STRATEGIC HUMAN 

CAPITAL 

MANAGEMENT

NRC Could Better 

Manage the Size and 

Composition of Its 

Workforce by Further 

Incorporating Leading 

Practices

Report to Congressional Committees

April 2017

GAO-17-233

United States Government Accountability Office
United States Government Accountability Office

Highlights of GAO-17-233, a report to 

congressional committees

April 2017

STRATEGIC HUMAN CAPITAL MANAGEMENT

NRC Could Better Manage the Size and Composition 

of Its Workforce by Further Incorporating Leading 

Practices

What GAO Found

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has made efforts to enhance its 

strategic human capital management to ensure the agency has the right number 

and composition of staff; however, these efforts do not incorporate some leading 

practices. Leading practices—identified by GAO and others—indicate that using 

forward-looking strategies, setting goals, using data-driven planning and 

accountability systems, and ensuring that employees have relevant knowledge to 

carry out their responsibilities are essential for strategic human capital 

management. NRC has taken steps through Project Aim—an effort to help the 

agency respond more strategically to changes in the nuclear industry—and other 

efforts to manage its human capital, such as developing a strategic workforce 

plan, conducting workload forecasting, and cross-training employees. 

However, GAO identified three areas where NRC’s efforts do not fully 

incorporate leading practices. First, NRC has not established agencywide goals 

for its workforce size or composition—that is, goals for the number of people with 

specific skillsets and levels of expertise—beyond a 2-year budget cycle. Second, 

NRC does not have comprehensive employee skills information because it

currently does not have a systematic approach or system to track this 

information. Third, in some cases, NRC has not consistently trained managers or 

supervisors on strategic human capital management or assessing employees’ 

skillsets. Without incorporating these practices, NRC cannot determine the most 

appropriate size and composition of the agency’s workforce, and it risks being 

unable to respond to changes in the nuclear industry. NRC has reduced its staff 

by 587 FTEs since its peak in 2011 (see figure), but if not carefully managed, 

imprecise reductions could lead NRC to miss efficiencies in matching its 

workforce with expected demand for services.

Total Allocated Nuclear Regulatory Commission Full-Time Equivalent Employees, Fiscal 

Years 2005 through 2017

View GAO-17-233. For more information, 

contact Frank Rusco at (202) 512-3841 or 

ruscof@gao.gov.

Why GAO Did This Study

After the passage of the Energy Policy 

Act of 2005, which included tax 

incentives for nuclear energy, NRC 

significantly expanded its workforce to 

meet the demands of an anticipated 

increase in workload that ultimately did 

not occur. More recently, a forecast for 

reduced growth in the nuclear industry 

prompted NRC to develop plans for 

changing its structure and workforce to 

better respond to changes in the 

nuclear industry. Strategic human 

capital planning is one of several 

actions the agency is taking.

The explanatory statement 

accompanying the Consolidated 

Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2016 

included a provision for GAO to report 

on NRC’s workforce management. 

GAO examined NRC’s strategic human 

capital management efforts and the 

extent to which these efforts 

incorporate leading practices.

GAO reviewed NRC’s strategic 

workforce plan and other related 

documents and interviewed 

knowledgeable NRC officials.

What GAO Recommends

GAO recommends that NRC (1) set 

agencywide goals for workforce size 

and skills composition to meet 

workload demands that extend beyond 

the 2-year budget cycle, (2) establish a 

systematic approach for tracking 

employee skills, and (3) consistently 

train managers and supervisors in 

strategic human capital management 

and assessing employee skillsets.

NRC generally agreed with these 

recommendations.
Page i GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Letter 1

Background 5

NRC Has Taken Steps that Support Strategic Human Capital 

Management but Has Not Incorporated Some Leading 

Practices in Its Efforts 16

Conclusions 27

Recommendations for Executive Action 29

Agency Comments 30

Appendix I Information on Steps Taken by the Nuclear Regulatory 

Commission to Strategically Manage its Human Capital 31

Appendix II Comments from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 40

Appendix III GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments 41

Figures

Figure 1: Distribution of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s 

(NRC) Fiscal Year 2015 Obligations by Business Line 9

Figure 2: Number of Actual Full-Time Equivalent Employees for 

the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Work Activities, 

Fiscal Year 2015 10

Figure 3: Total Allocated Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) 

Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Employees, Fiscal Years 

2005 through 2017 12

Figure 4: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Full-Time Equivalent 

(FTE) Employees by Business Line, Fiscal Years 2005 

through 2017 14

Figure 5: Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Competency 

Model for Health Physicist 37

Contents
Page ii GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Abbreviations 

FTE Full-time-equivalent

GPRA Government Performance and Results Act

NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission

This is a work of the U.S. government and is not subject to copyright protection in the 

United States. The published product may be reproduced and distributed in its entirety 

without further permission from GAO. However, because this work may contain 

copyrighted images or other material, permission from the copyright holder may be 

necessary if you wish to reproduce this material separately.
Page 1 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

441 G St. N.W.

Washington, DC 20548

April 27, 2017

The Honorable Lamar Alexander

Chairman

The Honorable Dianne Feinstein

Ranking Member

Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development

Committee on Appropriations

United States Senate

The Honorable Mike Simpson

Chairman

The Honorable Marcy Kaptur

Ranking Member

Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies

Committee on Appropriations

House of Representatives

From fiscal years 2005 to 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission 

(NRC)—an independent agency established to regulate civilian uses of 

nuclear materials for commercial, industrial, medical, and academic 

purposes in the United States—increased its budget and workforce by 

about 57 percent and about 28 percent, respectively. This increase 

occurred largely in response to the anticipated growth of the commercial 

nuclear industry, referred to as the “nuclear renaissance,” and was aided 

by the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that included tax 

incentives that would favor additional nuclear energy development. As the 

agency responsible for regulating the commercial nuclear industry—

including nuclear power plants and other civilian uses of radioactive 

material, through licensing, inspection, and enforcement of its 

regulations—NRC expected a substantial increase in workload due to a 

projected large number of applications for new nuclear power plants and 

interest in new reactor designs, among other things. In preparation for the 

anticipated workload, NRC’s budget authority grew from $669 million in 

fiscal year 2005 to over $1 billion in fiscal year 2011. Similarly, NRC’s 

workforce grew from about 3,100 full-time-equivalent (FTE) employees to 

Letter
Page 2 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

about 4,000 FTEs over the same period.1 By 2011, however, it became 

clear that the nuclear renaissance had not materialized for a variety of 

reasons, including low prices of natural gas and concerns about the 

safety of nuclear power plants. Additionally, concerns have been raised 

about the storage of nuclear waste generated by nuclear power plants.

The forecast of reduced growth in the nuclear industry prompted NRC to 

establish Project Aim in June 2014. Through Project Aim, NRC sought to 

develop plans to establish clearer agencywide priorities, align the 

agency’s budget and workforce with its workload, streamline agency 

processes, and better position the agency to respond to changes in 

external conditions in an agile and flexible manner. NRC’s January 2015 

report on Project Aim estimated that NRC could meet projected industry 

demand in 2020 with its workforce and budget reduced by 10 percent and 

with a workforce composition similar to the agency’s composition in 

2005.2 The explanatory statement accompanying the Consolidated 

Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2016 stated that the appropriations 

committees were not satisfied with NRC’s explanation of the basis on 

which it developed workload projections, nor with its plans for the 

execution of Project Aim.3 The explanatory statement also highlighted 

that NRC must be able to effectively and efficiently forecast its future 

workforce and resource needs and adapt its workforce and resource 

allocations accordingly so that the agency has the right number of staff 

with the right skills at the right time. The explanatory statement also 

included a provision that GAO report on NRC’s workload forecasting, 

workforce management, and Project Aim. This report examines NRC’s 

strategic human capital management efforts and the extent to which 

these efforts incorporate leading practices.

 1

FTEs reflect the total number of regular straight-time hours (i.e., not including overtime or 

holiday hours) worked by employees divided by the number of compensable hours 

applicable to each fiscal year. For a glossary of federal budgeting terms and definitions, 

see GAO, A Glossary of Terms Used in the Federal Budget Process, GAO-05-734SP 

(Washington, D.C.: Sept. 1, 2005). 

2

Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Achieving Exemplary Nuclear Regulation in the 21st 

Century, Report on Project Aim 2020 (Rockville, MD: January 2015). 

3

Section 4 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, Pub. L. No. 114-113 (2015), 

provides that the explanatory statement accompanying the act and printed in the 

Congressional Record shall have the same effect as if it were a joint explanatory 

statement of a committee of conference.
Page 3 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

We have found that addressing complex challenges, such as national 

security and rapidly evolving technologies, requires a high-quality federal 

workforce achieved by following leading practices for strategic human 

capital management.4 In 2001, GAO designated strategic human capital 

management as a government-wide high-risk area, and it remains a highrisk area because agencies need to address current and emerging critical 

skills gaps that could undermine their ability to meet vital missions.5

Strategic human capital management involves undertaking workforce 

planning activities to develop long-term strategies and can include, for 

example, selecting, developing, training, and managing staff to create a 

high-quality productive workforce.

To determine the key efforts NRC has taken as part of its strategic human 

capital management efforts and the extent to which these efforts 

incorporate leading practices, we reviewed agency documents, including 

the agency’s strategic workforce plan, management directives, and 

documentation of recommendations to the Commission and Commission 

decisions. We also analyzed agency-level budget information for staffing 

and appropriations levels. We combined and analyzed FTE requested 

and allocated data from NRC’s budget justifications from fiscal years 

2010 through 2017, as well as actual FTE data that NRC provided us 

from fiscal years 2010 through 2015, the last completed fiscal year at the 

time of our data request. Due to the limited scope of the available actual 

FTE data, we supplemented it with allocated FTE data from fiscal years 

2005 through 2009. Where possible, we discuss actual FTE levels but 

made comparisons outside of fiscal years 2010 through 2015 using 

allocated FTE levels. To assess the reliability of the data systems and the 

calculations used to develop actual obligations and FTE levels, we 

reviewed documentation about the systems used to develop the 

information in the budget justification, interviewed NRC staff with 

knowledge of the systems, and reviewed NRC staff responses to written 

questions about the systems and calculations.6 Based on this 

 4

GAO, High-Risk Series: An Update, GAO-15-290 (Washington, D.C.: Feb. 11, 2015). 

5

GAO, High-Risk Series: An Update, GAO-01-263 (Washington, D.C.: Jan. 1, 2001), and 

High Risk Series: Progress on Many High-Risk Areas, While Substantial Efforts Needed 

on Others, GAO-17-317 (Washington D.C., Feb.15, 2017).

6

These systems include NRC’s Budget Formulation System, which NRC uses to manage 

budget formulation data; the Financial Accounting and Integrated Management 

Information System, which NRC uses to manage its budget execution data, among other 

things; and the Human Resources Management System, which NRC uses to manage its 

time and attendance data.
Page 4 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

assessment, we determined these data to be sufficiently reliable for the 

purposes of determining trends in NRC’s FTE and budget levels.

We also analyzed forecasting data from three of NRC’s five major 

offices—the Office of New Reactors, the Office of Nuclear Material Safety 

and Safeguards, and the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.7 We 

selected these three offices because, combined, they lead the business 

lines that house a majority of NRC staff, are allocated the majority of 

NRC’s budget, and perform core programmatic functions of the agency. 

We also reviewed the Project Aim report and related materials, such as 

monthly progress updates. In addition, we interviewed officials 

knowledgeable about Project Aim and NRC’s strategic human capital 

management efforts—including officials from NRC’s Office of the 

Executive Director for Operations, Office of the Chief Human Capital 

Officer, and Office of the Chief Financial Officer, and a representative 

from NRC’s union—about topics such as Project Aim’s implementation, 

goals, recommendations, and outcomes. We also interviewed these 

officials about the agency’s strategic workforce plan, workload 

forecasting, human capital management, strategic planning, and 

employee skills tracking, among other topics. To gain further insight into 

NRC’s workload forecasting methods, strategic human capital 

management, and Project Aim implementation at the office level, we 

interviewed officials from the three selected major offices, two regions 

(Regions II and IV), the Office of Administration, and the Office of Nuclear 

Security and Incident Response. We selected these additional officials to 

interview to provide more diverse insights into NRC’s efforts. We selected 

Region II because it contains the states in which most of NRC’s new 

reactor work occurs, and Region IV oversees many state materials 

programs and several decommissioning reactors. We selected the Office 

of Administration because it includes several agency support functions. 

We selected the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response

because it is involved in, but does not lead, many NRC programs. 

Information gathered from interviews from these offices cannot be 

generalized to all of NRC. To identify criteria for evaluating the extent to 

which NRC’s strategic human capital efforts incorporate leading practices, 

we reviewed our prior work on key features and issues for federal 

agencies to consider in strategically managing their human capital.8 We 

 7

NRC’s two other major offices are the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, 

and the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research. 

8

For additional information on our work on strategic human capital management, see 

http://www.gao.gov/key_issues/strategic_human_capital_management/issue_summary. 
Page 5 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

also reviewed government-wide guidance on strategic human capital 

management topics, such as the standards for internal control in the 

federal government;9 the Office of Personnel Management’s Human 

Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework;10 the Office of 

Management and Budget’s Circular A-11;11 and the Government 

Performance and Results Act (GPRA), as updated by the GPRA 

Modernization Act.12 Using these sources, we selected six key practices 

that can help an agency strategically manage its human capital.13 We 

compared these practices to NRC’s strategic human capital efforts.

We conducted this performance audit from March 2016 to April 2017 in 

accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. 

Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain 

sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our 

findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that 

the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and 

conclusions based on our audit objectives.

This section discusses NRC’s organizational structure, the nuclear 

renaissance, and Project Aim.

 9

GAO, Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government, GAO-14-704G 

(Washington, D.C.: Sept. 10, 2014).

10Office of Personnel Management, The Human Capital Assessment and Accountability 

Framework: Systems, Standards and Metrics (Washington, D.C.: March 2006). The Office 

of Personnel Management has issued a final rule establishing a new Human Capital 

Framework, which will replace the Human Capital Assessment and Accountability 

Framework, effective April 11, 2017. This rule is intended to align human capital 

management practices to broader agency strategic planning activities and better align 

human capital activities with an agency’s mission and strategic goals to enable agency 

leadership to better leverage the workforce to achieve results.

11Office of Management and Budget, Circular No. A-11 - Preparation, Submission, and 

Execution of the Budget, (Washington, D.C.: June 2015).

12The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, Pub. L. No. 103-62 (1993); 

GPRA Modernization Act of 2010, Pub. L. No. 111-352 (2011).

13These six practices are: forecasting workload, setting workforce size and composition 

goals, identifying and tracking employee skills, aligning workforce with workload, training 

managers and supervisors on strategic human capital management, and assessing 

employees’ skills. We selected these practices because they were applicable to NRC 

planning efforts given the status of Project Aim implementation and were consistently 

identified in the reports and guidance we reviewed.

Background
Page 6 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

NRC is an independent agency established by the Energy Reorganization 

Act of 1974 to license and regulate civilian uses of nuclear materials in 

the United States for commercial, industrial, medical, and academic 

purposes.14 NRC is responsible for issuing licenses to commercial 

nuclear reactors and conducting oversight under such licenses to protect 

the health and safety of the public, among other things.15 NRC is 

authorized to conduct inspections and investigations and enforce 

regulatory requirements by, among other things, issuing orders, imposing 

civil (monetary) penalties, and revoking licenses.

NRC is headed by a five-member Commission, with members appointed 

by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and one Commissioner is 

designated by the President to serve as the Chair and official 

spokesperson. NRC is comprised of 28 offices located in headquarters 

and the regions, including 5 major program offices, 4 regional offices, and 

19 smaller offices. NRC staff from headquarters and the 4 regional offices 

conduct the agency’s regulatory development, licensing, operational 

experience, inspection, enforcement, and emergency response programs, 

among other responsibilities. The Commission as a whole formulates 

policies and regulations governing nuclear reactor and materials safety, 

issues orders to licensees, and adjudicates matters brought before it. The 

Executive Director for Operations carries out the policies and decisions of 

the Commission and is responsible for directing the activities of 15 offices 

to ensure that the commercial use of nuclear materials in the United 

States is safely conducted. In addition, NRC has an Office of the 

Inspector General, which is managed separately from the rest of the 

agency.

For budget formulation purposes,16 NRC is organized by activity into 

seven programmatic business lines related to key regulatory groups of 

licensees. NRC’s seven programmatic business lines are:

 14Pub. L. No. 93-438 (1974). 

15Pub. L. No. 83-703 (1975).

16For additional information on NRC’s budget see GAO, Nuclear Regulatory Commission: 

Changes Planned to Budget Structure and Justification, GAO-17-294 (Washington, D.C.: 

Mar. 8, 2017).

NRC’s Organizational 

Structure
Page 7 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

• Operating reactors, which regulates the nation’s civilian nuclear power 

reactors, as well as its research and test reactors, that create 

radiation for experiments in a wide variety of scientific fields.

• New reactors, which performs technical reviews and provides 

oversight for the nuclear power plants currently under construction in 

the United States, and develops strategies to review applications for 

advanced reactor technologies that may be submitted in the future.

• Fuel facilities, which licenses and regulates facilities that convert, 

enrich, and fabricate uranium to be used as fuel for nuclear reactors, 

and provides oversight for certain users of special nuclear material.17

• Nuclear material users, which maintains the regulatory safety and 

security infrastructure needed to process and handle nuclear 

materials. It also oversees the Agreement State Program, under 

which NRC relinquishes some of its authority to license and regulate 

certain kinds of nuclear materials to the states.

• Spent fuel storage and transportation, which performs technical 

reviews and inspections of storage, transportation, and shipments of 

spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive materials.

• Decommissioning and low-level waste, which oversees the process 

by which a nuclear facility is safely removed from service, uranium 

recovery, and disposal of low-level radioactive waste, which are 

materials that either have become radioactive or have been 

contaminated with radioactive material.

• High-level waste repository, which oversees activities associated with 

Department of Energy’s application to build an underground facility at 

Yucca Mountain to store spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive 

waste from the nation’s nuclear weapons program.18

NRC also has an agency-wide business line, Corporate Support, which 

includes support activities for the agency’s programmatic business lines, 

including acquisitions, administrative services, financial management, 

human resource management, information management, information 

technology, outreach, policy support, and associated training and travel. 

Corporate Support costs are allocated across the other business lines in 

 17Special nuclear material includes plutonium and types of uranium that are typically only 

mildly radioactive on their own, but that in concentrated form can be used as the primary 

ingredients of nuclear explosives. 

18NRC stopped requesting funds to support this activity after 2011 but spent funds 

remaining from prior years after 2011. 
Page 8 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

NRC’s budget. In addition to the business lines discussed above, NRC 

also has an Integrated University Program that supports university 

research and development in areas relevant to NRC’s mission and 

provides grants to support research projects that do not align with 

programmatic missions but are critical to maintaining the discipline of 

nuclear science and engineering. NRC also has an Office of the Inspector 

General.

Each business line has an assigned lead office, which is the program 

office responsible for accomplishing a key component of NRC’s safety 

mission and its associated activities. For example, the Office of Nuclear 

Reactor Regulation is the lead office for the operating reactor business 

line; the Office of New Reactors is the lead office for the new reactors 

business line; and the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards is 

the lead office for the fuel facilities, high-level waste, and 

decommissioning and low-level waste business lines, among others. In 

fiscal year 2015, NRC obligated about $1 billion across the seven 

programmatic business lines, the Corporate Support business line, the 

Integrated University Program, and the Office of the Inspector General 

(see fig. 1).
Page 9 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Figure 1: Distribution of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Fiscal Year 2015 Obligations by Business Line

Note: NRC’s business lines manage the agency’s activities with respect to key regulatory groups of 

licensees, as well as agencywide Corporate Support. In addition, the agency obligates money for its 

Integrated University Program and Office of the Inspector General.

Each of the seven business lines, plus the Corporate Support business 

line, includes several broad product lines, or work activities, such as 

licensing, oversight, and rulemaking. Figure 2 shows the number of FTEs 

allocated to each of the product lines in fiscal year 2015.
Page 10 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Figure 2: Number of Actual Full-Time Equivalent Employees for the Nuclear 

Regulatory Commission’s Work Activities, Fiscal Year 2015

Note: For the purposes of this figure, we refer to categories of agency work performed under a 

business line as work activities.

a

Corporate Support is a business line that encompasses several activities: administrative services, 

financial management, human resource management, information management, information 

technology, outreach, policy support, training, travel, and acquisitions. For the purposes of this figure, 

these activities are consolidated and presented as the Corporate Support work activity.

According to NRC documents, licensing and oversight of nuclear power 

reactors have been prominent activities of the NRC since its creation in 

1975. The intervening years have included periods of increased and 

decreased interest in the deployment and operation of commercial 

nuclear power reactors. Starting in 2001, there was increased interest in 

nuclear energy, due to the increased cost of fossil fuel energy and 

concerns about emissions from these energy sources.

The passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, with its tax incentives 

favoring additional nuclear energy development, contributed to increased 

interest in nuclear construction, among other things. Based on the nuclear 

power industry’s expressed intentions, NRC documents state that the 

The Nuclear Renaissance
Page 11 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

agency was anticipating a large number of applications for new nuclear 

power plants, as well as facilities that create and process nuclear fuel and 

other new work. Beginning in 2005, the agency was authorized to 

considerably expand its budget and staff. In 2006, the anticipated 

increase in new reactor licensing workload led to the creation of a new 

office to manage the workload. Ultimately, NRC’s budget increased from 

$669.3 million in fiscal year 2005 to $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2011, while 

its workforce increased from 3,108 FTEs to 3,992 FTEs during the same 

time frame. However, changes in the economy—particularly a decline in 

natural gas prices—reduced the cost-effectiveness of constructing and 

operating nuclear power plants. In addition, the Fukushima Daiichi 

accident in March 2011 further eroded interest in pursuing construction 

and operation of new nuclear facilities in the United States and abroad.19

Further, some new reactor applicants suspended or withdrew their 

applications, and licensees for several operating reactors began or 

announced plans for decommissioning before the expiration of their 

operating licenses.

NRC’s workforce increased in anticipation of the increased workload and 

has been decreasing since 2011 (see fig. 3). Between 2005 and 2011, 

NRC increased its workforce by 884 FTEs, or about 28 percent, to a peak 

of about 3,992 FTEs. After it became clear that there would not be a 

proportional increase in workload, NRC began to reduce its workforce. 

According to an NRC official, NRC ended fiscal year 2016 with 3,549 

FTEs.20 For fiscal year 2017, NRC requested 3,525 FTEs, a decrease of 

75 FTEs from the target the Commission established for fiscal year 

2016.21

 19The Fukushima Daiichi accident resulted from a prolonged loss of electrical power when 

a powerful earthquake triggered a tsunami wave that exceeded the plant’s seawall and 

flooded the site.

20This FTE figure also includes reimbursable allocations, which are the number of FTEs 

funded by fees charged to other organizations for services provided by NRC, as well as 

those used by NRC’s Office of the Inspector General. For additional information on NRC’s 

fees see GAO, Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Regulatory Fee-Setting Calculations 

Need Greater Transparency, GAO-17-232 (Washington, D.C.: Feb. 2, 2017).

21The proposed staffing level in the fiscal year 2017 budget request does not incorporate 

additional reductions for 2016 and 2017 from NRC’s efforts to assess whether activities 

could be done later, with fewer resources, or not done at all, which NRC calls 

“rebaselining.” Including additional reductions from rebaselining would further reduce 

NRC’s FTE request for fiscal year 2017 to 3,405 FTEs—a decrease of 195 compared with 

the fiscal year 2016 target.
Page 12 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Figure 3: Total Allocated Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Employees, Fiscal Years 2005 

through 2017

Note: FTE data for fiscal year 2017 are the estimated levels from NRC’s Congressional budget 

justification, adjusted to reflect planned reductions in response to Project Aim.

According to NRC budget documents, FTE levels varied within business 

lines from fiscal year 2005 to fiscal year 2017, increasing in some 

business lines, and decreasing or staying flat in others (see fig. 4).22

Increased FTE levels in the new reactors business line and, to a lesser 

extent, Corporate Support drove increases in NRC’s overall FTE levels. 

Specifically:

• New reactors: In response to an anticipated increase in workload, the 

New Reactors business line was created in fiscal year 2006 with an 

FTE allocation of 156 and reached its peak size in fiscal year 2011 

with 758 FTEs. As it became clear that the nuclear renaissance that 

drove the office’s creation would not materialize, NRC decreased FTE 

 22We discuss NRC’s allocated FTE levels to allow for comparisons of data prior to fiscal 

year 2010 and after fiscal year 2015. Actual FTE levels for each business line during this 

period may differ, reflecting fact-of-life changes in workload. FTE data for fiscal year 2017 

are the estimated levels from NRC’s congressional budget justification, adjusted to reflect 

changes made in response to Project Aim.
Page 13 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

allocations for the new reactors business line to 455 by fiscal year 

2017.

• Corporate Support: FTE allocations for Corporate Support also 

increased during this period, from 626 FTEs in fiscal year 2005 to its 

peak of about 806 FTEs in fiscal year 2014, an increase of about 29 

percent. However, NRC began reducing FTEs for Corporate Support 

in fiscal year 2015. By fiscal year 2017, NRC had reduced its FTE 

allocations for Corporate Support to 718, 15 percent larger than its 

initial allocation in fiscal year 2005.

• Operating reactors: FTE allocations for operating reactors were 

largely flat from fiscal year 2005 to 2016, at about 1,700 FTEs. 

However, these levels decreased to 1,601 FTEs in fiscal year 2017, or 

about 6 percent less than the business line’s allocation in fiscal year 

2005.

• Materials: FTE levels for the five business lines that address materials 

and waste safety trended downward from their overall allocation of 

735 FTEs in fiscal year 2005 to 568 FTEs in fiscal year 2017, a 

reduction of about 23 percent.23 This reflects, among other things, the 

elimination of FTEs allocated to the high-level waste repository 

business line after the Department of Energy made a motion to 

withdraw its application for the Yucca Mountain facility in fiscal year 

2010.

 23These five business lines are: fuel facilities, nuclear materials users, spent fuel storage 

and transportation, decommissioning and low-level waste, and the high-level waste 

repository.
Page 14 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Figure 4: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Employees by Business Line, Fiscal Years 2005 through 

2017

Note: FTE data for fiscal year 2017 are the estimated levels from NRC’s Congressional budget 

justification, adjusted to reflect changes made in response to Project Aim. This figure does not include 

NRC’s Inspector General Program, which was allocated 47 FTEs in fiscal year 2005 and 63 FTEs in 

fiscal year 2017

a

Prior to the fiscal year 2011 budget justification, activities that are now classified under the operating 

reactor business line were classified under the Nuclear Reactor Safety Program as licensing tasks, 

licensing renewal, reactor oversight, and incident response programs.

b

Materials represents all activities that fall under the Nuclear Materials and Waste Safety Program, 

which includes the fuel facilities, nuclear materials users, decommissioning and low-level waste, 

spent fuel storage and transportation, and high-level waste repository business lines.

c

Prior to fiscal year 2011, activities that are now classified as Corporate Support were labeled as 

“infrastructure and support.”

NRC has made plans to combine the Office of New Reactors and the 

Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation by 2020, reflecting the decreased 

workload for the new and operating reactors business lines. However, the 
Page 15 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

combined FTE level for these two business lines is 356 FTEs higher in 

fiscal year 2017 than it was in 2005, an increase of about 21 percent.24

Project Aim, which began in June 2014, was intended to identify ways in 

which NRC could improve efficiency, effectiveness, and agility and align 

its resources and workload in response to changes in the nuclear 

industry. According to the NRC staff’s February 2017 presentation to the 

Commission, NRC has completed all 19 of the major tasks from Project 

Aim. Completing several of the project’s tasks means that NRC has 

written plans or conducted evaluations, but the agency has not fully 

implemented the plans or recommendations stemming from these tasks. 

NRC has taken steps to implement the plans and recommendations, and 

in some cases implementation is ongoing.

According to NRC’s 2015 Project Aim report, Project Aim focused on 

addressing four broad areas: (1) right-sizing the agency to have the right 

people with the right skills to accomplish the agency’s mission, (2) 

streamlining agency processes, (3) increasing timeliness of regulatory 

functions, and (4) establishing clearer agencywide priorities. NRC 

solicited recommendations from stakeholders and staff on how the 

agency might improve its effectiveness, efficiency, and agility in 

addressing these four broad areas. NRC’s Project Aim team analyzed 

recommendations from NRC staff and external stakeholders from other 

federal agencies and industry groups, among others, and provided a 

consolidated set of recommendations to the Commission for 

consideration. The recommendations approved by the Commission 

resulted in the creation of 19 Project Aim implementation tasks, which in 

some cases resulted in additional follow-on tasks, NRC officials said.

The 19 Project Aim implementation tasks represent a broad array of 

activities. Examples of these tasks include business process 

improvements to the agency’s workflow and evaluations of certain agency 

functions, including consolidating some of NRC’s administrative 

operations, such as relocation, repairs, and computer support. In addition, 

several of Project Aim’s tasks were to create plans such as a transition 

plan for merging the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation and the Office 

of New Reactors. Steps taken to implement the improvements and plans 

 24These figures include planned reductions in FTEs due to NRC’s rebaselining efforts.

Project Aim
Page 16 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

were not included within the scope of Project Aim, but according to NRC 

officials, the agency tracks the steps separately.

Several of the Project Aim tasks provided a basis for the agency’s 

strategic human capital management that was not previously in place. For 

example, Project Aim called upon NRC to develop a strategic workforce 

plan that identified core mission-critical skills and competencies and 

outlined plans to match the agency’s people with those competencies. 

Project Aim further called on NRC to incorporate strategic workforce 

planning principles into the agency’s annual budgeting and planning 

processes. Other Project Aim implementation tasks focused on identifying 

mission-critical positions, creating a plan for developing competency 

models to assess the agency’s skill needs, and developing or enhancing 

existing training to meet those needs.

NRC has taken steps to strategically manage its human capital, but some 

of these efforts have not incorporated some leading practices. First, NRC 

has not established long-term, agencywide goals for its workforce size or 

composition—the number of people with specific skillsets and levels of 

expertise—beyond the budget cycle. Second, NRC does not have 

information on employees’ skills, nor a system for tracking those skills. 

Third, NRC has provided limited training to managers and supervisors on 

strategic human capital management and assessing employees’ skillsets.

NRC has taken steps through Project Aim and other efforts to 

strategically manage its human capital that support the agency’s ability to 

ensure it has the right size and composition of its workforce—that is, the 

number of people with specific skillsets and levels of expertise. Our prior 

work on strategic human capital management has identified certain 

activities or practices that can help an agency strategically manage its 

human capital, such as forecasting the agency’s incoming workload, 

aligning agency staff and skills with workload projections, identifying gaps 

and surpluses in agency staff and skill sets, conducting systematic 

assessments of current and future human capital, and aligning its 

NRC Has Taken 

Steps that Support 

Strategic Human 

Capital Management 

but Has Not 

Incorporated Some 

Leading Practices in 

Its Efforts

NRC Has Taken Steps to 

Strategically Manage Its 

Human Capital
Page 17 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

workforce with current and future needs.25 Key steps that NRC has taken 

to strategically manage its human capital are summarized below; 

additional information is in appendix I.

Developing a strategic workforce plan. In February 2016, as part of 

Project Aim, NRC issued its first strategic workforce plan. The strategic 

workforce plan contains high-level information about the current 

workforce, the alignment between the workforce and future workload, and 

areas of the agency’s work where additional skills needs exist, among 

other topics. In January 2017, NRC issued a memorandum to establish a 

working group to enhance its strategic workforce planning process. 

According to the memorandum, this working group is expected to focus 

on improving NRC’s workload projection, skills identification, staffing, 

employee development, and other human capital planning tools.

Conducting workload forecasting. Officials at the three major offices 

we interviewed conduct workload forecasting primarily to meet the needs 

of the 2-year federal budget cycle, but in some cases they forecast 

beyond this timeframe.26 While the specific methodologies for assessing 

the nuclear industry environment and forecasting workload differ across 

NRC offices, the methodologies typically incorporate several common 

data elements, including (1) historical workload and resource utilization 

data, (2) information from informal discussions with licensees and 

industry groups, and (3) data gathered from formal requests for 

information and letters of intent from licensees.

Officials we interviewed from NRC’s three major offices said that their 

forecasting is typically limited to the 2-year budget cycle, and in some 

cases not more than a year, in part because licensees cannot predict the 

type or quantity of application submissions any further into the future. For 

example, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation officials said that their 

 25See, for example, GAO, Human Capital: Strategies to Help Agencies Meet Their 

Missions in an Era of Highly Constrained Resources, GAO-14-168 (Washington, D.C.: 

May 7, 2014), and GAO, Human Capital: Key Principles for Effective Strategic Workforce 

Planning, GAO-04-39 (Washington, D.C.: Dec. 11, 2003)

26The federal government assembles an annual budget through an administrative process 

of budget preparation and review. This process may take place several years before the 

budget for a particular fiscal year is ready to be submitted to Congress. This process 

typically starts in the spring of the year prior to the year the budget is submitted, and 2 

years prior to that budget being executed by the agency. For the purposes of this report 

we refer to this 2-year timeframe as the budget cycle. For additional information on NRC’s 

budget, see GAO-17-294.
Page 18 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

workload for routine inspections is generally predictable since inspections 

require a predetermined number of samples to be taken, which takes a 

known number of hours to complete, thereby allowing the office to 

effectively forecast its workload of this type. However, these officials said 

that smaller projects, such as licensing amendments, cannot be predicted 

more than 1 year in advance.

Despite the challenges of a sometimes unpredictable workload, in some 

cases offices have taken steps to forecast beyond the 2-year budget 

cycle, and have made associated workforce adjustments to 

accommodate the incoming workload. For example, since 2008, the 

Office of New Reactors has performed annual assessments of incoming 

workload that forecast 5 years into the future. In 2014, the Office of New 

Reactors used one of these 5-year assessments to identify an expected 

decrease in incoming workload that led to an anticipated decrease of 

about 26 percent of the FTEs needed for certain work activities. To adjust 

to the change in workload, officials decided not to backfill positions as 

staff left the division, among other strategies, and reduced the division’s 

staffing level by 20 percent, according to NRC officials.

Developing and analyzing staffing plans. According to NRC officials, 

office-level managers are responsible for creating annual staffing plans 

that identify where they have too many or not enough FTEs—referred to 

as surpluses and vacancies—in relation to the office’s estimated incoming 

workload.27 NRC collected its first set of surplus and vacancy data in 

2015. However, according to the strategic workforce plan, the data could 

not be used to determine whether the skills of NRC’s workforce would 

meet mission demands due to the low quality of the data. Additionally, as 

a result of Project Aim’s task to create a strategic workforce plan, in 2015 

the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer requested that all NRC 

offices submit supplementary workforce planning narratives annually with 

their staffing plans to provide insight into workload changes and 

corresponding workforce needs 3 to 5 years into the future.

Developing competency models. In 2016, NRC began a pilot project to 

develop competency models that articulate the skills employees need to 

fulfill the functions of their positions. These models could provide 

information on the skills needed to perform each position’s functions, and 

 27NRC defines surpluses as positions that currently are, or are expected to be, no longer 

needed to meet work demands of the agency, and vacancies as positions that are open 

and need employees with specific skillsets to meet current or future work demands.
Page 19 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

the training needed to develop those skills. NRC officials said that the 

agency has additional qualifications for many positions that are specific to 

office-level work, and they said that many managers and supervisors are 

generally knowledgeable regarding the skillsets and qualifications 

required to perform the work in their work units.28 NRC officials said the 

competency modeling project includes piloting a system that can include 

employee skills. As of July 2016, NRC had completed 4 of the 30 to 50 

competency models that officials estimate they will need to account for all 

of the agency’s positions. If the pilot project shows that competency 

models are a viable alternative to the current process for training 

employees in new skills, officials said that expansion to the wider NRC 

workforce would begin in late fiscal year 2018 at the earliest.

Reprioritizing work activities. To reduce resources allocated to lowpriority workload areas, NRC performed a one-time agencywide 

prioritization and rebaselining effort under Project Aim. Within this effort, 

NRC developed an agencywide framework to assess all NRC activities 

with more than 10 FTEs to determine if, for example, these activities 

could be done later, done with fewer resources, or not done at all. 

Rebaselining resulted in a plan to cut 150 low-priority activities, thereby 

reducing NRC’s contractor support by $18 million and agency staff by 185 

FTEs. As of February 2017, NRC had made 138 of the 150 proposed cuts 

to low-priority activities, resulting in a reduction of 147 FTEs.

Cross-training employees. To manage the size and composition of the 

agency’s workforce, NRC is training existing staff in new skill areas, which 

NRC refers to as cross-training. NRC’s strategic workforce plan states 

that retraining existing staff in new skill areas can be an especially useful 

strategy to develop individuals occupying surplus positions.

NRC has not established longer term agencywide goals for its workforce 

size or composition because NRC’s efforts have generally focused in the 

2-year budget cycle. In general, NRC determines the workforce size 

through the budgeting process, and it determines the workforce 

composition—that is, the number of people with specific skillsets and 

levels of expertise—for offices through the staffing planning process. 

Federal guidance and leading practices emphasize the importance of 

 28NRC could not provide information on how many positions or employees are covered by 

these office-level qualifications because this information is not tracked at the agency level.

NRC Has Not Established 

Longer Term Agencywide 

Workforce Size or 

Composition Goals
Page 20 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

forward-thinking planning to, among other things, help identify and close 

skill gaps. Without workforce size and composition goals that extend 

beyond the 2-year budget cycle, NRC is at risk of not having the right size 

and mix of skills needed to meet the demand for its services, nor the time 

needed to develop or obtain employees with the skills needed to 

complete future workloads.

NRC determines its workforce size goals 1 fiscal year in advance as part 

of the agency’s annual budgeting process. However, NRC does not have 

goals for agency size beyond the 2-year budget cycle. NRC’s Project Aim 

report presented a target of a 10 percent reduction in FTEs and budget by 

fiscal year 2020, which would have led to a staff size of about 3,400. 

However, NRC officials stated on several occasions that the target cited 

in the Project Aim report was not a planned reduction, but a general level 

intended to assist in planning and to act as a driver to improve the 

efficiency mindset of staff.

As mentioned previously, individual offices have taken some steps to 

gather data to forecast future workload to inform decisions about future 

workforce needs through each office’s staffing plan.29 Office-level officials 

develop their staffing plans to identify the composition of their office’s 

workforce, within the limits of staffing level allocations set by the Office of 

the Chief Financial Officer based on the agency’s budget. In fiscal year 

2015, the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer began requesting 

information from offices on surpluses and vacancies, among other 

information, in an attempt to enhance its staffing planning process. 

However, according to the strategic workforce plan, differences in how 

the offices defined key terms led to low-quality data for fiscal year 2015

that could not be used for analysis. To correct this, the Office of the Chief 

Human Capital Officer updated the definitions for key terms for the fiscal 

year 2016 staffing plans. According to an NRC official, an analysis of the 

fiscal year 2017 staffing plan data was presented in November 2016.This 

analysis described certain NRC staffing and attrition trends and the 

agency’s current efforts to identify and reduce overage positions. This 

 29NRC has not performed workload forecasts for its Corporate Support business line, a 

business line for agencywide support activities, which include acquisitions, administrative 

services, financial management, human resource management, information management, 

information technology, outreach, policy support, and associated training and travel. 

These support activities account for about one-third of NRC’s budget. According to an 

NRC official, NRC has not performed workload forecasting for Corporate Support because 

this business line depends on the other offices to work with industry to forecast licensing 

activities. 
Page 21 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

analysis also identified some next steps for NRC’s strategic workforce 

planning efforts, including refining NRC’s ability to accurately identify 

overage positions and identifying positions where future vacancies may 

exist to redeploy overages based on historical attrition, among other 

things.

NRC’s future workload can be difficult to forecast, according to NRC 

officials, because variations in the type and amount of incoming workload 

could change the size and composition of the workforce needed to 

address it. For example, NRC documents state that workload is shifting 

from the operating reactors business line towards decommissioned 

reactors after an increase in the number of reactors decommissioning 

before the end of their licenses. According to NRC officials, 

decommissioning a power reactor typically leads to a reduction of 4 FTEs 

in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation and an increase of 1 FTE in 

the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards’ Division of 

Decommissioning, Uranium Recovery, and Waste Programs, leading to a 

net reduction of 3 FTEs for the agency as a whole. Furthermore, NRC 

documents acknowledge that NRC is operating in a budgetary 

environment that will continue to place downward pressure on staffing, 

making the agency smaller in the future, and lead to continued reductions 

in Corporate Support and overages in staff. However, when workloads 

shift, it can take a considerable amount of resources to identify, hire, and 

train employees, which can make it difficult for an agency to respond. For 

example, NRC’s program for training probabilistic risk assessment 

analysts—a mission-critical occupation required in several of NRC’s 

offices—takes 3 years to complete. This indicates that the budget cycle, 

which typically covers 2 years, may be too short a timeframe to adapt the 

workforce to the incoming workload, which puts NRC at risk of not having 

the right workforce size and mix of skills needed to meet the demand for 

its services or the time needed to develop or obtain employees with the 

skills needed to complete future workloads. NRC officials we interviewed 

told us that improved forecasting methods need to be incorporated into 

agency decision-making processes in order to determine how many 

employees with specific skill sets NRC needs for future agency 

operations.

Further, NRC has not developed agencywide goals for the composition of 

its workforce. The Project Aim report includes statements that indicate 

that in 2020, the composition of the agency’s workforce in its program 

offices is expected to be fairly similar to the numbers, grades, and 
Page 22 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

competencies of the NRC employees in 2005 because NRC’s work will 

be similar to that of 2005.30 NRC officials said that this information is not 

being used as a goal and that there is no plan in place to achieve this 

workforce composition. Even if this were to be used as a goal, several 

other factors differentiate NRC’s current and anticipated workload from 

what it was in 2005. For example, in 2005, NRC regulated 104 operating 

and 35 research and test reactors; in 2016, this number had been 

reduced to 100 operating and 31 research and test reactors. Since 2005, 

NRC has also experienced a similar decline in other areas of the 

agency’s workload, such as decommissioning of research and test 

reactors and complex materials sites. As a result, the composition of the 

workforce needed in 2020 may well be different than it was in 2005.

Federal guidance emphasizes the importance of forward-thinking 

planning. According to NRC officials and the Project Aim report, NRC 

agrees with this concept, and NRC’s strategic workforce plan states that 

early forecasting of the nuclear environment and taking early action to 

prepare for it are the keys to ensuring staff are adequately prepared for 

the future workload.31 The Office of Management and Budget states in its 

guidance for preparing agency budgets that the agency’s Chief Human 

Capital Officer is responsible for overseeing forward-thinking workforce 

planning and analysis within fiscal restraints, including identifying and 

continuously working to close skill gaps in mission-critical occupations, 

among others, and using effective hiring and workforce development 

strategies.32 Office of Personnel Management guidance states that 

agencies should have documented evidence of a current agency human 

capital plan that includes human capital goals, performance measures, 

and milestones, among other components.33 Finally, principles we 

identified for effective strategic workforce planning state that agencies 

 30The Office of Personnel Management, which is responsible for administering and 

overseeing the federal government’s classification system for defining and organizing 

federal positions, organized the work of the government into 15 grades, which are the 

numerical designations based on the complexity of the work and knowledge required to do 

the job. Generally, grades are assigned by using a point system based on the position’s 

degree of difficulty, responsibility, and qualifications. 

31Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Strategic Workforce Plan, (Rockville, MD: Feb. 4, 

2016).

32Office of Management and Budget, Circular No. A-11 - Preparation, Submission, and 

Execution of the Budget, (Washington, D.C.: June 2015).

33Office of Personnel Management, The Human Capital Assessment and Accountability 

Framework: Systems, Standards and Metrics (Washington, D.C.: March 2006). 
Page 23 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

should develop long-term strategies for acquiring, developing, and 

retaining staff to achieve programmatic goals, and monitor and evaluate 

the agency’s progress toward its human capital goals.34 Setting forwardthinking workforce goals early is particularly important for NRC since the 

specialized skills needed to do the agency’s work can take years of 

training to learn. Setting exact targets for overall workforce size and skills 

composition into the future can be complicated, but if NRC is not able to 

develop specific numbers for these goals, identifying goals as a range 

could help NRC better ensure that it has the right mix of skills needed to 

complete future workloads.

Without agency-wide workforce size or composition goals beyond the 2-

year budget cycle, NRC risks not being prepared for its future workload 

and cannot ensure that it has the right number of people, with the right 

skills, at the right time to meet future workforce demands. NRC’s recent 

focus has been on reducing the size of its workforce. However, without 

goals for future workforce and composition needs—either in exact 

numbers or as a range—NRC could reach a point at which it is reducing 

the number of staff when it needs to be increasing the numbers either in 

specific skill areas, as an agency, or both.

NRC does not currently have comprehensive employee skills information 

because it does not have a systematic approach or system to track this 

information. According to NRC’s Project Aim report, “The agency does 

not have an automated strategic workforce planning tool to manage the 

talent pipeline. Consequently, supervisors rely on past experience and 

the grapevine to be aware of employees with the skills and talents 

necessary to accomplish the work.”35 Furthermore, the strategic 

workforce plan states that it was evident that competency and skill 

information for staff was not readily available during NRC’s effort to 

identify strategies for managing its workforce and minimizing staff 

overages and skill gaps. The plan further notes that NRC needs this 

 34GAO-04-39. 

35Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Achieving Exemplary Nuclear Regulation in the 21st 

Century, Report on Project Aim 2020 (Rockville, MD: Jan. 30, 2015). 

NRC Does Not Currently 

Have Information on 

Employees’ Skills or a 

System for Tracking Them
Page 24 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

information in order to align the workforce with the agency’s current and 

projected needs.36

NRC had a system to track employee skills that it largely abandoned in 

2008 due to difficulties with the system. According to NRC officials, the 

system was difficult for users and managers to navigate, allowed 

employees to embellish their skills, and did not include tools for managers 

to verify information submitted by employees.37 The agency’s strategic 

workforce plan included a task to reassess whether the previous skills 

tracking system could be used again on a more limited basis to house 

skill and competency information. NRC completed the assessment and 

concluded that the resources required to restore the system were greater 

than the benefit the system would provide. NRC officials we interviewed 

also said that the agency’s management understood agency staffing 

surpluses and vacancies well enough that having a system is not 

necessary.38 However, NRC is testing a new skills tracking system to 

measure progress of those trained under the new competency model pilot 

project, which began in 2016. NRC officials said that the new system 

could be used to enhance NRC’s ability to track employee skills if the pilot 

project for expanding the competency models proves successful and the 

officials can make a business case for expanding the pilot. Even if NRC 

decides to adopt competency models for the entire agency after the pilot 

concludes in 2018, the project timeline indicates that it will be several 

years before the agency is able to develop and use the new skills tracking 

system across the agency.

The limited availability of employee skills data at NRC may affect the 

agency’s ability to make informed decisions about a variety of human 

capital management strategies that could help the agency strategically 

manage its size and composition and better align agency staff with 

projected workload. One NRC senior official we interviewed said that 

without a comprehensive tool with a reliable and up-to-date employee 

skills database, the agency’s ability to identify and mitigate critical skills 

gaps could become disjointed and cumbersome to navigate. Furthermore, 

 36Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Strategic Workforce Plan (Rockville, MD: Feb.4, 

2016). 

37NRC’s technical training center continues to use the system on a limited basis. 

38NRC defines surpluses as positions that currently are, or are expected to be, no longer 

needed to meet work demands of the agency, and it defines vacancies as positions that 

are open and need employees with specific skillsets.
Page 25 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

an NRC union representative expressed concern that NRC is making 

staffing reductions that are not informed by information about employees’

skills. As stated in NRC’s strategic workforce plan, “With the decline in 

budget and staffing levels, as well as other ongoing initiatives, the future 

workforce challenge is to enhance the NRC’s capability to reshape and 

redeploy staff where and when they are needed. In the short-term we will 

have more permanent staff on-board than the budget or workload would 

support.”

One key principle we identified for effective strategic workforce planning 

emphasizes that it is essential for agencies to determine the critical skills 

and competencies that will be needed to achieve current and future 

programmatic results, particularly as changes in national security, 

technology, and the budget occur.39 If an agency knows what skills its 

employees have, it can more readily ensure it can identify staff in need of 

additional training, as well as which employees have the skillsets needed 

for specialized or highly technical work. Additionally, according to leading 

practices for government human capital management, such as the Office 

of Personnel Management’s Human Capital Assessment and 

Accountability Framework, agency human capital decisions regarding 

recruitment, retention, development, and aligning workforce 

competencies with current and future agency needs should be guided by 

data-driven, results-oriented planning and accountability systems.40 The 

skills tracking system that NRC is developing as part of the agencywide 

competency modeling pilot project could improve the availability of 

employee skills information for the agency. However, implementation of 

this system is several years away and is contingent on the approval of the 

business case in favor of expanding the project. According to officials, 

NRC does not currently have plans to develop a system to capture 

employee skills information if the business case is not approved. 

Without a systematic, comprehensive approach to tracking employee 

skills information, the agency cannot ensure that the right personnel for 

the job are on board or will be in the future, or that it is making informed, 

data-driven strategic human capital management decisions about its 

workforce. This information is particularly important because many human 

capital decisions are already being made within the context of NRC’s 

 39GAO-04-39.

40Office of Personnel Management, The Human Capital Assessment and Accountability 

Framework: Systems, Standards and Metrics (Washington, D.C.: March, 2006). 
Page 26 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

organizational changes of reducing staff by hundreds of people. If not 

carefully managed, imprecise reductions could cause NRC to miss 

efficiencies in matching staff skills with expected workload. NRC 

established a working group for strategic workforce planning in January 

2017 that is expected to address some of these topics; however, NRC 

established the group as we were completing our review, and it is too 

soon to tell what recommendations, if any, the group will make to help the 

agency address the need to identify employee skills and match them with 

expected workload.

In some cases, managers and supervisors are not familiar with strategic 

human capital management or assessing employees’ skillsets because 

NRC has not provided managers or supervisors with consistent training. 

According to NRC officials, strategic human capital management is new 

to NRC since Project Aim was undertaken in 2014, and in some cases 

those in charge of executing it are not trained on how to implement it. The 

strategic workforce plan was the first of its kind for the agency. NRC

officials said that until recently, strategic workforce planning had not been 

done at an agency level; rather, it has been done in isolation by offices, 

with the exception of a Quarterly Performance Review meeting during 

which NRC’s leadership discusses agency priorities. Other NRC officials 

said that prior to the rebaselining project, individual office leads knew 

what the priorities were for their own offices, but the agency as a whole 

did not set priorities. NRC human capital officials said that NRC 

managers are responsible for skills management and rely on branch 

chiefs—who typically supervise 6 to 16 employees—to assess staff 

competencies and workforce composition and to identify critical skill gaps. 

NRC human capital officials said that workforce planning is a new 

concept to some of the agency’s branch chiefs, who are typically trained 

in technical areas, but receive training only at a high level on how to do 

strategic human capital management. Officials said that NRC provides 

supervisory training that includes high-level information on components of 

workforce planning, succession planning, employee development, and 

position management during a one-week course taken by new 

supervisors through the Office of Personnel Management, and NRC is in 

the process of developing a refresher course on related topics. The 

course for new supervisors covers human capital management, among 

other topics, but officials said that not all supervisors are fully comfortable 

with these responsibilities, and the application of these strategic human 

capital management approaches is inconsistent. Furthermore, this 

training is limited to new supervisors and is not tailored to NRC’s 

Managers and 

Supervisors Have 

Received Limited Training 

on Strategic Human 

Capital Management
Page 27 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

specialized skills needs or its current environment of organizational 

change.

Senior human capital officials confirmed that the agency has an 

inconsistent approach to training managers and supervisors on strategic 

human capital management. They said that some supervisors spend a lot 

of time with the staff and know their skills, while others do not. They also 

said that NRC’s workforce management panel has been an effective tool 

for identifying people to move to other positions on an informal basis,41

but that the agency is beginning to focus on equipping supervisors to 

have conversations with staff about moving to new areas of work within 

the organization. NRC officials said this new focus could contribute to 

more consistent application of strategic human capital management 

approaches. 

Federal internal control standards specify that for employees to be 

considered competent they must be qualified to carry out their assigned 

responsibilities.42 Competence requires relevant knowledge, skills, and 

abilities, which are gained largely from professional experience, training, 

and certifications. However, some managers and supervisors may not be 

able to fully carry out their strategic human capital management 

responsibilities because they have not been trained in depth on strategic 

human capital management or assessing employee skillsets. NRC’s 

strategic human capital management approach relies heavily on the 

agency’s ability to identify employees’ skills, train them in new areas, and 

move them to new positions if needed. If all managers and supervisors do 

not consistently perform these functions well, NRC may be unable to

adjust its workforce appropriately and efficiently or ensure that the agency 

has people with the skillsets it needs. If some managers and supervisors 

have limited knowledge of their employees’ skillsets, they will not be able 

to properly identify those best fit for additional training and movement 

within the agency.

Starting in 2005, the anticipation of a nuclear renaissance led to a large 

increase in NRC’s budget and staff levels, as well as changes to the 

 41In 2015, NRC created a panel to assist in workforce management, particularly with 

regard to external hiring; this panel includes deputy office directors and a deputy regional 

administrator. For more information on the workforce management panel, see appendix I.

42GAO-14-704G. 

Conclusions
Page 28 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

relative sizes of different NRC offices; these changes were intended to 

meet expected growth and changes to the domestic nuclear power 

sector. When it became clear that the nuclear renaissance was not 

unfolding as expected and that, in fact, some nuclear power plants were 

unexpectedly being retired, NRC began to take some steps to actively 

reduce the size and change the composition of its workforce. After 

growing by 884 FTEs (28 percent) from 2005 to 2011, NRC has reduced 

its workforce by 587 FTEs as of 2017, leaving it about 10 percent larger 

than it was in 2005. NRC has stated that it expects to shrink further, but it 

does not have clear goals with respect to its appropriate workforce size or 

composition. Trends in the nuclear power sector will likely continue to 

change the ideal size and composition of the agency’s workforce. In the 

future, workloads could increase, decrease, or shift to new areas that 

could require a different mix of skills and number of staff. However, 

without effective strategic human capital management, NRC cannot 

determine the appropriate size and composition of the agency’s workforce 

now or in the future.

We identified three areas where NRC’s efforts do not fully incorporate 

leading practices that could help NRC be better prepared to respond to 

future workload changes and manage its human capital more 

strategically. First, NRC has not developed agencywide workforce size or 

composition goals to meet its future workload beyond the 2-year budget 

cycle. NRC has been reducing its staffing levels in recent years, but 

without goals for future workforce and composition needs—in exact 

numbers or as a range—NRC may be reducing the number of staff when 

it needs to be increasing their numbers either in specific skill areas, as an 

agency, or both. Also, the budget cycle may be too short a timeframe to 

adapt the workforce to changes in the nuclear environment and incoming 

workload, putting NRC at risk of not having the right workforce size and 

mix of skills needed to meet the demand for its services or not having the 

time needed to develop or obtain employees with the skills needed to 

complete future workloads. Second, NRC has started to make decisions 

about moving or retraining employees to fill vacant positions, but it has 

not established a systematic, comprehensive approach to track 

information on employees’ skills. NRC is undertaking a pilot program 

through 2018 that, if successful, could lead to such a tracking system. 

However, NRC does not have a plan to establish a tracking system for 

employee skills outside of the pilot program. Without such a system to 

track employee skills, NRC cannot ensure that it is making data-driven 

decisions that ensure the agency has the right personnel on board and 

that make the best use of its workforce. Further, if not carefully managed, 

imprecise reductions could cause NRC to miss efficiencies in matching 
Page 29 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

staff skills with expected workload. Third, NRC is relying on managers 

and supervisors to, for example, properly identify employees to transfer or 

retrain from surplus to vacancy positions, but they have not been fully 

trained or may not be comfortable implementing NRC’s strategic human 

capital management efforts and assessing employees’ skillsets. If NRC 

does not provide managers and supervisors with the appropriate training, 

NRC may not be able to adjust its workforce appropriately or efficiently.

To improve NRC’s ability to strategically manage the size and 

composition of its workforce and respond to changes in the nuclear 

industry, we recommend that the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory 

Commission take the following three actions:

• Set agencywide goals, which could be ranges, for overall workforce 

size and skills composition that extend beyond the 2-year budget 

cycle.

• Establish a systematic, comprehensive approach for tracking 

employee skills information, either through the system developed 

through the competency modeling pilot program or some other 

system.

• Consistently train managers and supervisors in strategic human 

capital management and assessing employee skillsets.

Recommendations for 

Executive Action
Page 30 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

We provided a draft of this report to NRC for review and comment. NRC 

provided written comments, which are reproduced in appendix II. In its 

written comment, NRC generally agreed with our recommendations. NRC 

also provided technical comments, which we incorporated as appropriate.

We are sending copies of this report to the appropriate congressional 

committees, the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and 

other interested parties. In addition, the report is available at no charge on 

the GAO website at http://www.gao.gov.

If you or your staff members have any questions about this report, please 

contact me at (202) 512-3841 or ruscof@gao.gov. Contact points for our 

Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on 

the last page of this report. GAO staff who made key contributions to this 

report are listed in appendix III.

Frank Rusco

Director, Natural Resources and Environment

Agency Comments
Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital

Page 31 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has taken steps through 

Project Aim and other efforts to strategically manage its human capital 

that support the agency’s ability to have the right size and composition of 

its workforce —that is, the number of people with specific skillsets and 

levels of expertise. These steps include:

Developing a strategic workforce plan. In February 2016, as part of 

Project Aim, NRC issued its first strategic workforce plan (the plan). The 

official with primary responsibility for developing the plan said that the 

new planning process is intended to ensure that the agency responds 

more conservatively than it did in 2005, when it hired an additional 500 

full-time-equivalent (FTE) employees per year in response to a nuclear 

renaissance that never materialized. The plan contains high-level 

information about the current workforce, the alignment between the 

workforce and future workload, and areas of the agency’s work where 

additional skills needs exist, among other topics. The official also said that 

the plan’s purposes are (1) to be a one-time plan to identify core missioncritical skills and competencies and match the agency’s people with those 

competencies, and (2) to develop a process for incorporating strategic 

workforce planning principles into management’s annual budgeting and 

planning. According to the official, the strategic workforce planning team 

determined that NRC has most of the mission-critical skills it needs. 

However, the team identified six areas where the agency lacks either the 

breadth or depth of skills needed for future workload. In addition, the 

official said, strategic workforce planning will be institutionalized through 

the use of templates used to guide annual staffing plans. The plan 

acknowledges that the agency’s strategic workforce planning is limited in 

its sophistication but that NRC intends to use an iterative approach to 

systematically advance the level of sophistication of its strategic 

workforce planning commensurate with the needs of the agency.

Conducting workload forecasting. Officials at the three major offices 

we interviewed—the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, the Office of 

New Reactors, and the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and 

Safeguards—conduct workload forecasting primarily to meet the needs of 

the 2-year federal budget cycle, but in some cases they forecast beyond 

Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by 

the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital
Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital

Page 32 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

this timeframe.1 While the specific methodologies for assessing the 

nuclear industry environment and forecasting workload differ across NRC 

offices, the methodologies typically incorporate common data elements, 

which are used to develop workload forecasts:

• Historical workload and resource utilization data. NRC offices use 

several kinds of historical workload and resource utilization data to 

develop workload forecasts, including data on the average number of 

new license and license amendment applications received per year; 

the amount and distribution of staff time needed to process those 

applications; and the number of actions proposed, but not applied for 

by licensees in a year. For example, the Office of New Reactors uses 

historical data to estimate its staffing and contract needs per project 

by month for the design phase of licensing a nuclear reactor. NRC 

officials we interviewed said that this establishes a baseline resource 

estimate that they use for budget formulation, though the actual 

resources used during a licensing review vary based on the quality 

and timeliness of information that the applicant submits to the Office 

of New Reactors, as well as any requests by the applicant to suspend 

or slow down the review for business reasons.

• Information from informal discussions with licensees and industry 

groups. According to NRC officials, offices frequently gather 

information from current and prospective licensees on their business 

plans and anticipated requests for licensing actions through informal 

discussions between NRC project managers and licensees, working 

groups, and conference attendance, among other sources. For 

example, officials said NRC project managers make annual requests 

for information about licensees’ business plans and routinely conduct 

informal discussions with the vice presidents of licensee companies 

regarding potential changes to their business plans.

• Data gathered from formal requests for information and letters of 

intent from licensees. NRC officials said that offices make formal 

requests for information from licensees to help the offices fine tune 

their baseline workload forecasts made using historical data. 

Specifically, some offices within NRC conduct surveys of licensees 

 1

The federal government assembles an annual budget through an administrative process 

of budget preparation and review. This process may take place several years before the 

budget for a particular fiscal year is ready to be submitted to Congress. This process 

typically starts in the spring of the year prior to the year the budget is submitted, and 2 

years prior to that budget being executed by the agency. For the purposes of this report 

we refer to this 2 year timeframe as the budget cycle. 
Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital

Page 33 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

about their business plans and licensing actions that they plan to 

submit to the agency for review. For example, every 2 years, the 

Office of New Reactors sends out a survey to licensees requesting 

information on new reactors. NRC officials then work with business 

development staff of the potential licensee to develop a schedule for 

the associated licensing work. NRC officials said NRC uses this 

schedule to make sure it has people with the correct skillsets on hand 

to complete the work. In addition, licensees sometimes submit to NRC 

courtesy letters of intent, for example, when they plan to undertake 

new construction or amend their licenses.

Officials we interviewed from NRC’s three major offices said that their 

forecasting is typically limited to the 2-year budget cycle, and in some 

cases not more than a year, in part because licensees cannot predict the 

type or quantity of application submissions any further into the future. For 

example, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation officials said that their

workload for routine inspections is generally predictable since inspections 

require a predetermined number of samples to be taken, which takes a 

known number of hours to complete, thereby allowing the office to 

effectively forecast its workload of this type. However, these officials said 

that smaller projects, such as licensing amendments, cannot be predicted 

more than 1 year in advance. Similarly, NRC officials we interviewed told 

us that the nuclear materials workload can be unpredictable because 

these business lines work with large numbers of small licensees that may 

or may not apply for licenses depending on market conditions. For 

example, the officials said that uranium recovery firms are highly sensitive 

to the price of uranium; if the price of uranium increases, uranium 

recovery becomes more lucrative and may prompt additional firms to 

enter the market, increasing the likelihood that NRC will receive additional 

uranium recovery work. Conversely, the officials said that if the price of 

uranium decreases, NRC will likely see a decrease in its uranium 

recovery workload. In contrast, officials from the Office of New Reactors 

told us that because some projects have long timeframes, require 

extensive planning, and can cost millions of dollars to build, licensees 

know up to 4 years in advance that they plan to submit an application to 

NRC.

NRC’s Project Aim report included an implementation task to develop a 

process for conducting workload forecasting in support of the budgeting 

process and 4-year strategic plan revisions. However, the Commission 

did not approve the task because, according to NRC officials, (1) they 

were not comfortable nor familiar with workload forecasting techniques;

(2) they considered forecasting to be too hypothetical and chose to focus 
Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital

Page 34 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

resources on concrete and near-term objectives, particularly those that 

may occur during the 2-year budget cycle; and (3) they considered the 

budget formulation process to be sound, though they had reservations 

about individual components of the process. The Commission instead 

recommended that offices incorporate the lessons of Project Aim into 

existing workload forecasting efforts. NRC officials we interviewed told us 

that improved forecasting methods need to be incorporated into agency 

decision-making processes in order to determine how many employees 

with specific skill sets are needed for future agency operations. NRC 

officials also said that they need to know future workload demands in 

order to properly coordinate and train contractors and supplement staff 

from the national labs for work in which NRC’s existing expertise is 

limited.

Despite the challenges of a sometimes unpredictable workload, in some 

cases offices have taken steps to forecast beyond the 2-year budget 

cycle, and have made associated workforce adjustments to 

accommodate the incoming workload. For example, since 2008, the 

Office of New Reactors has conducted annual assessments of incoming 

workload that forecast 5 years into the future. These assessments allow a 

company to tell NRC that it plans to either submit an application for a new 

reactor design in the near future, identify a site to be considered for a new 

reactor, or notify NRC of an anticipated application for combining a 

license. NRC officials said that they then consider the impacts of this 

information on their workload, using it to identify future technical needs—

such as resident inspectors, geologists, or seismologists—and prepare 

for those needs. For example, in 2014, the Office of New Reactors used 

one of these 5-year assessments to anticipate a 26 percent FTE 

reduction primarily in flood and seismic work activities. NRC officials said 

they adjusted to the change in workload by using strategies such as not 

backfilling positions as staff left the division in order to reduce the 

division’s staffing level by 20 percent. Similarly, from 2003 to 2009, the 

Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards received many letters of 

intent from prospective licensees to apply for new uranium enrichment 

facilities several years before the planned submittal dates. Officials said 

that they increased staffing levels in the office and partner offices during 

the subsequent 3 to 5 years by using NRC staff and contractors to assist 

with these new licensing application reviews. As the number of new 

applications and operating licensees later decreased, NRC officials

allowed the staff levels within the office and partner offices to decrease.

Developing and analyzing staffing plans. According to NRC officials, 

office-level managers are responsible for creating annual staffing plans 
Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital

Page 35 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

that identify where they have too many or not enough FTEs—referred to 

as surpluses and vacancies—in relation to the office’s estimated incoming 

workload. This process is conducted about a year after the budget for the 

office has been determined and after FTE allocations for the year have 

been made. For example, an office could include in its staffing plan that it 

has a surplus of reactor inspectors or project managers in a specific area, 

such as environmental reviews. These 26 office-level staffing plans are 

submitted to the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer, which is 

responsible for reviewing, aggregating, and analyzing them. The Office of 

the Chief Human Capital Officer then conducts a comprehensive 

assessment that focuses on several human capital indicators, including 

surpluses and vacancies, the supervisor-to-staff ratio, and grade levels. 

NRC conducted its first collection of surplus and vacancy data in 2015. 

However, according to the strategic workforce plan, the Office of the Chief 

Human Capital Officer could not use the data to determine whether the 

skills of NRC’s workforce would meet mission demands due to 

differences in how offices had defined surpluses and vacancies, which 

resulted in low-quality data. NRC has since created standardized 

definitions to be used agencywide to promote a more consistent 

approach. According to an NRC official, an analysis of the 2017 staffing 

plan data was presented in November 2016.This analysis described 

certain NRC staffing and attrition trends and NRC’s current efforts to 

quickly identify and reduce overage positions. This analysis also identified 

some next steps for NRC’s strategic workforce planning efforts, including 

refining NRC’s ability to accurately identify overage positions and 

identifying positions where future vacancies may exist to redeploy 

overages based on historical attrition, among other things.

Additionally, as a result of Project Aim’s task to create a strategic 

workforce plan, in 2015 the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer 

requested that all NRC offices submit a supplementary workforce 

planning narrative annually with their staffing plans to provide insight into 

future workload changes and corresponding workforce needs 3 to 5 years 

into the future. These narratives required each office to update workload 

assumptions discussed in Project Aim, provide information on how these 

changes might impact the office’s ability to meet the workload, and 

describe any internal workforce needs that may result in changes to the 

office’s staff and resource needs. NRC documents state that these 

narratives are used to help NRC proactively identify and mitigate potential 

critical skill gaps before they happen and inform future iterations of the 

strategic workforce plan.
Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital

Page 36 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Developing competency models. In 2016, NRC began a pilot project to 

develop competency models that articulate the skills employees need to 

fulfill the functions of their positions. These models could provide 

information on the positions the agency has, the skills needed to perform 

each position’s functions, and the training needed to develop those skills. 

These models are in addition to the agency-level qualifications, which 

include educational requirements, that NRC has developed for 37 of its 

positions and that cover about 500 NRC employees. In addition, NRC 

officials said that the agency has additional qualifications for many 

positions that are specific to office-level work, and that many managers 

and supervisors are generally knowledgeable regarding the skillsets and 

qualifications required to perform the work in their work units.2 NRC 

officials said the competency modeling project includes piloting a system 

that can include employee skills. As of July 2016, NRC had completed 4 

of the 30 to 50 competency models officials estimate they will need to 

account for all of the agency’s positions, and officials said they do not 

know how many additional models they intend to complete in the future. 

Each of the 4 competency models that have already been developed 

contain 23 associated skills, and each skill specifies 5 levels of 

proficiency (see fig. 5). NRC officials said that they plan to finish the pilot 

project in the summer of fiscal year 2018, and if a business case for 

developing additional competency models is approved, NRC can develop 

about 10 competency models per year. If the pilot project shows that 

competency models are a viable alternative to the current process for 

training employees in new skills, expansion to the wider NRC workforce, 

including the development of additional competency models, would begin 

in late fiscal year 2018 at the earliest.

 2

NRC could not provide information on how many positions or employees are covered by 

these office-level qualifications because this information is not tracked at the agency level. 
Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital

Page 37 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Figure 5: Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Competency Model for Health 

Physicist

Establishing a workforce management panel. In 2015, NRC created a 

workforce management panel to assist in workforce management, 

particularly with regard to external hiring; this panel includes deputy office 

directors and a deputy regional administrator.3 The workforce 

management panel was charged with, among other things, reviewing 

requests from offices for new hires and merit promotions and overseeing 

transfers from surplus positions to vacancies, within the context of NRC’s 

resource constraints. The panel uses a set process to move staff out of 

surplus positions into positions where there is a vacancy and demand for 

work, and it provides advice to the Office of the Chief Human Capital 

Officer in support of workforce management decisions.

Offering voluntary early retirement incentives. To reduce the number 

of surplus positions, encourage attrition, and prepare for potential 

downsizing of the agency in the future, NRC has provided two rounds of 

 3

The panel’s official name is the Strategic Workforce Oversight and Utilization Panel, 

which for the purposes of this report we refer to as the workforce management panel. 
Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital

Page 38 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

incentives for voluntary early retirement. These incentives included lump 

sum payments and temporary decreases in age and service requirements 

for retirement eligibility to increase the number of employees who were 

eligible for retirement. NRC officials said that in 2015 and 2016, a total of 

135 individuals were approved for early retirement incentives, and that 

the agency has the authority from the Office of Personnel Management to 

offer 126 more through June 2018. However, these officials said that as 

of November 2016, the agency had not yet determined whether it will 

offer additional incentives before the authority expires.4 Human capital 

officials said that part of the justification for early retirement incentives 

was for them to be offered to employees in positions that would be 

restructured or eliminated, and thereby reduce the number of employees 

in surplus positions. NRC has also used early retirement incentives to 

manage skill levels within its workforce. For example, NRC officials said 

the agency may have a person with a high grade level working in one 

area but a lower grade level position in another area that needs to be 

filled. In this case, NRC cannot shift the high grade level employee 

without downgrading the employee, but the agency could use early 

retirement incentives to reduce the number of high grade level employees 

in that area.

Reprioritizing work activities. To reduce resources allocated to lowpriority workload areas, NRC performed a one-time agencywide 

prioritization and rebaselining effort under Project Aim. Within this effort, 

NRC developed an agencywide framework to assess all NRC activities 

with more than 10 FTEs to determine if they (1) required minimum effort 

to achieve statutory mandates; (2) required prudent effort above the 

minimum needed to achieve statutory mandates; or (3) were activities 

that could be shed, deferred, or done with fewer resources without 

materially compromising the agency’s safety and security mission. After 

sorting the activities into these three categories, NRC’s rebaselining team 

developed a one-time plan to reduce the agency’s workload by 

eliminating activities in the third category during fiscal years 2016 through 

2018. Rebaselining resulted in a plan to cut 150 low-priority activities, 

thereby reducing NRC’s contractor support by $18 million and agency 

staff by 185 FTEs. As of February 2017, NRC had made 138 of the 150 

proposed cuts to low-priority activities, resulting in a reduction of 147 

FTEs.

 4

Federal agencies receive authority to offer early retirement incentives by the Office of 

Personnel Management, which consults with the Office of Management and Budget. 
Appendix I: Information on Steps Taken by the 

Nuclear Regulatory Commission to 

Strategically Manage its Human Capital

Page 39 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Cross-training employees. To manage the size and composition of the 

agency’s workforce, NRC is training existing staff in new skill areas, which 

NRC refers to as cross-training. NRC’s strategic workforce plan says that 

retraining existing staff in new skill areas can be an especially useful 

strategy to develop individuals occupying surplus positions. NRC human 

capital officials said that all employees are encouraged to incorporate 

training in new skill areas into their individual development plans and to 

move to different parts of the agency as part of their career development; 

these officials said this is particularly true for staff in surplus positions. 

They also said that because cross-training and reassignment of 

employees is voluntary, the agency does not have specific statistics 

available on the number of employees who have been cross-trained or 

reassigned and placed into a new position.
Appendix II: Comments from the Nuclear 

Regulatory Commission

Page 40 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Appendix II: Comments from the Nuclear 

Regulatory Commission
Appendix III: GAO Contact and Staff 

Acknowledgments

Page 41 GAO-17-233 Strategic Human Capital Management

Frank Rusco, (202) 512-3841 or ruscof@gao.gov

In addition to the individual named above, Hilary Benedict (Assistant 

Director); Emily E. Eischen; and Perry Lusk, Jr. made key contributions to 

this report. Also contributing to this report were Richard Burkard, John 

Delicath, Cindy Gilbert, Wyatt R. Hundrup, Douglas G. Hunker, Benjamin 

Licht, Steven Lozano, Brian Shaw, and Sara Sullivan.

Appendix III: GAO Contact and Staff 

Acknowledgments

GAO Contact

Staff 

Acknowledgments

(100685)
The Government Accountability Office, the audit, evaluation, and investigative 

arm of Congress, exists to support Congress in meeting its constitutional 

responsibilities and to help improve the performance and accountability of the 

federal government for the American people. GAO examines the use of public 

funds; evaluates federal programs and policies; and provides analyses, 

recommendations, and other assistance to help Congress make informed 

oversight, policy, and funding decisions. GAO’s commitment to good government 

is reflected in its core values of accountability, integrity, and reliability.

The fastest and easiest way to obtain copies of GAO documents at no cost is 

through GAO’s website (http://www.gao.gov). Each weekday afternoon, GAO 

posts on its website newly released reports, testimony, and correspondence. To 

have GAO e-mail you a list of newly posted products, go to http://www.gao.gov

and select “E-mail Updates.”

The price of each GAO publication reflects GAO’s actual cost of production and 

distribution and depends on the number of pages in the publication and whether 

the publication is printed in color or black and white. Pricing and ordering 

information is posted on GAO’s website, http://www.gao.gov/ordering.htm. 

Place orders by calling (202) 512-6000, toll free (866) 801-7077, or 

TDD (202) 512-2537.

Orders may be paid for using American Express, Discover Card, MasterCard, 

Visa, check, or money order. Call for additional information.

Connect with GAO on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

Subscribe to our RSS Feeds or E-mail Updates. Listen to our Podcasts.

Visit GAO on the web at www.gao.gov and read The Watchblog.

Contact:

Website: http://www.gao.gov/fraudnet/fraudnet.htm

E-mail: fraudnet@gao.gov

Automated answering system: (800) 424-5454 or (202) 512-7470

Katherine Siggerud, Managing Director, siggerudk@gao.gov, (202) 512-4400, 

U.S. Government Accountability Office, 441 G Street NW, Room 7125, 

Washington, DC 20548

Chuck Young, Managing Director, youngc1@gao.gov, (202) 512-4800

U.S. Government Accountability Office, 441 G Street NW, Room 7149 

Washington, DC 20548

James-Christian Blockwood, Managing Director, spel@gao.gov, (202) 512-4707

U.S. Government Accountability Office, 441 G Street NW, Room 7814, 

Washington, DC 20548

GAO’s Mission

Obtaining Copies of 

GAO Reports and 

Testimony

Order by Phone

Connect with GAO

To Report Fraud, 

Waste, and Abuse in 

Federal Programs

Congressional 

Relations

Public Affairs

Strategic Planning and 

External Liaison

Please Print on Recycled Paper.