.
“So far, they’ve only looked at and evaluated six of the 105 hiring authorities and we suggested they take another examination.”
The 2016 report noted that the top two hiring authorities — Competitive Examining and the Department of Veterans Affairs — accounted for 38 percent of the more than 196,000 vacancies filled in fiscal 2014.
The Competitive Examining authority is used for jobs open to the public and posted on USAJobs, while the VA’s Title 38 authority is used for hiring certain medical occupations.
Attracting talent to the federal workforce has been a major goal of OPM as an increasing number of employees edge toward retirement. Then-acting OPM Director Beth Cobert introduced the Hiring Excellence plan in May 2016, which included goals like improving talent assessment strategies to find qualified applicants.
Agencies are slated to report their Hiring Excellence progress in September 2017.
When Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., asked Dodaro what measures Congress could take to assist agencies in streamlining their hiring efforts and avoid duplication, the GAO comptroller cited Capitol Hill’s most notorious problem.
“One of the first things would be to go back to regularly appropriating the money on time,” he said. “I hate to bring this up, but operating under a continuing resolution that’s last year’s money effectively limits you.”
Heitkamp agreed, saying, “You know the most amazing thing, Gene, is that we all agree with you, but somehow it doesn’t happen.”
Congress must agree on a spending plan by April 28 or risk a government shutdown.
