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88–246 PDF 2003

S. Hrg. 108–100

AN OVERLOOKED ASSET: THE DEFENSE CIVILIAN

WORKFORCE

HEARING

BEFORE THE

OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT,

THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE AND THE DISTRICT

OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

FIELD HEARING HELD AT THE

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, DAYTON, OHIO

MAY 12, 2003

Printed for the use of the Committee on Governmental Affairs

(
(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine, Chairman

TED STEVENS, Alaska

GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio

NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota

ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania

ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah

PETER G. FITZGERALD, Illinois

JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire

RICHARD C. SHELBY, Alabama

JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut

CARL LEVIN, Michigan

DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii

RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware

MARK DAYTON, Minnesota

FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey

MARK PRYOR, Arkansas

MICHAEL D. BOPP, Staff Director and Chief Counsel

JOYCE RECHTSCHAFFEN, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel

DARLA D. CASSELL, Chief Clerk

OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT, THE FEDERAL

WORKFORCE AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE

GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio, Chairman

TED STEVENS, Alaska

NORM COLEMAN, Minnesota

ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah

PETER G. FITZGERALD, Illinois

JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire

RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois

DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware

FRANK LAUTENBERG, New Jersey

MARK PRYOR, Arkansas

ANDREW RICHARDSON, Staff Director

MARIANNE CLIFFORD UPTON, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel

CYNTHIA SIMMONS, Chief Clerk
(III)

C O N T E N T S

Opening statement: Page

Senator Voinovich ............................................................................................. 1

WITNESSES

MONDAY, MAY 17, 2003

Hon. David S.C. Chu, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, Department of Defense ............................................................................... 4

Hon. David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, U.S. General Accounting Office .......................................................................................... 6

Michael L. Dominguez, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Manpower and

Reserve Affairs, U.S. Air Force ........................................................................... 8

General Lester L. Lyles, Commander, Air Force Materiel Command, U.S.

Air Force ............................................................................................................... 9

Dr. Vincent J. Russo, Executive Director, Aeronautical Systems Center, U.S.

Air Force ............................................................................................................... 11

Dr. Beth J. Asch, Senior Economist, RAND .......................................................... 29

J. Scott Blanch, President, American Federation of Government Employees,

AFL–CIO Council 214 .......................................................................................... 31

Michael Druand, Deputy Treasurer, American Federation of Government Employees Local 1138 ............................................................................................... 33

J.P. Nauseef, Vice President, Aerospace Defense Technology, Dayton Development Coalition on behalf of Ronald D. Wine, President and CEO, Dayton

Development Coalition ......................................................................................... 35

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES

Asch, Dr. Beth J.:

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 29

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 145

Blanch, J. Scott:

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 31

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 158

Chu, Hon. David S.C.:

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 4

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 51

Dominguez, Michael L.:

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 8

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 81

Durand, Michael:

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 33

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 175

Lyles, General Lester L.:

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 9

Prepared statement with attachments ........................................................... 92

Nauseef, J.P.:

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 35

Prepared statement submitted for Ronald D. Wine ...................................... 179

Russo, Dr. Vincent J.:

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 11

Prepared statement with attachments ........................................................... 127

Walker, Hon. David M.:

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 6

Prepared statement .......................................................................................... 62
Page

IV

APPENDIX

James Mattice, Dayton Ohio, prepared statement ............................................... 182

Letter dated November 19, 2002, to Hon. Donald H. Rumsfeld from Senator

Voinovich ............................................................................................................... 185

Letter dated 2 DEC 2002, to Seantor Voinovich from Michael L. Dominguez,

Assistant Secretary (Manpower & Reserve Affairs) Department of the Air

Force ...................................................................................................................... 187

Letter dated December 4, 2002, to Hon. James Roche, Secretary of the Air

Force, U.S. Department of Defense, from Senator Voinovich .......................... 189

Letter dated 19 December 2002 to Senator Voinovich from Lester L. Lyles,

General USAF Commander ................................................................................. 191
(1)

AN OVERLOOKED ASSET: THE DEFENSE

CIVILIAN WORKFORCE

MONDAY, MAY 12, 2003

U.S. SENATE, OVERSIGHT OF GOVERNMENT MANAGEMENT, THE FEDERAL

WORKFORCE, AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUBCOMMITTEE, OF THE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, Washington, DC.

The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 12:35 p.m., in

Philip E. Carney Auditorium, U.S. Air Force Museum, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, Hon. George V. Voinovich,

Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.

Present: Senator Voinovich.

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR VOINOVICH

Senator VOINOVICH. The Subcommittee on the Oversight of Government Management and the Federal Workforce will come to

order. Good afternoon, and thank you all for coming.

First, I would like to thank General Charles Metcalf and the Air

Force Museum for hosting this field hearing. I appreciate your hard

work and cooperation. As many of you know, this hearing was

originally scheduled to take place in February, but inclement

weather in Washington and Ohio caused its postponement. I am

pleased that we were able to reschedule the event for this spring.

It’s nice to be back in this facility. I visited many times when I

was Governor of Ohio, and I understand that there is going to be

another wing dedicated. Hopefully, we’ll get a chance to come down

for that also.

Today’s hearing is entitled ‘‘An Overlooked Asset: The Defense

Civilian Workforce.’’ This is the thirteenth hearing that this Subcommittee has held on the formidable human capital challenges

confronting the Federal Government. I suspect that 13 hearings is

unprecedented, and that this Subcommittee has had more hearings

on the Federal workforce since 1999 than it has at any time since

1978. Nineteen hundred seventy eight was when Congress really

looked at the last comprehensive review of our personnel system in

the Federal Government. And it’s a subject that I made up my

mind a long time ago that I was going to devote my attention to.

One of the reasons I came to the Senate was to change the culture of the Federal workforce, along with balancing budgets and reducing the deficit, and I have tried to get a hold of this like a bull

dog and don’t intend to let it go. And I know David Walker, who

has been my colleague in this effort, knows that we’ve been at it

for a while, haven’t we, David?
2

Mr. WALKER. We have, Senator.

Senator VOINOVICH. Today we are examining a significant element of the Federal Government’s 1.8 million employee workforce:

The civilian staff of the Department of Defense, the almost 700,000

workers who stand behind our men and women in uniform each

and every day. In other words, what we’re talking about is having

the right people with the right skills and knowledge in the right

place at the right time.

I mean this literally—in terms of what’s happened right here at

Wright-Patterson—in that these employees conduct vital research

and development, administer bases, build and repair military

equipment in arsenals and depots, operate the commissaries and

exchanges that are so important to the morale of our servicemen

and women, and countless other tasks.

And, General Lyles, I remember when I was here when the

President visited a couple weeks ago to meet with you and some

of the others on your team, and how very proud you were of the

role that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the labs had in our

successful operation in Iraq. And I think so often people take for

granted what’s happening here and how influential you have been

in terms of the modernization of our Air Force.

General LYLES. Thank you, Senator.

Senator VOINOVICH. Congress and the administration too often

spend more time examining and trying to ensure the health of the

uniformed services than the Defense civilian workforce. To some

extent this is understandable. Military personnel are often sent

into harm’s way, and can expect long separations in harsh, isolated

locations from their homes and families. These are just two aspects

of serving in uniform that the vast majority of civil servants do not

face.

Nevertheless, we must stop overlooking the Defense civilian

workforce, and instead ensure that it has the tools and resources

it needs to perform its absolutely vital missions. We will ill serve

the men and women on the front lines if the workforce designed

to support them is inadequately manned and trained.

I would note, however, that this year is different. The Bush Administration is working to address these issues, and Secretary

Rumsfeld and his Defense Department team are to be commended

for those efforts. And, Dr. Chu, we’re very happy that you are here

today as the Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness.

Mr. CHU. Thank you, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. In March 2001, the Subcommittee held a

hearing entitled ‘‘National Security Implications of the Human

Capital Crisis.’’ Among our panel of distinguished witnesses that

day were former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who was a

member of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st

Century. Secretary Schlesinger discussed a comprehensive evaluation on national security strategy and structure that was undertaken by the commission. Regarding human capital, the commission’s final report concluded, and this is very important, ‘‘As it enters the 21st Century, the United States finds itself on the brink

of an unprecedented crisis of competence in government. The maintenance of American power in the world depends on the quality of

U.S. Government personnel, civil and military, at all levels. We
3

must take immediate action in the personnel area to ensure that

the United States can meet future challenges.’’

Secretary Schlesinger added further, ‘‘It is the Commission’s view

that fixing the personnel problem is a precondition for fixing virtually everything else that needs repair in the institutional edifice

of U.S. national security policy.’’

And it’s interesting, I think, and in one of the statements that

we’re going to hear, that some 320,000 military individuals today

are assigned a task that could be performed by civilians, and the

reason why they are is because there is so much more flexibility

in the military side of the Defense Department than in the civilian

side.

As I mentioned, since 1999 I have worked to express the urgency

of the Federal Government’s human capital challenges, and their

impact on critically important government functions, such as

national security, to my colleagues. I have championed a series of

legislative reforms in Congress, which should have a significant impact on the way the Federal Government manages its people in the

coming years.

In fact, the first legislative solution I authored had its genesis

right here at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. So it’s apropriate

that we’re having this hearing here today. Three years ago base

leadership shared with me their concerns that the civilian workforce was not configured properly to achieve current and projected

mission requirements.

Working with my colleagues on the Governmental Affairs and

Armed Services Committees, we drafted a measure to address

these workforce shaping challenges. I was the primary sponsor of

an amendment to the fiscal year 2000 Defense Authorization Act

that authorized 9,000 voluntary early retirement and voluntary

separation incentive payments through this fiscal year. Of those

9,000 slots, 365 have been used here at Wright-Patterson Air Force

Base, 101 of which were used by the Aeronautical Systems Center.

I am interested in hearing more about how the Department of Defense, as well as the Air Force and Wright-Patterson Air Force

Base, have used those authorities and what impact the announced

cuts of 13,000 will have on their reshaping effort and the status of

the proposed reductions to the civilian workforce in the coming

years and, quite frankly, what’s the rationale behind the reductions. Why did this come about?

In addition, significant government-wide flexibilities, which I also

authored, were included in the Homeland Security legislation that

became law last year. I hope to learn today how the Department

intends to use these authorities. For example, the rule of three, a

statute which, in order to hire someone, requires managers to take

the top three certified candidates, and if they don’t like those three,

to announce the vacancy again, and so on and so on and so forth.

This was changed in our amendment to the Homeland Security

Act. How is that going to impact on the Air Force’s ability to move

forward and get the people they need to get the job done?

Last, but not least, the Department recently presented to Congress and requested enactment of the Defense Transformation for

the 21st Century Act, which includes a proposed ‘‘National Security

Personnel System,’’ NSPS, that would dramatically overhaul the
4

1The prepared statement of Mr. Chu appears in the Appendix on page 51.

way DOD manages its people. Although committees in the House

of Representatives have examined and marked up NSPS in a series

of hearings during the past 2 weeks, I am hoping today that our

Senate Subcommittee may learn more of the details and justifications behind this major reform proposal and specifically, if possible,

how it might impact right here at Wright-Patterson.

I’m delighted now to introduce today’s first panel of witnesses.

Dr. David Chu is the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and

Readiness. Dr. Chu and I have met and discussed the Department’s

workforce challenges on several occasions starting, I think, at Harvard University when Kennedy School of Government Dean Nye

made human capital the topic of a series of executive sessions. I

look forward to hearing you tell us about NSPS.

Michael Dominguez is the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force

for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. Mr. Dominguez has also been

to my office and we’ve talked, and we appreciate you being here.

Of course, my good friend, General Lester Lyles, is the commander of the Air Force Materiel Command, which is headquartered here at Wright-Patterson, and he is doing just an outstanding job.

And probably the person that I have known the longest—I think

the first time I met you was in 1978, when I was running for Lieutenant Governor of Ohio. Dr. Vince Russo is the Executive Director

of the Aeronautical Systems Center, which is also based here at

Wright-Patterson. We’re so lucky to have people like Dr. Vince

Russo in our civilian workforce who dedicated their lives to their

country.

I’d like to note that these four gentlemen will provide us both

with a macro view of the Defense civilian workforce from the Defense Department and Military Department level, as well as the

perspective from a major command and base activity.

And rounding out our first panel is the Hon. David Walker, we

can call him general too, Comptroller General Walker. He is a very

proud Marine. I have worked closely with GAO on various issues

during my time in the Senate. David, I appreciate, as I mentioned,

your continuing assistance in our examination of the Federal Government’s human capital challenges, and I’m grateful for your willingness to travel out to Ohio to be with us today.

Thank you all for coming. It is the custom of this Subcommittee

to swear in all witnesses. Therefore, I would ask you to stand and

raise your right hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. We’ll start with you, Dr. Chu.

TESTIMONY OF HON. DAVID S.C. CHU,1 UNDER SECRETARY OF

DEFENSE FOR PERSONNEL AND READINESS, DEPARTMENT

OF DEFENSE

Mr. CHU. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It’s a great privilege to be

here, and I very much value the chance to offer you the Department’s thoughts on the crucial issues you have identified, and I do

have a longer statement for the record, which I hope I may submit,

but I briefly want to summarize some of its key points.
5

Civil servants, as you have already noted, are a crucial part of

the total force that makes the Department of Defense effective.

When I first came to work in this Department in 1981, I was privileged to be associated with some of the people who came with our

government in the great wave of Federal expansion during the Second World War, when Mike Huran was the acting general council

of the Department of Defense. For a longer period of time there

were more civil servants filling in for political appointees than they

confirmed general office people in the 1960’s when President Kennedy issued his famous call to public service and who had dedicated themselves to the business of government.

When I returned to the Department in 2001, I discovered many

of these people had either passed away or had retired or were in

the process of retiring. They are gone. And I regret to say during

the decade of the 1990’s, we did not during this generation have

a substitute for these great leaders who leave and from whom we

have benefitted.

You and the Comptroller General Walker have spoken eloquently

on many occasions about the coming human capital crisis. I would

argue that the human capital crisis is upon us, it has already

begun with the departure of these valued civil servants. And we in

the Department, in my judgment, I will come to arguments in just

a second, need new tools if we’re going to succeed in recruiting the

replacement generation.

You are probably aware, sir, of the recent review published by

the Merit System Protection Board that takes a sample of Federal

job vacancy job announcements and analyzes them for their effectiveness, and it gives us a failing grade. It makes the point that

these do not make the positions that we are seeking filled to sound

attractive to young Americans. It does say, and this may be the

heart of the problem, that they do a great job of meeting legal requirements. Once that’s finished, it’s difficult to understand and it’s

amazing anybody gets through them.

And indeed, that is a point that is made also by the survey that

the Brookings Institution has just completed with the 2002 college

seniors who are graduating this year. They were asked about their

career aspirations, and specifically about their views of public service. Students asked to describe the hiring process in each of the

government, non-profit community and the private sector. They

ranked the government first in confusion, first in slowness, and

first in unfairness. Non-profits were seen the simplest and fairest

while the private sector was seen as the fastest.

It is not just the students who complain. The commander of tactical motor command recently provided me with a report from one

of his program executive officers who said, ‘‘We’ve encountered this

problem when recruiting professional engineers at the GS–12 level

and secretaries at the GS–6 and GS–7 levels. Generally, we have

to sit the applicant down and explain exactly what to do in order

to give them a chance of appearing on a certificate, because left on

their own, they have no idea what to do and either apply incorrectly or give up.’’

And we see that, I think, going back to the Brookings survey just

completed, in the attitude of the students graduating from America’s colleges torn where they see the chance to offer public service.
6

1The prepared statement of Mr. Walker appears in the Appendix on page 62.

They see volunteering 82 percent as being about public service, voting as being about public service, working for a non-profit being involved in public service, but working for the government, only 29

percent of the students see that as public service. And that is an

image we need to change.

That’s one of the key reasons the Secretary of Defense developed

the proposal for a National Security Personnel System. It is a set

of proposals that benefits from more than two decades of experimental powers the Congress has given this department, which it

expanded substantially during the decade of the 1990’s.

Although we have China Lake, which began around 1980, the

Department was joined in this by my colleague, Mr. Dominguez,

over the last year, really since March 2002, and has been engaged

in a major review of the lessons we’ve learned from those demonstrations, which currently embrace about 30,000 Department of

Defense employees.

And we do have authority within the Federal Government within

the Department of Defense to expand those best practices to the

laboratory and acquisition workforces, and first in the beginning

that expansion was published in April 2000.

The proposal for a National Security Personnel System would indeed take these same ideas and apply them to the Department’s civilian workforce as a whole, and there are three key features that

I would like to emphasize in my summary today.

First, much more expeditious hiring practices so that we are seen

as one of the best, not one of the worst, to apply to for young Americans. It takes the Department of Defense an average of about 90

days to hire someone. Today that’s far too slow in competition with

the private sector.

Second, we would like to move to pay banding for our workforce

as a whole, which includes a variety of important attributes, including emphasized work performance in determining someone’s

pay.

And third, we would like to move to national bargaining with our

union partners when it comes to human resource issues that cut

across the Department, which currently under the present statute

it has been bargained at the local level. It is to solve these hiring

problems, it is to be able to convert some of the 320,000 positions

we’ve identified as being possibly those which civilians could undertake to civil service status.

Those are the important reasons for presenting this proposal at

this time this year and for urging the Congress to consider this favorably. We look forward to working with you, Mr. Chairman, on

this proposal and on your questions this afternoon.

Senator VOINOVICH. Our next witness is Comptroller General

Walker.

TESTIMONY OF HON. DAVID M. WALKER,1 COMPTROLLER GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING

OFFICE

Mr. WALKER. Thank you, Senator. It’s a pleasure to be here. I

must say that this is very impressive that you were able to get four
7

presidential appointees with Senate confirmation to come to a field

hearing. It’s probably unprecedented, as far as I know. And I can

say that I’m here for two reasons, first, the importance of the topic

at hand, namely the human capital issue and, second, out of abundance out of respect for you and your ability, because I believe that

you’re one of the most outstanding members of the U.S. Senate,

and it’s a pleasure to be here to talk about this important topic.

As you know, Senator, I’ve been a long-standing supporter of government transformation, and human capital reform in particular.

I’ve also had the privilege of being an observer, and still being an

observer, on the Department of the Defense’s business practices implementation board, so I know firsthand of Secretary Rumsfeld’s,

Secretary Chu’s, and others at DOD’s top leadership commitment

to the need to transform the way the Department of Defense does

business, and agree that fundamental change is necessary.

At the same time DOD has 9 of 25 high-risk areas on GAO’s

high-risk list. DOD is No. 1 in the world for the standard of excellence in fighting and winning armed conflicts. It’s an A plus. It’s

a D on economy, efficiency, transparency, and accountability. Part

of that is the need for more administrative actions. Part of that is

a need for some legislative flexibility. It’s clear that management

needs reasonable flexibility to deliver results with available resources. At the same time, it’s also important that appropriate

safeguards should be in place in order to maximize the chance for

success and to minimize the chance of abuse.

Current Federal hiring classification pay systems are outdated

and in need of fundamental reform. Many of these challenges exist

at DOD, and many, quite frankly, are government-wide challenges

and not solely those experienced at DOD.

Several of DOD’s proposals are agency specific and merit serious

consideration such as the military reforms and selected civilian reforms. Others are much broader with significant potential implications for the civil service system in general, and OPM in particular,

the Office of Personnel Management, such as broad banding pay for

performance and re-employment provisions.

In our view, in GAO’s view, it would be prudent and appropriate

to consider these on a government-wide basis, not to slow down

DOD reforms, but to broaden the opportunity for these reforms to

be available to other parts of the government who can demonstrate

that they are deserving and have an ability to properly implement

these reforms.

Irrespective of whether these reforms are pursued on a single

agency or on a government-wide basis, we believe it is critically important to include appropriate safeguards to minimize the chance

of abuse and to maximize the chance of success. This is particularly

critical in connection with pay for performance and reduction in

force provisions.

In my statement I outline a number of suggested safeguards for

consideration by you and the Congress, Mr. Chairman. I would respectfully ask that my statement be included in the record, although I may want to make a few minor modifications for the final

version. I would also——

Senator VOINOVICH. OK. It’s without objection.
8

1The prepared statement of Mr. Dominguez appears in the Appendix on page 81.

Mr. WALKER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would also note the

importance that DOD take a more comprehensive and integrated

approach to strategic workforce planning. When I say integrated,

I mean the uniformed workforce, the civilian workforce, and the

contracting corps. All three are critically important to achieve the

mission, and all too frequently, as has been noted before, the Federal Government has viewed its civilian workforce as a cost to be

cut rather than an asset to be valued.

In addition, I note the importance of giving consideration to

adopting a chief operating officer concept, which I note in my testimony, and I won’t elaborate on it at this point in time other than

to say if we want to make transformation happen, and if we want

it to stick, then I believe that this concept has particular merit at

DOD in order to ensure continuity and continued effort, not only

within this administration, but between administrations.

In closing, GAO strongly supports both governmentwide and

DOD transformation efforts and human capital reform initiatives.

A number of DOD’s proposals have merit and deserve serious consideration. Others have merit, but need additional safeguards. And

still others have merit, but possibly should be considered on a

broader basis. Doing so would help to accelerate overall progress in

the human capital area governmentwide, while not slowing down

DOD. It would maximize the chance of success, minimize the possibility of abuse, and avoid the further bulkenization of the civil service within the Executive Branch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. Mr. Dominguez.

TESTIMONY OF MICHAEL L. DOMINGUEZ,1 ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE AIR FORCE MANPOWER AND RESERVE AFFAIRS, U.S. AIR FORCE

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Yes, sir, Senator. Thank you for inviting me to

this hearing. I also have a prepared statement, which I’d like to be

inserted into the record, and then I’ll follow with these oral comments.

Senator VOINOVICH. All of your statements will be inserted into

the record.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Thank you. I want to also——

Senator VOINOVICH. It’s very important that they do because my

colleagues aren’t here, and I want to make sure—and also the testimony of this will be shared with the staff and my colleagues on

this Subcommittee so that they get the benefit of the testimony

here today.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Yes, sir. I want to say a special thank you to

you for affording me an opportunity to return to Dayton, Ohio. I

attended as an Air Force brat junior and much of senior high

school here in Dayton, and it’s a real joy to be back with the people

of this city and this air base. I also want to thank you for the opportunity to participate in this important discussion of the challenges facing the Federal civilian workforce.

My comments to you today, and my approach to the responsibilities of my office, have been and will be informed by my dual status

as a presidential appointee and a career Federal civil servant. Like
9

1The prepared statement of General Lyles appears in the Appendix on page 92.

my colleagues on this panel, I share a deep and abiding respect for

the contributions civil servants have made and will yet make to the

DOD mission and the security of the Nation.

Air Force people face two-entwined challenges. First, the workload since September 11 has grown enormously, and the second is

demand for a different mix of skills than those we now possess.

Both challenges must be faced simultaneously on five axes.

First, DOD must adopt modern management practices, and I

speak here of results-based government focused on performance

outcomes, not resource inputs, and on replacing pay for longevity

with pay for performance. We must also understand our core competencies and learn how that understanding ought to affect our

management decisionmaking.

The second, DOD must deploy modern IT systems organized

around enterprise-wide information architectures. The DOD personnel community led by Dr. Chu is making good progress in this

direction, and the DOD comptroller is spear heading the creation

of the DOD enterprise architecture.

Third, we have to re-engineer practices, processes, and organizations to take advantage of those modern management concepts and

those modern IT systems. Re-engineering will strip work out of organizations, streamline staff, flatten hierarchies, compress cycle

times and improve results, and no question about it, fundamentally

alter jobs, which leads to the fourth axis. We have to invest in educating and developing our workforce to prepare them for these

challenges. It may not be rocket science, but it is hard.

Now, finally, the fifth axis is that the legislation enacted by the

Congress must enable this transformation. The proposed changes

to the civilian and military, both active and reserve, personnel systems submitted this spring by the Department, in my view, when

matched with the advances along these other axes, will create a

fast, flexible, agile workforce partnered and aligned with their military and civilian leaders; and to fast, flexible organizations pursuing specifically designed and precisely identified national security outcomes. In doing so, move at a pace of innovation and change

that eviscerates any enemy’s ability to threaten us. Thank you once

again for this opportunity, and I look forward to your questions.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you, Mr. Dominguez. General Lyles.

TESTIMONY OF GENERAL LESTER L. LYLES,1 COMMANDER,

AIR FORCE MATERIEL COMMAND, U.S. AIR FORCE

General LYLES. Mr. Chairman, Senator Voinovich, thank you

again for the opportunity to address the state of the Air Force Materiel Command’s civilian workforce before your Subcommittee.

And as the hearing reaffirms, human capital strategic management

is a critical aspect of our many transformation efforts. And, Senator, I’d like to let you know that I greatly appreciate the considerable support that you personally have given and provided in this

arena, from your successful introduction of legislation to allow the

Department of Defense to use separation incentives as a force

shaping tool, to the personnel flexibilities you added to the bill creating the new Department of Homeland Security. All of us have
10

1 Charts referred to appears in the Appendix on page 119.

benefitted from your tremendous efforts and those of your colleagues.

I’m pleased to report, Mr. Chairman, that the current state of

our civilian workforce of 56,000 men and women strong in Air

Force Materiel Command is first-rate, which allowed us to superbly

provide the capabilities that were needed by our warfighters in size

and technology, acquisition and development, logistics, maintenance and sustained testing. However, our real concern is not just

with the current state. Our concern is with the future and whether

or not the civilian workforce is properly shaped to meet the mission

requirements and imperatives for the 21st Century.

Let me call your attention, if I could, to a chart. I would like to

illustrate the first chart, if someone could put that up, please.1

Next chart please. Today the average age of our civilian workforce

is 46 years old, which is significantly above that of private industry. They average closer to the late 30’s. An older workforce, of

course, is an experienced force, and that’s helpful in the short term,

however, we’re concerned that 23 percent of our civilian employees

are eligible to retire this year.

If you consider the employees eligible for early retirement, the

figure jumps to more like 49 percent, and in 4 years 67 percent of

our force will be eligible for regular or early retirement. And our

figures reflect that somewhere between 25 and 35 percent of employees retire within 1 year of that eligibility, and an additional 15

to 20 percent separate the following year. Hence, you can see one

of the major concerns we have about managing the workforce that’s

so critically needed to meet our national security objectives.

Clearly we foresee a great deal of employee turmoil over the next

several years as seasoned employees retire and replacement candidates are hired.

I might add, Mr. Chairman, that demographically 33 percent of

our civilian force is female, 67 percent is male, while minority

members represent 21.1 percent of our total force. And we are, in

addition to everything else, committed to ensuring we have a diverse workforce, and that we have implemented a number of initiatives, including centralized engineer diversity recruitment programs for our command to help us to achieve this objective.

Next chart, please. So, Mr. Chairman, we talked and are going

to talk a lot about workforce shaping, the separation incentives

that we currently have available, and those we may need for the

future. Our command is extremely appreciative of the opportunity

that you and others have afforded us and our centers to reshape

our workforce with the passage of these workforce shaping separation incentives and initiatives.

The need for this authority was a key element in our groundbreaking workforce study findings. And it has been particularly

valuable to our product and test centers, Air Force research laboratories and in the past, when we closed two of our air logistics centers, to allow us to shape that workforce and shape it appropriately

for the missions we have at hand today.

Next chart, please. This chart documents the usage of the authorities that you provided us. In fiscal year 2001, the authority
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1The prepared statement of Dr. Russo appears in the Appendix on page 127.

could only be used to incentivize employees currently eligible for

optional retirement. This command used 147 of the total 175 allocations that the Air Force executed.

In fiscal year 2002 we were given authority to use a daisy chain

and to offer incentives to employees eligible for early and optional

retirement and resignations. This command used 362 quotas of the

total Air Force allocation of 450.

For fiscal year 2003, this fiscal year, we’re authorized 750 incentive authorizations. However, due to the unplanned reductions that

our centers must absorb this year, it is unlikely that they will be

able to use all of these authorizations. To date we’ve used 270, and

I know for sure we will not be able to use the full 750 that are

available to us.

Mr. Chairman, these proposed reductions are affecting all of us

in Air Force Materiel Command, just like the rest of the commands

within the U.S. Air Force. There is no doubt that these workforce

reductions are incompatible with workforce shaping for the most

part.

We’re experiencing some setbacks in our objectives here, but we

feel optimistic that we will still be able to make workforce shaping

work for us and work for our command. As we become more efficient through transforming our processes, we’re attempting to

develop an attrition strategy that balances the need to realign and

reduce the workforce with the need to ensure that adequate headroom exists for opportunity for replacement and replenishment

strategies to meet the future.

Mr. Chairman, there are lots of things that are currently under

way to allow us to better align our workforce. The things that are

being done through the proposed legislation and policies, what

you’ve done through the Homeland Security Act, your proposed

Federal Workforce Flexibility Act of 2003, and now the National

Security Personnel System, we think, will allow us the kinds of attention and actions that are necessary to properly align and shape

our workforce for the future.

Mr. Chairman, I will close here, and I look forward to your questions and comments about these and other things we are doing

today. Thank you very much.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you, General Lyles. Dr. Russo.

TESTIMONY OF DR. VINCENT J. RUSSO,1 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AERONAUTICAL SYSTEMS CENTER, U.S. AIR FORCE

Dr. RUSSO. Mr. Chairman, let me welcome you to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As you know, we call ourselves the birthplace,

the home and the future of aerospace. As you also know, we could

never say that without the people of the past, present, and the future of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The creed of Wright-Patterson was written in 1942, and it states that we will carry on the

splendid vision and unswerving power of those great leaders and

innovators, Orville and Wilbur Wright, so I’m here today to tell you

we still believe in that creed. As a matter of fact, we have a book

we give our distinguished visitors, and I believe I’ve given you one,
12

has that as our title, is sharing that vision of the Wright brothers

is our creed for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Now, let me take some of the demographics that you’ve heard

about in my written testimony and bring them down to the base

level. Can I have my first chart, please. Next please. Sir, this is

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s age demographics, and I would

like to call your attention first to the green bars. Just look across

there at the green bars. This was our demographics in the late

1980’s. You notice they were fairly well evenly distributed, the kind

of just demographics, I think, we would like to see.

I call your attention to the first two green bars in particular. If

you add the height of those two bars, you will note that 31 percent

of our workforce was under the age of 35.

If you now look forward to those light bars, which is our projection for 2007, you’ll find our hope today is to exceed 7 percent,

which is a tremendously dramatic reduction from the 31 percent

under the age of 35 to a projection of maybe only 7 percent.

Now, a lot of people have asked me, sir, why do I do this with

pessimism versus optimism, and my answer is it’s a mixed bag. I

am optimistic because it does give us the opportunity to bring on

a new workforce trained in different ideas, trained with different

skills than a person like myself may have, so it is a tremendous

opportunity for us to revitalize our workforce. But I also temper

that with a little pessimism because unless we do this quickly, we

are going to lose this incredible wealth of experience.

We are not here dealing with running a Wal-Mart or running a

data processing center. We are dealing here at Wright-Patterson

with things that are a matter of safety of flight and safety of life.

Those things are based on experience. A lot of experience, as we

learn from one airplane to another, we pass that experience down

to our people.

As you notice, back in the 1980’s we had a workforce that allowed us to do that. As we project it in the future, I’ve become

increasingly concerned of our ability to pass that experience base

to a new workforce. There are things that you just never learn in

college, you have to learn through experience.

May I have the next chart, please. The next chart just gives you

the same data with regard to years of service. Next chart, please.

So you asked us to talk a little bit about how we use the workforce

shaping legislation we’ve had already. Here’s the Wright-Patterson

statistics. I broke it down one level below that for you to show the

ASC statistics.

The low numbers for fiscal year 2001 are very understandable to

me. By the time we got all the implementing criteria it was pretty

late. I actually remember getting phone calls at home on Christmas

Eve from people asking me should I do this, Vince, or shouldn’t I

do this. So it’s understandable we had a little trouble in the first

year.

The second year when we had plenty of notice, you notice the

numbers went up dramatically. As General Walker pointed out, we

also have that here, the ability to use the daisy chain. When we

got to 2003, you see the numbers have fallen again. I think again

that’s most likely due to our inability to use the daisy chain for

backfill of senior leaders.
13

Next chart, please. So you heard a lot already about the legislation for bringing new workforce on. I would like to say something

else. I would like to talk a minute about retention, because not only

is it an issue of bringing people on, it’s also an issue of keeping

them here, so we have put a lot of attention in the last couple of

years on the subject of retention. And with your permission, I

would just like to highlight a few things just to show you that we

believe it’s not just bringing people here, but once you get them

here, you got to keep them here.

We have established something called a unified retention center

where we have a single office for all of our junior enlisted, our officers and our civilians that could go to one place to get issues dealing with the junior workforce. We even gave our junior workforce

their own communication devices, their own web pages, their own

E-mail distributors, all managed by our own junior workforce.

The sheer issues of that generation, which are clearly different

than the issues of our generation. We’re doing something I’m particularly proud of, providing probably for the first time that I can

ever recall, a diversity training for 22,000 people at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. All 22,000 of us will go through the same diversity training put together by probably the greatest mind in that

business in this country, a guy by the name of Dr. Samuel Papasis.

It’s an incredible ability to get our people more sensitive to the

workforces of the future, which the demographics will be significantly different than those of the past.

And finally, something we focused on is our supervisors. You can

go to any HR organization in this country, and they will tell you

people do not leave their company, they leave their supervisors.

And so we have put an incredible increased attention on getting

our supervisors properly trained and properly sensitive to the

workforces of the future.

Next chart, please. We have taken on abilities to try to train our

leaders. I have a favorite saying of mine, I like to move a workforce

from very efficient managers to very effective leaders of the future.

So we have our senior leaders. I’m teaching leadership principles

to our workforce.

And finally, something that I think I’m equally proud of is our

ability to have our workforce get master’s degrees right here on

base. We have had that capability in engineering through AFIT,

and through DAGSI, the Dayton Area Graduate Studies Institute

for quite a while. And University of Dayton has recently come on

base to help provide lunchtime master’s degrees for the engineering

workforce.

But just this year we have done the same thing for business people together with the University of Cincinnati, we have brought on

board here an MBA program that you could get without ever leaving the base, all done at lunchtime.

So I emphasize for my particular part of my verbal the retention

issue. Now, all the issues that were talked about in terms of legislation we fully support. I think that every one of them will make

life better for us. I am particularly interested in the ability to speed

up the hiring process. I think that is critical.

I also think that contribution compensation is the way to go. I’ve

seen it work in the laboratory based on my laboratory experiences,
14

and it works, it’s a wonderful tool, and I really encourage us to do

that.

And so, Mr. Chairman, I hope you share with me the tremendous

pride of accomplishment of all the employees here at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Every day we strive to make major contributions and do our best for our U.S. Air Force. We are powered by

our mission statement that says we bring a warrior spirit to this

operation. Thank you for this opportunity to express my views.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you very much. I’d like to thank all

the witnesses for their testimony. Dr. Russo, I really was pleased

with the last comments that you made in terms of some of the

things that you’re doing to have a better workforce and the importance of providing employees additional training to help keep them

on board.

I kind of smiled because when I was Mayor of the City of Cleveland, all of my employees went to diversity training. When I was

governor we trained three-quarters of the State workforce, and we

found that was one of the best things that we could possibly do to

improve our workforce. It helped them become better workers, it

improved management and it aided in the workforce understanding

each other.

I think many of those employees go home to their own families

and take the lessons they learned in diversity training back into

their own households. Many of those households had never had diversity training.

And we started DAGSI while I was governor. And I don’t know,

David, if you know about this or not, DAGSI, The Dayton Area

Graduate Studies Institute, and this base were very concerned

about whether or not they were going to be able to keep up with

AFIT, Air Force Institute of Technology, because they were saying

they wanted to be able to reach out to other places to get education.

So as an economic development tool, we put together DAGSI,

which allowed employees to use AFIT, Wright State University, the

University of Cincinnati, the Ohio State University, and many

graduate schools throughout the area so that at one same price

people could go out and pick the courses that they wanted. And

that was not only important to the people here on the base, but it

was also important to the businesses in this area who were looking

for graduates, for Ph.D. recipients to work for them. And, of course,

we were pleased that the Secretary has re-emphasized the importance of the Air Force Institute of Technology.

I’d like to start off my questions by addressing a local situation,

then maybe move up to the big picture. General Lyles, in your testimony you indicated that this announcement on the number of

people that you can hire is going to impact on this great challenge

you have to reshape your workforce to take on the challenges of

this century. That flexibility who granted and you used it. Now it’s

kind of in limbo.

And I’d like to ask Mr. Dominguez or even you, Under Secretary

Chu, on this whole issue of being able to have the workforce that

we need, has the Air Force taken that into consideration? Here we

are, we want to reshape the workforce, and one of the problems of

that mindless downsizing in the 1990’s was that once the people
15

left, they never were replaced. And the object of early separation

and early retirement was to make those slots available so that the

Department could bring in new people, even at the mid level, that

had the necessary skills.

Now I would ask you to comment on what can be done to make

sure that we don’t end up at the same time granting all kinds of

new flexibilities and cutting our nose off to spite our face.

Mr. CHU. I think here at Wright-Patterson you have a specific

issue, particularly in this command, Mr. Dominguez’ comment in

terms of the civilian workforce size, is relatively one in which difficulty is being described for the Department as a whole, we plan

to reallocate as many of the buyout spaces Congress has provided

us to others who can use them in a particular installation when we

cannot use them. That’s one way we came very close to a 100 percent, in terms of the buyout usage in fiscal 2000.

I think the challenge that you, however, identified cuts across

the entire department, and that is that you’ve got several developments occurring at the same time. You have reconsideration of

which functions are core in the Department of Defense and should

be, therefore, performed by duty personnel, either military or civilian, or some mix of the same, as opposed to functions that ought

to the performed by the private sector, and that’s going to affect

our workforce.

We are at the same time, as you’ve noted, attempting to move

from military to civilian status a large fraction of 320,000 slots now

in uniform that we believe could be performed by civilians, some

by civil servants in particular.

We need a more flexible set of rules under which to employ these

new people, and I know for any individual command and individual

installation, managing all those moving parts at the same time is

going to be a significant task. We do think it’s doable, however. I

think we can make this come together in a way that’s effective. I

don’t know if Mr. Dominguez wants to comment on Wright-Patterson.

Senator VOINOVICH. The question I have is whether anybody has

asked you to do an analysis of what is needed to reshape your

workforce. What we decide to do is going to impact you, so how can

we accommodate you to help get the people on board that you’re

going to need. These are frightening statistics here. And you’re basically saying that it’s frozen and you’re going to lose these people

from attrition and you’re not going to be able to bring in these new

people to take their place. Where will we be in 2007? We’re in pretty bad shape if they don’t have that ability to bring these folks in.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Yes, sir. There is no question about it. And this

issue for this year is actually now getting to the level where I can

get engaged with Dr. Chu and his staff. I mean our approach in

the Air Force has been to try to allow the person with the most

knowledge and the clearest vision about where the problem is and

where the solution lies to organize his attack, and that’s General

Les Lyles.

And our approach also has been to try and enable them to use

all of the policy tools that were enacted by the Congress to shape

that workforce without second guessing or putting in rules that the

Congress had not contemplated. Where we run into problems is
16

from others’ interpretations of those rules that infringe on General

Lyles’ ability to do something like allow early retirement for GS–

15, promote some of those older people in the 55 and up demographics, and then restructure fundamentally an entry level position at the GS–12 to get in somebody from the private sector or

right out of college. That seems to me to be an appropriate use of

the kinds of authorities that the Congress provided us. That’s the

daisy chain that Vince spoke about.

As you know, there are other views in the DOD, and we’ll need

to sort those out. I believe General Lyles knows best about how to

shape this or how to deal with the problem and where he needs to

go with it. And to the degree that I can, I will be his ally and advocate in creating the flexibility he needs to get this job done.

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, I would specifically like, and I say this

in front of Dr. Chu, to have in writing just exactly how this is all

going to work out starting here at Wright-Patterson and going

through the other Air Force facilities. When I authorized the workforce reshaping legislation in the first place, we wanted to make it

specific to Wright-Patterson, and I couldn’t get the votes. So I

talked to Senator Inhofe and a few other people who had the same

kind of problem in their respective places, and we made these

9,000 slots available. I’d like to know now that everybody is under

way, what’s the plan in order to deal with the respective responsibilities they have.

Are you going to, for example, reduce the workload or the challenges and restructure like Dr. Russo is doing or will you continue

to have this challenge of not having the manpower or the flexibility

to accomplish your mission? And I think that’s the old business of

dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s and really getting down into the

guts of some of these issues to try and make sure that we can continue to shape this workforce and to deal with this problem that’s

looming in the Air Force and with these facilities.

Mr. CHU. We would be delighted to provide that.

General LYLES. Mr. Chairman, if I can add, the current reductions that we’re looking at right now for our command, this is for

the entire Air Force Materiel Command, not just Wright-Patterson,

is 2,260 positions by fiscal year 2009. That’s a thousand military

and 1,260 civilians.

And Secretary Dominguez is correct, we tried to use all the tools

available to us by both Congress, OSD and the Air Force to ensure

that we smartly try to address this problem.

I was able to, with the great help of our tremendous personnel,

people, some of whom are on the stage behind me that you’ve met,

some who are in the audience, to figure out if we can use an attrition strategy for this fiscal year so we wouldn’t have to send people

out the door with a reduction in force sort of prospect. We’re probably not going to be able to do that for all fiscal years between now

and 2009. We’re looking at a wide variety of things that might be

available to us to try to address the problem.

One of the initiatives in very simple terminology that Dr. Russo,

General Reynolds, myself and all of my commanders are doing is

looking at the issue of divestiture. We know there are tasks and

jobs and things that we do today that perhaps are not value added,
17

but yet they add to the workload and burdens of our people to be

able to get the job done.

So we’re trying to get rid of unnecessary policies, procedures, paperwork, documentation, reporting, all of those things so that we

can take workload that is of no value off our plates so they can do

the many things that we’re asking them to do as part of our mission and our national security objectives, those types of things,

along with trying to work with the various tools in ways in which

we’re trying to address the manpower situation that we’re in. And

we look forward, of course, in the future, to having the additional

legislation provided by you proposed by NSPS to give us even more

flexibility to deal with the problems.

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, I think the issue of getting rid of some

of that stuff is part of what you ought to be doing anyway.

General LYLES. Sometimes it’s much harder than you might

think, Senator.

Senator VOINOVICH. I believe it was 2 years ago that I was here

when we had a little session with college students. General, I’m not

sure you were here for that, but I met with about a dozen students

and asked them to share with me whether or not they were interested in going to work for the Department of Defense. It was very

interesting. Some weren’t interested at all, and others said they

didn’t know where to get information on it. It was just incredible

how little they knew about what was available. And I’ll never forget one of the young men, I think he was an electrical engineer,

and I think, Dr. Russo, you have some kind of an internship or

part-time work or something——

Dr. RUSSO. Right.

Senator VOINOVICH. And I recall the military official who was

there that day told the student we need you and I want to have

you come on board and so on and we want to talk to you. And I

turned to him and he said, how long will it take for this young man

to find out whether or not he can come to work here in this program that you have, and he said 6 months. And the bright smile

on the student’s face disappeared.

And I just wonder with the changes that we put in the Homeland

Security legislation eliminating the rule of three and going to categorical hiring, is that going to be able to be reduced down to some

reasonable time frame.

Mr. CHU. Yes, sir, I think it can. That’s why we’ve included some

of the provisions in the National Security Personnel System legislation. We have attempted to enlarge on them modestly relative to

what you did in the Homeland Security Act for the government as

a whole. We’re very keen on getting exactly what you were hinting

at, which is on-the-spot authority for situations like the college job

fair.

Obviously you have due diligence like this, checking their references and so on and so forth, but as we’ve started to do what I

would congratulate Wright-Patterson doing at its level, which is

reaching out to the colleges, to go to the campuses to recruit young

people to tell them about these opportunities.

We must solve the problem you’ve identified, which is it takes too

long to give them an answer. And at that stage in their careers I

can understand why they’re going to take the offer from our com-
18

petitor, whether it is General Electric or one that’s a State or local

government or one that’s a non-profit organization because it’s here

and now. We’re going to put them through a several month process.

We need to get beyond that. Categorical hiring will help, but we

do need, as the national security personnel legislation proposes, expanded on-the-spot hiring authority for certain situations like the

college job market.

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, the categorical hiring procedures

should have an impact.

Dr. RUSSO. Yes, we have to abide by the rule.

Senator VOINOVICH. But you have the rule of three.

Dr. RUSSO. Right.

Senator VOINOVICH. I think the regs still haven’t been published

on that.

Mr. CHU. That’s correct, sir. Government regulations have not

been written by OPM. We are in the process, however, of applying

categorical ranking to elements of the defense workforce, where we

currently possess legal authority, those are specifically the entire

laboratory community and the acquisition workforce, which will

eventually benefit Wright-Patterson as well.

We’re big believers in categorical ranking. I think it speeds up

the process. It also gives the manager a better ability to solve his

or her problem. As you know, sir, it’s very much modeled on the

way military promotes junior officers to the next grade. There is a

best qualified pool, which is what is first considered, then a highly

qualified pool, a qualified pool, not qualified. You need to take each

pool in sequence. It gives more range.

The current system, the reason it takes so long, in my judgment,

there is a tedious process of going down these small lists and deciding in excruciating detail whether you have met the mark or not.

The practice that you’ve permitted the Federal Government to

adopt that we are in the process of using at the Department of Defense will, I think, substantially improve that, but we still do need,

I think, sir, broader on-the-spot hiring authority to deal with the

college kind of situation you described.

Senator VOINOVICH. And I would like to say we do have agencies

today that are able to hire people with a 3.5 average on the spot,

but when you pierce the veil and look into it, it’s not what they say

it is. Yes, I can hire you, and by the way, I will submit your name

up to so-and-so to look at it and then the place you are interested

in going looks at you and they also go through this interview process, and you lose a lot of applicants because it’s too cumbersome

of a process.

Mr. Walker.

Mr. WALKER. Mr. Chairman, GAO prides itself of being in the

vanguard of transformation, including in the human capital area.

And some of the things that we’ve done that could be helpful here,

some are administrative and some are legislative.

On the administrative front, we’ve really used internships as a

strategic recruiting device whereby we’ve tried to identify top talent, we’ve tried to hire people for internships. And what we’ve been

able to do is by keeping them in a position for a minimum of 9

weeks, we can hire them competitively on a full-time basis when

they come out.
19

In addition to that, one of the things that, Senator, you may

want to consider is, one of the things we have at GAO is we always

have the ability to hire a certain number of critical occupations

for—it’s limited to number and it’s limited to period of time on a

non-competitive basis on the authority of the comptroller general to

meet critical needs. That concept, frankly, may have merit in situations where you’re dealing with critical occupations and you’re

dealing with critical needs.

The last comment I would make is the Congress has provided additional authority for realignment authority, for buyouts and for

voluntary early retirement. I would hope that much of that is being

used based upon strategic workforce planning concepts to deal with

some of the issues that the general mentioned, rather than position

by position because in many cases it’s trying to realign the overall

workforce to deal with skills and balances, shaping issues and succession planning challenges, which is a broader perspective rather

than a position by position basis because you’re not going to be able

to make a whole lot of progress if you look at it just on a position

by position basis.

Senator VOINOVICH. One other thing that came up at that student roundtable was from one of the young men. He was an engineering student from Poland, and because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen

could not go to work for one of these agencies.

And it seems to me that if you look at the crisis we have in recruiting scientists and others, and if you go to the graduate schools

today and look at the countries from where these young people

come, you realize we’re not producing them here in this country.

It seems to me that the Defense Department ought to be looking

at ways to attract these people because if you get someone really

interested and they have a good background, we should put them

to work. There is a good possibility they may decide to stay. And

we need them.

Mr. CHU. Absolutely. In fact, the issue has come up in terms of

reconstruction of Iraq in which we would like to use individuals

who have green card status. The irony as you know, sir, we could

enlist them in the armed services of the United States as a noncitizen, they could even be appointed as a reserve officer as a noncitizen, but we cannot, at least under the rule we received from

OPM, appoint them as a non-citizen without first going through a

long competitive process to demonstrate that there were no American citizens available to take those positions. That’s exactly the

kind of flexibility that we’re seeking in the National Security Personnel System, so we can deal in a common sense way with these

urgent needs.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Sir, if I may make one last point on this, I want

to reiterate our support for the flexibility envisioned in the National Security Personnel System, but we’re not waiting for that to

happen. The Secretary of the Air Force about 2 weeks ago directed

a re-engineering of the civilian fill process across the U.S. Air Force

with the objective of dramatically reducing cycle time, so we’ll move

whatever that we have to move to get this thing to work faster.

That could envision technology, new ways of working, eliminating

layers of review, deregulating classification authorities and those,
20

so lots of things we’re looking at to re-engineer that process within

the next couple of months.

Senator VOINOVICH. Mr. Dominguez, you’re a career employee,

aren’t you?

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Yes, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. Can you go back into your career position

after this administration? Are you allowed to do that?

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. I am allowed to do that, yes, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. That’s good. That gets back to what Comptroller General Walker was talking about. You have this terrific

work that Dr. Chu is doing, and you’re doing, and so forth, and

we’re reviewing personnel flexibilities, but the continuity of the career workforce is very important.

So often a new group comes in and reinvents the wheel, and this

concept of having a COO—like Comptroller General Walker has

suggested, should be something we may want to consider.

The other thing is, I think, it would lend itself to better recruiting if they knew what they were going to have. There has to be

some certainty where people can look down the road and say these

people are really committed and serious.

And part of the problem that we identified at Harvard in talking

to some of the students was that some would rather go to work for

a non-profit or private firm than to go work for the government because, you know, who knows next year or the year after that

they’re going to outsource the work. If I were in their position, I

would want some continuity at the agency I’m going to go to work

for.

Dr. RUSSO. Yes, sir. Last year when you had the first potential

layoffs at Wright-Patterson, we did lose some people who were on

the hook, so to speak, to come work for us, but the uncertainty did

change their minds for us. So stability would be something I certainly would like to see, the ability to tell people what to expect.

They may not all stay with us, that’s OK, but at least they know

what they bought into. And sometimes it’s hard for us to do that.

So stability is one of my issues.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Sir, one of the things we’re doing, we’re very

early in the stages of the dialog within the Department of Defense

about this, but this is an area where thinking about core competencies can add some stability. There are things we’re doing in

the Department of Defense, that we have Federal employees doing,

both military and civilian, that we really are not the world’s greatest experts at. And the advantage of doing it is marginal at best,

and maybe negative.

If we can shift our workforce into those areas and those specialties where we have demonstrated competencies, and those competencies are clearly linked to where we’re going strategically in

the future, and our workforce moves into those areas, the areas we

leave behind are the appropriate venues for the marketplace to deliver these services to us in a variety of different ways.

Now, we will still need to put the heat on to stay on the step,

innovating and delivering the products and services in our core

competencies, faster, better, cheaper, but that’s a wholly different

thing. You know you’re going to be in that business, you’re going
21

to be doing these things. Why? Because this is what we are and

it’s the Air Force.

Senator VOINOVICH. It gets back to why I asked you to just take

a look at these organizations like the one Dr. Russo heads up to

see what is the plan, what is the vision.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Right.

Senator VOINOVICH. Can you say to them this is where we’re

going, this is what we want, and you have a career here.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Yes, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. That’s one aspect of going to work for the

Federal Government today that is attractive to applicants. You

know, there are not very many places you can go where they say

you have a future. It’s one of the things we have available to us

that some other places do not.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. Right.

Senator VOINOVICH. I think it’s something that we should take

advantage of. We should say to applicants one thing we can offer

you is the opportunity to work your way up to Russo’s job while

doing exciting work and so forth. That’s what it’s all about, and do

something for your country at the same time. And I know that you

have the capability of being in the military and geting master’s degree that the government pays for, and maybe going on to get a

doctorate degree. You do that in the military.

Mr. CHU. That’s one of the reasons in the proposed National Security Personnel System we would like to have the authority to

waive the current Title 5 restrictions on training. The irony, as you

know, for civilians, unlike the military where we can pay to train

you if you’re a military person for a post, you don’t now have that

if you’re a civilian. It’s a much more highly constricted situation.

And basically we’re not supposed to be paying for civilians to be

trained for a job they don’t have, which is almost backwards in a

way, if you think about it. If you have the job already, we can train

you. If you don’t have the job, we won’t advance you to the next

position. That’s the place we can go.

Senator VOINOVICH. OK. I think we’ve kind of exhausted that. I

know that there is a great deal of emphasis on broad banding and

on performance orientated compensation. And the President initially talked about $500 million to go to a performance-based pay

system. And I’m not going to argue about the amount of money, I

think it’s unrealistic if you look back to see what Congress has

done. But the real question, and it’s one that I’d like you to comment on, and it’s one that Comptroller General Walker and I have

talked about on several occasions, is the capacity to do performance

evaluations. That is a very time-consuming process. The people

who do it need to be trained in writing performance evaluations.

And one of my concerns is that if we go to broad banding, as suggested, and we don’t make an effort to qualify people who have the

capability of doing the performance evaluation, it could end up

being a real detriment. In other words, it will not be successful.

And I can tell you for sure when you get started with it, there are

those who will say this is arbitrary, capricious, and personal bias

gets involved in this, and so forth. And when we start this process,

it must be done the right way.
22

The question I have for you, Dr. Russo, is, do you think that you

have the system in place in your shop to have pay-for-performance?

Dr. RUSSO. Not at ASC. We do have it in the laboratory. You’re

right on with your point. I lived through the first year of lab demonstrations here at Wright-Patterson. I was part of the first team

that did this.

Senator VOINOVICH. You did what?

Dr. RUSSO. The first time we went to a compensation based, contribution based compensation in the laboratory.

Senator VOINOVICH. How long ago was that?

Dr. RUSSO. Five years, I think.

Senator VOINOVICH. About 5 years ago?

Dr. RUSSO. Five years ago. I was in the lab for the first year.

You’re right on. It was a tremendous education program for the

workforce. It was hard. It took a lot of effort, but we did it, and

I think it was well worth it. As a matter of fact, as I look back on

it, I tell a lot of people I think the employees are better served by

that system. It’s more people looking at the evaluation, not just the

supervisor in the chain. Our experience with that has been just tremendous.

And too many people, I think, concentrate on the high end of

that, how much is somebody going to be compensated for how much

he is contributing. But we found one of the real values is with poorer performers who clearly understood what was expected of them

because of the evaluation system; is that they either improved their

performance or in some cases they left. And so it didn’t matter. We

were better off for it. So I’m a real advocate of it. But you are right,

it takes a lot of training, it’s not easy, especially the first couple

years.

But the lab has been in it 5 years, it’s more routine, and I think

it’s broadly accepted. So I’m a strong advocate of that.

General LYLES. Mr. Chairman, if I can add to that. As Vince

said, we started off a little rough with the lab demo and acquisition

demo, a similar thing we did at Edwards Air Force Base, but after

the first brunt of concerns, it’s worked very well. And I think we

now have the process down that we can train people properly to do

those performance evaluations, and we can’t say enough about how

much we like what we have in the lab demo, and I’m hoping NSPS

will allow us to do that and more in terms of flexibility.

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, the real issue is, don’t you think, it

would be wise to make sure that the agencies are in a position to

do what it is that we’re asking them to do. And one of the things,

Dr. Chu, that bothers me is that the NSPS removes the Defense

Department from the oversight of the Office of Personnel Management. There are some of us that are very concerned about that. Is

there some compromise that could be worked out so that we know

that the people who are going to be implementing this new system

are ready? I mean I’ve heard testimony that if you tie the money

in with it, if you go to pay banding then all of a sudden managers

will engage in performance management and the reason why they

don’t do it today and the reason why they don’t do it as well as

they should is because there is no money connected with the process. And I can’t believe that. I think that’s not the case.
23

Mr. CHU. Well, let me speak to the first issue you raised, which

is the issue of OPM. For the President’s proposed performance fund

for fiscal 2004, that each agency must submit to OPM for its approval of the first National Security Personnel System that the

policies and regulations would be jointly developed with OPM. So

OPM is our partner in moving this forward.

Many of our ideas, and what makes sense here, to come out of

OPM’s research and OPM’s white papers, but I do think across the

board, it’s exactly what General Lyles and Dr. Russo have described, the advent of pay banding requires each component part

of the defense to look at that type of evaluation system and restructure it, which includes re-educating everyone as to what their responsibilities are so, in fact, it can be successful.

And I do think the fact the Department has done this in these

various demonstrations, which now encompasses 30,000 of our employees, is some of the evidence you’re looking for about our competence to do so. The other competence I will point to is what we

do in the military side, it is the same department, while we have

different kinds of construct in their promotion system, it is again

one where the supervisor is charged with important authority, and

the institution exercises significant authority about the advancement of people’s careers that we have brought to a high state. And

we saw some payoff just recently with the operations concluded in

Iraq, so I think the competence is there.

The challenge that both the President’s performance fund and

National Security Personnel System gives to the civil part of the

Department is to bring that across the board to the same level. I

think we’ve shown it in demonstration projects and I’m confident

over the 2 years or so it would take actually to apply the National

Security Personnel System to the entire department that we would

indeed meet the kind of standards that you are describing, that I

know David Walker is concerned with, be met as a precursor for

gaining such discretion.

Senator VOINOVICH. Comptroller General Walker.

Mr. WALKER. Well, first let me be clear that I individually and

we institutionally at GAO strongly support broad band and pay for

performance and government transformation, and a lot of conceptually what DOD is talking about. We’ve had broad banding for

over 20 years. We’ve had pay for performance for about 20 years,

so we have real live experience. And we’re making a number of

changes to continuously improve that.

There is no question that the demonstration projects that DOD

has undertaken in the past can provide valuable lessons to help it

go forward. At the same point in time I think we have to recognize

there is a scale issue. Less than 5 percent of DOD’s workforce has

been involved in these demonstration projects, so you’re going from

5 percent to a 100 percent, and obviously that’s not something

that’s going to happen in one fell swoop or overnight.

There is no question in my mind that the leadership at DOD has

the commitment and that the Department has the ability for implementing broad banding and pay for performance on a broad basis.

At the same point in time I think it’s very important that before

any such authority be operationalized now, that’s different from authorized, one can authorize this authority, I would argue, not just
24

for DOD, but potentially for many others as well, but before that

authority would be operationalized, then I think that’s when it’s

important to make sure they have certain systems and safeguards

in place to maximize the chance of success, to minimize the possibility of abuse, to hopefully prevent a further bulkenization of the

Executive Branch in this critical area.

So I think there is a way, there is a sensible center that can, A,

allow the Department of Defense to accomplish what it wants to accomplish but, quite frankly, could leap frog us to the future a lot

quicker, a lot safer and a lot more consistently.

Mr. DOMINGUEZ. I want to pick up on that point on the leap frog

because at this same time while we’re talking about expanding the

pay-for-performance paradigm to the broader civilian workforce,

the President and Secretary of Defense have been pushing very

hard on changing our organizational management paradigm to a

performance-based, results-based paradigm. So you begin to change

the organizational focus and what leaders manage towards, and

how they’re evaluated at the same time. Then give them a personnel system that aligns and maps to that new form of management, and now you get some really powerful synergy to change the

culture that you’ve talked about very early in this hearing.

Senator VOINOVICH. I know we’re probably going to be talking

about this in a lot more detail in the next couple of weeks when

the defense authorization bill is on the floor, but I’d like to talk

about some compromise in this area or some type of standards that

have to be met before this system becomes operational. Secretary

Rumsfeld has been in the business world, but I can tell you that

as someone who has been involved with government employees for

a long time that if you want a new system like this one to be successful, you need to cascade it. I mean you just can’t whip it into

shape and expect it to happen because if you do, the thing will

blow up right in your face. It will.

When the State of Ohio implemented total quality management,

it took us 5 years to go through over 50,000 employees, and there

were cultural things that needed to be changed. It’s amazing how

much of a challenge this is going to be at DOD. And I’d suggest

that maybe even if you picked out certain portions of the proposal

and looked at them, the Department might be better able to do it

and move from there and learn from some of those experiences. Because to do it overnight or even in a year and a half or 2-year period, that’s a mouthful.

Mr. CHU. We recognize those challenges, we look forward to

those conversations, sir. It is one of the reasons that we are so

pleased we’ve gotten consistent ideas from the Department on how

to proceed for the laboratories and acquisition workforce as a

whole. Because that, as I indicated, is something which we’re starting to publish Federal notices on, and this is a leading edge of this

change, and will give us some of the experience that you’re correctly pointing to.

Senator VOINOVICH. OK. I know we’re running out of time here

because we have the other witnesses. This is great to be the only

Senator to be asking questions. And under Senate hearings in

Washington, as you know, the witness has 5 minutes, then we have

5 minutes and you just keep moving along.
25

Dr. Chu, the proposed National Security Personnel System would

waive significant portions of Title 5 for the Department of Defense.

In some cases it seems DOD has requested waivers that are significantly broader than necessary to make the decided reforms to its

personnel system.

For example, the Department would like to be able to bargain

collectively with unions at the national level, yet NSPS proposes to

waive all of Chapter 71 of Title 5 which governs labor management

relations. I’d like you to explain the Department’s thinking behind

these broad proposed waivers. And the reason I ask the question

is I was very involved in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the legislation that waived major areas of Title

5.

And in working with Congressman Rob Portman and others, they

restored a lot of Title 5 to Homeland Security and then left out six

areas to be negotiated, and at the present time those negotiations

are under way. And we provided in those negotiations that, first of

all, the unions would be involved, and when a 30-day period starts

they can lay out the changes that they are going to make at the

end of the 30-day period, then they must publish the differences of

opinion in the next 30 days and then the new system goes into

place.

And with that as a backdrop, to just move in the direction that

DOD is going just ignores the fact that the DHS system is still

being created, and I must tell you that one of the reasons why the

unions were so concerned about it is they understood that what

came out of those negotiations probably would be a model perhaps

for the rest of the Federal Government. And I know that I’m concerned about that, I know that the Chairman of the Governmental

Affairs Committee, Susan Collins, is also concerned about it in

terms of the breadth of your moving out of Title 5 and coming up

with a whole new system.

Mr. CHU. Let me address that, sir, because, in fact, the actual

proposed legislation of language very much takes Homeland Security as a template and then enlarges upon it. A number of the

waivers are the same as Homeland Security, some are different,

and let me specifically speak to the ones that are different.

We do propose to waive Chapter 31, which is the authority for

employment except for that section that deals with the senior executive service, that is specifically to deal with the speed of hiring

issue. And I think that’s one of the reasons, in our judgment, this

will improve the kind of system we can construct if you were to

give us that authority.

Both legislative proposals waive Chapter 51 and Chapters 53, we

do propose to waive Chapters 55, 57, 59, which are not waived in

the Homeland Security Act, but particularly Chapter 55 on pay administration. And the reason for that is, I think, and your colleague, Joanne Davis, in the House has acknowledged, Homeland

Security may ask for similar authority, is that the premium pay

system in the government, including overtime pay, is so complex

that, in fact, it is no longer having the kind of incentive effects that

it was intended to create when the Congress and various other authorities are constructed over the years. It’s a patchwork quilt.
26

Among other ironies, if you are a higher grade employee, you actually make less on overtime than you do on straight time because

of the limit in the law that says you cannot be a GS–10 step one.

Moreover, it’s sufficiently complex that supervisors are making

well-intentioned mistakes in terms of what people are being offered, and that also means that people are not feeling the kind of

incentives that were intended. If no one can explain to them in a

straight forward way what am I going to earn if I work on Sunday

or work on a holiday or if I do this job under difficult conditions,

so it’s difficult to rationalize the reason behind the Chapter 55

waiver.

We have requested, as I mentioned earlier, we do want the

bridges for training, for which reasons I describe, in my judgment,

we have the training machine backwards. It is not the same as the

military model. I think the military model has been very successful. I think Mr. Dominguez spoke eloquently, we need to invest in

our civil servants. We do not do the job we should in investing in

human capital of our human personnel. We view the military outcome—not necessarily the way we do it—but the outcome it produces as the model we want to follow, and we would like to be privileged to make those kinds of investments.

Chapter 33 is waived by both bills, which has to do with competitive examinations that are conducted. Chapter 75 is waived by both

bills, as is Chapter 43 by both bills.

We do model our labor relations section on the Homeland Security model, but whereas Homeland Security models see it as something that is waived, we do have in our proposal specifically how

we would propose to proceed as far as the beginning is concerned,

and there would be a period of notification to Congress. If an impasse is reached, during which time mediation is to be invited to

give the Congress a chance to comment that if, indeed, there is a

difference of opinion between the Department and its employees.

Senator VOINOVICH. And you’re going to waive all of the Chapter

75?

Mr. CHU. That is also, if I understand it correctly, a waiver that’s

in the Homeland Security law. The Homeland Security Act does

have language concerning rights of employees to preserve collaboration and union relations, etc., and we have a somewhat different

construct of how that’s handled in this proposed statute, but the

spirit is to see if we can get agreement to change the current situation, which is one more issue for the Department of Defense. It is

all local union bargaining units.

We have 1,366 locals, if I remember correctly. That means for department-wide human resources issues it can take a long time to

reach a resolution. My favorite example is the issue of garnishing

someone’s wages. If he or she does not pay the travel card bill, the

last administration, if I understand this correctly, began this negotiation procedure, it is 21⁄2 years later, we still have 200 locals to

go through, and in my judgment it’s a very straight forward issue.

I recognize how individual local leaders would like to bargain over

it, but I think that’s the kind of thing we should not bargain——

Senator VOINOVICH. I can understand that. And we got into that

too with Homeland Security in terms of how to go about doing
27

these things, and we have a lot of people who are not in unions

that are going to be affected.

Mr. CHU. That’s a very fair point. Half the workforce is union,

half is not unionized.

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, would anyone like to make a last comment or comment on anything that anyone else had to say? I really

appreciate it. This has been a good day, and I think from the dialogue here I’ve learned a lot and I am looking forward to hearing

from you about some of the information I’ve requested.

Mr. Walker.

Mr. WALKER. In summary, Mr. Chairman, I think one of the

things we have to keep in mind is that while there is probably

broad based consensus on this panel of the need to transform, not

only the Department of Defense, but also the government, and the

critical element of the human capital, the people strategy has, as

part of that, I think you have to recognize the difference between

institutions and individuals. And by that I mean there is no question that Secretary Rumsfeld, Dr. Chu, and others are dedicated to

doing the right thing here. I think we have to recognize, however,

that whatever laws are passed are for all time until Congress decides to change them. Not just for the players that are here today,

but the next Secretary of Defense, the next Under Secretary of Defense for Manpower Readiness.

That leads me back to the issue that I mentioned before that you

touched on with the chief operating officer, DOD has 9 of 25 highrisk areas. I believe the primary reason that it has 9 of 25 highrisk areas is because you don’t have enough continuity of attention

on the basic management issues that it takes to solve them over

the average tenure of a typical political appointee.

And I believe that whatever Congress decides to do with regard

to legislative authority, that if the Department of Defense really

wants to transform itself, it needs to consider a level two position,

something like a 7-year term appointee who can be responsible for

strategic planning and integration with the key players within the

Department to focus on these basic management challenges to help

transform the Department, no matter who the secretary is, no matter which administration is in charge.

I think that’s going to be critically important because, frankly, I

don’t know that you’re ever going to solve these problems unless

there is more continuity. This person could either be a civil servant

who has a contract for 7 years, it could come from the private sector. It should be performance based. I think the time has come for

that, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. CHU. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for holding this

hearing. I want to thank you for your leadership you’ve shown over

many years, even often when an issue was unpopular and

uninteresting to most, and for highlighting it. I do think that you

and David Walker have repeatedly said we do face a crisis in

human capital in the Department of Defense. We welcome to work

with you on legislation to help with the crisis. I’m confident we can

produce a good result.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. If I can make one comment

about truth in lending, if you will, it perhaps relates to Mr. Walker’s comment about the chief operating officer, the proposed legisla-
28

tion, acts and laws and authorizations are very much needed besides the ones that we have today.

One of the continuing challenges we’re always going to have is

funding, to actually enact some of the flexibilities that are currently provided to us in statutory authorities or that will be provided in the future. That will continue to be a challenge for us.

We’re hoping, at least within the Air Force, that we can always

make a balance between physical capital investments and human

capital investments, and to make sure we don’t overlook one at the

expense of the other.

Well, I’d like to suggest that the human capital has been neglected, and we have a great football coach, Woody Hayes, and I

think Jim Tressel would probably confirm what Woody said, is that

you win with people. And we must continue to make sure we got

the very best people to get the job done. It gets to Secretary Schlesinger’s report, and what you’re doing came out of that report.

Mr. CHU. Yes, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. Dr. Chu, that was the Hart-Rudman report

that looked down the road and said the area where the Federal

Government really has not done the work is in the area of personnel. It’s been neglected, if we don’t do something about it, we’re

going to have a tough time doing a lot of other things that need

to be done to make sure that we guarantee our national security.

Dr. RUSSO. Sir, we spent a lot of time this afternoon talking

about the things we need to make it better. I would like to end by

assuring you the workforce we have here today, at least within

Wright-Patterson, and I believe within the Air Force and the DOD

is still one of a bunch of marvelous, dedicated civilians, they go beyond the call of duty day in and day out.

I think the things we witnessed over the last couple years in our

Air Force’s ability to support our country is a testament to a lot

of civilians, as well as military that work with us, I’m pleased even

though we have problems, we still survive pretty well.

Senator VOINOVICH. They’ve done a good job because we have a

lot of people like you, Vincent, that really care. You’re dedicated

people that really care about what you’re doing and you care about

your country, and I thank you and I thank the others that are

here.

Dr. RUSSO. There are a lot of us.

Senator VOINOVICH. They all are back behind you and we thank

you for what you do.

Dr. RUSSO. Thank you, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. I’m going to call a recess for

about 5 minutes until the next panel can come in.

[Recess.]

Senator VOINOVICH. We’re going to continue our hearing and

hear from our second panel of witnesses that will offer us an outside perspective on the issues that we’re considering here today.

Dr. Beth Asch is a senior economist with RAND, who has conducted extensive research on Defense workforce reshaping authorities.

Scott Blanch is the president of AFGE Council 214. And I’d like

to say to you, Mr. Blanch, that we hear a lot from Bobby Harnage,
29

1The prepared statement of Dr. Asch appears in the Appendix on page 145.

who is a good friend of mine, and we spend a lot of time together.

He is going to be in my office, I think, tomorrow morning.

Mr. BLANCH. Very good. It’s very important.

Senator VOINOVICH. Michael Durand, who is pitching in for Pamela McGinnis. Mr. Durand is the deputy treasurer of AFGE Local

1138 based here in Dayton.

And J.P. Nauseef who is vice president of Aerospace Defense

Technology of the Dayton Development Corporation, and he is

pinch hitting here for Ron Wine who has a medical family situation

that he is trying to take care of for his mom and dad. Please give

Ron our very best and we appreciate your sharing the situation. As

was the case with the other witnesses, I’d like you to stand and

raise your right hand.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Senator VOINOVICH. Let the record show that all of the witnesses

answered in the affirmative. Our first witness is Dr. Beth Asch,

who is a senior economist with RAND. Again, thank you for being

here, Dr. Asch.

TESTIMONY OF DR. BETH J. ASCH,1 SENIOR ECONOMIST,

RAND

Dr. ASCH. Mr. Chairman, thank you for this opportunity to provide input to DOD on civilian workforce management. I’ve prepared a written statement that’s been submitted for the record, and

at this time I’ll just make a short statement and answer any questions you might have. In my statement this afternoon I’ll briefly

summarize RAND’s research results on the effects of workforce

shaping tools on the retirement behavior of Defense civilian employees.

Our research estimated the effects on the probability of retirement of the Voluntary Separation Incentive Program or VSIP, of

the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority or VERA, and the retention allowance.

The first two programs are intended to increase the financial incentives to voluntarily leave, while the third is intended to increase

the financial incentives to stay in the civil service.

Both VSIP and VERA were used during the 1990’s by Federal

agencies to reduce employment, but recently both have been identified as tools to help Federal managers shape the experience and

skill mixes of their workforces. By providing Federal workers with

an incentive to retire early or separate, it is hoped that managers

will be better able to hire and possibly outsource replacement

workers with different skills and experience levels.

A key question is whether these flexibility-related tools are effective. Our study finds that if used, these tools could be highly effective in changing retirement behavior among Defense civilian employees.

Our study focused on Defense civilians age 50 and older who participate in the civil service retirement system or CSRS. We found

a large effect of retention allowances, offering an older employee

the maximum retention allowance of 25 percent of pay over the

rest of his or her career would reduce the probability of retirement
30

by about 20 percent. VERA was estimated to more than double the

separation and retirement rates for the civil service among those

who would be eligible for that benefit. VSIP was estimated to increase separation retirement by about 30 to 40 percent, depending

on age.

These estimated effects are very sizable, but at the same time

are quite consistent with studies of private sector retirement behavior. There are two points that are noteworthy. First, these estimates are not an assessment of the past success of VERA and

VSIP as tools to accomplish downsizing in the aftermath of the cold

war. Rather they represent predictions of their effects on retirement behavior based on estimates of how Defense civilians generally respond to the financial incentives embedded in CSRS.

Second, our study didn’t consider the costs of offering these workforce shaping incentives, and so we can’t draw any conclusion at

this time about relative cost effectiveness.

Now, so far the authority for VSIP and VERA for workforce

shaping purposes has been limited in DOD. Currently, DOD has

authorization for 9,000 VERA and/or VSIP payments. Given that

the DOD has about 400,000 employees who would be eligible for either early or optional retirement, these authorities are really quite

small relative to the size of the Defense civilian workforce that

would be the target population for these tools.

Available evidence also suggests that retention allowances have

not been widely used in the past. The OPM estimated that retention allowances were given to less than 1 percent of all Executive

Branch employees in 1998.

So why don’t civil service managers use the flexibility-related

pays that are available to them? One reason that’s been put forward by the OPM is excessive bureaucracy in the approval process.

Another reason put forward in the context of the Defense laboratories by the Naval Research Advisory Committee on Personnel

Management in the Defense science and technology community was

the absence of leadership. The committee stated in its report that

in the absence of a sustained commitment to use flexibility-related

tools aggressively in the Defense laboratories, most tools were unused or underutilized.

Successful management of the Defense civilian workforce has become even more important in recent years, not only because of the

changing national security environment and the war on terrorism,

but also because of the aging of the Defense civilian workforce. Successfully responding to this aging will require that DOD actively

manage the departure of retiring employees and the hiring of new

workers or contractors to replace them, and must define its workforce requirements, and then develop a plan that coordinates the

timing of retirements with the replacements.

Importantly, it will also need to aggressively use workforce shaping tools to successfully implement the plan. Because of the potentially important role of these tools, the personnel managers in the

DOD should be given expanded authority and expanded resources

to use the flexibility-related policies extensively. Our estimates

show that such policies would be effective if they were used.

This concludes my oral statements here, but I’ll say that in my

written testimony I also talk about evidence on how the civil serv-
31

1The prepared statement of Mr. Blanch appears in the Appendix on page 158.

ice personnel system has worked in the past in terms of workforce

outcome, summarize some of the research on the effectiveness of

the waiver programs, talk about what factors are related to the

successful civilian personnel management. So I just wanted to let

you know there are other topics, but I didn’t want to take up too

much time today. In any case, I’m happy to answer any questions

that you have.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you very much. Mr. Blanch.

TESTIMONY OF J. SCOTT BLANCH,1 PRESIDENT, AMERICAN

FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, COUNCIL 214,

AFL–CIO

Mr. BLANCH. Senator Voinovich, my name is Jon Scott Blanch.

I’m the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 214 AFL–CIO. Council 214 is the national consolidated bargaining unit that represents by far the majority of the

bargaining employees employed by the U.S. Air Force in the Air

Force Materiel Command (AFMC). Council 214 consists of ten

AFGE local unions at the following Air Force Materiel Command

Air Force bases, Wright-Patterson; AFMETCAL Department in

Heath, Ohio; Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma; Warner Robins

Air Force Base in Georgia; Hill Air Force Base in Utah; Edwards

Air Force Base in California; Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico; Eglin Air Force Base in Florida; Brooks Air Force Base in

Texas; and Logistics Support Office in Michigan.

In all, the Council 214 bargaining unit totals approximately

36,000 AFMC workers across the command. It is Council 214’s role

to address issues that have command-wide impact on bargaining

unit employees the council represents. This is accomplished

through negotiations and collaboration at the AFMC Council 214

level.

For example, the master labor bargaining agreement between

AFMC and AFGE Council 214 was negotiated at this level and is

applied command-wide to Council 214’s bargaining unit. Other examples of what we do here are Air Force instructions, DOD manuals, Air Force supplements to AFI’s or DOD manuals, and AFMC

policies that affect the working conditions of the 214 unit command-wide or multiple bases over the command.

With that in mind, I deeply appreciate the opportunity to testify

on behalf of the thousands and thousands of AFMC bargaining unit

employees AFGE Council 214 is proud of and proud to represent.

They’re a vital, skilled and dedicated national asset focused on one

mission, that being to support this Nation’s warfighters through

developing, modifying, testing, maintaining, and delivering the best

weapon systems the world has ever known in the past, now, and

in the future.

What AFMC does is a team effort, and the leadership of the

AFMC team is exemplary. It is my opinion, and the opinion of

AFGE national president, Bobby Harnage, that General Lester

Lyles and his senior staff are the best there are in taking care of

their employees, so they, the employees, can take care of the AFMC
32

mission, military and civilian alike. When we say the best, we

mean the best in the entire Federal sector.

In that spirit, AFGE Council 214 and AFMC work in partnership. Together we have committed to develop and advocate the

means to fully implement our labor/management partnership and

to make AFMC an exciting, but productive and rewarding place for

people to live and work. AFMC is a huge, diversified and complex

command, as is the Council 214 bargaining unit structure. But we,

AFMC and AFGE have been and will continue to work in collaboration to meet our challenges now and in the future, both internal

challenges and external challenges, where appropriate.

AFMC may be able to do things independently, AFGE may be

able to do things independently, but the parties recognize that

working together when we have mutual interests that there is

probably not much of anything we cannot accomplish. That is our

race strategy, and we are committed to going the distance.

The instructions I received Friday in my invitation was it asked

me to testify on five issues. The first three issues refer to WrightPatterson Air Force Base specifically. I will defer my testimony to

the specifics at Wright-Patterson to Deputy Treasurer of AFGE

Local 1138, Deputy Treasurer Michael Durand. I will testify to the

same issues from an AFMC command-wide perspective with your

permission.

Senator VOINOVICH. Sure.

Mr. BLANCH. I base this perspective on my personal knowledge

and experience in the AFMC/AFGE partnership activities and faceto-face discussions with bargaining unit employees and local union

leadership. As an original charter member of the AFMC/AFGE

partnership council, I am now co-chair of that council, it has been

my privilege to visit every AFMC base that is represented by

AFGE Council——

Senator VOINOVICH. Tell me again your—the council is made up

of who again?

Mr. BLANCH. The AFMC, the AFGE Council 214 or the AFMC

partnership council?

Senator VOINOVICH. The partnership council.

Mr. BLANCH. The partnership council is made up of—we have a

local and a base manager from the air logistics center, product center, and a test center, then we have the chairman of the council,

two co-chairs of the council, and then we have personnel and the

vice president of the council.

Senator VOINOVICH. So it’s a labor/management council for better

labor relations, is that it?

Mr. BLANCH. Yes. It’s like a center director, a director from the

logistics center, a director from the test center, a center director

from the product center, then you have union leaders the same

way. That’s the command partnership council.

Senator VOINOVICH. OK.

Mr. BLANCH. That’s how it’s made up. Where was I?

Senator VOINOVICH. I’m sorry.

Mr. BLANCH. That’s OK. I base this perspective on my personal

knowledge and experience gained through the AFMC/AFGE partnership activities and face-to-face discussions with bargaining unit

employees and local union leadership.
33

1The prepared statement of Mr. Durand appears in the Appendix on page 175.

As an original charter member of the AFMC/AFGE partnership

council and now co-chair of that council, it has been my privilege

to visit every AFMC base that is represented by AFGE Council

214. Not only does our partnership council con-ops require the

council to rotate bases, but they also require that the partnership

council be provided a mission briefing at every base before we visit.

I’ve received this briefing at every base.

The partnership council is also provided a tour of each base to

allow us to see up close and personal on what exactly the employees of that particular base do, how they do it, how they are working

to improve the way they do it, and tell us how they feel about the

work they do. A valuable experience.

In my day-to-day dealings I also receive the rest of the story

through conversing with local union leadership and disgruntled

employees who may not feel comfortable airing their frustrations

and complaints during the partnership council tours. I am also frequently approached by management officials to share concerns. If

something is going on, either good or bad, that pertains to the bargaining unit, I hear about it sooner or later, one way or the other.

Based on the above, my testimony is submitted, and we’ll be happy

to address any questions you have.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you. Mr. Durand.

TESTIMONY OF MICHAEL DURAND,1 DEPUTY TREASURER,

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES

LOCAL 1138

Mr. DURAND. Yes, sir. Good afternoon to everybody, Senator. I’m

here on behalf of Pamela McGinnis, president of Local 1138, who

due to family illness could not attend. My name is Michael Durand.

I’m deputy treasurer of Local 1138 of the American Federation of

Government Employees AFL–CIO. Senator Voinovich, on behalf of

the members of Local 1138 I would like to thank you for the opportunity to make a statement today to you and the Members of the

oversight Subcommittee.

First I would like to address four major concerns that you outlined in your letter of April 21. And I would like to offer solutions

to these personnel challenges for your consideration.

First, it is my opinion that the civilian workforce at the WrightPatterson Air Force Base has been severely demoralized because of

the continuing reduction in force which we have been subjected to

nearly every year for the past decade. This is especially true among

the younger population who no longer see employment at WrightPatterson as a long-term option.

This continuing downsizing affects how they view their future. It

affects how they perform their jobs. It affects their motivation because opportunities for advancement become fewer with each surplus action. And in better times they would be on a fast track.

Today their government careers are dying on the vine.

Second, it is my perception that the DOD 2001–2002 fiscal year

authorization bill which offered early retirement and separation

incentives gutted the civilian workforce of its knowledge base. Furthermore, in conjunction with the downsizing, the remaining em-
34

ployees have been stressed by the additional workload imposed on

them and upset once again by the lack of promotional opportunity

and mobility in their careers.

Third, the proposed reduction for fiscal year 2003 and 2004 will

continue this cycle of despair. This is the worst time, as we ponder

our fate, before the first wave of notices are sent out. The question

begins will I lose my job this round or just transfer again. Will I

be downgraded this time. Managers and supervisors worry about

losing their key employees, the ones with the most knowledge, the

most dedication. They also face the possibility of being displaced,

downgraded, or laid off themselves.

Every reduction in force I have witnessed has created an atmosphere of complete turmoil and confusion in spite of the fact that it

has become an annual ritual at Wright-Patterson. It just gets

worse, not better.

In a memorandum dated October 25, 2002, the Air Force Materiel Command announced the new reductions, with the caveat that

there is virtually no chance that the projections will decrease, but

decisions by the Air Force may very well increase the command’s

total share of the 2004 reduction mandate as well as those of the

out years. That’s hardly encouraging news for the workforce here.

Fourth, possible changes in the law that would enhance the Department of Defense’s ability to manage its civilian workforce

should include the following: A, require agencies to identify what

happens to the workload from positions subject to proposed surplus

action. For example, will the work be distributed to other persons

of like kind and grade? If not, what effect will eliminating the

workload have on the mission of this organization?

B, required payoffs and voluntary retirement incentives to be

separate from the downsizing process. Vacancies resulting from incentives, usually targeted for the older population near retirement

age, will provide promotional opportunity for the remaining workforce. This would have a positive effect on morale and offset negative impact of surplus action. If surplus actions are deemed necessary, they should be determined by factors other than the fact

that a position was voluntarily vacated by the incumbent.

I would like to discuss a collateral issue that is directly related

to workforce morale and stability for your consideration. It is the

issue of contract services. During the past decade, the Pentagon

has decreased its civilian workforce by nearly 300,000 while increasing its cost of contract services by 40 percent.

I would like to propose the following legislation to provide a level

playing field for the civilian workforce when our jobs are on the

chopping block. One, place a moratorium on contracting out jobs

traditionally performed by civilians until an accounting is complete

which identifies the number of contract employees which have been

hired to replace civilian employees, the cost of such contracts, and

the work being performed. Statistics from this database should be

accessible to the public as well as other governmental agencies,

labor organizations, the media, etc. The civilian workforce should

be allowed to bid on these contracts as they are renewed.

Two, free agencies from privatization quotas, whether self-imposed or imposed by the Office of Management and Budget. This

will take the pressure off of agency managers to contract out serv-
35

1The prepared statement of Ronald D. Wine, President and CEO, Dayton Development Coalition submitted by Mr. Nauseef appears in the Appendix on page 179.

ices that are more efficiently performed in-house by knowledgeable

career employees.

Three, allow Federal employees to compete for their own jobs as

well as for the new work in order to save money for taxpayers. This

will eliminate the discretion by DOD managers to simply give most

work of contractors without—to contractors, excuse me, without

any private or public competition.

Four, make the competition process more equitable and more accountable by providing Federal employees with the same legal

standing enjoyed by contractors.

In closing, I believe the Air Force should slow down its

downsizing in view of what is happening nationally with all the

challenges facing our country, the constant threat of more terrorist

attacks, and a possible pre-emptive attack on Iraq by our military

forces. It defies reason for the Air Force to carry out its arbitrary

manpower reductions for the current fiscal year and beyond. During this time of uncertainty and insecurity, downsizing the civilian

workforce should be put on hold.

Furthermore, more than 5,000 Federal employees have been

called into active duty and deployed to overseas locations. How

many of these 5,000 civilians work at Wright-Patterson? Who will

do their job while they are gone? Will the absence from the workplace be considered in the current downsizing equation? These

questions need to be addressed before any further manpower reductions are even considered.

For now, I thank you for listening and giving me the opportunity

to make this statement on behalf of the members of AFGE Local

1138. I hope we can do this again. Thank you, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you, Mr. Durand. Mr. Nauseef.

TESTIMONY OF J.P. NAUSEEF, VICE PRESIDENT, AEROSPACE

DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY, DAYTON DEVELOPMENT COALITION ON BEHALF OF RONALD D. WINE, PRESIDENT & CEO,

DAYTON DEVELOPMENT COALITION

Mr. NAUSEEF. Mr. Chairman, I’m presenting testimony on behalf

of Ronald Wine, president and CEO of the coalition who was scheduled to speak, but, unfortunately, due to some family health concerns Ron is attending to those issues with his family right now.

Ron very much wanted to be here to present his testimony personally, and he sends his sincere regrets, Mr. Chairman. I ask that

Ron’s full statement be included in the record in its entirety, and

I will summarize his remarks for you.1

Senator Voinovich, on behalf of the coalition and the entire Dayton business community and the 12-county area that we serve, we

would like to welcome you back to Wright-Patterson Air Force and

the Dayton region. It is an honor for us to have you here holding

these hearings in our community. Thank you very much.

Ron wanted to extend his personal thank you to you, Senator

Voinovich, for holding this hearing on the topic of the Defense civilian workforce. The coalition is deeply grateful for your consistent

leadership in looking out for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and
36

the thousands of talented and dedicated men and women who work

here.

This is a wonderful time to visit Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

and the Air Force Museum as we make final preparations for our

celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers first

flight.

So great is the magnitude of this base on our region’s economy

that statistics barely tell the story. Over 20,000 civil service, military, and contract employees work on the base. Putting it another

way, about one out every 18 jobs in the entire metropolitan area

is physically located within the fence of Wright-Patterson Air Force

Base. The base is by far the largest employer in the metropolitan

area. In fact, it is almost three times larger than the second largest

employer.

Wright-Patterson is more than just a national defense asset and

an economic engine to this region. It represents a solid base of citizens in our community. Its workers contribute to local charities

through the combined Federal campaign, they are Boy Scout troop

leaders, hospital volunteers, and school tutors. And because of

Wright-Patterson, the Dayton area has one of the highest concentrations of Federal civil service workers outside of the Washington, DC area.

The workforce of the base is very special. It’s a highly stable,

educated and active group of motivated people. They are the kind

of workers every community wants. Few places are as lucky as the

Dayton region to have these workers. That is why we care so much

about Wright-Patterson and its people, especially its civilian workforce.

Not only are civil service employees at Wright-Patterson large in

number, they are diverse in function. That means that if there is

a problem with any aspects of civil service law or regulation, that

problem may show up here. In fact, Wright-Patterson may be a microcosm of many of the challenges that face civil service reform.

We are proud that Wright-Patterson probably has more employees in science and engineer classifications than any other single

Federal installation. Recent pilot programs authorized by Congress,

again with your help, Mr. Chairman, have made important contributions to workforce flexibility in these important areas.

A large challenge in our community is the sheer decline in workers. Through the 1980’s the workforce at Wright-Patterson increased slowly, hitting a peak of 30,000 civilian and military employees in 1989. We have seen a steep, steady decline since then.

We understand that Dayton’s loss is largely the result of America

winning the Cold War and facing a requirement for a smaller military. This is good for our Nation, and we embrace the change.

Still, we are concerned that the cuts might be too deep. Hiring

freezes and last-hired, first-fired rules have created an aging workforce. We risk losing enormous institutional memory when large

groups of our senior employees leave at once. Managers need the

flexibility to give workers a healthy balance of a combination of

young vigor and senior wisdom.

Thanks to your efforts, Mr. Chairman, Congress began to tackle

this problem a few years ago, and some progress has been made.

Mr. Chairman, the title of this hearing, An Overlooked Asset: The
37

Defense Civilian Workforce, is all too appropriate from a national

perspective. However, I can assure you that here in the Dayton

area we are proud of our civilian workers’ unselfish contributions

they make to our national defense. They are not overlooked by our

local leaders, nor by our representatives in Washington.

Thank you again for giving the coalition the opportunity to express our support for you and for these important issues. Thank

you for your leadership and dedicated service, especially for holding

this important hearing here at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,

the birthplace and future of aviation.

Senator VOINOVICH. Thank you very much. As you may know,

one of my concerns has been what I refer to as mindless

downsizing. And what I’m picking up from you, Mr. Durand, is that

the downsizing continues. Do you have any members that work in

Dr. Russo’s shop?

Dr. RUSSO. The air base wing.

Mr. DURAND. The air base wing.

Senator VOINOVICH. Are you familiar with what’s going on in Dr.

Russo’s shop in terms of taking advantage of the legislation that

we provided? The purpose of it was to allow him to shape his workforce, meaning that he could provide voluntary early retirement or

voluntary early separation payments, but that rather than having

less people, those slots would remain open so that he could bring

in new people to deal with the challenges that he has and to get,

in some instances, some expertise that he needs that he doesn’t

have in his current workforce, but it wasn’t meant to have less people. Is that your observation?

Mr. DURAND. I would like to say that mostly what I’ve seen in

the last couple years a reduction has occurred, but it has come in

and is slow in coming, but most of the positions that have been reduced by employees leaving the workforce has not been filled at the

moment and people that are staying there are right now gathering

and doing the job of those vacancies, and it’s kind of a morale issue

at this point.

Senator VOINOVICH. So your impression is that they’re still losing

people and they’re not bringing new people in?

Mr. DURAND. They’re trying to get people in, but, sir, at the moment it’s not that quick. The turnover is a little bit more. We have

lost more folks than we have brought in at the time, and I’m talking about my organization at the moment.

Senator VOINOVICH. Yes. Some of the people that you’re losing

occurs through attrition. Many of them are retiring, correct?

Mr. DURAND. That’s correct.

Senator VOINOVICH. Do you sense a crisis in retirement and loss

of institutional knowledge?

Mr. DURAND. Yes, we do. We do sense that there is a crisis of

knowledgeable people walking out the door and not passing that information on to the younger generation walking in.

Senator VOINOVICH. Mr. Blanch, you’re familiar with what’s

going on at various places your council represents. I notice you had

some very complimentary words for General Lyles and his operation here. I know that Bobby Harnage has a lot of respect for General Lyles, and I’ve talked with him about it. He challenged me one

of these days to come out here and spend some time with him and
38

with General Lyles. But I like your observation. What we’re trying

to do is reshape, not downsize. And does it look to you like it’s

downsizing and not reshaping?

Mr. BLANCH. Well, we went through the decade of downsizing in

the 1990’s and then we went through the fiasco with the privatization in place, and we got all that behind us, we got that done, that

was a lot of work to make that happen, so a lot of——

Senator VOINOVICH. That was the challenge the previous administration cited, you had to get rid of 57,000 people and outsource

or downsize.

Mr. BLANCH. Right. Specifically the ALC’s were only running 60

percent capacity. It was killing us on labor rates. We went through

all that, and my observation command-wide is we’re at the point

now where we’ve kind of stabilized. I’m talking a command-wide

look here. What I see, especially in the Air Logistics Centers, we

are in a hiring mode out there.

Senator VOINOVICH. What?

Mr. BLANCH. Hiring people. We’re having trouble, AFGE, and

this is one thing that we agree on in this partnership, we agree the

hiring process needs to be fixed. And we’re seeing it out there in

the air logistics centers. They need people desperately and they

can’t get them. And if they do get them, it takes way too long, it’s

just way too hard. As far as I see that, we’re at the point now

where we’re kind of stabilized, we’re looking more at right sizing

more command-wide.

Senator VOINOVICH. And has your union done any calculation—

were you here for the first panel’s testimony?

Mr. BLANCH. No, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. OK. We got into the announcement that

they made to get rid of 13,000 people throughout the Air Force.

And has your observation been that since that’s been announced

that it’s impacting on your membership at these various facilities

that you’re responsible for?

Mr. BLANCH. Well, that gets into just the arbitrary manpower

cuts just announced recently.

Senator VOINOVICH. Yes.

Mr. BLANCH. The manpower cuts that were announced, that’s

what you’re talking about. When I was first briefed on that I was

told the only base that was going to lose positions or lose jobs was

Wright-Patterson. And the reason being the air logistics centers

which we were in a hiring mode, I was told Hill Air Force Base at

that time was sitting on 800 vacancies they needed to fill and

couldn’t fill.

We’ve got a new modern personnel system that just came on

board, it has got a lot of bugs in it, they’re doing a lot of workarounds, it’s just real hard. And I was informed that Wright-Patterson would be the only base that would actually take any cuts.

Everybody else would do it through attritions and by absorbing vacancies.

My position was that we need to take these vacancies because I

assumed that if Hill Air Force Base had vacancies, the other ALC’s

would have had vacancies, so it was my position to absorb those

and to use vacancies that we have at other ALC’s so we don’t lose

people. It didn’t make sense to me to let people at one AFMC base
39

with years of service out of the gate while we’re trying to hire other

people off the street at other bases.

And my understanding is that’s what we did in 2003, that’s the

approach we took, and so there wouldn’t be any cuts in 2003. We

have 2004 and beyond coming up.

Senator VOINOVICH. Are you familiar with the level of employment here in the last couple of years in terms of your membership?

Have you lost members or have you gained members?

Mr. BLANCH. I would say as far as potential members in the last

couple of years——

Senator VOINOVICH. Yes.

Mr. BLANCH. I would say we’ve probably been pretty stable. A lot

of what Dr. Russo said about the workforce shaping initiatives and

stuff, these are professional series employees. I understand the

challenges they have in getting these folks. We don’t represent

those folks. They’re not in the bargaining unit. But we talk about

them a lot in the partnership council activities and things like that.

I see the challenges they have to get these college graduates on

board. But as far as the bargaining unit, like I said, I’m not as familiar with it probably as much as Mike would be because I have

the whole command. I might defer that specifically to Wright-Patterson to him.

Senator VOINOVICH. Dr. Asch, you’ve been observing it. What is

your appraisal?

Dr. ASCH. It being?

Senator VOINOVICH. In terms of they have these new authorities

that we granted them, 9,000 slots, and they started to utilize them.

Is it working out as we envisioned, that is providing early retirement, early separation and are we reshaping, in your opinion?

Dr. ASCH. I don’t know if we’re reshaping to the extent that there

is a requirement—some people are going out the door and they’re

being replaced with skilled people who—or with people who have

more appropriate skills, which is my impression of the intent of

having workforce shaping tools. What we know is that these incentives are effective in getting them out. Whether or not they’re

achieving the workforce that’s going to make the mission by hiring

or whatever, that I don’t know.

Senator VOINOVICH. So you haven’t decided. You know that the

tools do work though?

Dr. ASCH. That they do work?

Senator VOINOVICH. That people do take advantage of them. If I

recall from your testimony, you said that a lot of it had to do with

people just figured out they’re financially better off taking advantage of it and do it.

Dr. ASCH. Not everybody who was offered it takes it because obviously people make these decisions for a range of reasons, but

there is a marked change in their behavior as a result of financial

incentives.

Senator VOINOVICH. There is always the argument—we did early

retirement when I was mayor and as governor, and you’re supposed to end up with less cost. But if I’m not mistaken, it’s not that

much less and you have to weigh that against the institutional

knowledge that’s going out the door, so you got to do it very

carefully——
40

Dr. ASCH. That’s right.

Senator VOINOVICH [continuing]. So you make sure that you don’t

leave yourself without the people that you need to get the job done.

Dr. ASCH. Or conversely, there will be separation incentives

towards maybe mid career, even more junior workers sometimes—

for example, I’m thinking of the separation incentive for military

personnel. And if you do that, you can change the mix that way

too. So I agree with your point, which is you can lose the productivity of those people, but at the same time—the way you do it will

affect the age mix as well, so you have to be sensitive to that.

Senator VOINOVICH. Was it Mr. Blanch or Mr. Durand that commented on the fact that downsizing has impacted on the current

workforce, that they’re a little demoralized because of it?

Mr. DURAND. Yes, I did, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. And from your observation, has that impacted on the ability to recruit? We were talking at the last hearing about the fact that when people come to work for an outfit,

they would like to have some idea of where they’re starting and

where they could end up and the kind of work that’s there and so

forth because that’s something to which they’re going to devote a

lot of their life. And have you observed that there is a lot more uncertainty? How long have you been with the Federal service, Mr.

Durand?

Mr. DURAND. Twenty-three years.

Senator VOINOVICH. Twenty-three years. And this downsizing

really took place during the 1990’s?

Mr. DURAND. Yes, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. Do you want to comment again in terms of

recruiting new people, on the effect of this downsizing on the government’s ability to get new people to come to work for them?

Mr. DURAND. No, not in recruiting new people, I’m not saying

that it is affecting it. I’m just saying they do bring new tools, and

Dr. Russo has done a very good job in promoting some of those, and

to come up with tools they also have to meet organizational goals.

The organizational goals are kind of molded into us when we come

here and we have years of experience of what the goals are. When

the tools are brought in, a new generation is brought in, they have

to be taught these goals, these are the directions we are going to.

That’s all I’m saying.

All the generations are here, and they’re almost out the door,

probably in retirement age. What I’m saying, those are here and

they’re saying, OK, the tools are here, but they’re more oriented to

the younger generation, what about me, what am I going to contribute, I’m contributing here, I’m still here, I’m not dead. That’s

what they’re looking at. They want to contribute. But the offer

sometimes either doesn’t get to them, the information, like Dr.

Asch said, is not disseminated to them. But that’s basically what

I’m referring to.

Senator VOINOVICH. You observe that it’s a problem. Do you

think that the hiring process is archaic in terms of bringing people

in?

Mr. DURAND. I apologize, what was archaic?

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, that it’s very slow. Are people frustrated?
41

Mr. DURAND. Yes.

Senator VOINOVICH. Let’s just start off, you have people who

want to come to work for the Federal Government, for instance

here, they go to the Web site. Do you hear any comments about

why it takes so long for approvals to come through——

Mr. DURAND. Yes.

Senator VOINOVICH [continuing]. Or it took so long for me to get

my approval after I actually got the offer? Any of that?

Mr. DURAND. I’ve heard some situations where people have said

I got hired, but I haven’t seen the paperwork, they’re still waiting

for the paperwork. It doesn’t occur until several weeks or months

probably. I’ve heard that situation, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. Mr. Blanch, do you want to comment on

that?

Mr. BLANCH. Sure. What I’ve seen is like we just came into this

new personnel system, it’s called the modern personnel system and

we talked a lot about it before it happened, they kicked it around

on the smaller AFMC bases, and it was working pretty good, so

they wanted to try it at a big AFMC base, Hill Air Force Base.

They turned that system on, and it has just caused a lot of problems.

What I’m seeing out there is, and I’m getting this from the SES’s

on down, the system is really hurting the mission. It’s really we

need to hire people, we can’t hire people.

So what they’re doing is they’re going out and hiring a contractor

to work for us to subsidize it. These contracts are coming on board

working about 5 or 6 months, they get up to speed on systems,

whatever the systems are they’re working on, they’re told go apply

and they are getting hired as Federal employees.

It’s interesting that I was told these contractors are costing $8

more than the hourly rate of pay over the long run, but that’s the

problem I’m seeing out there at those centers. It is like I said,

these are not engineering and scientist jobs. These are actually just

blue collar type people. And that’s a big issue out there. But interesting enough, these contract employees, while they make a little

more money with the contractor, they are jumping to Federal service. They want to work for Uncle Sam.

Senator VOINOVICH. I’ve talked to Bobby Harnage a little bit

about this, but it seems to me, first of all, one of our witnesses, I

think it was Mr. Chu, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel

and Readiness, indicated DOD has about 320,000 military people

doing jobs that civilians should be doing. And the reason they’re

doing them is the flexibilities that are connected with the military

side are so much broader and better than what you have on the

civilian side.

Second of all, I’ve heard that because of the frustration that

many of these people have with the system, many times the temptation is just to try and outsource the jobs because it’s too much

of a hassle to try and get the civilians on board to do them. So they

say, I just can’t hire them, so I’m going to look around and

outsource the work because it’s a lot easier to do that than to try

to go through this complex system of trying to bring people on. Do

you want to comment on that?
42

Mr. BLANCH. That’s one thing, like I said, we’ve talked about.

We’ve identified that at AFMC–AFGE Council 214 as a mutual interest. That’s something we want to work together on. We agree

that that’s a problem, that’s one of the issues we’ve set. Yes, we

agree there has got to be a better way to get these people on board

and up to speed. It’s nice to agree with management.

Senator VOINOVICH. Do you believe there are governmental jobs

that are being outsourced that should remain? And there is a big

question about outsourcing, I didn’t get into it with Mr. Dominguez, but the whole issue of outsourcing these jobs, is it——

Mr. BLANCH. It’s my concern with outsourcing the jobs, I’ve

heard core for the last 10 years, core workload. Nobody can tell me

what core workload is. I have real concerns with national security.

You start outsourcing these weapons systems to who knows who or

where, they have foreign ownership, they’re subject to labor strikes,

they’re subject to go broke. There are just all kinds of things.

AFGE believes that national security, these major weapons systems should be maintained by Federal employees on Federal installations because we just can’t afford the risk.

Senator VOINOVICH. In other words, you believe they should be

more conservative in their definition of core responsibilities and

that in too many instances activities that should be defined as

core—is there a definition that is used commonly in the civil service?

Mr. BLANCH. I’ve never heard a definition of what is core. When

we were doing authorizations in places like McClelland, people

were calling and asking me what is core. I said I don’t know where

you draw the line at core workload. To me core workload is workload that national security focuses on.

Senator VOINOVICH. So we need a better definition of core. Would

you agree with that?

Mr. BLANCH. Yes, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. OK. Second of all, if an agency is thinking

about outsourcing work, what kind of competition do they have?

For example, when I was governor, we gave our unions the opportunity to bid for jobs that we considered to be not core or not governmental in nature, such as security and cleaning. But we did

give our State employees an opportunity to bid for them to show

that they could do them better.

Are you given an opportunity to compete for this type of work?

And if you are, do you think you’re getting a fair shake?

Mr. BLANCH. I spoke with Jim Hansen, he was on the Armed

Services Committee before he retired, and we talked about Hill Air

Force Base where I came out of, and that was his thing. We could

do this in, I believe, the Federal sector, Federal DOD workers could

go in there and not only compete for the work to do, but compete

for outside work. I think we could go compete at Delta Airline for

their landing gear corps. But those things are not out there to

allow us to do that.

Senator VOINOVICH. So you’re telling me you think your guys

should be able to compete for work that somebody is doing in the

private sector, and that you could bring it back in and do as good

a job or better?
43

Mr. BLANCH. Yes, I think we can do that. As far as for competition, I think it hurts us. We have so many rules and things we

have to account for that. It makes it real hard. We have MEO’s.

The MEO’s, you got MEO, it just really hurts you, trying to do

what you’ve already got to do. Once you got it on the table, you

mention these MEO things, they say hey, you’re good, we’re going

through a war here, we really got to get into this right now.

So like I said, like Michael said, the stress, the stress, the stress,

to put in for that job, we got to, I think we can go in, and if we

had the equal opportunity to compete with these jobs, we got a fair

shot. We’re ready, willing and able, especially AFMC employees.

Senator VOINOVICH. From my experience I’ve seen it both ways.

When I was Mayor of Cleveland that we outsourced our data processing. They did a disastrous job, and we were way behind because

they billed us for their cost of developing new systems.

So I had a private sector firm conduct a management study, and

they said you ought to take this work back in-house. We did and

it was one of the best things that we ever did. So it works both

ways. But you think that overall we should have more fairness

than we have?

Mr. BLANCH. Yes, I do.

Senator VOINOVICH. Yes. Are any of you familiar with the new

NSPS, the new National Security Personnel System that’s been

promoted by the Defense Department?

Dr. ASCH. Some of it.

Senator VOINOVICH. I would be interested in your comments on

it.

Dr. ASCH. I think what I would say, like everything you said, the

devil is in the details. I think there are things that work very well

in the civil service, and some have worked in the past, but it’s not

fully effective.

Senator VOINOVICH. It’s what?

Dr. ASCH. It’s not fully effective or as effective as it could be. Especially when one considers all of the factors that define a successful human resource system. The current system doesn’t have all

those areas.

For example, there are the issues of whether managers have discretion over resources, are there incentives for performance, are

there adequate resources for policies that could make a difference?

These are areas where the civil service isn’t quite where it should

be. But, of course, there are also things that have been done well.

And I think there has been so much attention by such a diverse

array of groups. So many commissions and study groups of all sorts

have looked at the system and consistently said there are some serious problems with the civil service system.

So looking at the DOD proposal, I think it has the potential to

be terrific and provide the flexibility that is needed—the ability to

introduce innovative methods, be quicker at hiring, those things.

The plan would have those potentials. But that said, when you look

at past examples of, for example, the demonstration projects and

so forth, one of the conclusions, and I would recommend reading

the Naval Research Advisory Committee for the science technology

community, the conclusion is that the flexibilities were underutilized, it didn’t meet its potential.
44

And some of the reasons for why that was the case was excessive

bureaucracy, the need to get approval from OPM, and OPM having

concerns about some of the more radical ideas. They felt that they

did not have a system that was supporting the efforts. And so looking at the DOD proposal, it certainly is focused on many of the

areas that commissions consistently identify as problem areas. But

it needs to recognize that if not implemented well, it could be a real

disaster and attention needs to be put to such things as including

the employees, making sure they’re not going to be hurt by the

process, that’s critical, not having arrangements with OPM so that

not everything has to be approved. On the other hand, OPM needs

to have oversight.

Senator VOINOVICH. So you think it goes too far in zapping out

OPM?

Dr. ASCH. I don’t know that.

Senator VOINOVICH. Are you familiar with it?

Dr. ASCH. In general terms.

Senator VOINOVICH. There is some criticism that they’re really

trying to get out from OPM.

Dr. ASCH. I think what I’ll respond to is that commissions consistently find that the need for approval by OPM has hindered real

progress in many initiatives that have the potential to be very positive. And so it’s a fine line between giving people the authority to

make decisions without having to go to OPM, and yet at the same

time recognize that oversight is important, clarity is important,

transparency, all those things need to be there too. So I think there

is a fine line that needs to be walked there.

Senator VOINOVICH. I’ve been working on this issue for over 4

years. Last Congress I drafted the Federal Workforce Improvement

Act, and included about half of it in the Homeland Security Act.

That legislation called for elevating the importance of human resources management.

A question I have is, if you don’t have good human resource people already in the Department, then how can you outsource the

personnel function?

When I was governor we did outsource it because the Department of State services, frankly, got in the way, so we let them go

ahead and do it and they had to follow certain guidelines. So if you

take this on, I think you will agree, you really have to do some

work in this area to make it work well. A question I asked the

other witnesses that were here was about going to a pay banding

system with performance pay. I’m going to ask you this question

as well. Tell me if you’re not familiar with it and I’ll understand,

but if you’ve observed that aspect of the Federal workforce, do you

think that they’re capable of doing pay for performance.

Dr. ASCH. How many of the human resource managers?

Senator VOINOVICH. Yes. One of the concerns that we have is if

you go to pay for performance, the people that do the performance

evaluations really have to know what they’re doing.

Dr. ASCH. That’s correct.

Senator VOINOVICH. That is hard work. You have to be trained

for the issue. Is the infrastructure in place in order to get that done

inside the Federal Government or in the Department of Defense?
45

Dr. ASCH. I’m more familiar with the Department of Defense civil

service, but I think that it is possible to go to that system. It could

be very costly. It’s very costly in terms of people’s time to do a

meaningful performance review, especially in the kind of work that

people do in the civil service because much of it is difficult to quantify. How do you quantify good ideas? It’s very difficult.

So my position is that it is possible to have a pay for performance

system. It won’t necessarily be in the form of you did a good job

this year, I’m going to give you a raise. It could be in the form of—

I’m not recommending this, but just to give an example of a system

that does work pretty well is the military pay system where promotion is very important? It’s essentially pay for performance.

So you can structure pay and compensation in a way that provides incentives for performance that doesn’t—maybe where you’re

reviewing performance not every year, but maybe every few years.

I’m not recommending the military system. I’m saying it is possible

to design meaningful performance incentives in a governmental situation.

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, I think probably one of the reasons

why they want to do it is that they’ve had some good experience

with the uniformed service, and they think we can maybe transfer

it over.

Dr. ASCH. But it will take work. My sense is that infrastructure

isn’t there today. I think that given the lack of incentives right now

for performance, basically where the performance incentives exist

in the civil service is that the civil service hires really good people

who are motivated and want to work in the public service. But it

would be nice also to reward them when they do perform well, and

that is missing. And so the infrastructure isn’t quite there, but

maybe it should be. In fact, I think it should be.

Senator VOINOVICH. You would have to get on with that before

you just go full blown with it.

Dr. ASCH. I think it’s important to have a meaningful plan and

then be willing to tweak the plan. I do a lot of research on the active military. When you consider what happened in the move from

the draft to the all volunteer force, what a radical change in personnel policy that was. And, yes, it was rocky at first, but with attention to pay raises, introduction of bonuses, revamping——

Senator VOINOVICH. Where is this again?

Dr. ASCH. I’m talking about the active duty military in the uniformed service.

Senator VOINOVICH. OK.

Dr. ASCH. We moved from the draft to an all volunteer force in

the 1970’s. My point is exactly an example of a radical change in

personnel policy that wasn’t done successfully at first, it was rocky,

but it evolved and it improved, and so I think it’s important to

have a good plan in place and then have the willingness to come

back. And I think that’s an important role for Congress is to say,

OK, how is this working, and actually in the legislation include

data collection, and say we’re going to have evaluations. It’s interesting going back to the military example, the institutionalized

quadrennial review of military compensation that occurs every 4

years. DOD has to review its compensation system. So institutions

were put in place in the 1970’s so that it wasn’t like we’re changing
46

the law and off it goes. Rather we’re going to monitor this very

carefully and make changes.

Senator VOINOVICH. My complaint, General Lyles, and it’s too

often, 3 years——

Dr. ASCH. Is not enough.

Senator VOINOVICH. They ought to look at giving him a little

more time. Mike, would you want to comment on this?

Mr. BLANCH. I can tell you from the bargaining unit perspective

one of the most controversial issues we have out there is performance appraisals. I mean probably half the grievances filed in this

command every year are over performance appraisals. We have

Chapter 43 in place now. We have a system in place that generates

so many complaints.

Senator VOINOVICH. What is it again?

Mr. BLANCH. Chapter 43, the performance appraisal system.

That’s something they want to get rid of in the new personnel system. They would get rid of that. We have that in place. That is

something——

Senator VOINOVICH. I’m sorry, maybe I should know more about

it. Is that one of the waivers that one of the agencies received and

they’re doing it?

Mr. BLANCH. That’s what’s waived in the Homeland Security Act.

DOD is going for the same thing to get rid of that that people go

through.

Senator VOINOVICH. In other words, you have some members

where they’ve waived that and you have performance evaluations.

Mr. BLANCH. No. We have that in place now, and we use that.

That’s a tool that the employees have to make sure they get a fair

appraisal, they have to use that system and the collective bargaining agreement and if you take that, that takes away from employees and you give that sole authority to the supervisors to determine if he or she moves up or down or anything else.

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, let me just ask you this, do you think

the supervisors that you deal with are trained enough to——

Mr. BLANCH. That’s exactly my point. That system now is a good

objective system in place, and they have a lot of trouble administrating this system, which I think because it’s right there in the

same place, and like I said, it’s one of the hardest things is the supervisor, and I feel for them because no matter what they do it’s

not good enough, so it’s like——

Senator VOINOVICH. The real question——

Mr. BLANCH. What we have now is they have a real hard time

with what we’re looking to replace. They’re going to have a harder

time with it.

Senator VOINOVICH. Does the union have any information about

training people in doing performance evaluations?

Mr. BLANCH. No. We think the problem is in our line of business,

the Council 214 people—you’re a good employee and stuff, and

we’ve talked about this again—it’s a partnership council issue,

we’re working this thing, OK, you’re a good mechanic or you’re a

good whatever you are, and tomorrow you’re a supervisor and

that’s how it happens. You might get a 1 week training course, but

supervision is—it’s an art, it’s not——
47

Senator VOINOVICH. I’ll tell you something, I really would like

you to go back and get additional information on this. I’m going to

see Bobby Harnage tomorrow, I would really like to get into the

issue of how much training people actually receive in the civilian

side on doing performance evaluations.

Mr. BLANCH. I think we could probably answer this from this

command because we’ve been working that at the partnership

council. I think we can probably get you that from this command

real soon.

Senator VOINOVICH. I know that when I spoke to you about a

year ago, you said you were working on something like that, but

I would really like to know how you’re going about getting it done

and the time it takes to get it done.

General LYLES. We’ll provide that information to you, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. Great.

Mr. BLANCH. The next biggest issue in AFMC would be disciplinary type actions. We are really concerned with waiving Chapter

75. We have real big concerns there because we are very active

with locals and in processing disciplinary actions, and sometimes

they’re warranted, sometimes they’re not.

Senator VOINOVICH. Is the process expedited?

Mr. BLANCH. To my understanding it pretty much goes away.

You lose your right.

Senator VOINOVICH. I see, but it goes away.

Mr. BLANCH. Right. We have an expedited procedure in place at

AFMC.

Senator VOINOVICH. For hearing grievances.

Mr. BLANCH. We worked our grievance procedure, we’ve shortened that up substantially. We’ve stressed to people here for grievances to move them fast, let’s get these things out of our way. To

freshen everybody’s minds, in the old days it would take months

and months and months to get through the grievance procedure

and we’ve taken it through collaboration, we know, let’s get these

problems behind us and let people get back to work because the

longer this goes on the worse it gets.

Senator VOINOVICH. Right. Let me ask you another question on

the grievance procedure.

Mr. BLANCH. Right.

Senator VOINOVICH. How familiar do you think the supervisors

are with the grievance procedure? We regularly hear from people

that you have poor performers and can’t get rid of them.

Mr. BLANCH. That’s just amazing to me. I’ve been a union steward for a long time, and I can tell you in this command and I get

into that——

Senator VOINOVICH. Do what?

Mr. BLANCH [continuing]. With the OPM director. I don’t know

where this came from because I represent literally hundreds and

I know lots and lots of people just like me. If you are not—if you

are unacceptable in your performance on any one critical element

on your performance plan, you are unacceptable and you are given

90 days to get up to speed or you’re out the gate or downgraded

seriously. My experience is you’re out the gate. I mean, we just

don’t mess around with that. And I don’t know where this old
48

wives’ tale comes from that it takes 5 years or whatever to fire a

Federal employee.

Senator VOINOVICH. Yes.

Mr. BLANCH. If you do something wrong at AFMC, you are held

accountable, so why do we need this flexibility. You’ve got it right

there. And, if you violate a security regulation, you’re out the gate,

just like that. It happens. I don’t know where these things come

from.

Senator VOINOVICH. So your observation is that at the Air Force

Materiel Command the people who are in supervisory positions are

pretty knowledgeable about how the system works, they follow the

procedures, and if somebody is not doing what they’re supposed to

do, you think they’re gone?

Mr. BLANCH. My observation of the Air Force Materiel Command

is sometimes they’re a little overzealous.

Senator VOINOVICH. They’re what?

Mr. BLANCH. They’re a little overboard. I would say the person

needs some discipline, but you don’t need to fire him. But I would

say, yes, AFMC is very aggressive.

Senator VOINOVICH. It would be interesting to see the number of

grievances, some statistical evidence on the grievances and appeals

here versus some other parts of the Defense Department.

Mr. BLANCH. Yes.

Senator VOINOVICH. That’s good to hear. I’m not glad that they’re

running people out, but that they are familiar with the procedure.

My experience as mayor was that the city directors often complained that they couldn’t get rid of poor performers. So I talked

to the person that ran the civil service and the appeals process,

and it turned out they didn’t follow the rules. They have to follow

the rules and if they do what they’re supposed to do it would work

out. You know what, they went back and trained them, they started following the rules and the frustration ended. But the problem

was that most of them didn’t know the system and in some instances they were just too lazy to use the system. But you think

the system we have in place is fair?

Mr. BLANCH. I think it’s a real fair system. I’ll be frank with you,

I’ll have a new supervisor come in, an employee will do something

wrong, I’ll bring the employee over afterwards and say maybe your

boss screwed up procedurally here, but let me tell you something,

you got a job to do, so does that supervisor, and he is not going

to make the same mistake twice, and, I mean that’s the way it goes

down. And, yes, all the protections they need are out there, all the

tools they need are out there, they use them, and so I just don’t

understand why they need more.

Senator VOINOVICH. Does anyone else want to make a comment

on anything? Mr. Durand, you’re where the rubber meets the road.

Do you share his observations?

Mr. DURAND. Yes, I do share his observation. There is times, and

I haven’t been a union treasurer for a long time, so I apologize a

little bit of my ignorance on it, I do share his observation. I do realize that there is training to be involved and it all boils down to

that, both from the management side and both from the employee

sides. They both have to know what the advantages are, what the

disadvantages are, what you can do, what you cannot do. And once
49

they’re educated in the system, Dr. Asch was talking about the system you were referring to earlier, you have to learn both, it has to

be training, it has to be uniform, it has to be disbursed to the people so that they know what to expect.

Senator VOINOVICH. And do you think that that training, for the

most part, is going on so that people are trained for their responsibilities?

Mr. DURAND. Yes. I think the training is occurring.

Senator VOINOVICH. OK.

Dr. ASCH. Can I make one last suggestion? In addition to training, there also has to be an incentive for supervisors to give poor

evaluations when necessary and feel that they’re going to be

backed up when they give poor evaluations. So it’s partial—I mean

it’s the typical argument there are lot of policies on the books that

are the right policies, but for some reason they’re pointing to the

training issue, which is, of course, critical, but another possibility

is what’s the incentive for them to use it?

I am an economist, there is big literature on how organizations,

particularly public organizations because it’s not a profit maximizing type of thing, the incentive of a supervisor is to make sure

the workers like them, and so they might not do things that a private sector supervisor would do. I’m not saying that’s the case here.

I’m just saying there is an incentive for supervisors not to give poor

evaluations or to follow through with them.

Senator VOINOVICH. Well, it’s interesting. David Walker, who is

comptroller general, has commented that in their studies on the

performance evaluations, most of the time it’s always very good.

Dr. ASCH. Everybody is above average, yes.

Senator VOINOVICH. And it’s either because it’s easier or you

don’t want to——

Dr. ASCH. I think that’s very telling.

Senator VOINOVICH [continuing]. Have the discomfort of saying to

somebody what you’re doing. Then, of course, there are some that

are arguing for a flexible pay band, or broad banding. This is particularly important in the senior executive service where 70 percent

of the people earn the same amount of money.

Dr. ASCH. Right. And actually what’s to prevent them from going

to the top of the pay band. I mean what incentive does a supervisor

have to control costs? So the incentives of the managers and the

supervisors in this process are pretty critical, especially when

you’re in a public organization where it’s harder to measure productivity. There is no cost bottom line, like you would have in a

private sector concern.

Senator VOINOVICH. I’m going to ask you one last question, it’s

for Mr. Blanch and Mr. Durand, do you know what total quality

management is? Do you know what that term means?

Mr. BLANCH. I worked on that a few years ago. Yes, I’m familiar

with the term.

Senator VOINOVICH. It’s primarily about demonstrating principles

of empowering your workers to become involved in decisionmaking

and developing self-improvement teams of excellence and continuous improvement. Do you have any experience?

Mr. BLANCH. Yes. I’ve had a lot of experience in that. In fact,

AFMC is working on basically TQM. It’s lean logistics.
50

Senator VOINOVICH. Lean what?

Mr. BLANCH. Lean logistics. It’s a new program that’s come on

board. It started down in Warner Robins Air Force Base. They’ve

gone to the people with all these crazy things, all these things—

get these things out of my way, it’s just basically a common sense

thing, but it’s going to the people, the people are like the customer,

to know what that customer wants and they know how to get it

though now, to get it fast to them. I believe AFMC, we’ve been kind

of practicing that one way or another. Sometimes I don’t think we

get through with one situation or before we start another one. It

was like there was always something going on in this command.

Somebody is always looking for a better way to do it.

Senator VOINOVICH. Yes. Do you think overall that your members

are involved in decisionmaking and asked how they think they can

do their jobs better?

Mr. BLANCH. That depends on the leadership at like General

Lyles’ leadership. He put the word out, but you get this impermeable layer, you get the word out, you have to go through all the

layers of management before it gets down. Sometimes I see it working great, at some bases they’ll push back on it, but it’s been endorsed at this level.

Senator VOINOVICH. I’d be really interested if you would share

with me from your perspective where you think you have some

good information because my next project, if we get all these personnel reforms completed in this next couple of years, is to see if

we can start moving on total quality management. It’s been my experience in the city and in the State Government that when you

empower people and you give them the tools and the training and

you do the performance evaluation properly you will have a very

motivated workforce.

And I think the problem that I’ve observed is that this whole

area of personnel has been neglected for so long in so many places

that we must get the fundamentals in operation before we can

start going——

Mr. BLANCH. It sounds so easy.

Senator VOINOVICH [continuing]. Where we move on to something else.

Thanks for being here. Thank you, Mr. Durand and Mr. Nauseef.

I know you’re listening intently. Thank you for your nice words. We

enjoy working with you and we understand how important this

base is to you.

Mr. NAUSEEF. Thank you, Senator.

Senator VOINOVICH. We want to make sure you have the best

workforce you can possibly have here.

Mr. NAUSEEF. Yes, sir.

Senator VOINOVICH. Again, thank you very much.

Dr. ASCH. Thank you.

Senator VOINOVICH. The hearing is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 3:36 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
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192

Æ