Republican lawmakers are resurrecting a bill to slash the civilian workforce at the Pentagon by 15 percent over the coming years. While the proposal to save $82.5 billion over five years by shedding more than 115,000 civilian jobs may seem draconian to some, it would barely put a dent in the overall army of both civil service and private contract employees involved in the day-to-day operations of the Defense Department.
Related: Big Post-Election Push to Increase Defense Spending
The Rebalance for an Effective Defense Uniform and Civilian Employees (REDUCE) Act is designed to reduce the current 770,000-person government workforce to about 655,000, according to Government Executive. The Department of Defense would have to reach the new employee cap by fiscal 2022 and sustain it for at least five years.
“Many of our civilians at the Pentagon and around the world do a fine job, but their growth is unsustainable,” said Rep. Kevin Calvert, R-Calif., the bill’s chief sponsor, who introduced similar legislation in the last Congress.
Gordon Adams, a military authority and professor of International Relations at American University, agrees that “This isn’t a bad idea.” He said it would help to address the long-standing problem that there are far more civilian employees working for the DOD than active military men and women in uniform.
The numbers pretty much tell the story, according to Adams: When you factor in the estimated 700,000 government contractors who provide non-military related services to the Pentagon and about 340,000 uniform personnel who are essentially assigned to civilian-type work, there is a grand total of 1.8 million civilians providing support services to roughly 1.1 million people in uniform.
Related: Battle Against ISIS Could Boost the Pentagon’s Budget
From 2001 to 2012, the number of active duty military personnel grew by 3.4 percent while the number of civilian Defense Department employees grew by 17 percent, according to Defense One.
Calvert said his bill would essentially rein in a Defense bureaucracy that has grown out of control. Outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel previously called for significant staff cuts in anticipation of more cuts under the budget sequester. Hagel promised to cut hundreds of positions from his own office, while DOD officials have estimated the department plans to slash 40,000 civilian jobs in the coming years.
The Pentagon has a checkered past in managing its force of civilian workers, and oftentimes relied more on attrition to cull its ranks than strategic action to hang onto the best and the brightest while weeding out unproductive or inefficient workers. The DOD’s civilian workforce has ebbed and flowed over the years, with the last big downsizing occurring in the 1990s, following the end to the Cold War.
During that period, the Pentagon reduced its civilian work force by about a third – from roughly 1 million to 700,000 or so, according to Adams. The civilian workforce surged again in the post 9/11 era, as the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. But now it is tapering off just as the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force are all downsizing.
Related: Troubling Signs the Pentagon Is Going Soft
The legislation being pushed by Calvert and others in effect would bring down the civilian workforce to the pre-9/11 levels again. And considering the fact that the civilian workforce is aging — with many planning to retire in the next few years — Calvert’s schedule for cutbacks largely would coincidewith the Pentagon’s civilian attrition rate for the coming decade.
“So we may be just legislating the inevitable here,” Adams said. “This is not an attack on the civil service, per se. The rate of attrition being proposed in the bill is a relatively shallow slope. That is not draconian or, ‘Oh my God, the sky is falling.”
Top Reads From the Fiscal Times:
