**GAO-08-439R**                      Published: Feb 06, 2008. Publicly Released: Feb 06, 2008.                  

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## Highlights

The achievement of the Department of Defense's (DOD) mission is dependent in large part on the skills and expertise of its civilian workforce--which consists of almost 700,000 personnel, who develop policy, provide intelligence, manage finances, and acquire and maintain weapon systems. With more than 50 percent of its civilian personnel becoming eligible to retire in the next few years, DOD may find it difficult to fill certain mission-critical jobs with qualified personnel. Strategic workforce planning, an integral part of human capital management, helps ensure that an organization has staff with the necessary skills and competencies to accomplish its strategic goals. We have previously reported that it is critical that DOD engage in effective strategic workforce planning to ensure that its human capital reforms have maximum effectiveness and value. In 2007, we reported that strategic human capital management remained a high-risk area because the federal government now faces one of the most significant transformations to the civil service in half a century, as momentum grows toward making governmentwide changes to agency pay, classification, and performance management systems. In January 2006, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 20065 directed DOD to develop and submit to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees a strategic plan to shape and improve the DOD civilian employee workforce. Section 1122 (b) of the act provided that the plan address eight requirements. On November 6, 2007--ten months after the due date--DOD submitted to the committees both its plan titled "Department of Defense Civilian Human Capital Strategic Plan 2006-2010," and its implementation report titled "The Department of Defense Human Capital Strategic Plan for Civilian Employees of the Department of Defense, Fiscal Year 2006 Implementation Report." This latter DOD report, however, noted that it responded to section 1122(d) of the act. In addition to the mandate for DOD, the act also required GAO to review and report on the human capital strategic plan DOD submitted to meet its mandate no later than 90 days after DOD's submission. Accordingly, we examined the extent to which DOD's civilian human capital strategic plan addresses the reporting requirements mandated by the act.

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## Topics

National Defense

Civilian employeesData collectionData integrityEmployee retentionHuman capitalHuman capital managementHuman capital planningPersonnel managementPersonnel recruitingReporting requirementsRequirements definitionRisk managementSkilled laborStaff utilizationStrategic planningAssessmentsExecutive agency oversight