U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

31–276 PDF WASHINGTON : 2018

EXAMINING THE ADMINISTRATION’S 

GOVERNMENT–WIDE REORGANIZATION PLAN 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT 

AND GOVERNMENT REFORM 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

JUNE 27, 2018 

Serial No. 115–88 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov 

http://oversight.house.gov 


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COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

Trey Gowdy, South Carolina, Chairman 

John J. Duncan, Jr., Tennessee 

Darrell E. Issa, California 

Jim Jordan, Ohio 

Mark Sanford, South Carolina 

Justin Amash, Michigan 

Paul A. Gosar, Arizona 

Scott DesJarlais, Tennessee 

Virginia Foxx, North Carolina 

Thomas Massie, Kentucky 

Mark Meadows, North Carolina 

Ron DeSantis, Florida 

Dennis A. Ross, Florida 

Mark Walker, North Carolina 

Rod Blum, Iowa 

Jody B. Hice, Georgia 

Steve Russell, Oklahoma 

Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin 

Will Hurd, Texas 

Gary J. Palmer, Alabama 

James Comer, Kentucky 

Paul Mitchell, Michigan 

Greg Gianforte, Montana 

Vacancy 

Elijah E. Cummings, Maryland, Ranking 

Minority Member 

Carolyn B. Maloney, New York 

Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of Columbia 

Wm. Lacy Clay, Missouri 

Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts 

Jim Cooper, Tennessee 

Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia 

Robin L. Kelly, Illinois 

Brenda L. Lawrence, Michigan 

Bonnie Watson Coleman, New Jersey 

Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois 

Jamie Raskin, Maryland 

Jimmy Gomez, Maryland 

Peter Welch, Vermont 

Matt Cartwright, Pennsylvania 

Mark DeSaulnier, California 

Stacey E. Plaskett, Virgin Islands 

John P. Sarbanes, Maryland 

SHERIA CLARKE, Staff Director 

WILLIAM MCKENNA, General Counsel 

KEVIN ORTIZ, Professional Staff Member 

JULIE DUNNE, Government Operations Subcommittee Staff Director 

SHARON CASEY, Deputy Chief Clerk 

DAVID RAPALLO, Minority Staff Director 


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C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Hearing held on June 27, 2018 ............................................................................... 1 

WITNESSES 

The Honorable Margaret Weichert, Deputy Director for Management, U.S. 

Office of Management and Budget 

Oral Statement ................................................................................................. 5 

Written Statement ............................................................................................ 7 

APPENDIX 

American Federation of Government Employees Statement for the Record 

submitted by Mr. Cummings .............................................................................. 48 

The National Treasury Employees Union Statement for the Record submitted 

by Mr. Cummings ................................................................................................ 52 

National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association submitted by 

Mr. Cummings ...................................................................................................... 62 

‘‘Two Years Not Ten Years Redesigning Infrastructure Approvals,’’ Common 

Good, submitted by Mr. Palmer can be accessed at: https:// 

www.commongood.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2YearsNotl0Years.pdf 

‘‘Assessing the Costs Attributed to Project Delays’’ submitted by Mr. Palmer 

can be accessed at: https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/fed/projectdelay-summary.pdf ............................................................................................... 65 

2018–06–20 New York Times ‘‘How One Conservative Think Tank Is Stocking 

Trump’s Government’’ submitted by Ms. Plaskett ............................................ 66 

Response from Ms. Weichert, Office of Management and Budget, to Questions 

for the Record ....................................................................................................... 83 


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EXAMINING THE ADMINISTRATION’S 

GOVERNMENT–WIDE REORGANIZATION PLAN 

Wednesday, June 27, 2018 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM, Washington, D.C. 

The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:00 a.m., in Room 

2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Mark Meadows presiding. 

Present: Representatives Duncan, Issa, Amash, Foxx, Meadows, 

Walker, Blum, Hice, Russell, Grothman, Hurd, Palmer, Comer, 

Mitchell, Cummings, Norton, Clay, Lynch, Connolly, Kelly, Lawrence, Watson Coleman, Raskin, Welch, DeSaulnier, Plaskett, and 

Sarbanes. 

Also Present: Representative Scott. 

Mr. MEADOWS. The Committee on Oversight and Government 

Reform will come to order. Without objection, the presiding member is authorized to declare a recess at any time. 

The modern Federal Government is a result of layers upon layers 

of legislative executive and judicial actions throughout our Nation’s 

history. The inertia of bureaucracy created by the process allows it 

to persist year after year after year. And as our former President 

said, there is every reason why our executive governmental machinery should be at least well planned, economical, and efficient 

as the best machinery of the great business organizations which, 

at present, is not the case. That was President Theodore Roosevelt 

in 1905, but those words are still true today as they were just as 

true a century ago. 

Decisions that may have made sense in the past may not work 

in the context of a modern 21st century society. And as we progress 

as a Nation, it is incumbent upon elected officials to reevaluate 

how to best deliver on the services to the American people and the 

services indeed that they deserve. 

Take pizza for example. If a company wishes to sell cheese pizza, 

it has to meet with the Food and Drug Administration requirements. However, if they add pepperoni to that pizza, the company 

must now adhere to rules issued by the Food Safety Inspection 

Services of the Department of Agriculture. So you have one pizza 

going through one agency, another pizza with pepperoni going 

through a different agency. 

Or let’s look at imported seafood, which accounts for nearly 90 

percent of consumed seafood in the United States. In September of 

2017, a Government Accountability Office audit found that the 

FDA and the FSIS were not fully coordinating on the drug residue 


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testing methods. GAO also found that two agencies were using different standards for testing drug residue to determine if seafood 

was safe. Now, the lack of coordination and aligned standards only 

harms businesses seeking to comply with the law. But also, it 

harms consumers and puts their health at risk. 

The complex and ever growing demands of our citizens require 

an efficient and effective Federal Government. And as these examples suggest, the current construct fails to meet this requirement. 

The plan to reorganize the executive branch put forward by 

President Trump seeks to help us meet this—the new needs or I 

might say the existing needs of our constituents. 

In March 2017, President Trump issued an executive order calling on the Office of Management and Budget to create a comprehensive reorganization plan that consolidates or eliminates redundant and ineffective programs and agencies. And the plan 

which was released last Thursday seeks to deliver an—to the executive branch what they dictated to be wholly meeting the Federal 

Government’s important mission of service and stewardship objectives. 

The plan suggests bold reforms, such as the elevation of the Office of Personnel Management into the executive branch—I mean, 

the Executive Office of the President, the merger of Departments 

of Labor and Education, and the consolidation of welfare programs 

and a revamped Department of Health and Human Services. 

This plan is a roadmap designed to jump start a conversation 

about how to best deliver these services to the American people, 

the services they expect. And we’re pleased to have the OMB deputy director of management, Margaret Weichert, here today to 

present that roadmap to the committee and to the American public. 

Accomplishing the goals in this plan will not be easy, and it will 

require a hand-in-hand work with Congress, the administration, 

and stakeholders to fully recognize and realize the potential transformation that is envisioned here. 

I want to thank you, Deputy Director Weichert, for being here, 

and I look forward to our conversation. 

With that, I recognize my good friend, the ranking member, the 

gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Cummings. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And I’m 

glad that we are having this hearing today. 

I definitely have numerous questions for the witness about the 

Trump administration’s reorganization plan. For example, I want 

to know why is it that there is no analysis of the cost and benefits 

of this proposal? Why is there no assessment of its impact on the 

Federal budget? Why is there no information at all about how it 

will affect Federal workers? And why is it there’s no list of actions 

that require congressional approval? These are all basic prerequisites for a serious plan, and they are completely missing from 

this one. 

Last week, my staff asked the Office of Management and Budget 

for these assessments, and they were told that they did not exist. 

The Trump administration now claims that it wants to use this 

proposal, and I quote, ‘‘to build productive bipartisan dialog,’’ end 

of quote. If that were a serious claim, the Trump administration 

would have worked with us over the past year, instead of keeping 


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their work secret, despite multiple requests from members of this 

committee. 

Take just one example in our committee’s jurisdiction, the Postal 

Service. We have a bipartisan bill—Mr. Chairman, you have 

worked very hard on that bill with us—that we passed out of our 

committee unanimously, that would help the Postal Service maintain a more solid financial footing forward. Instead of working with 

us, President Trump unilaterally appointed a task force to come up 

with its own ideas about the Postal Service. Then without even 

waiting for its own task force’s results, President Trump rushed in 

this proposal to eliminate the Postal Service entirely. Ladies and 

gentlemen, it makes no sense. 

Like so many other ideas that have come out of this White 

House, President Trump’s proposal to privatize the Postal Service 

is disorganized, unilateral, nonsensical and, frankly, incompetent. 

I do not think this plan is a serious one. What I do think is extremely serious is the urgent plight of thousands of children who 

the Trump administration separated from their parents with no 

discernible plan to reunite them. None, zero. 

Tomorrow, the Judiciary Committee is holding a so-called, quote, 

‘‘emergency hearing,’’ end of quote, on Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

They’re hauling up Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray to demand more answers. But the real emergency is these children, 

these babies and toddlers, whom the government has unilaterally 

and literally torn from the arms of their parents, some of them a 

few months old. 

To my Republican colleagues, last week, I asked a very simple 

question, but a very profound one. I simply asked for your help. 

Call a hearing, ask DHS and HHS and DOJ to come up here and 

testify about what the plan is to reunite these children and these 

kids with their families. Light a fire up under them to get them 

moving. If we can have an emergency hearing on Hillary Clinton, 

we certainly can have an emergency hearing on these children. 

And so I ask the question, I asked for help. But guess what? I 

got no response. Zilch. Didn’t even get a letter, not a phone call, 

nothing. And so the children continue to suffer. You’ve seen them 

locked up in cages. I said it before and I’ll say it again: This is our 

country. It is a great country, but we will be judged by the way we 

treat our citizens and particularly our children. 

So on Friday, we had to send our own letter just from the Democrats, dated June 22, to the Attorney General Sessions, DHS Secretary Nielsen, and HHS Secretary Azar. We asked for basic information on each child that was separated from his or her parents 

so we could monitor and promote efforts to unify these families. 

These are documents they should have at their fingertips, and we 

asked for them by tomorrow. Apparently however, we cannot have 

these documents, for some reason. 

And as we all know, the Democrats are in the minority. And 

since no Republican joined our request, the agencies will not 

produce the documents. We hear a lot of talk from the agency 

heads, but no documents. And so now I’m pleading, I’m pleading 

with you once again. Anyone on this panel, anyone, is there one Republican who will join us, just one, to save and help these families 

reunite? Anyone? Radio silence. Is there one Republican who will 


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sign his or her name to this letter requesting the basic facts and 

the documents about these children? 

I will yield to any Republican member who will join us in this 

effort. I ask one last time, is there one—— 

Mr. ISSA. Would the gentleman yield? 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Yes. 

Mr. ISSA. Would you give the 30 days that the San Diego court 

has ordered for full reunification as part of the letter since the 

President’s executive order now has been codified by a Federal 

judge? 

Mr. CUMMINGS. No, no. 

Mr. ISSA. So you wouldn’t give the President and the Federal 

court system the 30 days to unify them? 

Mr. CUMMINGS. I’m just—taking back my time. I’ll let you see 

the letter, and if you want to sign on to the letter—— 

Mr. ISSA. I look forward to seeing it. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Yeah. We need help. These children need help. 

We wouldn’t do this to our own children. We would not allow people to split up our families. As a matter of fact, if they tried to split 

up our families, we would go off. 

And so as I close, Mr. Chairman—— 

Mr. MEADOWS. If the gentleman will yield. 

If you’ll give me a copy of the letter, I’ll get back to you within 

24 hours. You know that I have a bipartisan history of demanding 

documents, regardless of their political, I guess—— 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Yes. 

Mr. MEADOWS. —relevance. And if you’ll give me a copy of the 

letter, we’ll get back to you within 24 hours. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, 

Mr. Chairman. 

Is there—so—and I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for that. 

It means a lot to me. 

And so we move forward. But I say to my colleagues, you can 

have your emergency hearing on Hillary Clinton’s emails, but can 

we also have one on these kids who desperately need our help? 

Children are separated from their parents by our own government. 

Isn’t that an emergency? Another week has gone by and there’s 

still no functioning plan to reunite these families. Isn’t that an 

emergency? 

The harm and the trauma our own government is inflicting on 

these children is continuing and compounding every single day. 

There’s no question that this is an emergency. I’ve often said that 

what you do to a child, and if it’s negative, it probably lasts them 

for the rest of their lives. And it is not the deed, it’s the memory 

that haunts them and harm them. And so we all know in our 

hearts that we need to address this, and we need to start treating 

it like the emergency that it is. 

And, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for what you just said. 

This is a bipartisan issue, it should be. And we look forward to 

your response. 

With that, I yield back. 

Mr. MEADOWS. I thank the gentleman for his opening remarks. 


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I’m pleased to introduce our witness, the Honorable Margaret 

Weichert, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget. Welcome. 

And pursuant to committee rules, we’d ask that you would stand 

before you testify and please raise your right hand. 

Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you’re about 

to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 

truth, so help you God. 

Ms. WEICHERT. I do. 

Mr. MEADOWS. Thank you. You may be seated. 

And please let the record reflect that the witness answered in the 

affirmative. 

Obviously, in order to allow time for questions and answers, your 

oral testimony will be limited to 5 minutes. This is not your first 

rodeo, you get that. And the clock’s there in front of you. And yet 

at the same time, your entire written statement will be made part 

of the record. 

So you’re now recognized for 5 minutes. 

WITNESS STATEMENT 

STATEMENT OF MARGARET WEICHERT 

Ms. WEICHERT. Thank you. 

Chairman Meadows, Ranking Member Cummings, and members 

of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the plan 

to reshape government in the 21st century. 

Healthy organizations change and adapt to customer needs and 

the demands of the free market. The U.S. Government should be 

no different. Our Founders conceived a durable governing framework and Constitution to serve the American people, but our current organizational model has not kept pace with 21st century 

needs. 

Despite dramatic changes in technology, our Federal Government 

still operates much like it did 50 years ago. And it isn’t well organized to provide the service and flexibility that Americans expect 

in the digital age. I cringe when I hear how inefficient it is to interact with Federal agencies. 

Let me give you some examples. Jobseekers have to navigate 

more than 40 workforce development programs across 15 agencies. 

Poultry companies deal with multiple offices and time-consuming 

paperwork because chickens and eggs are regulated by different 

agencies. Environmental conservation for fish in our rivers are affected by regulations from four different organizations. And basic 

infrastructure development and maintenance projects for roads and 

ports face organizational complexity that can delay investments by 

years. This is not how Americans want government to operate. 

As a result, in March 2017, the President issued Executive Order 

13781 directing the Office of Management and Budget to work with 

key stakeholders and produce a comprehensive government reform 

plan to better meet the needs of the American people. This plan is 

part of a broader set of management improvement initiatives designed to balance executive branch mission, service, and stewardship responsibilities, while reducing duplication, risk, and inefficiency. 


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Concrete efforts to drive change were released in the President’s 

Management Agenda in March 2018. The PMA is the administration’s blueprint for aligning government IT, data, and the Federal 

workforce in the 21st century. Reorganization proposals build on 

this blueprint and are among the various tools we are using to 

modernize government. 

Over the past year, OMB reviewed top-down and bottom-up reform and reorganization proposals from Federal agencies, the public, academics, interest groups, and Federal employees. The reform 

plan was also informed by years of research and recommendations 

from the Government Accountability Office, GAO, including the 

GAO high-risk lists and reports on government duplication and 

fragmentation. After synthesizing this information, OMB developed 

the recommendations included in the reform and reorganization 

plan released by the President in last week’s Cabinet meeting. 

Given the seriousness of this task and its potential for major impact to government missions and to our workforce, the OMB team 

worked with executive branch agencies on reform plan deliberation 

and predecisional analysis in phases. The initial phase covered 

data collection where agency input and 100,000 public comments 

were collected between June and December of last year. 

The second phase focused on opportunities to reduce duplication 

and fragmentation and improve cross-agency efficiency. This 

worked through on GAO reports on risk, duplication, and inefficiency, as well as literature review from think tanks and good government groups, which is included on page 128 of the proposal. 

And that phase started in January 2018. 

The final phase incorporated President’s Management Agenda 

priorities that were used to prioritize proposals where mission, 

service, or stewardship might be improved via reorganization or restructuring. This final phase began after the PMA release in 

March. 

A transformation of this scope will take time to implement. Some 

changes can be applied directly within agencies, while other more 

complex proposals may require action by the President or Congress. 

Now that the plan has been issued, we are eager to engage in 

a constructive conversation with Congress on how to move forward 

together. We know that Congress shares our interest in driving 

positive reform. This committee in particular has dedicated considerable effort over the years to exposing duplication and inefficiency 

in government and exploring ways to improve government operations. 

At times of great change, commitment to government of the people, by the people, and for the people is critical. As the U.S. faces 

the challenge of serving the diverse needs of our growing country, 

I look forward to working with all of you to ensure that the executive branch is well-organized to deal with 21st century realities. 

Thank you again for inviting me here today. I look forward to 

your questions. 

[Prepared statement of Ms. Weichert follows:] 


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Testimony to House Oversight and Government Reform 

Committee 

Margaret Weichert 

Deputy Director for Management 

Office of Management and Budget 

June 27, 2018 

Reshaping American Government in the 21st Century 

Healthy organizations are designed to change and adapt to customer needs and 

the demands of the free market. The United States Government should be no 

different. Our Founders conceived a remarkably durable governing framework 

and Constitution to serve the American people. However, our current Federal 

Government organization model has not kept pace with the needs of the 21'1 

Century. 

Despite dramatic changes in technology, today's Federal Government still 

operates much like it did 50 years ago. Current government infrastructure is not 

well organized or aligned to provide the service and flexibility that Americans 

expect in the Digital Age. 

Americans expect convenience, and use online shopping, mobile banking, and 

other modern solutions to make their lives simpler. So I cringe when I hear 

stories about how inefficient it is for Americans to interact with Federal agencies. 

This is not how Americans want government to operate. 
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Job seekers have to navigate more than 40 workforce development programs 

across 15 agencies while small businesses face overlapping and bureaucratic 

certification processes and complicated paperwork challenges every time they try 

to work with the government. Poultry companies have to deal with multiple 

government offices and time-consuming paperwork because chickens and their 

eggs are regulated by different agencies. Even simple things like pizza are 

affected by government complexity, since cheese pizza and pepperoni pizza are 

regulated differently. There are numerous other examples of how fish in our 

rivers are affected by regulations from 4 different organizations, and projects for 

basic infrastructure development and maintenance activities on our roads and in 

our ports face organizational complexity and costly regulatory overhead that can 

delay investments by years. 

And recently, while visiting Federal facilities in Kansas City, I learned firsthand 

how veterans struggle to navigate across the Department of Veterans Affairs and 

the Social Security office to figure out how to handle their medical and disability 

benefits. 

This Administration recognizes these challenges and frustrations. As a result, in 

March 2017, President Trump issued an Executive Order 13781 directing the 

Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to work with key stakeholders to 

produce a comprehensive plan to reform and reorganize the Government to 

better meet the needs of the American people. This reorganization plan is 

intended to balance the mission, service, and stewardship responsibilities of the 

Executive Branch, while reducing inefficiency, risk, and duplication. 

At its core, reorganization aims to increase the efficiency, effectiveness, and 

accountability of how government serves its people. It's not uncommon to see a 

large company change and realign its business model to respond to evolving 

technologies and customer needs. Even though its mission and priorities are 

different, the Federal government should be similarly responsive to changing 
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customer expectations and technology-enabled opportunities to enhance mission 

delivery. 

While it can be difficult to break through bureaucratic red tape and restructure 

old, paper-based processes, it's not impossible. Concrete efforts to drive this 

change are highlighted in the President's Management Agenda (PMA) released in 

March of this year. The PMA is the Administration's blueprint for investing in IT 

modernization, effective use of data and providing the tools for our workforce to 

better serve the country. By realigning our own business model, we will be able 

to streamline processes that help the economy and create jobs. 

Over the past year, OMB reviewed reform and reorganization proposals from 

Federal agencies and solicited ideas through the White House website, where we 

received suggestions from the public, academics, interest groups, and Federal 

employees. In fact over 106,000 public comments came in from Americans 

interested in seeing their Government work more efficiently, and we shared this 

important feedback with the relevant agencies to inform the ideas and proposals 

that they submitted to OMB. We also assessed the latest in cutting-edge 

organization design frameworks and recommendations from think tanks and 

leading business experts. After synthesizing this information, we developed 

reorganization and reform recommendations that were included in the Report 

released last week: Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century: Reform 

Plan and Reorganization Recommendations. 

Ultimately, the recommendations included in this report represent both "top 

down" and "bottom up" transformational proposals for near- and long termchanges. This approach balances the realities and challenges of making change 

happen to entrenched, outdated and bureaucratic processes, while signaling a 

new direction for the future. Many of the proposals included in the report draw 

on years of research and recommendations coming out of the Government 

Accountability Office (GAO), including the GAO High Risk Lists and reports on 

fragmentation and duplication within the Federal Government. 
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Given the seriousness and import of the analytical task and its potential for major 

impact to our government missions and to our workforce, our team at the Office 

of Management and Budget worked with Executive Branch agencies in conducting 

the deliberation and pre-decisional analysis for the Reform Plan in phases. 

• The initial phase was the data collection phase, the OMB team collected 

input from all the key stakeholders, seeking the most significant input from 

the agencies themselves. Some of the most straightforward outputs from 

the initial phase were included in the February release of the President's 

2019 Budget proposal. 

• The second phase focused on opportunities to reduce duplication and 

fragmentation, and improve cross-agency efficiency- this analysis drew 

heavily from GAO reports and other stakeholder input about ways where 

taking an enterprise view across government agencies would better serve 

the underlying missions and objectives. 

• The final phase of analysis incorporated the priorities of the President's 

Management Agenda- identifying organizational challenges that impact 

the broad ability of government to support the mission, service, and 

stewardship needs of the 21st Century, enabling us to have the 

organizational foundation needed to confidently move forward with IT 

Modernization, Data and the Workforce in the Digital Age. 

A transformation of this size will take time and teamwork to implement. Some 

changes can be applied directly within Federal agencies while other, more 

complex proposals contain elements that will require action by the President or 

Congress. Now that the proposed Reform and Reorganization Plan has been 

issued, we are eager to engage in a conversation with Congress on where, and 

how, we can move forward together. We know that the Legislative Branch shares 

our interest in creating positive reform. This Committee, in particular, has 

dedicated considerable effort over the years to exposing duplication and 

inefficiency in Government, and exploring ways to improve its operations. 
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With the proposed Reform and Reorganization Plan, this Administration has 

seized an opportunity to highlight how leading management and reorganization 

practices from the private sector can bring practical improvements to government 

services. 

We have already seen similar transformations at the State and local levels. Cities 

like Pittsburgh, Reno, Kansas City, and Provo, and States like Georgia and North 

Carolina, are evolving from their industrial and agrarian roots to become beacons 

of digital and technological innovation. 

At times of great change, commitment to "government of the people, by the 

people and for the peoplel," is critical. As the United States faces the challenge of 

serving the diverse needs of our growing country, it is important to reexamine 

government services to ensure that the executive branch is well-aligned to 21't 

Century realities. 

Although we, in OMB, were tasked with creating this report and recommending 

the initial proposals for Reform and Reorganization of the Executive Branch, we 

recognize and acknowledge the important role of dialogue and public deliberation 

in setting the best course for the future. To that end, we welcome dialogue, 

debate, and discussion of the proposals we have set out and look forward to 

engaging in a constructive discussion of the issues, today and going forward. 

Thank you again for inviting me here today. 

1 President Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863. 
12 

Mr. FOXX. [Presiding.] Thank you very much, Ms. Weichert, for 

your statements, and we appreciate your being here. 

I will in 1 second introduce members to ask their questions. But 

I want to a brief followup on what you have said. As I said when 

the reorganization was announced, the Federal Government is long 

overdue for a serious overhaul. The proposal to merge the Departments of Education and Labor is recognition of the clear relationship between education policy at every level and the needs of the 

growing American workforce. At the Committee on Education and 

Workforce, we make these connections in everything we do. I appreciate the administration’s support for this idea, and I look forward to working with the administration on the proposal and how 

the new department could function to best serve American students, workers, job creators, and families. 

I now would like to recognize Mr. Issa for 5 minutes of questions. 

Mr. ISSA. Thank you, Madam Chair. 

I’m delighted to see a real proposal. The last administration had 

asked us for authority, but never gave us any proposal. But having 

said that, I’d like to delve into a piece of history for a moment. 

As you know, this committee in the past has held hearings to review the history of how you do a reorganization. And the gold 

standard appears to—try to make sure I can see you—the gold 

standard seems to be the history of the Hoover Commission. In 

that situation, in addition to many, many ideas that had bubbled 

up and were obviously on the forefront of the executive branch’s 

mind, what they did was they did a lot of what you’ve just done, 

but they did it in a way in which Congress had to buy in along the 

way, along with the interest groups, and that allowed a commission 

that, through multiple Presidencies, continued to allow an evolution. 

As you look at the short term and authority, why is it that we’re 

not seeing, if you will, a sustaining body that would put this out 

in the public and at the same time bring Congress on a, if you will, 

a permanent basis into the process, rather than an approval and 

then see you later? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So—— 

Mr. ISSA. And I mean no disrespect with the approval but see 

you later, but we do know how that works. 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I appreciate the question. And we too looked 

at the history of reform in government and in the private sector 

and looked at various experiences, including experiences in the recent past where proposals basically got winnowed away in the public deliberation process before there was a rich and full dialogue. 

So much about the process that we engaged in was designed to ensure that we had some really meaty proposals to put out for public 

debate before engaging into more implementation oriented part of 

the change, which we know needs to happen in public. 

Mr. ISSA. I appreciate that. I guess I’ll go back and sort of restate 

the question, if you will. In the corporate world—and you mentioned that in the corporate world generally there are two kinds of 

reorganizations. There are ones that are evolutionary, for example, 

pulling up to the corporate headquarters, the IT functions as a 

service, something that’s long overdue in the Federal Government. 

And this committee has seen, although we did empower CIOs, we 


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still have too many of them based on the legislation. But, you 

know, that’s an example of one that is very limited. And the execution is everything, while the lines of code that it would take to authorize it are relatively few. And then you have things more like, 

let’s say, General Electric, where they find that the organization 

itself is in doubt and they start with serious combinations, reductions, sales, et cetera. 

You seem to be blending the two. In other words, the IT function 

broadly being under a consolidated authority, professionalizing it, 

and taking it out of, if you will, little fiefdoms that sometimes go 

all the way down to an agency of only a few million dollars of 

spending, is a shortcut that we could certainly understand you’re 

bringing us a single proposal for. And I have to be honest, I didn’t 

see that part of the proposal. But then the other side of it, which 

is recognizing that too many people report directly to the President, 

or to be more cynical, too many people try to get through the chief 

of staff to the President. 

What are you going to do about that in this proposal? Because 

nothing I see here really says we have too many Cabinet positions 

and those Cabinet positions cannot possibly get the ear of the 

President or direct access to decisionmakers in some sort of a corollary to the private sector. 

Ms. WEICHERT. So thanks for the question. You’re exactly right 

that we did blend both what we learned from public sector reform 

initiatives in the past as well as in the private sector. And what 

really drove everything that we did here is the same thing that 

drove the work we did in the President’s Management Agenda, 

which is looking at the intersection between mission, delivery, service to the American people, and stewardship of taxpayer resources. 

And it was where that sort of trio of things came into either conflict or in confluence that we really focused our activity. And I 

think the key thing to reiterate is there are many tools and many 

approaches. We tried—— 

Mr. ISSA. And lastly, in the few remaining seconds, if we were 

to have the authority to approve it here today, what would be your 

timeline which—in other words, how many years would you really 

envision to execute even the portions that you’ve already laid out? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I’d say 3 to 5 years. 

Mr. ISSA. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. 

Mr. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Issa. 

Mrs. Watson Coleman, you’re recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Thank 

you very much. And thank you very much for being here today and 

sharing this information with us. 

Ms. Weichert, I’ve got a lot of questions about this reorganization 

plan. I’m really concerned about the impact of the proposals as it 

relates to active and retired employees and moving the function out 

of OPM and eliminating OPM. At some point, I’m going to need to 

have a discussion about how that happens and our role in that. I’m 

very concerned about protecting careerist employees. And I’m fearful that if that function in any way, shape, or form gets into the 

White House, we’ve got a real problem, given the White House’s 

disdain for the workforce in the first place. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
14 

But I am the ranking member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation and Protective Security. I have a 

major concern and it has to do with the vulnerabilities that are facing our surface transportation systems. The threat to public transportation systems has fully grown in recent years, culminating in 

an attempt of terrorist attack against New York City subway system just this last December. Unfortunately, the administration has 

responded to this growing threat by proposing drastic cuts to surface transportation security programs. And now you propose that 

Federal security responsibilities for these vulnerable systems be 

transferred back to the Department of Transportation, which failed 

to protect transportation systems on 9/11 and no longer maintains 

security expertise. You seem to envision an ever shrinking Federal 

role in protecting public transit, despite how critical these systems 

are to our national security. 

What responsibility do you believe the Federal Government 

should have in protecting surface transportation systems? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So thank you for the question, and there are a 

number of things in there. I’ll start by saying that definitively and 

from a business standpoint on the first set of issues you raised 

around people in the workforce, the pragmatic and practical reality 

is any change that delivers on mission, service, and stewardship for 

the American people has to be delivered by the workforce we have. 

And we do not disdain that workforce; we applaud the work that 

that workforce does. And so I do look forward to engaging on that 

conversation. 

As it relates to transportation, I’m not familiar with all of the 

back and forth components that happened prior to the latest proposal. What I can say was the goal of many of the proposals in 

here, including the transportation proposals, was to reduce fragmentation, duplication, and areas where the government was not 

having an integrated approach to serious issues as the ones you’re 

mentioning. 

Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. So am I to assume that TSA weighed in 

on this discussion and agreed with the transfer of these functions 

into the Department of Transportation, and that the Department 

of Transportation weighed into this discussion and agreed that it 

would be capable of handling this additional responsibility when it 

hasn’t had a like responsibility since after the transfers after 9/11? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the Department of Transportation absolutely 

weighed in on the proposals. And basically, the conversation looked 

at what would need to be done to align from an organizational 

standpoint to reduce communication and efficiencies, to reduce 

overlapping resource or fragmentation, diffuse resources so that we 

could put the bulk of the money towards the mission. 

Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Well, part of the problem then is that 

with regard to surface transportation issues, the administration 

has consistently proposed to cut those things. And now it’s to move 

them into a department that doesn’t seem to have as its primary 

function that issue. And you didn’t say whether or not TSA had 

any input in this, you simply said that the DOT did. 

I’m wondering, is there a thought that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was not a good idea? 

Ms. WEICHERT. There’s no thought that that was not a good idea. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Do you believe that State and local authorities have the necessary resources to protect public transportation systems without significant government—Federal Government support? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the issue in the proposal was really about coordination of effort, and so it’s not the only tool, as you’re clearly 

indicating. Money is another important tool that helps align us to 

the needs of the mission. What this proposal was trying to do was 

look at structural impediments that were organizational in nature 

that made it difficult to steward resources in a way that provided 

the best service. 

Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Thank you. If the transportation security responsibilities were split across the multiple departments, 

how would the Federal Government effectively protect against and 

respond to attacks affecting multiple modes? And who would direct 

those Federal efforts in such an attack? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the specifics around how we actually implement these proposals, again, back to the earlier comment. What we 

wanted to put out was a framework, a set of principles, and an orientation that was informed by leading practices around how do we 

structure government in the 21st century. We believe now it’s the 

time for experts like yourself and others who care deeply about the 

issues to help articulate a path forward. 

Mrs. WATSON COLEMAN. Thank you. I’m out of time. 

I yield back. 

Mr. FOXX. Thank you, Mrs. Watson Coleman. 

Mr. Comer, you’re recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. COMER. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

And welcome to the committee today. I think I for one am strongly in favor of reorganizing the government. The two things that I 

support strongly from an ideological standpoint with respect to government is to reduce the size of government and the bureaucracy, 

as well as cut wasteful spending. 

So my questions are, first of all, is this reorganization plan, is 

it an actual downsizing of government? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I think it’s a great question. The initial look 

at the data around how do we deliver the mission in the 21st century looked at what are we doing? What does the American people 

expect the government to do? And where are we doing it well and 

where do we have challenges? Much like in business, looking at the 

gap analysis. 

What we do not actually have is a problem of too many Federal 

employees. So when we did the analysis, something like 60 percent 

of our existing Federal workforce is eligible to retire within 10 

years, 40 percent within 3 years. So what we don’t have is a challenge of too many Federal workers to deliver the mission. What we 

do have is a skills alignment challenge and opportunity. 

Mr. COMER. So is reducing the Federal workforce, is that a purpose of the reorganization? 

Ms. WEICHERT. It is—it is not the purpose of the reorganization. 

It may be a byproduct in certain areas, but it’s actually a major 

priority to look at the workers we already have who have passed 

background checks, who are committed to the missions, and look 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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at how we might redeploy them to the areas we can’t hire enough 

people. 

Mr. COMER. Would you say that one of the goals of this reorganization is to actually save money? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. 

Mr. COMER. Shifting gears, I want to ask some questions about 

the nutrition assistance programs, the welfare programs. I’m a 

member of the Agriculture Committee. This has obviously been a 

big topic of discussion as we squeaked a farm bill through the 

House last week. 

With respect to the consolidation of nutrition assistance programs from the Department of Ag’s Food and Nutrition Service into 

the renamed Department of Health and Public Welfare, this action 

would require congressional approval, correct? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. 

Mr. COMER. What is the proposed timeline for stating the purpose of obtaining statutory authority here? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So this would be something we’d want to work 

with Congress on determining. The rationale for this proposal is 

really to make it easier for the States who actually administer the 

cash or near cash aid, who typically administer it out of one function, to make it more streamline so that more of our money actually goes to the needy families and isn’t wasted on bureaucracy. I 

think the timeline and all the issues need to be hashed out with 

the key players. 

Mr. COMER. Okay. Could you explain the benefits to taxpayers 

and those needing assistance from the government of the consolidation of nutrition assistance programs with other welfare programs? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Sure thing. So conflicting and confusing eligibility requirements actually make it difficult for people who are in 

need of assistance to navigate what the requirements are, and 

make it also difficult for the States who are supporting that to help 

their constituents, their clients get the need—need-based aid that 

they need. It also may—the conflicting eligibility requirements may 

make it more vulnerable to fraud and abuse of that system. 

So the belief is that if we take a customer-centric approach, both 

in terms of how we deliver the money to the States as well as how 

the States interact with their clients, the needy families, this 

should streamline it and make it easier. 

Mr. COMER. Great. Sounds good. Look forward to working with 

the administration as we move forward with this reorganization. 

Last question, this is a big question. When you’re looking at reorganizing the Postal Service, has privatization come up? Is that the 

direction that you think you’re going to propose to head in? Or 

what’s the status of privatization of the Postal Service? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So privatization is definitely a vision for the 

longer term and a framework that could be looked at. I think in 

all scenarios, both in the proposals that this body has agreed to as 

well as the task force that the President has pulled together, the 

near-term has to be about economic sort of improvement in the 

Postal Service, because you couldn’t privatize an entity that has 

the level of liabilities and economic challenge that the existing 

Postal Service does. 

Mr. COMER. Great. Thank you very much. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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And I yield back, Madam Chairman. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Thank you. 

Mr. FOXX. Ms. Norton, you’re recognized for 5 minutes. 

Ms. NORTON. Yes. Ms. Weichert, looking at the proposals, one appears to dismantle the OPM’s government personnel office. Now, 

that office was established by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. 

Note the word ‘‘civil service’’ in that Act. But the proposal appears 

to remove OPM’s retirement, healthcare, and H.R. Servicing functions to the Government Services Administration, the GSA. It then 

renames the GSA the Government Services Agency. That is correct? 

Ms. WEICHERT. That is correct. 

Ms. NORTON. The policy function of OPM that ensures that we 

have a merit-based, nonpartisan civil service system, as I understand it from the plan, is going to be subsumed in the Executive 

Office of the President? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So it would move and be elevated to the Executive Office of the President. 

Ms. NORTON. Why is that an elevation? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So in most companies that have a human centric 

and employee centric strategic human capital function, having that 

function, having a chief human capital officer who is close to the 

executive and close to where prioritization and decisions are made 

is critical. And that the key element in this proposal is, since that 

initial 1978 change and the establishment of OPM with great merit 

system principles and great civil service reform ideas, we have not 

delivered against those merit system principles. By the data from 

the employees themselves in the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, our civil servants do not believe we are keeping up with merit. 

They don’t believe that promotions are based on merit. They don’t 

believe awards depend on merit. They don’t believe that—— 

Ms. NORTON. I certainly don’t know what putting part of the HR 

office in the executive office of the President would speak to those 

concerns of employees. That’s not the—that is not the opinion of 

your own executive, Linda Springer, a former senior adviser in 

your office who has helped launched the administration’s reorganization effort. And she’s a former OPM director in the Bush administration, has warned that this change is, and here I’m quoting 

her, very troubling. She believes that a central personnel office is 

necessary. 

According to her, an independent central personnel office is needed because—again, I think I should quote her—because of the firewall between the agency and political personnel at the White 

House as it relates to personnel practices, particularly hiring and 

other actions, to be sure the oversight for compliance for merit systems principles is handled independently. And that comes from a— 

that comes from a functionary senior adviser in your own office 

from the Bush administration. 

Ms. WEICHERT. So one of things that’s a real challenge about any 

reorganization is the people who have grown up within an organization are rarely able to fundamentally change it. And so it’s important to look at data and facts. And one of the things we did look 

at is across the OECD countries that are relevant and similar to 

the United States, only one had an organizational construct for 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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people that was comparable to OPM, and that was France, which 

is not known to be a bastion of bureaucratic efficiency. Every other 

major comparable country in the OECD had a function while they 

still had civil service principals. And in some cases, they might 

have had something like the Merit System Board that we have as 

separate. But in each case, the—having it close to where decisions 

are made about budget and policy priority helped ensure that mission, service, and stewardship were aligned with the workforce 

issues. 

Ms. NORTON. I yield back. But I have to note that you’re having 

it very close to where political decisions are made and that firewall 

seems to disappear. Thank you. 

Mr. FOXX. Thank you, Ms. Norton. 

The chair notes the presence of our colleague Congressman 

Bobby Scott of Virginia. We appreciate your interest in this topic 

and welcome your participation today. 

I ask unanimous consent Congressman Scott be allowed to fully 

participate in today’s hearing. 

Without objection, so ordered. 

Mr. Russell, you’re recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. RUSSELL. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you, Ms. 

Weichert, for coming here today. 

While I support the administration’s dedication to improving efficiency and streamlining government bureaucracy, the proposal to 

spinoff Federal responsibility and congressional oversight for operating our air traffic control functions as written in the reform plan 

is inconsistent with that goal by putting national security, safety, 

accessibility, and efficiency of our national airspace in jeopardy. 

The reform plan states that privatizing air traffic control operations would reduce transportation fragmentation across government. This fragmentation refers to the vital relationship between 

the FAA and Department of Defense to protect the national airspace in tandem by sharing airspace, training systems, assets, 

equipment, and information. This is made possible by their mutual 

status as Federal agencies within the Federal Government. 

By divorcing ATC functions from the government and thus Department of Defense, each shared interest would be subjected to a 

yet unknown established process of coordination, which could leave 

our Nation vulnerable to cybersecurity and physical attack. It 

would also create a potential multibillion dollar unfunded liability 

for Department of Defense to update its own systems in coordination with these new processes. 

Instead of reducing fragmentation, air traffic control privatization compromises the interoperability the Department of Defense 

and other agencies such as the FBI, Homeland Security, the DEA, 

and our intelligence services currently enjoy. Instead of jointly developing the technologies of spectrum vital to our national security, 

privatization of ATC separates and complicates them. Furthermore, 

past proposals have also diminished the powers of the President 

and reduced his vital oversight, as well as Congress’, to protect the 

national security of our airspace against nefarious cyber actors in 

times of national duress such as the 9/11 terrorist attack. Instead 

of the President, the FAA, and the military being able to rapidly 

make decisions, such as September 2001, the emergency would first 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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have to navigate its way through a private board, something that 

is not only unrealistic, but dangerous. 

The proposal to streamline Department of Transportation by 

privatizing ATC functions is intended to better enable our aviation 

system to respond to consumer needs and modernized services. And 

while we embrace modernization efforts to improve cost efficiency, 

the lengthy process of privatizing would be counterproductive to 

those ends, especially given that modernization under NextGen is 

well on track. Instead, it would result in industry uncertainty, significant cost to the Federal Government, and a slower pace for 

NextGen implementation. 

FAA administrator and NextGen chairman Ed Bolton warned 

that such a transition could take 7 years and handle the billions 

of dollars of taxpayer paid for infrastructure to a private entity, 

while industry would be unable to update technology and procedures. The aviation industry cannot afford to lose time and resources in these indirect efforts. They would much better be served 

in investing these years and dollars directly into an already unfolding and modernizing NextGen implementation. 

While language in the reform plan advocates privatized ATC systems such as those in Canada and other places, it is important to 

note that there can be no comparison with the 88,000 flights a day 

in the United States to those of 9,000 in Canada, most of which 

originate or terminate in the United States, handled by our system, 

or even the 35,000 in Europe, when combined with Canada, don’t 

even equal half of U.S. air traffic. 

The U.S. airspace is not only the largest, busiest, and most complex in the world; it is also the safest and most accessible. This is 

in large part due to the public structure of the system, including 

its accountability to this Congress and the FAA and its mission to 

provide reliable air traffic services to a wide range of users and 

communities across our Nation. For these reasons, Congress has 

recently, historically, and repeatedly rejected legislative efforts to 

privatize our Nation’s air traffic control systems. 

Language for privatization in the 21st Century AIRR Act held up 

FAA reauthorization for over a year in the House, and it faced stiff 

bipartisan opposition in both the House and the Senate. Any further attempt at ATC privatization would be redundant and a waste 

of legislative efforts, and also reduces the very powers of the President that the President is trying to reform. 

While we appreciate and support reorganization as an opportunity for much needed government reform, we will continue to oppose any attempt to those advocates and allies of this system to 

privatize it in the United States. For this fundamental reason, our 

national airspace belongs to we the people and not a private company. 

And, Madam Chairman, I yield back my time. 

Mr. FOXX. Thank you Mr. Russell. 

Mr. Lynch, you’re recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. LYNCH. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. And, Ms. 

Weichert, thank you for appearing before this committee to help us 

with our work. 

I had a chance to read through the Trump administration reorganization plan, and it says here at page 124, it says that the overall 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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goal of the reform is to enhance our global presence and policy 

processes and to serve the goal of ensuring the most efficient allocation of personnel consistent with the best U.S. interest around 

the world. 

Am I reading that correctly? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I can’t see what you’re reading, but I’m guessing 

it’s right. 

Mr. LYNCH. Yeah, all right. Okay. I’ll actually ask to submit it 

for the record. 

Mr. FOXX. Without objection. 

Mr. LYNCH. Okay. 

You realize we don’t have an ambassador in Albania. Would that 

be consistent with an enhanced global presence? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I was not aware of that. 

Mr. LYNCH. Okay. We don’t have one in Australia either. We 

don’t have one in Azerbaijan. We—and I’m talking about we don’t 

have an ambassador and we don’t have anybody nominated. So 

here’s the President out here trying to reorganize the government, 

and we don’t have anybody in, as I said, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belize, Bolivia, Central African Republic, Ivory 

Coast, and Cuba. No ambassador, no one nominated. So it’s not 

like we’re slowing the nominations down; no nominations have 

been made. So, obviously, we can’t confirm someone because the 

President has not offered a nominee. 

We don’t—I was in—Mr. Issa and I were in Egypt about 10 days 

ago, a couple of weeks ago, I guess. We don’t have an ambassador 

in Egypt, an incredibly critical post in the Middle East, an important ally at times with Israel. They’ve got an insurgency on the 

ground in the Sinai. We’ve got troops there. We’ve had them there 

since 1973, believe it or not. 

And, you know, there are also some outlying human rights issues 

that we raised with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi a couple of 

weeks ago as well, but we have no ambassador, and that’s problematic. 

We don’t have an ambassador in Eritrea, Georgia, Honduras. 

We’ve got major problems on our border involving many Honduran 

refugees, and yet we don’t have anybody on the ground in 

Tegucigalpa that could articulate our policies. And again, no nominees in any of these countries. 

We don’t have anybody in Iceland, Ireland, Jordan. Mr. Issa and 

I visited with King Abdullah last week. Forty percent of his population are refugees. He’s trying to do the right thing by Iraqi refugees, Syrian refugees. He’s a great—we do not have a better ally 

in the region, ourselves and Israel, than Jordan. They are with us 

in the fight against ISIS. They are doing their work. We have no 

one on the ground. We don’t have anybody representing this government as an ambassador to Jordan. Hugely problematic. 

Libya. Growing concerns about ISIS regenerating in that country. We have no ambassador. 

Mexico. You think we would have an ambassador to Mexico. We 

do not. The President has not nominated anyone, and we’ve got 

major problems on the Mexican border. I don’t have to go over that 

with you. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
21 

Mongolia. OECD, you mentioned OECD, we don’t have a designee to OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and 

Development. Hugely important. 

Panama. No ambassador. No one nominated. Qatar. Another 

huge problem in our Middle East policy. We don’t have anybody on 

the ground there. Saudi Arabia. You think we might have an ambassador to Saudi Arabia? No one nominated, no one appointed. 

Seat is empty. Singapore. Somalia, Al Shabaab is on the way back. 

We have nobody on the ground in Somalia. South Africa, Sudan, 

no one in Khartoum. Sweden, Syria, obvious problems. Tajikistan, 

major problem for the folks—for our troops on the ground in Afghanistan. There’s a foreign fighter path. Tanzania, Turkey. Again, 

I was there a couple of weeks ago. Critical post in the region, straddles Europe and Asia. Huge problems going on right now. No one 

on the ground there. In Venezuela. 

So this plan, rather than going out and trying to privatize the 

post office, how about the President do his job? Nominate people 

for these countries. Get us on the ground. The President’s proposal 

last year was to cut State Department by 30 percent, and this year, 

to cut them by 22 percent. We need to do our job on the ground. 

We—you know, we had a group of 50 generals that signed on to 

a letter to express how important it is for the military to have good 

diplomatic people on the ground so that we don’t put our men and 

women in uniform on the battlefield. We can avert that by having 

good strong diplomacy on the part of the State Department. 

Mr. FOXX. Mr. Lynch, you time has expired. 

Mr. LYNCH. Madam Chair, you have been indulgent, and I really 

appreciate that. And I do yield back my time and I thank you. 

Mr. FOXX. Thank you. 

Mr. Mitchell, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. MITCHELL. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Ms. 

Weichert for being here. 

In contrast to what’s happened a little bit here, I will endeavor 

not to do a 5 minute and 30 second floor speech. 

A couple of comments on my colleague about FAA and air traffic 

control. I support what the administration is trying to do, support 

it as we looked at the FAA bill. There’s some differences of opinion, 

clearly. 

The Defense Department weighed in and said there weren’t concerns with the national airspace. In fact, Secretary Mattis personally made phone calls to Members about that issue. So I’m confused 

as to where some of my colleagues think somehow we’re going to 

give up our airspace to foreign entities. 

There’s discussion about NextGen being well under track. Well, 

in fact, we spent billions of dollars, yet they can’t give us a date 

when NextGen will be put in place. We put additional accountability measures in the bill of the FAA reauthorization from the 

House to in fact insist we get a better idea when that’s going to 

happen, the cost of not doing that. So I will support, if we don’t 

get NextGen in place, we don’t update our air traffic control system 

which, in fact, is archaic, we’ll make another pass by and privatize 

the air traffic control, whether all of my colleagues are happy with 

that or not. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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Let me shift, if I can. I spent 35 years in workforce development 

and post-secondary ed. So your proposal on combining education 

and workforce is intriguing to me. Give me an example, I’m curious 

have you looked at it. As we looked at workforce programs in the 

country, there’s administrative costs at the Federal level, both the 

national office and regional office. There’s administrative costs to 

the State, both the agency administering it as well as their management and budget unit, which also charged what was called indirect costs. Then you had the local agency has an admin rate, and 

then the service provider has administrative costs. 

As you looked at this, did you estimate what the total administrative cost currently being incurred by those programs was? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So thank you for the question. We definitely 

looked at duplication and overlap, and where estimates had already been done by others such as the Government Accountability 

Office, we took those into consideration. 

As I have said before, the goal of this proposal was not to actually size the costs and benefits but put out a framework. What I 

can say is the fragmentation in workforce development was stunning. So 40 programs—and actually there is a lot of debate about 

that. So I heard the number 40. I have heard the number 46. I 

have heard the number 47. We can confirm 40 in OMB, but we 

know the number might be higher. 

Mr. MITCHELL. Let me give you an estimate of that. I have done 

it for a variety of programs. We operated a lot of those programs. 

About 30 percent of the total money that we authorized in Federal 

funds goes to administrative costs before it delivers services to any 

individual that needs those services, be it a laid off auto worker, 

whatever you want to call it. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Right. 

Mr. MITCHELL. Thirty percent of the money. I guess I agree with 

what you are trying to do here in terms consolidating and reduce 

the fragmentation, but the important thing to the taxpayer and 

people that need services is actually put more money of what we 

authorize the taxpayers pay directly delivering services. 

So what is your thoughts on the next step in terms of how it is 

we do that and limit the administrative costs that chew up so 

much of these budgets? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So, I think it is a great point, and this is obviously one that has generated a lot of interest. I think what the 

chairwoman indicated in her remarks is really important. Congress 

and the House, in particular, already thinks about education and 

labor in an integrated way, and I think this is a great place to start 

that dialogue and actually frame out, you know, what would a 

timeline that would be appropriate, what would the way to start 

forward, and to your point, what are the metrics that we are really 

focused on. 

I mentioned earlier, you know, what drove this was mission, 

service, stewardship. In this context I’d want to have metrics 

around the mission of training people, are we actually effectively 

training people for the jobs that we have versus jobs of the past. 

Mr. MITCHELL. Well, for example, I mean, some of these programs, which, in fact, do duplicate. I have been involved with them 

again. You can grant them as block grants to the State and reduce 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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a great deal of the Federal bureaucracy in terms of allegedly delivering the programs. 

They don’t deliver a service. They theoretically make sure that 

you are delivering it in a way they want to. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Right. 

Mr. MITCHELL. We could block grant it to the State. We could 

further limit administrative costs to the State and local service providers. So I think the right direction you are going is correct, but 

we need to be aggressive about that administrative cost because it 

is a huge burden. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Yeah, and I think it is a great point. And from 

this point forward, we put out kind of the principles, but the experts, the people who really live and breathe this can help us 

frame, you know, the—both the desired metrics as well as metrics 

that we would be worried about unintended consequences, that we 

have to ensure as we are making change happen, we don’t inadvertently do some harm, and that would be something, again, we 

would like to engage in dialogue on. 

Mr. MITCHELL. I appreciate your time, and I yield back. Thank 

you, Madam Chair. 

Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Mitchell. 

Mr. Cummings, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much. Ms. Weichert, first of all, 

I want to thank you for meeting with me on yesterday. And as I 

said to you then, one of my main—major concerns is that this is 

not just an effort to do more harm to Federal employees. I think 

they have given over and over again. Whenever folk want to get 

extra money for something or they need some, they go after Federal employees, and it concerns me greatly. 

I want to go and talk about this retraining, but before I do that, 

I want to go to something that Mr. Lynch talked about. 

You got all these vacancies in the ambassadorships and people 

not even nominated. It seems like this is—there is some homework 

we need to do before we even get to where you are. We are not— 

we are not even functioning competently right now. You follow 

what I am saying? Are you there? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the—— 

Mr. CUMMINGS. You have this blank look on your face. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Yeah. So I appreciate the comments, both of Mr. 

Lynch and what you are saying about nominations. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Yeah. 

Ms. WEICHERT. None of the proposals that we looked at were specifically dealing with that element, so all of the places we looked 

at programs, we were looking at fundamentally structural challenges to achieving mission, service, and stewardship. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. One thing we talked about yesterday was the 

whole idea that in the next 10 years, I think you told me, a large 

percentage of our Federal employees will be retirement eligible. Is 

that right? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Correct. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. What was that percentage? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Sixty percent. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. That is a lot. 

Ms. WEICHERT. That is a lot. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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Mr. CUMMINGS. You also said that we don’t—you have got a good 

group of people, the Federal employees, but sometimes you need to 

kind of find a way to make sure their skills match up with the jobs 

that are available. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Correct. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. How do you plan to do that? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So there are a number of proposals in here. One 

of the key areas is really elevating the OPM function to focus on 

the strategic elements of the mission. 

So, today—and this is really the kernel of the proposal. Today, 

most of the people in OPM are effectively doing transaction processing related to HR paperwork. They are not thinking about the 

strategic issues that you and I discussed. They are not thinking 

about skill set mismatches between, you know, the skills that were 

put in the GS schedule back in 1949 and what we need today. 

We don’t have the resources, given the way that organization has 

to function, because it is dealing with all this administrative overhead. So the first thing we want to do is elevate the strategic functions of OPM to stay focused on merit systems principles in the 

21st century and how we actually execute that. 

There are a couple of other proposals in there that I think are 

critical. There is one that probably has gotten almost no attention, 

but it is something called, ‘‘The Government Effectiveness Advanced Research Center,’’ something that we would like to propose 

that would invite academics, public sector, and private sector individuals to share ideas about things like retraining and retooling. 

And fundamental issues that affect Americans broadly around as 

we automate more functions around paperwork processing, how do 

we redeploy those same people, those valuable workers to the highest and best use in government serving people, reducing backlogs, 

and doing jobs like cybersecurity, data science, and other things 

that add value. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Now, you—the entire world has witnessed this 

administration’s inhumane treatment of children. So when you testify about the Trump administration’s plan that would remove children’s aid programs from their traditional department, people are 

right to question the true motives. I think Ms. Norton was referring to that. 

President Trump’s plan would move the supplemental nutrition 

assistance program and the women’s, infants, and children program out of the Department of Agriculture where they have been 

administered, helping millions of children and low-income parents 

for decades. 

The administration says that this disruption would benefit the 

country, but I think we need to see more than empty promises. Has 

the administration conducted a cost-benefit analysis for this particular proposal? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So as I indicated earlier, the proposals were 

meant to look for ways that we could better serve the communities 

that we are trying to help and that the implementation phase 

would look at cost benefits. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. One last question. The postal service. This is 

something that we, as I said earlier on this committee, worked very 


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hard on for years. We finally came up with a proposal where all 

the stakeholders were in pretty much agreement. 

Have you taken a look at that? I mean, because it seems that it 

solves a lot of the problems, and now we hear that you want to privatize the postal system. So, I mean—— 

Ms. WEICHERT. So we are definitely aware and appreciative of 

the work that this committee has done. And as you and I discussed 

yesterday, having a bipartisan perspective is welcome, and it is 

something that the team that is working on this issue is definitely 

taking into account. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much. 

Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Cummings. 

Mr. Walker, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. WALKER. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Ms. Weichert, 

under the proposed reorganization plan, the administration has decided to combine the Department of Education and Labor. I think 

many of us commend that effort. 

Are there any other agencies that the administration looked at 

combining or even completely eliminating? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the analysis—and I would encourage—this is 

a shameless plug, but I would encourage folks to look at not just 

the proposals themselves but also the framing of them. It shows 

how we actually looked at the mission, service, and stewardship. 

So we focused on areas where there were challenges in, first and 

foremost, delivering the mission that the people expect of us. I 

think another proposal that I would mention—so the Army Corps 

civil works component was another area where the civilian work of 

the Army Corps, which is about 22 percent of the total work that 

that group does, is very complex, very bureaucratic, and has a lot 

of problems with mission delivery, which is why we proposed reducing the number of agencies involved in some of those projects from 

three to two. It wouldn’t eliminate Army Corps for Defense proposes, but it would get it out of the business of civil works. 

Mr. WALKER. Sure. Okay. Under the reorganization plan, I believe also the administration has suggested the postal service, 

which was just discussed, could be at least partially or maybe even 

fully privatized. Can we unpack that a little bit more. When it 

comes to the administration, how they reached the conclusion that 

the postal service needs to be at least drastically restructured? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I think the simple facts—you know, if we look 

at what we want the postal service to do, it has got three main 

roles: universal service for Americans that was outlined a very long 

time ago in the Constitution; we want to take care of the postal 

service employees; and we want to ensure that it is economically 

solvent. 

In the last two categories, economic issues and really, you know, 

change in the economic model for the postal service, and particularly the drop in first class mail has fundamentally affected our 

ability to meet our liabilities for employee benefits as well as to be 

economically viable as an independent agency. 

Mr. WALKER. Sure. Do you see a moment or a time where the 

historical average would be followed when it comes to the price of 

First Class mail? Is that part of your discussion? 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
26 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I have not been in the details of this particular proposal, and as I said earlier, we invite the experts who 

are deeply steeped in these issues to be involved. But what I can 

say is, you know, the driving force behind, I think, all of these activities, the work done in this body, the work of the task force, and 

then the proposal for the long-term potential privatization all have 

in mind the fact that the current economic situation—and you 

know, $100 billion in unfunded liability, 6 years of default, that is 

unsustainable, and we still have an obligation to serve, you know, 

the core—the core ethos of that. 

Mr. WALKER. Well, thank you. I don’t—Ms. Weichert, I don’t consider that a shameless plug on your behalf. I think it was Yogi 

Bear that said: It ain’t bragging if you have really done it. 

So keep up the good work. With that, I yield back, Madam Chairman. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Thank you. 

Mr. CONNOLLY. Would my friend yield before he yields back? 

Mr. WALKER. In theory, yes. 

Mr. CONNOLLY. I was just going to suggest to my friend that one 

of the things Ms. Weichert did not talk about in response to your 

question about the postal service was, of course, the onerous prepayment requirement that Congress put on the postal service in 

2006 in lame duck, which has cost the postal service billions of dollars, and that needs to be addressed. This committee, as you know, 

Mr. Walker, has addressed that unanimously. 

Mr. WALKER. Yes. 

Mr. CONNOLLY. I would love to see the administration at least acknowledge that that is a major problem. 

Thank you for yielding. 

Mr. WALKER. Of course. And since I have a couple of seconds of 

my time left, Ms. Weichert, would you like to touch on that at all 

before I officially yield back? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Unfortunately, I don’t have the context to have 

an informed response. 

Mr. WALKER. Fair enough. Yes. I don’t want to put you on the 

spot without more information. Thank you, and with that, Chairwoman. 

Ms. FOXX. The gentleman yields back. 

Ms. Lawrence, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mrs. LAWRENCE. Thank you. Ms. Weichert, can you tell me— 

other agencies had the opportunity to submit reorganization plans 

with their own prospectives. Did you offer this opportunity to the 

Postal Service? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I don’t know the answer to that question. 

Mrs. LAWRENCE. Do you have, in your possession, a reorganization plan from the Postal Service? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I do not. 

Mrs. LAWRENCE. Do you know why not? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I do not. 

Mrs. LAWRENCE. Did OMB consult the Postal Service at any 

point in the process of creating such a plan, or did your task force 

at any time even ask for it? 

Again, you don’t know. 

Ms. WEICHERT. I don’t know. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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Mrs. LAWRENCE. So how did you come up with this recommendation or plan on privatizing the Postal Service, keeping in mind that 

the Postal Service does not fund itself with taxpayer’s dollars. It 

funds itself based on the sale of their products. In addition to that, 

it operates under a directive of the Constitution. 

So how did you come up with a plan to privatize it when you 

have not engaged the organization? And could I add to that, when 

you are talking about reorganization, I am looking at the members 

of the task force who are political appointees. Have you had a forensic audit of tasks and desk audits of these departments so that 

when you—this is a very severe recommendation. It is very high 

level. To say I am going to privatize it and then actually put it on 

the selling block for the highest bidder is what I am reading into 

this proposal, and you have not even engaged the organization, but 

you have political appointees who have sat at a table, and, to me, 

I will be honest, looks like a political just throw it up against the 

wall, we should privatize it when you haven’t, to me, addressed the 

constitutional responsibility as saying that there is economic challenges when the Postal Service pays its own bills because they do 

not use taxpayer dollars. 

So you are putting apples and oranges together, and I am very, 

very concerned that a recommendation of privatization, not reorganization, but privatization is something that this task force to—and 

I am not seeing the expertise or the due diligence to even get to 

that point. I am extremely concerned. 

You are saying all the right words. I am very impressed with 

your presentation. You obviously understand a lot, but right here 

in this lane, you are lacking a lot that for me to have you to sit 

here and say privatize, to sell it off when this body has been working for years to come up with a bipartisan plan—bipartisan—because we are trying to service the country based on our constitutional requirement. I need you to say something other than ‘‘I don’t 

know.’’ 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I appreciate the passion and the commitment 

to the topic. On this particular proposal, it very much was looking 

at the long term with the understanding that there were a number 

of players looking at the near term issues. And, again, every proposal that made it in here was looking at a combination of are we 

achieving the mission, the service, and the stewardship responsibilities. And the notion of an independent organization that is meant 

to be self-funded but that has $100 billion in unfunded liabilities—— 

Mrs. LAWRENCE. And part of that is because of what we did. We 

put legislation together to address that, because we are on all this 

body, who has the constitutional responsibility as well, based on 

our oath, we have pushed that forward. 

How in the world did you get from saying we want to be economically feasible to selling it to the highest bidder and to privatize it? I just don’t understand that leap, unless it is purely political. 

Ms. WEICHERT. I wouldn’t say it is purely political. What I would 

say—and again, in the front of the volume, we looked at what are 

those things that are fundamental to the mission, service, stewardship component. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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Mrs. LAWRENCE. So why wasn’t reorganization even put on the 

table? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the external analysis and looking at other proposals, including how other countries have looked at this, definitely 

fed into that, but what I would say is—— 

Mrs. LAWRENCE. But I just want to interrupt you. You looked at 

other countries, but you did not talk to the organization that you 

are talking about privatizing. Something seems wrong with that, 

that you would sit in a room and look at other international post 

companies, organizations, and make a recommendation of 

privatizing and sell it without even doing your due diligence for 

what we do in America and looking at the forensic operations, to 

look at where are the cost deficiencies. 

I am very concerned that this is not appropriate. My time is up, 

so I am going to close with this. This body, who has the legislative 

responsibility based on the people who voted us here, I would hope 

every single one of us will stand up and have the political courage 

to say we must meet those economic responsibilities. 

Ms. FOXX. The gentlewoman’s time has expired. 

Mrs. LAWRENCE. And we will continue to do that—— 

Ms. FOXX. The gentlewoman’s time has expired. 

Mrs. LAWRENCE. —but this is not professional and it looks political and unacceptable. 

I yield back. 

Ms. FOXX. The gentlewoman’s time has expired. 

Mrs. LAWRENCE. I yield back. 

Ms. FOXX. The gentlewoman’s time has expired. 

Mr. Grothman, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. GROTHMAN. Thank you for being here, and I will point out, 

the post office is in the Constitution. I think it is important for everybody to realize what is in the Constitution and also important 

for everybody to realize what is not in the Constitution and the 

Federal Government is forbidden to do. And it is important to bring 

that up as well. 

Thank you for the proposals. I mean, I think it is a good thing 

to try to look at what we can do to make the government more efficient, and I think when too many different agencies have things, 

you know, one hand not know what the other is doing, you result 

in spending too much money and having perverse effects. 

One of the things you want to do is you want to combine the nutrition assistance programs with other welfare programs. Could you 

explain the benefits of that? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I think that the primary issue actually looks 

at the delivery and the service component. 

Mr. GROTHMAN. Right. 

Ms. WEICHERT. So States administer both the temporary assistance for needy families, as well as the SNAP and the WIC programs essentially to largely the same group of people, and they 

tend to have one organization that does that administration, but 

when they deal with the Federal Government, they have to deal 

with confusing, overlapping, sometimes conflicting requirements 

that add to their overhead and basically reduce the amount of 

money of the whole pool that actually goes to the needy families. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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Mr. GROTHMAN. It is good. You know, one of the things that I am 

interested in and one of the reasons I ran for this job is you add 

up the public benefits, all the different things: income tax credit, 

the SNAP, the low-income housing, the TANF, you wind up with 

really big numbers that discourage people from working and discourage people from getting married as well. 

Do you think that by trying to put everything under one roof we 

do a better job of seeing, quite frankly, how much is available out 

there if you don’t try to work as hard as you can? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I think that the key thing from this proposal 

was really in taking a great view of some of the best in serving 

communities that are at risk. When you look at how charities are 

judged and measured, they are measured by how much of the actual benefit goes directly to the cause, and then, you know, the 

charities that have the best performance have the least amount of 

overhead. That is really where I think we should be judged. 

Mr. GROTHMAN. You feel we are spending a lot of money on poverty and a lot of that money is going to government employees who 

are administering the programs? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I absolutely think that we have excessive administrative overhead that would be better served actually bringing 

that money to the people that are targeted for it. 

Mr. GROTHMAN. I will give you a question, and you can think 

about this. It is a conversation I once had with a person high up 

in the administration. It was not the President. 

Do you feel we would be better off just taking a block amount 

of money and giving it to the States and saying: Here, you deal 

with the low-income housing, you deal with the nutrition, you deal 

with the educational requirements, and we are out of here all together, because when you look at the overall amount of money 

spent per person in poverty, it is just shockingly high. 

The average person would be happy to live off that, and of 

course, a lot of that is not trickling down to the people if poverty. 

It is going to the bureaucracy. But could you see the day come 

when the administration would just say: Here is X amount of dollars per person in poverty in your State today. You deal with it? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I haven’t done the full analysis to be able to 

get to that conclusion. What I would say is that would be part of 

the dialogue that I think we should have. Certainly there are governors and State and local authorities who would welcome that. 

And I think, you know, as many Members of this body have indicated, when we get to the implementation phase, we have to look 

at the costs and benefits, but I think it is certainly something we 

would want to look at. 

Mr. GROTHMAN. I would encourage you to do that. I came here 

with all sorts of ideas how to run these programs, but over time, 

I realize that Congress is incapable of doing what they should do 

in these programs, and maybe if you just said: We will give the 

State of Wisconsin $20,000 a year for every person in poverty, we 

would be ahead of the game and just clear the decks here in Washington. 

With regard to the merger of Education and Labor, is there a 

reason why we didn’t include something in there a little bit more 

like commerce to kind of change the mentality and realize that our 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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goal here is to help commerce and not get in its way? Is that something you would ever think about adding to the mix? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I am sorry. I didn’t understand the question. 

Mr. GROTHMAN. Would you ever consider adding commerce or 

economic development, that type of thing, in the mix maybe to try 

to change the mentality in the departments of education and labor? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I think it is a great question. What we wanted 

to do was get as clear as we could about core mission elements, and 

so I think the place we saw the greatest overlap had to do with 

workforce development and the alignment of how we actually prepare people for the work force, so it didn’t go as far as the actual 

commerce mission, but I think it is an interesting thought. 

Mr. GROTHMAN. Thank you for coming over. It is a tough—we 

are a tough crowd. 

Ms. FOXX. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Ms. Kelly, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Ms. KELLY. Thank you, Madam Chair. Welcome. The President’s 

reorganization proposal includes a radical plan to merge the Department of Education with the Department of Labor, but it only 

devotes four pages to this proposal. Such a merger obviously would 

require Congress to agree. But Senate appropriations chairman, 

Roy Blunt told reporters there are not sufficient votes for this 

merger, so it is not going to happen. 

But I wanted to ask about reorganization that is happening inside the Department of Education. The office of civil rights within 

the Department is charged with protecting the rights of disabled 

students, people of color, LGBTQ students, and others who face discrimination. 

Has the Department considered downsizing or consolidating the 

regional offices of the office of civil rights? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I am not aware of anything that would affect the 

office of civil rights at all. 

Ms. KELLY. Your proposal says you would move the office of civil 

rights. I am asking if you or the Department have considered consolidating its regional offices or shrinking its footprint? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So what I can say—so I am not familiar with all 

of the details of the internal deliberations that the Department of 

Education has done, but as part of this proposal, very explicitly, a 

number of the programs, including anything impacting the office of 

civil rights, was not discussed. 

Ms. KELLY. So you don’t know if there was an analysis on the 

caseload of investigations this office would be able to maintain 

after you cut the number of regional offices? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I don’t know, no. 

Ms. KELLY. I would also like to ask you about another important 

office in the Department of Education, which is the budget service 

office. That is the office that communicates with Congress and performs fiscal evaluations on current and future programs. It is an 

important office, and Congress relies on it. 

Are there any plans that would change the place and prominence 

of that office at the Department of Education? And if so, what are 

the details? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I am not aware of that. It was not included in 

this proposal. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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Ms. KELLY. So you don’t think anything will change? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I don’t know in terms of internal organizational 

structure. 

Ms. KELLY. I would like to ask you about the Federal student aid 

office now. The Federal student aid office, which is responsible, as 

I am sure you know, for administering millions of taxpayer dollars 

in loans to student borrowers. The President’s plan says that the 

Federal student aid office will be merged with American workforce 

and higher education administration office, along with eight other 

offices from the Department of Ed and Labor, leaving it further removed from any accountability to borrowers or taxpayers, but that 

big merger is not likely to happen soon. 

Why did you propose moving the Federal student aid office in 

this way? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the proposal that is in the volume was hoping 

to get Federal student aid aligned to a full workforce development 

view of student aid that would encompass not only higher traditional 4-year educational opportunities but also vocational opportunities, make that easier. The proposal envisions it is still operating 

as a whole entity and not being further merged but that the management shift would help align that broader mission of ensuring 

that we have student aid available for a range of educational opportunities, not just 4-year universities and things of that nature. 

Ms. KELLY. So you are looking at not only 4-year but 2-year 

or—— 

Ms. WEICHERT. Two-year vocational technical type programs, as 

well as potentially a greater understanding of the role of apprenticeships and other type on-the-job training. 

Ms. KELLY. Any graduate? Are graduate programs included in 

that? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So, again, the goal would be to align all of the 

Federal student aid ideas to really the end-to-end perspective 

route, workforce development. 

Ms. KELLY. And as you—as this plan may come about, does it increase the accountability to taxpayers and borrowers as the GAO 

and Inspector General have repeatedly recommended? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So this tool is not, I think, the optimal tool for 

that. I think there are a number of things in the President’s management agenda looking at our IT modernization and data accountability and transparency where we absolutely welcome the opportunity to get more transparent around elements of the data so that 

we can be more accountable but do that in a way that is efficient, 

effective, and not burdensome. 

Ms. KELLY. Okay. Well, I think I yield back the balance of my 

time. Thank you. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Does the gentlelady yield? 

Ms. KELLY. Yes, I will. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Madam Chairwoman, I ask unanimous content 

so have the statements from the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, and the 

National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association entered into the record. 

Ms. FOXX. Without objection. 

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Hice, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. HICE. Thank you, Madam Chair. 

Thank you for being here. Can you explain the proposal to move 

alcohol and tobacco responsibilities out of the ATF? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I am not familiar with the details of that proposal, but I would be happy to get back to you for the record. 

Mr. HICE. Okay. Do you know anything about that, the whole 

issue of where the firearms and explosive bureau would go and 

why? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I do not. 

Mr. HICE. Okay. I think it is—before I move on to some other 

questions, I think it is something that we have got to consider. It 

appears to me that we have got to look at who would regulate firearms if it goes back under the Department of Justice or remains 

under the Department of Justice and potentially FBI. 

Certainly the FBI is, in my opinion, not the proper place to regulate firearms, are not equipped to regulate industry and that type 

of thing, and it is concerning to me where ultimately that would 

go. 

Let me ask a little bit about the Department of Labor. Specifically, as it relates to OSHA, has that issue come up at all? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So there are no plans to change any of the specific activities of OSHA under this plan. 

Mr. HICE. Okay. Well, there are about half of our States that 

have a State run type OSHA program that, frankly, works better 

because it is closer to home. They know the industries. They know 

the issues that are facing their States better than the Federal Government. 

Is there a possibility or would the administration in any way consider encouraging States to develop their own OSHA type program 

rather than it coming straight from the Federal Government? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I think it is a great idea, and I think it brings 

up a great point. We wanted this proposal to be the beginning of 

a dialogue that would be iterative and ongoing. That is how modern, flexible organizations adapt and ensure that they are aligned 

in the mission. 

I think there are many principles in here that really are asking 

questions about what should the Federal Government be doing and 

what are States and local governments better positioned to do. So 

we would welcome dialogue that is fact based and, you know, asking the right questions. 

Mr. HICE. So how would that dialogue best take place? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So we have already started some preliminary 

conversations with governors, and we have our intergovernmental 

affairs organization in the EOP, but we would welcome congressional involvement in essentially curating a conversation on those 

topics. 

Mr. HICE. Okay. Well, I would look forward to being part of that, 

that communication and that discussion. 

And Madam Chair, with that, I will yield back. 

Ms. FOXX. Thanks for yielding back. 

Mr. Clay, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. CLAY. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ms. 

Weichert, for being here. 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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You know, President Trump’s reformed plan appears to be premised on the belief that reform requires structural reorganization, 

the merging or moving around of agencies and their employees, 

and I question whether that is truly necessary or whether reform 

can be accomplished without eliminating, merging, or moving agencies around. 

Let’s take, for example, President Trump’s proposal to merge the 

Departments of Education and Labor into a single agency to be 

called, and I quote, ‘‘The Department of Education and Workforce.’’ 

The new name is very similar to the jurisdiction of the House 

Committee on Education and the Workforce. Ms. Weichert, was 

this similarly a factor that was considered in the President’s plan? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely, and the fact that most OECD countries and countries like China actually organize in this way. 

Mr. CLAY. Now you mentioned workforce development in your 

other colloquy. You know, that is one of the important missions of 

the U.S. Department of Labor. They retrain workers, they help 

stand up workers, they even job corps. It is all geared towards 

workforce development. How do you envision that once these two 

agencies are merged? Is it still going to be as robust? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I think it will be more robust. So one of the 

things—and getting to your first point of, is reorganization necessary to make change happen. 

Mr. CLAY. Yeah. 

Ms. WEICHERT. I think it is a pivotal question and one that we 

thought deeply about. Organizational change is one tool among 

many, and so many of the proposals actually focused on places 

where change has been needed for some time, as highlighted by 

Government Accountability GAO studies and other concerns, and 

change hasn’t happened, organization can be a tool that actually 

gets resources together, aligns priorities. 

As it relates specifically to the workforce, what we saw when we 

looked at, you know, whether it is 40 programs or 46 or 47 workforce development programs, we saw a real mix in terms of quality 

and outcomes orientation. We saw a real mix in terms of evidence, 

evidence-based decisionmaking. What we are hopeful to do is that 

we can steward the resources associated with these various programs and focus them on the things that are driving the reskilling, 

driving the workforce development in ways that actually help the 

American worker that are easier for businesses to actually deal 

with as well, and ultimately get more Americans in the right jobs 

for the 21st century. 

Mr. CLAY. You know—and thanks for that response, but some of 

my colleagues are quite skeptical of the President’s plan and question the underlying motive or purpose. For example, Ranking Member Scott of Virginia called the plan, and I quote, ‘‘hastily concocted 

proposal that uses the false promise of streamlining to cut investments in our future.’’ 

Ms. Weichert, how do you respond to critics of the plan like Mr. 

Scott? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So, first thing, to anyone who wants to accuse us 

of being hastily—these plans are being hastily concocted, I would 

encourage them to read the whole volume and not just the thumbnail proposals in the back, including the bibliography and including 


KING-6430 with DISTILLER
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the President’s management agenda that really provides the context for the whole thing. 

I understand in Washington, you know, in a hyper political environment, questioning people’s motives, but what I would like to ask 

people to do is judge us by our actions and judge us by results. 

Mr. CLAY. But, look, there is one member of even the President’s 

party who was quoted in the New York Times as saying that, one, 

that the proposal to move the $3 billion CDBG program from the 

Department of HUD to Commerce is just a first step to eliminating 

the program. He says the move to the Commerce Department was 

an attempt to strangle the program by removing it from HUD—career HUD official. How do you respond to that? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So, again, I can’t—I can’t have a conversation 

about motives. What I can say is that the proposals that we have, 

we believe have a fact base and merit, and we have attempted to 

showcase that in the report and in the bibliography. What I would 

say is reasonable people with expertise and passion may disagree, 

and it may be because they are informed by facts that we don’t 

have. 

I would invite folks to actually, you know, meet us in the realm 

of public debate, bring the facts, bring the alternative proposals, 

and that is probably the most important thing I would say is we 

have attempted to create a holistic path forward. Is it perfect? Of 

course it isn’t. Does it have elements of challenge and difficulty? 

Absolutely. 

But what we attempted to do was actually put together a plan 

that was a holistic vision, and to the extent people disagree with 

that, I absolutely welcome that debate, and I think folks who have 

spent time with me and spent time with our team realize we are 

genuine in having that debate. 

Mr. CLAY. And my time is expired. Madam Chairwoman thank 

you. 

Ms. FOXX. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Mr. Palmer, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. PALMER. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Good to see you, Ms. 

Weichert. I think the majority of members on both sides out of this 

committee understand the need to make some reforms in the Federal Government. We have had hearings on everything from mismanagement at the Veterans’ Affairs, Social Security, 

cybersecurity, improper payments, and I can go on down the list. 

I mean, we are acutely aware that there are needs for reform. 

You said something in your testimony that the Federal Government operates much like it did 50 years ago. I have been acutely 

focused on how do we reduce improper payments, and it is a huge 

problem. It was $140 billion last year. Do you see the reforms as 

having a very positive impact on reducing improper payments? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I think, to the extent that we can get management oversight of like programs like money, it is going to improve 

general management efficiency. It is not the only way. 

Mr. PALMER. Also, the data systems, we can—— 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. 

Mr. PALMER. The savings that you can generate from some of 

these reforms and reducing improper payments can go back in to 

replacing data systems. 


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Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. 

Mr. PALMER. Which should really improve that area. You also 

mentioned the GAO’s high risk list and that not every Federal 

agency has taken action to get. 

We know that from hearings here that not every agency has 

taken action. Will this effort to improve accountability from the 

Federal agencies, will this effort improve that? 

Ms. WEICHERT. That is absolutely one of the objectives. 

Mr. PALMER. Will it help increase our oversight and our effectiveness? 

Ms. WEICHERT. That is absolutely the goal. 

Mr. PALMER. I also want to get into an area that I think is of 

great importance, and that is the whole issue of infrastructure and 

the permitting process, and you mentioned in your testimony the 

need to reduce the permitting time. 

Madam Chairman, I would like to introduce a couple of reports 

into the record. 

Ms. FOXX. Without objection. 

Mr. PALMER. One is 2 years, not 10 years redesigning infrastructure approvals. It is from an organization called, ‘‘Common Good.’’ 

And they make this point that a 6-year delay in starting construction on public projects costs the Nation over $3.7 trillion. That is 

more than double the $1.7 trillion that is needed to upgrade America’s infrastructure through the next decade, and that is everything—that is rail service, water infrastructure, roads and bridges, 

inland waterways, power generation, power transmission. 

I really think that what you are trying to do and what this administration is trying to do in regard to infrastructure is critical. 

And to give you a more local example of that, I would also like to 

introduce this report into the record: Assessing the Costs Attributed to project Delays in Texas. 

Ms. FOXX. Without objection. 

Mr. PALMER. There was a rural road, a four-lane project, 2.7 miles, it was delayed 33–1/2 months and the delay was $96,000 a 

month. That added $3.5 million to just a 2.7-mile rural road project 

in U.S. Highway 59 in Texas, 2.6 miles they were going to widen 

that stretch of road. A 5-year delay at $297,000 a month, that 

added $17.8 million to the project. And then I–10 and I–410 in the 

San Antonio area, adding an interchange, is 1.5 miles that was affected, it was delayed 11 months at 447 a month. That added $5.1 

million. 

We are literally throwing our infrastructure dollars down the 

drain with these delays, and if you would like to comment on that, 

I think the committee would be very interested in hearing your 

thoughts on how we are going to make these changes that will reduce the permitting delays. 

Ms. WEICHERT. I absolutely appreciate that, and reducing burden 

and actually increasing the economic output are definitely, you 

know, important missions that we have out of this plan. 

I think the Army Corps’ proposal for the civilian work is a great 

example of just what you are talking about—very good intentions 

to preserve various people’s rights around our waterways, to protect fish, lead to very complex, and you know, hard to navigate conflicting regulatory burden that make it very difficult to do improveVerDate Nov 24 2008 15:55 Nov 02, 2018 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00039 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\31276.TXT APRIL

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ment projects of any type, and I think that is an example of exactly 

what you are saying. 

Mr. PALMER. Well, one other point here. We have had hearings 

on cybersecurity breaches, particularly at the Office of Personnel 

Management, and one of the problems that we have is hiring highly qualified people. We have a program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham called the joint forensics research—I mean, 

‘‘The Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research,’’ one of the top guys in the world running this. 

His students have a job before they graduate, but if they try to 

get a job with the Federal Government, it is months before they 

can even hear back from them. And I just wonder if part of this 

restructuring is going to enable us to hire the very best that is out 

there to work in the Federal Government on cybersecurity. 

If the chairman may—she may answer? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Thank you. So absolutely, and that is one of the 

key areas of why we wanted to elevate the OPM function because 

getting to the bottom of that challenge requires strategic emphasis 

and a real commitment at the top of the house. 

Mr. PALMER. So the bottom line is we have got to change. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. 

Mr. PALMER. I thank the chairwoman for her indulgence, and I 

yield back. 

Ms. FOXX. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Ms. Plaskett, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Good afternoon. 

Ms. Weichert, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the 

implementation if this plan takes place. 

The executive order advised for looking for opportunities for the 

private sector to take over some of these government functions. We 

have heard discussion about post office and air traffic control. What 

other agencies or areas do you think that privatization might be 

appropriate? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the other place that I think has gotten a lot 

of attention, not just now but practically in every administration in 

recent history, is around the Tennessee Valley Authority. Our proposal is a fairly narrow proposal around transmission assets, looking at, you know, whether the Federal Government really needs to 

be in the business of providing the transmission of power. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Okay. And in discussing the privatization or even 

the merging of these businesses, how much input was given to 

those career individuals, civil servants? Was discussion had with 

them about how this implementation might affect the civil service? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the agencies were absolutely involved in providing bottoms-up feedback as part of a process that took place between June and December of last year. Some of the proposals that 

resulted out of that were included in the February release of the 

2019—— 

Ms. PLASKETT. When you say bottom-ups, what specifically? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So as I mentioned in my opening statement, we 

did the analysis in three phases. We did a data collection phase 

that included bottoms-up input from agencies and from public comment. We got 106,000 public comments. 


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Ms. PLASKETT. When you say ‘‘from agencies,’’ do you mean the 

employees or the management of the agency? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Presumably, both. 

Ms. PLASKETT. How do you know presumably? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So in almost every case, the proposals required 

a depth of knowledge that require that the civil servant population 

had to participate in the—— 

Ms. PLASKETT. So in the outside—the comments, you said that 

you also received public comments. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Correct. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Did you receive public submissions or submissions 

from employee unions? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I can’t say for sure whether those were included 

in the public comments. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Did you seek out the unions’ input in these discussions. 

Ms. WEICHERT. So we—the requests for comment was generally 

made public after the executive order so—— 

Ms. PLASKETT. But did you engage the unions as a whole? Specifically, did you engage the unions? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Specifically, no. As I indicated earlier, one of the 

reasons we did the deliberation the way we did is, in the recent 

past, no reform effort—despite the fact that there have been reform 

efforts and reorganization efforts proposed in every administration, 

no reform effort has successfully moved forward with the exception 

of one that took place after 9/11, precisely because entrenched interests essentially negotiated a way around—— 

Ms. PLASKETT. I didn’t ask you if you were negotiating. I just 

asked you if you requested from them their comments or their positions? 

Ms. WEICHERT. We requested public comment. 

Ms. PLASKETT. But not specifically from unions. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Not specifically from anyone individually. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Now that, you know, you are talking about a negotiation, which would be the implementation of the process. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Correct. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Would you be engaging—and I would assume, 

how would you engage the unions because they would need to be 

engaged in the implementation, which then becomes this discussion 

that you were talking about just a moment ago. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Yeah, absolutely, and this is something that, you 

know, we released the plan last week. We are—you know, this is 

the first truly public conversation we are having, but we anticipate 

having many public conversations. And what I would say is there 

are great examples in the not too distant past of where unions and 

management of a variety of ilks have gotten together and looked 

at, you know, how do we achieve the mission of our business, serve 

the customers—— 

Ms. PLASKETT. So I am assuming then that you are going to engage those. Is that what you are saying? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. Yes. 

Ms. PLASKETT. So when you talk about influencing the plan, you 

said that, you know, you discussed bottoms up, you also asked for 

public comment. You did not necessarily speak specifically to the 


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unions about this. Were there other outside groups that you spoke 

with? Were there think tanks or others that supported your ideas? 

Ms. WEICHERT. We didn’t speak to anyone. As I mentioned again, 

there were three phases to our—— 

Ms. PLASKETT. I heard the three phases. I am just asking did you 

speak to them? 

Ms. WEICHERT. The second phase involved looking at things in 

the public realm, including GAO reports. We looked—our bibliography on page 128 of the report articulates all of the knowledge—— 

Ms. PLASKETT. So did you engage the Heritage Foundation who 

has specific reports about this? 

Ms. WEICHERT. There is a Heritage Foundation report that was 

reviewed as part of this. 

Ms. PLASKETT. And what would be the name of that report? 

Ms. WEICHERT. It is on—— 

Ms. PLASKETT. If you could get that back to me, I would appreciate that. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Ms. Chairwoman, I would ask to insert into the 

record an article from the New York Times entitled: ‘‘How One 

Conservative Think Tank is Stocking Trump’s Government. By 

placing its people throughout the administration, the Heritage 

Foundation has succeeded in furthering its right-wing agenda.’’ 

Ms. FOXX. Without objection, and the gentlewoman’s time has expired. 

Ms. PLASKETT. Thank you. 

Ms. FOXX. Thank you. 

I will recognize myself for 5 minutes. 

As the chairwoman of the Education and Workforce Committee, 

I take our oversight responsibilities very seriously with respect to 

the worker protection agencies within the Department of Labor, 

evidenced by the many hearings and other oversight actions we 

have conducted during this Congress. 

Under the Trump administration’s reorganization proposal, 

Labor Department worker protection agencies, such as the occupational safety and health administration and the wage and hour division would be housed within the, quote, ‘‘enforcement,’’ end quote, 

agency at the newly created Department of Education and the 

Workforce. 

Would this enforcement agency continue the administration’s approach of providing needed compliance assistance while also effectively enforcing the laws, and do you foresee any impacts on the 

enforcement of worker protection laws because of the proposed realignment? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the answer is: There are no changes in direction in terms of compliance and enforcement support, and the goal 

would be to continue to provide that support at the highest level. 

Ms. FOXX. Thank you. You said the proposal was built around 

mission and purpose, and this proposal seems to focus better the 

work of the agencies when it comes to helping students, job seekers, and employers. 

By having a seamless approach to programs for students pursuing postsecondary and continuing education from one office in 


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bringing the programs focused on elementary and secondary 

schools into another, do you expect it will be easier for students, 

families, school officials, and employers to find the resources and 

guidance they need to improve and/or provide a better educational 

opportunity for students? 

Ms. WEICHERT. That is absolutely the objective. 

Ms. FOXX. Thank you. What safeguards would be in place to ensure students will not lose valuable protections, especially for students from vulnerable groups in the restructuring of these offices? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So it is a great point, and disability employment, 

OSHA, mine safety, office of civil rights, none of those are expected 

to change at all under this proposal. 

Ms. FOXX. And we appreciate that, and I assume you will want 

to work with the Congress and the relevant stakeholders to maintain those protections. I think it is important for the administration—— 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. 

Ms. FOXX. —to assert that. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Yes, we absolutely assert that we believe that the 

oversight responsibilities of Congress are paramount. 

Ms. FOXX. Thank you. To what extent did OMB ensure that GAO 

and Inspector General reports and recommendations were fully 

considered in developing the crosscutting proposals? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So they were very important in considering the 

crosscutting proposals. As I mentioned earlier, reorganization is 

one tool among many, and we wanted to look at those things where 

there were known problems and intractable problems that did not 

seem to get traction without a reorganization purpose, and so much 

of the thinking really was, you know, where are there places where 

time and time again has GAO said this is a problem. 

Ms. FOXX. You have indicated several times that this is right in 

the beginning stages. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Correct. 

Ms. FOXX. But has the—how does the administration propose 

Congress address authorizing the government reform plan proposals which require congressional action if you have such plan already? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So what we are planning to do this summer—so 

we were genuine about saying this is a framework and a plan but 

that we need to engage with key constituencies, especially Congress but also other stakeholder groups, including unions and civil 

servant—service representatives. And so, over the course of the 

summer, we will be working with agencies. I am very happy to 

take feedback and input on highlighting what is a proposed implementation construct and what would require legislative input, what 

could be proceeded with administratively, and then what would be 

expected to be in the 2020 budget. 

Ms. FOXX. And the last question. If the administration believes 

the proposal does not need congressional approval, can you commit 

to notifying Congress in advance of any proposed action so we can 

evaluate to propose change? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So what we can do is commit to the dialogue 

around all of these proposals and incorporate the feedback and the 

insights from the people who have oversight over those. 


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Ms. FOXX. Thank you very much. 

Mr. Sarbanes, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. SARBANES. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for being 

here today, Ms. Weichert. I want to thank you for your testimony. 

My understanding is that part of the proposal would be to eliminate OPM or absorb its functions into the executive office of the 

President. Is that correct? Can you explain that a little bit more? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Sure. So the proposal is not to eliminate OPM. 

It is actually to take and follow leading practice for modern human 

capital management and take the administrative transaction processing, essentially the paperwork functions, and move them into 

shared services context, and then focus the efforts of the core 

human capital elements of the organization, focus those more strategically on workforce needs for the future, reskilling, redeploying 

civil service reform, and elevating that into the executive office of 

the President, ensuring it gets the right level of attention, resources, and priority. 

Mr. SARBANES. So let me express the concern I have. From what 

I can gather, looking at the way the executive office of the President has operated, there is a real kind of partisan edge to it. 

There is plenty of evidence of a kind of ethical blindness, which 

has afflicted the office overall, which is a bad combination, politicizing things, being overly partisan, not observing ethical boundaries, transparency, accountability, you put all that together, and 

it can really undermine and corrode the effectiveness of government. 

Mr. SARBANES. And what I worry about is pulling more functions 

and key decisions around how human resources are deployed across 

the Federal Government and all of its various agencies, pulling 

that into an environment where you’ve got this kind of partisan politicized outlook, where there’s—there’s these examples of not observing transparency accountability, ethical norms, et cetera, which 

could just make the overall situation that we see even worse. 

So I’m extremely concerned about the potential for this reorganization to the extent some of the human resources decisionmaking 

is being into a place that has that edge to it, how that will ripple 

through. So what I’d like you to address is, you know, how are you 

going to have safeguards? 

What kind of safeguards will be in place to prevent nepotism, because we’ve definitely seen that, operating close—in the close quarters of the White House and the executive office, to safeguard 

against political patronage in the executive branch, and others 

things like that, which, frankly, undermine the confidence of the 

public in government’s ability to act on the public’s behalf and in 

the public interest, rather than to act to serve special interests or 

insiders or what have you. 

So what kind of safeguards are there going to be in place to address that potential concern? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I appreciate the question. I think it’s a fantastic question. And it’s actually one that has good precedent. 

So the office I run—so deputy director for management has responsibility for a range of functions that expand across the Federal 

Government, around IT, around—so the Federal CIO is in my office. The Comptroller of the United States is in my office and is reVerDate Nov 24 2008 15:55 Nov 02, 2018 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00044 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\31276.TXT APRIL

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sponsible for finance and accounting policy, procurement policy. 

The Office of the Federal Procurement Policy administrator is in 

my office. And Congress has actually put in safeguards around 

those key functions and elevated them into the Executive Office of 

the President precisely so that they can get the attention that Congress over time has felt it’s needed. 

The lack of an office of equivalent heft in the EOP for people is 

actually in some ways conspicuous by its absence. I mentioned earlier that most OECD countries have people up there with IT, with 

finance, accounting and—— 

Mr. SARBANES. Okay. Well, thank you. I’m still nervous, because 

you take functions of heft and you put them in a place where ethical boundaries are ignored on a daily basis, And I think it complicates the situation. 

Ms. WEICHERT. I push back, though—I appreciate, absolutely appreciate the concern. What I would say is if you could—and I’d be 

happy to talk to you more about your concerns. But when it comes 

to the functions that are already there, we have a range of vehicles, 

including performance.gov, data.gov, and other vehicles to ensure 

not less, but more accountability and oversight. We work very 

closely with the congressional committees that have oversight—— 

Mr. SARBANES. Well, then I’d just ask you to work harder at that, 

because I’m not necessarily seeing the results that you’re suggesting when it comes to observing accountability and transparency 

and all. 

I’ll yield back my time. Thank you. 

Ms. FOXX. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Mr. Raskin, you’re recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. RASKIN. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. 

Welcome, Ms. Weichert. I notice you’re planning to reorganize a 

whole bunch of departments, from the Postal Service to OPM, but 

curiously absent on the list was the Department of Defense, which 

has a $700 billion budget. And our committee has seen a report 

just a couple of years ago saying $125 billion could be saved in efficiency. So I’m just wondering why it’s missing. 

Ms. WEICHERT. So we looked at the areas where, again, mission, 

service, and stewardship were having the most challenges in moving forward. I absolutely appreciate the concerns. And we did look 

at GAO studies in that realm. 

In order to focus this activity, we wanted to look at those things 

where we had enough information, we had the ability. 

Mr. RASKIN. Okay. I’m going to get you this report. You check it 

out. There’s about $125 billion that could be saved almost overnight by improving efficiencies there. 

I represent Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District, which is 

home to more than 88,000 Federal employees who’ve come under 

some harsh rhetorical treatment by this administration, but also 

some attacks on their pay and benefits. And also, I hear regularly 

from Federal employees who love their jobs and love the country, 

as do you, and you’re committed to your government job, whose 

mission has been interfered with for political reasons, they believe. 

And I’m wondering, what are you doing now or what are you 

hoping to do in the future to protect the Federal workforce, the inVerDate Nov 24 2008 15:55 Nov 02, 2018 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00045 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\31276.TXT APRIL

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tegrity of the civil service, and to prevent corruption by political interference? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I think it’s a great question. And again, I will 

say it as many times and as many ways as I can, that it is enlightened self-interest for us as the largest enterprise employing people 

to really understand and internalize the importance of the Federal 

worker to the—— 

Mr. RASKIN. Cool. So that’s your value, but do you have any specific actions that you’re taking to protect the Federal workforce 

today? 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. So one of the cross-agency priority 

goals that was released in the President’s Management Agenda is 

looking explicitly at people in the workforce in the 21st century and 

the civil service reforms we need to do that. And we’re focusing 

very heavily on the areas where the employees themselves have 

said that, you know, the merit systems principles that were enshrined in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act where they are not 

actually being aligned with—— 

Mr. RASKIN. If I could, I’ve got to cut you off there because I’ve 

got a few more questions, but I’d love to hear more specifics from 

you about that. 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely 

Mr. RASKIN. The administration’s been rolling back proudly 

workplace, consumer, and environmental protections deemed to be 

overly intrusive. For example, Mr. Mulvaney has ordered that the 

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau drop enforcement against 

payday lenders. Do you have any plans to somehow honor the commitment of the CFPB to protect borrowers in the wake of that announcement? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I am not involved in the activities of the 

CFPB. 

Mr. RASKIN. Okay. Similarly, you might not be involved in this 

one. What about in the area of HUD? Do you have any plans to 

follow through on HUD’s commitment to fair housing in the wake 

of the administration’s nullification of the fair housing rule that 

had been promulgated to address patterns of discrimination and 

segregation? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I can’t comment on that specifically. 

Mr. RASKIN. I saw yesterday, there’s a rule called the hog carcass 

cleaning rule which says, quote: All hair, scurf, and dirt, including 

all hoofs and claws, shall be removed from hog carcasses and the 

carcasses thoroughly washed and cleaned before incision is made 

for evisceration or inspection. 

This is for food protection. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. 

But the Department of Agriculture just posted its intent to repeal 

this rule last month. Do you know how that particular mechanism 

of deregulation would work to protect consumers or is that being 

done at the behest of the slaughterhouse operators? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I am not familiar with that. 

Mr. RASKIN. Okay. Can you tell us what the role of The Heritage 

Foundation was in the development of this plan? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So there was no specific involvement, other than 

the review of the materials that are listed on—— 


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Mr. RASKIN. Do you know of anything that The Heritage Foundation recommended that was not incorporated in the final plan? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I don’t have the plan in front of me, but if you 

actually compare our document and the document that we reference, there’s a significant difference. 

Mr. RASKIN. Okay. I didn’t see it, but thank you very much. I appreciate it. 

Ms. WEICHERT. It’s page 128 of the report. 

Mr. RASKIN. I’ll check it out. Thank you. 

Ms. FOXX. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Mr. Scott, you’re recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I thank you for your 

courtesies. 

Ms. Weichert, I agree with you that you shouldn’t question people’s motives in legislation. But in this case, isn’t it true that many 

Republicans have run on platforms that include the total abolition 

of the Department of Education? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I’m not aware of anyone specifically. If there’s 

information, I’d be happy to look at it. 

Mr. SCOTT. You’re not aware of any Republican who’s run on a 

platform that included the abolition of the Department of Education? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I’m a management consultant who came to 

Washington in August of last year. I haven’t spent my time focused 

on the political realm. What I’ve spent my time looking at is how 

to drive transformational change—— 

Mr. SCOTT. Okay. Well, let me just say that a lot of Republicans 

have run on that platform, and so you have to understand why 

there’s skepticism—— 

Ms. WEICHERT. Absolutely. 

Mr. SCOTT. —when you want to merge. And some think it’s submerge the Department of Education. 

The Department of Labor is essentially law enforcement at its 

core. It enforces wage and hour, it enforces OSHA, labor standards, 

like unfair labor practices; basically a law enforcement agency. A 

very small portion is in job training and unemployment situations. 

Education is education policy. 

You see the difference in their missions when you look at their 

civil rights focuses. You’re aware that the Department of Education, when you say civil rights, you’re talking about Brown v. 

Board of Education, desegregation, equity in education, rights of 

disabled students, disparities in discipline. And when you talk civil 

rights in the Department of Labor, you’re talking about affirmative 

action, and contracts, implementing the Janus decision that just 

came down today, employment discrimination, and things like that. 

How would a civil rights division of this combined thing actually 

operate? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I think that is one of the areas where we 

would look forward to working with the Oversight Committee on 

the operationalization of this. Most of the enforcement components 

were going to simply be moved as they were and then look at if 

there were synergies going forward. 

To the extent the missions are distinct, and particularly the skill 

sets or the core needs or the players involved are different, that is 


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absolutely a reason you could have organizationally distinct activities. But our belief is that there probably are some synergies to the 

extent enforcement involved a range of like skill sets. Whether it’s 

law or compliance, that would be something to look at. 

Mr. SCOTT. Is this expected to save any money? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So the vision for all of these things is to, at a 

minimum, improve mission and service and not cost any more. The 

goal in a perfect world would also save money, but that—— 

Mr. SCOTT. But you don’t expect to not necessarily save any 

money. One of the rationales was overlapping workforce programs. 

When we passed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act in 

2014, we thought we had taken care of the unnecessary overlaps. 

Can you name any programs that are still, quote, duplicative? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So I would submit that if there are 40 workforce 

development programs or 46 or 47, that there would be duplication 

among those. 

Mr. SCOTT. Can you name the ones that are duplicative? 

Ms. WEICHERT. I cannot. 

Mr. SCOTT. Can you say a word about what would happen in the 

school nutrition programs from a public school perspective? I know 

we have the school lunch program and one agency. Most of the 

child nutrition programs are under Agriculture and they are going 

to be moved around. Can you say from a school perspective what’s 

going to happen? 

Mr. Cummings mentioned WIC and other programs kind of 

moved around. 

Ms. WEICHERT. So only SNAP and WIC, which are near-cash programs, would be proposed for moving. All of the commodity assistance programs, particularly as it relates to school lunch, would remain as is. 

Mr. SCOTT. And would—this Child and Adult Care Food Program 

moves to the Department of Health and Human Services? 

Ms. WEICHERT. So, again, the SNAP program and the WIC program would move to HHS. 

Mr. SCOTT. And how would that operate in a school system? Like 

an afternoon snack program. 

Ms. WEICHERT. So, essentially, the programs that would move to 

HHS are the near-cash programs that are largely administered by 

States and local entities. And what this would essentially do is 

streamline the provision of resources, the dollars from the Federal 

Government to those agencies that actually administer them. So 

presumably, it would make the job of anyone whose doing that administration at a State or local level easier. 

Mr. SCOTT. Thank you, Madam Chairman. 

Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Mr. Scott. 

I’m now prepared to make some closing comments. 

Ms. Weichert, I want to thank you very much for the excellent 

presentation that you made and the superb way in which you have 

handled the questions, and some animosity, it appeared to me, directed at you, which I think was inappropriate, but I appreciate 

very much. 

And I read the paragraph given to us about you. And I can understand that you are a consummate professional. And I think we 

are extraordinarily fortunate to have had someone with your expeVerDate Nov 24 2008 15:55 Nov 02, 2018 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00048 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 H:\31276.TXT APRIL

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rience come in and help shepherd this study that was done and be 

able to explain it to us. I will compliment Director Mulvaney very 

highly for having the good sense to bring you in to work with him 

on this project. 

I particularly appreciated the fact that you kept coming back to 

mission, service, and stewardship as your guiding principles. I do 

think that—we do that with the committee too. When we propose 

legislation, we outline what our principles are in putting forward 

the legislation and make sure they are like a North Star for us. 

And I believe you have come up with three very, very good ways 

to anchor what it is you’ve done. 

I think, again, many of the comments and questions that were 

directed to you were not in your bailiwick to answer and I appreciate, again, the way you handled that. 

I believe that we here have a great responsibility to spend hardworking taxpayer dollars as well as we can spend them. We are 

taxing the American people at a very high rate, in my opinion. And 

when we take on a responsibility to do something for the American 

people here at the Federal Government level, then I think we need 

to be doing the best we can. 

And the world is changing, and it’s changing rapidly. And again, 

with your background in information technology and other areas, 

you see that. Unfortunately, I think people who get entrenched in 

government jobs, who get entrenched in elected office, sometimes 

cannot see what is happening out there in terms of change and the 

need to change that. 

I heard you say one of your missions is to have the Federal Government better serve the public. That should be the mission of all 

of us here. And if it requires change with an organization, then we 

should be out there joining you in saying this needs to be changed. 

I’ve always believed we should sunset every piece of legislation 

that passes here. That would help us gain much better control over 

making the adjustments that need to be made every 3 years, every 

5 years, whatever, instead of having to wait for these reports to be 

done and these studies to be done periodically, and then have agencies be very defensive because they do not want to make the 

changes that are necessary. I think they forget, people in the agencies, often why they are here. They think the public is here to serve 

them. We are here to serve the public. 

I also want to thank you very much for emphasizing that this is 

the beginning of a conversation which Congress should engage in 

and not just discount out of hand the kinds of comments you made 

because the motives are questioned. I think you did an excellent 

job of representing the administration. And I realize you came into 

the administration, I believe from the comments, to specifically do 

the thing that you have done and that you do not have a political 

agenda. And I appreciate that very much. 

If the Federal Government does not make the kinds of changes 

that you all are recommending here and many, many more, we are 

failing the American people. And the American people, I believe, 

will hold us responsible for that, and they should hold us responsible for it. Again, and I think what we are seeing—while I don’t 

like the vitriol that’s going on, I think that there are people out 

there very frustrated because the Federal Government is not doing 


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its job. In some cases, it’s doing jobs it has no business doing, and 

we need to sort those things out better. 

So I want to thank you very much for the excellent presentation 

and for the way that you have responded to members today in a 

very open and fair and honest way. 

I would like to take a point of personal privilege and recognize 

Nathaniel Wallace and his parents, who are here. Nathaniel is the 

art competition winner for the Fifth District of North Carolina. And 

I’m a little late for my appointment with Nathaniel and his parents, as they’re going to go over to the reception for the art competition winners who are here in town today. 

I’m sure, Mr. Scott, you want to mention yours? 

Mr. SCOTT. Yes. Right over here. Please stand. 

Thank you. 

Ms. FOXX. Great. We’re glad to have both of you all here. And 

I appreciate Mr. Scott speaking up. 

So again, I thank you for being here today, Ms. Weichert. 

The hearing record will remain open for 2 weeks for any member 

to submit a written opening statement or questions for the record. 

And if there is no further business, without objection, the committee stands adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 12:21 p.m., the committee was adjourned.] 


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APPENDIX 

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING RECORD


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CONGRESSIONAL 

TESTIMONY 

STATEMENT FOR THE RECORD 

J. DAVID COX, SR. 

NATIONAL PRESIDENT 

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, AFL-CIO 

BEFORE 

HOUSE OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE 

ON 

EXAMINING THE ADMINISTRATION'S REORGANIZATION PLAN 

June 27,2018 
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Chairman Gowdy, Ranking Member Cummings, and Members of the House Oversight 

and Government Reform Committee, on behalf of the more than 700,000 federal and District of 

Columbia government employees represented by the American Federation of Government 

Employees, AFL-CIO (AFGE), I submit this statement for the record of the Committee's hearing 

to examine the Administration's government-wide reorganization plan on June 27, 2018. 

On June 21, 2018, the Trump Administration issued a document entitled "Delivering 

Government Solutions in the 21" Century -- Reform Plan and Reorganization 

Recommendations." The plan outlines the Administration's recommendations for reorganizing 

the federal government. AFGE objects to many recommendations of this plan as implementation 

will result in inefficient allocation of agency resources and workload, and politicization of the 

civil service. 

Background 

Prior to public dissemination of the Administration's reorganization plan, on March 13, 

2017, the President issued an Executive Order1 mandating that the Director of the Office of 

Management and Budget (OMB) and the heads of executive branch agencies create agency 

reorganization plans within 180 days. In April 2017, the OMB Director also issued a 

memorandum2 with instructions stating what reorganization plans were supposed to include and 

the policies they were supposed to implement. Although the April OMB memorandum included 

the following sentence: "When developing their Agency Reform Plan in coordination with 

OMB, agencies should consult with key stakeholders including their workforce ... , " very few 

agencies complied with this direction. With a few rare exceptions, national AFGE bargaining 

councils and AFGE locals were not consulted or even informed of reorganization plans. The 

same is true for the Administration's recent reform plan and reorganization recommendations. 

As public servants, federal employees take very seriously their duty to provide vital 

services to the American public. Federal employees are dedicated to their professions and are 

experts not only in their field of work, but also, through yeara of service, many federal 

employees understand what is needed to improve the internal workings of their agencies far 

better than private consultants. Federal workers and their representatives should play an 

important role in the development of organizational changes involving federal agencies and the 

services they provide. Neglecting to seek input from employee representatives in the 

development of government-wide reorganization plans is counterproductive to any genuine effort 

to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government. 

Reformation and Reorganization-Privatization 

In introducing its government reorganization plan, the Administration has stated that 

there are no plans to cut jobs, and that job reductions were not a factor in devising the plan. 

However, the recommendations of the plan, as outlined, are contrary to the Administration's 

statements. The reorganization plan contemplates privatization of the Postal Service, the various 

Department of Energy Power Marketing Administrations, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, 

1 EO 13781 

2 OMB M-17-22, April12, 2017 
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to name but a few. In addition, the Administration's plan constantly uses words such as 

streamlining, consolidating, restructuring, realigning and transferring. No one opposes these 

actions in principle. In practice, however, words like "streamlining" often just mean reduction or 

degradation of service delivery. 

The reorganization plan promotes a particularly pernicious govemmentwide 

"consolidation" of so-called "shared services." The substance of this concept is that all federal 

administrative service functions should use or will be required to use centralized cross-agency 

administrative support for these "common functions" of government. The theory behind the 

"shared services" concept is allegedly based on economies of scale; when multiple federal 

agencies make use of administrative services functions, centralizing these services in a limited 

number of providers and requiring that every agency use the centralized source{s) to obtain the 

services will supposedly reap cost savings. However, AFGE believes that the concept of"shared 

services" encourages private sector entities to either compete with government-sponsored service 

providers or to enter into "partnerships" with government agencies to provide the services. It is 

not efficiencies that drive this quest for consolidation, but rather profits for the private sector. 

It must be noted that consolidation of services, "shared services," is actually at odds with 

maximizing flexibility and agency responsiveness to the public. Mandatory centralization of 

administrative services has proven to result in less responsive government and will have a 

negative impact on agency head accountability for the efficient and effective administration of 

their own Departments. 

While AFGE strongly objects to many of the consolidations and mergers of agencies 

recommended by the Administration's reorganization plan, we would like to explicitly object to 

the following reorganization of agencies: 

Consolidation of the Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works with the Department of 

Transportation and the Department of Interior-The realignment of the Civil Works funded 

programs of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers into the Department of Transportation and 

Department of Interior will significantly weaken a war-fighting capability of the Department of 

Defense. Specifically, both the military and civilian skill sets and capabilities that are partially 

funded on a civil basis in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provide a reach-back capability for 

the military during national emergencies and contingency operations. For instance, a civilian 

employee may be performing civil works functions, but based on that employee's skill set, he or 

she may also be regularly called upon to perform military functions when the need arises. Such 

mission support will not be as readily available if the civil works functions are transferred to the 

Department of Transportation and the Department of Interior. We acknowledge that the Civil 

Works programs are separate funding streams from the Military funded appropriations in the 

Defense budget and therefore, on the surface it may seem harmless to simply transfer the civil 

works functions to other agencies, but such a transfer ignores how the Atmy Corps of Engineers 

actually operates in support of the military, and how it manages its human capital planning and 

workforce development. 

Merge the Department of Education with the Department of Labor-The missions of 

the Depat1ment of Education and the Department of Labor are distinctly different. The merger of 

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these two agencies would directly undermine the public education system and the opportunity for 

equal access to a quality education afforded to all Americans. The Administration is misleading 

the American public by insinuating that merging these two agencies, which both have substantial 

organizational structures and missions that touch every American, will lead to improved public 

services as it relates to our nation's schools and education system, and increasing employment 

opportunities. In fact, it is more plausible that such a merger will have the exact opposite effect 

as combining two agencies with such expansive missions will likely result in limited resources, 

reduction of services to the public, and increased bureaucracy. 

Transfer the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Policy Functions to the 

Executive Office of the President-Moving OPM policy functions into the Executive Office of 

the President is direct politicization of personnel policy. The Administration's reorganization 

plan would designate the Executive Office of the President as responsible for policy decisions in 

areas such as employee compensation, workforce supply and demand, and employee 

performance. The Administration's plan also refers to the existing framework of the civil service 

as "archaic." AFGE believes that the current framework of civil service rules and regulations is 

anything but archaic. Rather, the current civil service is based on merit system principles and 

focuses on employees' skills, qualifications and experience instead of discriminating based on 

race, sex, gender or age. A "merit-based" civil service system is a cornerstone of all modern 

Western democracies. It ensures that technical expertise is brought to bear on performing agency 

missions, without the threat of overt partisan agendas driving day-to-day operations. Moving the 

OPM policy functions to the Executive Office of the President will undermine this system. 

These and many other recommendations from the reorganization plan are shortsighted 

and do not fully take into consideration how such changes will hinder agencies' mission 

fulfilment. ·Many agency leaders have already made the decision to not only consolidate offices, 

but to close agency offices. These decisions to close offices were made prior to the 

Administration making the reorganization plan public. Office closures are directly affecting 

federal employees and their families with many employees forced to relocate or lose their jobs. 

AFGE urges this Committee to conduct oversight of these office closures and assess the impact 

that the closures will have on the public's access to important public services. 

Conclusion 

The Administration's reorganization plan does not provide any information or indication 

that an analysis has been conducted to project how employees will be affected by the 

recommendations of the plan. Without any type of reliable analysis on the impact to the 

workforce, we can only assume that little analysis has been conducted to determine how the 

recommendations will affect the services provided to the American public. 

AFGE strongly suppotis examining effective approaches to accomplishing government 

work. While AFGE supports initiatives to improve delivery of government services, the 

Administration's reorganization plan is a thinly veiled attempt to devolve federal involvement in 

everything from education to postal delivery to energy research and development. AFGE would 

welcome the opportunity to work collaboratively with the Committee and Congress to identify 

ways in which we can improve the delivery of our important public services. 

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NTEU 

The National Treasury Employees Union 

Statement of 

Anthony M. Reardon 

National President 

National Treasury Employees Union 

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 

"EXAMINING THE ADMINISTRATION'S GOVERNMENT-WIDE 

REORGANIZATION PLAN" 

June 27, 2018 
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Chairman Gowdy, Ranking Member Cummings and members of the Committee, thank 

you for allowing NTEU to share its thoughts on the Administration's plans to reorganize the 

federal government. As National President ofNTEU, I represent over 150,000 federal employees 

in 32 agencies and I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this important issue. 

As the committee is aware, on June 21st, the White House released a report detailing its 

plans to reorganize the executive branch entitled, "Delivering Government Solutions in the 2F' 

Century: Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations." The report is in response to the 

President's March 20 17 Executive Order directing the 0 flice of Management and Budget 

(OMB) to propose a comprehensive plan to reorganize federal agencies. The report highlights 

32 proposals, which impact the following agencies with employees represented by NTEU: 

Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of 

Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Consumer Financial 

Protection Bureau (CFPB). 

Reorganization Proposals 

The Administration proposal would separate Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) voucher 

programs from the Department of Agriculture's commodity-based programs. Specifically, the 

Administration proposes to move the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the 

Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WI C), 

the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), and the Farmers' Market Nutrition Programs 

into the Department of Health and Human Service's Administration on Children and Families 

(HHS-ACF). USDA, whether with a smaller FNS or a different division, would continue to 

administer the commodity-based programs, including the National School Lunch and School 

Breakfast Programs, the Emergency Food Assistance Program, the Commodity Supplemental 

Food Program, and others. The Administration also proposes to rename HHS the Department of 

Health and Public Welfare. It is unclear from the Administration's plan what the impact would 

be on the UDSAiHHS workforces, and whether employee reductions and program elimination 

are in fact the main goals. 

A new Federal Food Safety Agency would combine the "food" duties of the Food and 

Drug Administration (FDA) with the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. This new 

Food Safety Agency would become part of USDA. Following the food reorganization, FDA 

(which would be renamed the "Federal Drug Administration") would focus on drugs, devices, 

biologics, tobacco, dietary supplements, and cosmetics. The proposed consolidation would 

merge approximately 5,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees and $1.3 billion from FDA 

with about 9,200 FTEs and $1 billion in resources in USDA. 

The proposal calls for a reorganization within the Depmtment of Energy, with an 

emphasis on consolidating currently existing applied energy research programs offices and 

programs including the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). However, there 

are few concrete details. It is impmiant to note that Congress has continued to recognize the 

value of, and the role of ARPA-E. the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy 

(EERE), and the Office of Science in maintaining our nation's current capabilities and 

competitiveness in scientific research. 

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The Administration also proposes to require the Department of the Treasury to develop 

recommendations for federal financial literacy and education activities that would be shared with 

OMB before October I, 2018. The Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC) and the 

National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) both perfonn valuable distinct financial research 

and education, while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) performs significant and 

important work on financial literacy. NTEU is concemed that overall policy differences with the 

mission of the CFPB could be a reason for its inclusion in this reorganization proposal. 

In addition, the report proposes to break apart the Office of Personnel Management 

(OPM), moving core employee policy divisions to the White House. Additionally, retirement 

policy and the processing of annuities, as well as the administration of the Federal Employees 

Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), would move to a renamed GSA, the Government Services 

Agency, and federal employee background investigations would be transferred to the Department 

of Defense. While NTEU does not represent OPM employees, we are concerned about the breakup of retirement and health care policy and operations, and the loss of needed independence from 

all White Houses for federal employee and workforce management policy-making and decisions. 

The White House's Office of Presidential Personnel has rightly been responsible for the selection 

and hiring of presidential appointees; however, OPM's independent authority over the career 

civil service-and employing agency human resources' actions and decisions-must be maintained 

for our government not to reve1i to the spoils system. 

It is clear the majority of the Administration's reorganization proposals will require 

congressional action, and that further details on the impact on the workforce and programs are 

needed before se1~ous consideration can occur. NTEU has always suppmied efforts to improve 

agency performance and eliminate government waste and inefficiencies. However, previous 

reform and reorganization efforts failed to accomplish these goals. Instead, we've seen overly 

ambitious effmts to reform the civil service that eroded employee rights and employee morale or 

haphazard efforts to reduce the number of federal workers by cutting an arbitrary number of 

personnel, implementing a hiring freeze, or failing to replace employees who had retired 

resulting in gutted agencies and largely contributing to the looming retirement crisis facing the 

federal government today. In fact, one of the biggest lessons and failures of the Clinton-Gore 

Administration's so-called "Reinventing Govemment'' initiative was the hollowing out of 

positions, leaving agencies unable to conduct proper workforce planning, and without a skilled 

workforce in place---which devastated agency's abilities to effectively perforn1 their 

responsibilities, opening up federal agencies and workers to criticism. Under this Administration, 

it is unfortunate that there has already been a lost oppmiunity to improve government by not 

engaging with, and including, frontline employees in ways to improve agency functions and 

operations from the very beginning. 

Agencies Consulting with Employee Representatives 

Effective govermnent management does not attempt reform effmis in a vacuum. Senior 

agency officials and political appointees do not have all of the relevant information or ideas on 

where to focus refonn effmis. Rather, we believe that only by having senior officials working 

closely with fi·ont-line employees and their representatives will real positive rcfonn take place. 

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Front-line federal employees and their union representatives are an essential source of ideas and 

information about the realities of delivering government services on-the-ground to the American 

people. 

In 2009, President Obama issued Executive Order (EO) 13522, Creating LaborManagement Forums to Improve Delivery of Government Services. As E.O. 13522 makes clear, 

pre-decisional involvement (PDI) is an important component of the implementation oflabor 

management forums, and therefore calls for agencies to involve employees and their union 

representatives in pre-decisional discussions conceming all workplace matters to the fullest 

extent practicable. Front-line employees and their union representatives have essential ideas and 

information about delivering quality government services to the public and the PDI process 

allows employees, through their labor representatives, to have meaningful input resulting in 

better quality decision-making, more support for decisions, timelier implementation, and better 

results for the American people. 

According to the October 2014 Labor-Management Relations in the Executive Branch 

report, there are numerous instances where PDI and employee engagement efforts have been 

successful. These examples demonstrate how PDI has increased agency productivity as well as 

significantly increased employee satisfaction and morale. I sec no reason why similar success 

cannot be had with this new govemment-wide reform effort. 

Suggestions for Agency Reform Plans 

The President's March 13, 2017 EO tasked the Director ofOMB, to formulate a proposal 

to reorganize Executive branch agencies, components, and functions. Notably, the EO also 

required agencies ''to develop a long-term workforce reduction plan." Additionally, the EO 

directed OMB to evaluate whether a program is federal in nature, whether programs and 

functions would be better out-sourced to the private-sector, whether agencies or programs are 

relevant or duplicative, whether internal, administrative operations arc necessary, e11icient, and 

duplicative, and whether the costs to continue current operations, or to close or merge agencies 

are justified, and in the public interest. The OMB Director was also directed to include any 

personnel costs associated with the impact on "affected agency staff." 

Following release of the March EO, in May of 2017, I met with then OMB Senior 

Advisor Linda Springer and discussed our desire to be part of the Administration's 

reorganization planning. I also discussed how our chapter leaders were engaged in soliciting 

refonn recommendations from our members. However, we did not hear back from OMB 

regarding our request to have OMB counsel agencies to reach out and involve front-line 

employees. We fear that such reform eff011s without employee involvement will fail; adversely 

impacting the morale of the federal workforce as well as the services we provide to the American 

people, and ultimately wasting taxpayer dollars. Not deterred, I then sent a memo to our 

chapters, asking them to provide ideas I could share with agency heads. I am pleased to say that 

the response from our members was overwhelming. After collecting these ideas, I then wrote 

letters to agency heads summarizing our members' suggestions and otlering a meeting to discuss 

them in depth and answer any questions they might have so that they could fully appreciate how 

these recommendations would improve Agency and employee performance. Unfortunately, other 

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than a meeting with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and a perfunctory response in a few 

cases, we did not hear back from agencies, nor were we consulted about the proposals they 

submitted to OMB. While we held no illusions that all of our ideas would be accepted, it is 

important for agencies, the Administration, Congress and the public to understand that when it 

comes to meeting the public's expectations for their government, front-line federal employees 

have much to offer. 

In June, I sent letters to CBP, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Commodity Futures 

Trading Commission (CFTC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Social Security 

Administration (SSA), and to HHS, among others, to share our members' recommendations for 

the agency refonn plans. Although the recommendations were specific to each agency, they fell 

into similar themes. 

Increase telework and/or hoteling to reduce real estate costs and wasted travel time 

At the IRS, we recommended eliminating the requirement that employees repmt to their 

assigned posts-of-duty (POD) at least two days each pay period. Many employees report that 

they do not have any work-related need for repOiiing physically to work, and that it is sufficient 

that the Agency have the ability to direct telework-eligible employees to repoii to their POD on 

special circumstances. In addition, it would also include expanding the "Home as POD" 

program to include any employee who volunteers to telework full-time and is willing to 

surrender their permanent office space/cubicle. These changes would increase employee morale 

and reduce Agency rent expenses. 

Similarly, at the CFTC we recommended an increase in telcwork. With increased 

telework, CFTC could promote office sharing and reduce rented otfice space. In addition, one 

additional telework day per week could save up to an estimated $300,000 per year in transit 

subsidies. We also recommended increased flexibility in work schedules, which would increase 

productivity and staff retention as well as reduce the amount the Agency spends on transit 

subsidies. 

Consolidate Management Layers 

According to the OMB memorandum, as part of their reforn1 plans, agencies are to 

consider consolidating higher-grade positions, downgrading management-level positions, and 

ensuring that they have the fewest amount of management layers needed to provide for 

appropriate risk management, oversight and accountability. 

For example, at CBP we continue to see a top-heavy management organization. In terms 

of real numbers, since its creation, the number of new managers has increased at a much higher 

rate than the number of new frontline CBP hires. CBP's own FY 15 end of year workforce 

profile (dated 10/3/15), shows that the supervisor to frontline employee ratio was I to 5.6 for the 

total CBP workforce, I to 5. 7 for CBP 011icers, and I to 6.6 for CBP Agriculture Specialists. 

Prior to 2003, supervisor to frontline ratio was closer to I supervisor to 12. It is also NTEU's 

understanding that nearly I ,000 CBP Officers are serving either at CBP headquarters or nonOftice of Field Operations locations. This means that nearly 4,000 CBP Officers are serving in 

supervisory positions. 

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The tremendous increase in CBP managers and supervisors has come at the expense of 

border security preparedness and frontline positions. Also, these highly paid management 

positions are straining the CBP budget. CBP' s top heavy management structure contributes to 

the lack of adequate staffing at the ports, excessive overtime schedules and flagging morale 

among the rank and file and is something we have routinely raised with CBP leadership. 

In another example, units such as the National Case Assistance Centers (NCAC) in the 

Office of Field Operations (OHO, formerly Office of Disability Adjudication and Review) at the 

SSA have four layers of management ranging from GS 13s toGS ISs. First line supervisors are 

GS 13s. They directly interact with and supervise bargaining unit employees. The group 

supervisor reports to a unit manager, who reports to an associate director, who then reports to the 

Director. The multiple layers of management in these offices are not only wasteful, but also 

make communication less effective and efficient. 

In addition, the Baltimore NCAC was initially set up to manage approximately 300 

employees. Due to transfers and attrition, the Baltimore NCAC employs approximately 181 

employees. Despite the reduction in the frontline workforce, NCAC management remains at the 

same level. The Baltimore NCAC, as well as the St. Louis NCAC, have four levels of 

management- 1 Director, I Deputy Director, 2-3 Unit Managers, and a number of Group 

Supervisors. NTEU proposes eliminating the NCAC Unit Manager position. These are GS 14 

positions and the resulting savings would total $698,495 to $778,338 annually. NTEU also 

proposes eliminating the two NCAC Deputy Director Positions, which would result in additional 

saving totaling $208,794 to $271,437 annually. 

At Ol-IO, NTEU proposes eliminating the Quality Review Officer (QRO) positions in the 

Regional Offices and shifting oversight of the quality review specialists to the Regional 

Attorney. The Regional Attorney position description outlines that one task to be perfonned is to 

"coordinate and evaluate the work of Attorney Advisors and other support staff." Often Regional 

Attorneys review cases sent to them by hearing offices asking for guidance on issues identified 

in decisional drafts. They provide guidance and feedback to the hearing offices. These duties go 

hand in hand with the duties performed by the QRO, which results in duplicative processes. 

QROs are GS 14 positions. Eliminating the 6 QRO positions would result in savings ranging 

fi·om $598,710 to $779,338, based on the Rest of the US pay scale. 

Furthennore, at the IRS Office of Chief Counsel, we recommend eliminating the 

approximately 200 non-bargaining unit (NBU) GS-15 905 Senior Technician Reviewer and 

Special Counsel, and Special Trial Attorney positions in Chief Counsel and converting these 

positions to bargaining unit (BU) GS-15 Senior Counsel positions. These positions arc not used 

or needed for management functions, but are needed for perfonning complex legal and review 

work. The Office has too many GS-15 attorneys designated as NBU who are not really 

managers. These employees generally do not pcrforn1 or arc not needed to perform managerial 

functions. They act as reviewers and lead attorneys and work on the more complex matters. 

Essentially, they perform functions that are substantively indistinguishable from Senior Counsel 

BU attomeys. All of these positions should be converted to a single Senior Counsel bargaining 

unit position both in the National Office and the field offices. 

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In addition, NTEU recommends reducing the number of front line managers in the Field 

Offices, Associate Area Counsel (AAC), and Deputies/ Assistants NBU GS-15 905 positions at 

the IRS and converting them to BU Senior Counsel positions. Field attorneys should continue to 

perforn1litigation functions and not only administrative managerial tasks. The Assistant Branch 

Chief or Assistant to the Branch ChiefNBU GS-14 position could be eliminated. 

Hire more support staff 

For many agencies, we recommended the hiring of additional support staff so that staff 

members with more complex work could spend less time pcrfmming administrative functions. 

At OHO, for example, we believe that by simply focusing on hiring more Administrative Law 

Judges (ALJs) without the support staff of Attorney Advisors and Decision Writers is counterproductive to reducing the backlog. 

_Empower front-line decision making 

We believe that by empowering employees, agencies breed individual and group 

confidence, enabling people to work both more efficiently and more effectively. When 

employees are confident within their work and with their employer, they are more willing to 

identify problems and suggest ways to improve the quality of their work. 

Fill existing vacancies 

While this recommendation may seem counter to the goals of the agency reorganization 

efiorts by the Administration, we believe that efficiencies can be achieved by fully staffing 

agencies so that agencies can meet their missions. For example, we recommend OHO staff 

approximately 200 unfilled Senior Attorney Advisor (SAA) positions via promotion. Filling 

these SAA positions with cuJTent Attorney Advisors will allow a number of significant tasks to 

be perfonned which will improve case processing. 

A Senior Attomey can conduct prehearing conferences with unrepresented claimants just 

about anywhere using the phones or video hearings or other modalities. Feedback indicates 

that unrepresented claimants appreciate the opportunity to talk to someone about their appeals 

and what to expect. This provides excellent public service and the data we have seen indicates 

prehearing conferences reduce the numbers of no shows/continued hearings to obtain 

representatives, allowing ALJs to be more efficient. Moreover, rocket dockets for unrepresented 

claimants can be set with Senior Attorneys and after a prehearing conference type meeting, could 

go to an AU hearing when appropriate or possibly an on-the-record (OTR) recommendation. 

At the IRS, we recommend increasing the number ofDepmiment of the Treasury, Office 

of Tax Policy GS-15 docket attomeys to expedite work on published guidance regulations and 

legislation. The Office of Tax Policy attorneys in TLC (Tax Legislative Counsel), BTC 

(Benefits Tax Counsel) and lTC (Jnternational Tax Counsel) work with IRS Office of Chief 

Counsel attorneys in publishing tax guidance including regulations, revenue rulings, notices and 

announcements. Inadequate staffing in the Office ofT ax Policy results in a bottleneck in issuing 

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tax guidance to the public. Hiring attorneys for very short-tcm1 tenures (I 2-year stints) further 

exacerbates the problem. 

Another option is to insource work currently being performed by contractors. 

Contracting companies charge overhead costs while contract employees lack the accountability, 

expertise, and institutional knowledge of federal employees. Moving these contractor 

responsibilities in-house would translate into improved productivity, better work product, and 

savings in overhead costs. The CFTC currently has just under 700 full-time equivalent 

employees and 400-600 contractors and could realize significant savings by insourcing work. 

Concerns Over Outsourcing 

Relatedly, one of the major concems NTEU has with reorganization efforts is that such 

plans often are intended as a way to increase the outsourcing of government functions. In fact, 

the 2017 OMB Reorganization Memorandum states that agencies should consider leveraging 

outsourcing to the private sector when the total cost would be lower. It also states that agencies 

should consider government-wide contracts for common goods and services to save money and 

free-up acquisition staff to accelerate procurements for high-priority mission work. 

NTEU has long maintained that federal employees, given the appropriate tools and 

resources, do the work of the federal government better and more efficiently than any private 

entity. When agencies become so reliant on federal contractors, the in-house capacity of agencies 

to pcrf01m many critical functions is eroded, jeopardizing their ability to accomplish their 

missions. It has also resulted in the outsourcing to contractors of functions that are inherently 

govemmental or closely associated to inherently govemmental functions. 

Over the years, we have seen at agencies delivering vital services, contractors perform 

critical and sensitive work such as law enforcement, govemment facility security, prisoner 

detention, budget planning, acquisition, labor-management relations, hiring, and security 

clearances. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Department of 

Homeland Security has used contractors to prepare budgets, develop policy, support acquisition, 

develop and interpret regulations, reorganize and plan, and administer A-76 efforts. 

One of the most egregious examples of the outsourcing of inherently govemmental 

functions was the 2006 IRS private tax collection program. The program, under which private 

collection agencies were paid to collect taxes on a commission basis, was an unmitigated 

disaster. The program resulted in a net loss of almost $5 million to the federal government and 

lead to taxpayer abuse. Further, at one juncture in the program, the IRS had to assign 65 of its 

own employees to oversee the work of just 75 private collection agency employees. Given the 

obvious failures of this undertaking, and in the face of strong opposition by NTEU and a broad 

range of consumer and public interest groups, Congress voted to cut off funding for tl1e program. 

Then, in March 2009, after conducting a month-long, comprehensive review of the program, 

including the cost-effectiveness of the initiative, the IRS announced it was ending the program. 

Yet, Congress reinstated the program in late 2015 to offset the costs of the long-term 

highway funding bill, and NTEU remains highly conccmed by the use of private collection 

agencies, which not only arc costly to taxpayers, but run the risk of exposing the public to scam 

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artists. According to a recent analysis of the program's first year by the National Taxpayer 

Advocate, these private tax collectors who are collecting tax debts on a commission basis, have 

been forcing many taxpayers into payment plans they simply cannot afford. The National 

Taxpayer Advocate's analysis found that of the taxpayers put into payment plans by these private 

collectors, 43 percent had income lower than their allowable living expenses. The Taxpayer 

Advocate was so concerned about this finding that it issued a directive on April 23, 2018 that the 

IRS stop assigning to private collection agents any cases where the taxpayer had income below 

250 percent of the federal poverty level. NTEU is pleased with bipartisan legislation approved by 

the Ways and Means Committee this April as a first-step to limiting the damage, but continues to 

believe that Congress must act to allow only fully-trained IRS professionals to handle debt 

collection and payment duties. 

The aggressive targeting of federal jobs for public-private competition is not new. 

During the Administration of President George W. Bush, competitive sourcing was one of its top 

initiatives. As part of their efforts, we saw the rules of competition overhauled, quotas set for 

competed jobs, and grades given to agencies on their efforts in conducting competitions. The 

changes undoubtedly had the desired effect: between 2000 and 2008, spending on contracting 

doubled, since 2001, reaching over $500 billion in 2008. The explosion in contract spending 

also led to a drastic increase in the size of the contract workforce in addition to waste, ti·aud and 

abuse. 

The Obama Administration, noting several issues with the A-76 process, instilled a 

moratorium on outsourcing while it looked to improve the competitive process. I urge this 

Committee to ensure that the current A-76 moratorium be continued. In addition to the concems 

with the A-76 process and issues with cost overruns and proper contractor oversight, ethical 

issues are also of concem as contractor employees are working for the benefit of their employer 

company-not the benefit of the Amelican people. Such initiatives also have a demoralizing 

impact on the existing federal workforce as they wonder if their job is the next to be outsourced. 

By ensuring that the outsourcing process is fair and that federal employees are able to 

compete for work with contractors on an even playing field, federal agencies will be better able 

to provide high quality services and will save taxpayer dollars and achieve the goals for the 

OMB Memorandum. NTEU strongly supp01is both the House Appropriations Committee's FY 

2019 Financial Services and General Govemment (FSGG) measure, and the Senate 

Appropriations Committee's FSGG FY 19 bill, that would maintain the A-76 moratorium. 

Conclusion 

There are many challenges facing the federal government, including a need to invest 

wisely in the federal workforce, and to provide agencies with stable, timely, and adequate 

funding resources. The Administration's plans to re-shuffle, or to eliminate offices and 

programs, coupled with previous stated goals of reductions to the overall workforce--without real 

input from frontline federal employees, require serious congressional review and ultimately 

approval. We remain deeply concemed with directions to agencies requiring reductions to their 

workforces, based only on proposed budgets or plans. Overall, we fear the potential for a real 

opportunity for change will be wasted, along with taxpayer dollars, subjecting federal agencies 

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and employees to further charges of being a failed bureaucracy, when it will be one of failed 

leadership. The proposed pay freeze for January 2019 during a time of a robust economy, FY 

2019 budget proposals to slash earned retirement, health care, leave benefits and workers' 

compensation, the recent May 25th EOs to decimate representation and collective bargaining 

rights of frontline employees, and the lack of action to invest in training and professional 

development for federal workers, all serve to demonstrate an Administration that fails to 

understand that agencies cannot hope to successfully implement federal programs and policies 

without providing for and valuing a skilled workforce. Thank you again for the opportunity to 

share NTEU's views. 

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Richard G. Thissen 

National President 

June 26,2018 

Committee on Oversight and Government Reform 

United States House of Representatives 

Washington, D.C. 20515 

Jon Dowie 

National Secretary/Treasurer 

Dear Chairman Gowdy, Ranking Member Cummings, and members of the House 

Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: 

In advance of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's hearing, 

titled "Examining the Administration's Government-wide Reorganization Plan," I write 

to share the views and concerns of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees 

Association (NARFE). NARFE is dedicated to advancing the interests of the more than 5 

million federal employees and retirees, as well as their spouses and survivors, and has 

more than 205,000 dues-paying members across the country and abroad. 

NARFE appreciates the swiftness with which the Oversight Committee scheduled a 

hearing to discuss and debate the president's reorganization plan. Most of the changes 

proposed would require action by Congress. As these changes would not only impact the 

more than 2 million federal employees who carry out the work of our nation, but also the 

American taxpayers who rely on their services, NARFE commends the Committee for 

taking the time to give these proposals the thoughtful and deliberative attention they 

deserve. At this time, I share some initial thoughts on the reorganization proposal by the 

White House, but NARFE is continuing to evaluate these and other proposals as more 

details are provided. 

First, transferring federal personnel policy to the Executive Office of the President 

threatens to politicize the federal civil service. While some have expressed support for 

this move, as it has the potential to elevate the attention the largest workforce in our 

country receives from the White House, NARFE has serious concerns that this move 

could prove detrimental to career civil servants. With an administration that has shown 

disdain at times for a professional, merit-based civil service, this raises red flags that the 

move is intended to exert undue political influence on non-political hiring and firing 

decisions. Political influence in civil service hiring and firing allows jobs to be handed 

out or taken away based on political contributions or affiliations rather than individual 

capabilities. The history of the spoils system that existed in the 1800s shows that this 

leads to corruption and incompetence in the civil service. It would also shift substantial 

power from Congress to the Executive as federal jobs could depend more on allegiance to 

the President or political party than to the Constitution and laws enacted by Congress. 

While this element of the reorganization does not achieve this by itself, it removes 

important safeguards in the process. While the current administration has proposed 

policies that alarm NARFE, we would express the same concerns with moving policy 

National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association 

www.NARFE.org I 606 N. Washington Street. Alexandria, VA 22314 1 phone 703-838-7760 1 fax 703-838-7785 
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from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to the Executive Office of the 

President regardless of which political party is currently in the White House. 

However, we cannot ignore that this Administration has proposed substantial cuts 

to federal pay and retirement benefits, and therefore elevating federal personnel 

policy to the White House is troubling. In exchange for hard work and public service, 

often over long careers, federal employees and retirees earned the retirement benefits 

they have been promised. Diminishing their value in any way for those who have already 

earned them- including by eliminating or reducing COLAs, altering how they are 

calculated, or eliminating an entire element of the pension- fails to honor the basic 

commitments made to our public servants. While in most cases reorganization proposals 

should be considered independent of the current administration, policies that would roll 

back retirement benefits for individuals approaching, and even in, retirement arc 

particularly egregious. Elevating responsibility for these policies to the Executive Office 

of the President would undoubtedly raise their profile, which is a potential consequence 

of the reorganization to consider. 

Third, eliminating OPM entirely and transferring its remaining programmatic 

functions to the newly-named Government Services Agency (GSA), or other 

agencies, raises concerns that OPM's important functions- such as administering 

federal retirement and health benefit programs -will not receive the attention and 

resources that they deserve. Public servants put in hard work often over long careers to 

serve the needs of the American people. In exchange, they earn both pay and benefits. It 

is OPM's job to make sure our government is upholding its end of the bargain. More than 

eight million people rely on the highly-acclaimed and model Federal Employees Health 

Benefits (FEHB) Program to meet their health care needs. In terms offedcral retirement 

benefits, while OPM has had its challenges in modernizing retirement processing, we 

should evaluate whether simply moving this program to another agency will accomplish 

the modernization it sorely needs. In considering this recommendation, we urge Congress 

to give careful thought as to whether OPM's current mission will receive the appropriate 

prioritization and resources if moved to an entirely new agency with larger 

responsibilities. 

Fourth, privatizing the United States Postal Service (USPS) undermines the 

provision of universal services that has existed for more than a century and 

threatens the jobs, pay, health and retirement security of hard-working, middleclass postal employees. NARFE wholeheartedly opposes privatization of the USPS, 

which is not a privately-owned business because it has a constitutional obligation to 

provide universal public services. Transforming it into a private entity unnecessarily 

threatens the continuation of the public services it provides. It also would promote a race 

to the bottom in terms of basic pay and benefits for postal workers. The timing of this 

proposal is perplexing given the president has formed a cross-agency task force currently 

working to provide recommendations on postal reform in mid-August. If the 

recommendations will be the same -to privatize USPS - what is the point of the task 

force? If not, why muddy the waters with potentially conflicting administration views? 

The Oversight Committee has prioritized reforms of USPS operations in the past, and 

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even though NARFE has not always agreed with the path forward the Committee has 

recommended, we strongly urge the Committee not to abdicate its jurisdiction in this 

arena. 

Finally, in evaluating the reorganization proposals, I urge the continuation of 

careful, thoughtful deliberation and consideration of how the proposals will affect 

the public servants within the affected agencies who are tasked with carrying out 

the important work our country asks of them. Government reorganization aims to 

improve government efficiency and performance to better carry out the missions directed 

by Congress and the president. As the individuals who dedicate their work, day-in and 

day-out, to these goals, federal employees share a desire to align the federal government 

to best serve the American public. They should be viewed as necessary partners in any 

reorganization effort. At the end of the day, no reorganization can be successful if 

agencies, whatever their names and whatever their new structures, are not equipped with 

a competent and effective federal workforce to carry out their missions. 

Thank you for considering NARFE's views. If you have any questions or comments 

regarding this request, please contact NARFE Staff Vice President, Advocacy, Jessica 

Klement at 703-838-7760 or jklement@narfe.org. 

Sincerely, 

Richard G. Thissen 

National President 

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"Two Years Not Ten Years Redesigning Infrastructure Approvals," Common Good, submitted 

by Mr. Palmer can be accessed at: ]lttps://wvvw.commongood.org/wpcontent/uploads/20 17/07/2Y earsNotl OY ears.pdf 

"Assessing the Costs Attributed to Project Delays" submitted by Mr. Palmer can be accessed at: 

https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/fed/project-delay-summary.pdf 
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New York Times: How One Conservative 

Think Tank Is Stocking Trump's 

Government 

By placing its people throughout the administration, the Heritage Foundation 

has succeeded in furthering its right-wing agenda. 

By Jonathan Mahler 

June 20, 2018 

On the day after Thanksgiving in 2016, Ed Corrigan, then the vice president 

for policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, was summoned to Trump 

Tower in New York to join the senior leadership team of the Trump transition. 

From inside the building where the climactic personnel decisions of "The 

Apprentice" were once taped, Corrigan oversaw the staffing of 10 different 

domestic agencies. Donald Trump, the former reality-TV star, was now the 

president-elect of the United States, and he had an administration to fill. 

The job of staffing the government is the first, and in many ways defining, 

challenge faced by every president. As the size of the government has grown to 

accommodate the nation's economy, frequent military interventions and 

increasingly complex geopolitical obligations, so have the scale and gravity of 

the task In 1933, there were just over 200 presidential appointees in the 

executive and legislative branches. At the end of the Barack Obama's second 

term, there were 4,100. 

Filling enough of these jobs in time to get the government off the ground on 

Jan. 20 is difficult in the best of circumstances, which is to say when the 

president-elect has some smt of pre-existing political infrastructure to draw 

upon. Even Ronald Reagan, who, like Trump, campaigned as a Washington 

outsider, relied on both his inner circle from the California Statehouse and a 

kitchen cabinet of mostly self-made millionaires who helped finance his 

political rise. Trump would be coming to the White House with little more 

than the remnants of a campaign staff that included his daughter and son-inlaw, a contestant from his reality-TV show and his longtime bodyguard. What 

is more, in the days after his election, Donald Trump replaced the head of his 

prelimina1y transition operation, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, with Vice 

President-elect Mike Pence and purged Christie's allies from the team, 

throvving away months' worth of their work recruiting and vetting personnel; a 
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senior Trump aide, Stephen K. Bannon, made a show of gleefully dumping 

binders filled with resumes into the trash. 

The Trump team may not have been prepared to staff the government, but the 

Heritage Foundation was. In the summer of 2014, a year before Trump even 

declared his candidacy, the right-wing think tank had started assembling a 

3,000-name searchable database of trusted movement conservatives from 

around the country who were eager to serve in a post-Obama government. The 

initiative was called the Project to Restore America, a dog-whistle appeal to 

the so-called silent majority that foreshadowed Trump's own campaign 

slogan. 

In some ways, Trump and Heritage were an unlikely match. Trump had no 

personal connection to the think tank and had fared poorly on a "Presidential 

Platform Review" from its sister lobbying shop, Heritage Action for America, 

which essentially concluded that he wasn't even a conservative. ("Despite his 

rhetoric, Trump's history suggests a reluctance to engage in debates over 

protecting civil society from the imposition ofleft-wing values," it read in 

part.) After Trump mocked John McCain's P.O.W. experience in Vietnam, 

Heritage Action's chief executive, Michael Needham, called the candidate "a 

clown" on Fox News and said "he needs to be out of the race." Trump claimed 

to want to shake up the Washington establishment. The Heritage Foundation 

is a Washington institution. Its large, stately headquarters sits just a few 

blocks from Capitol Hill. 

And yet Heritage and Trump were uniquely positioned to help each other. 

Much like Trump's, Heritage's constituency is equal parts donor class and 

populist base. Its $8o million annual budget depends on six-figure donations 

from rich Republicans like Rebekah Mercer, whose family foundation has 

reportedly given Heritage $500,000 a year since 2013. But it also relies on a 

network of 500,000 small donors, Heritage "members" whom it bombards 

with millions of pieces of direct mail every year. The Heritage Foundation is a 

marketing company, a branding agency - it sells its own Heritage neckties, 

embroidered with miniature versions of its Liberty Bell logo - and a policy 

shop rolled into one. But above all, Heritage is a networking group. It has 

spent decades fashioning itself into the hub of a constellation of conservative 

individuals and organizations united by their opposition to government 

regulations - from taxes to gun control to environmental protections - and 

socially progressive causes like same-sex marriage. 
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Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current administration, 

Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those who worked on the 

project estimate that hundreds of the people the think tank put forward 

landed jobs, in just about every government agency. Heritage's 

recommendations included some of the most prominent members of Trump's 

cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed Heritage's Richard 

and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick 

Perry, Jeff Sessions and many more. Dozens of Heritage employees and 

alumni also joined the Trump administration - at last count 66 of them, 

according to Heritage, vdth two more still awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a 

kind of critical mass that Heritage had been working toward for nearly a halfcentury. 

"Feulner's first law is people are policy," Ed Feulner, Heritage's founder and 

former president, told me recently. Feulner was the head of domestic policy 

for the Trump transition, charting the direction of the Environmental 

Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and several other agencies. 

We met late on a Friday afternoon, in a sitting room at the Metropolitan Club 

in Washington, a private social club founded by a group of Treasury 

Department officials during the Civil War. At his feet as we spoke sat a small 

box of table cards for a dinner he was hosting at the club that evening for the 

newly appointed director of Trump's National Economic Council, the 

television personality Larry Kudlow- another name on Heritage's Project to 

Restore America list. Now 76, ruddy, white-haired and content, almost jovial, 

Feulner founded Heritage decades ago as an ambitious young legislative aide 

with a radical dream built on a simple concept. As he put it, sinking deeper 

into his club chair: "First, you have to have the people." 

Heritage was born in the spring of 1971 in the basement cafeteria of the United 

States Capitol. Feulner had just turned 30 and was working for Representative 

Philip Crane, an Illinois Republican who had written a book, "The Democrat's 

Dilemma: How the Liberal Left Captured the Democratic Party," arguing that 

left-wing radicals inspired by the Fabian Society, a socialist group in Britain, 

were secretly trying to turn America into a socialist state via the Democratic 

Party. As an undergraduate at Regis College, Feulner had been drawn to an 

emerging conservative movement that saw as its enemy not only Democrats 

but also moderate Republicans who threatened to do to their party what they 

believed the Fabians had done to the Democrats. In 1964, as a graduate 

student at the Wharton School, he organized a campus group to support the 

insurgent presidential candidacy of his political hero, Senator Barry Goldwater 

of Arizona. 
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Over breakfast at the Capitol, Feulner and another Hill aide, 28-year-old Paul 

M. Weyrich -later credited with coining the phrase "moral majority"-

commiserated over a recent study from the American Enterprise Institute, an 

established conservative think tank, about a proposed supersonic transport 

plane. The report could have helped buttress their argument that the 

government should continue to fund the plane as part of its effort to win the 

Cold War, but A.E.I. had withheld it until after the Senate voted on the issue 

so as not to bias the debate. This was, to their thinking, the wrong approach. 

What if they could create a new sort of think tank, one that would actively seek 

to cultivate and influence politicians, and in the process advance the cause of 

movement conservatism? 

Soon after, they made their pitch to .Joseph Coors, the highly motivated 

Colorado beer baron who would later, at the suggestion of the Reagan White 

House aide and future National Rifle Association president Oliver North, wire 

$65,000 to a Swiss bank account to buy a cargo plane for Nicaraguan rebels. 

Coors had come to Washington in search of a conservative institution in which 

to invest. The meeting was held in the office of the irreverent exnewspaperman and Nixon aide Lyn Nofziger. Weyrich had heard that Coors 

was also considering investing in A.E.I., which gave Nofziger the idea for "a 

little artifice," as the official history of the Heritage Foundation describes it. 

Before Coors arrived, Nofziger sprinkled some cigar ashes on a thick American 

Enterprise Institute study resting on his bookshelf. When Coors asked about 

A. E. I., he took the book off-the-shelf and blew off the ashes. "A. E. I.?" he 

asked. "That's what they're good for- collecting dust." 

Coors invested $260,000 in the new venture, and within a few years, Heritage 

had taken its place at the center of the growing conservative 

counterestablishment. Its initial fund-raising success foreshadowed the rise of 

the Republican donor class as a political force: Another early and generous 

giver was the banking and oil heir Richard Mellon Scaife, who went on to 

invest hundreds of millions of dollars in conservative media outlets and 

nonprofit organizations that, among other projects, targeted the Clintons 

during the 1990s. (Heritage trustees used to joke that Coors gave six-packs; 

Scaife gave cases.) 

Feulner packaged his fledgling think tank's ideology into five basic principles: 

free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional values 

and a strong national defense. They would guide Heritage's agenda, which 

would be set by Feulner and his senior leadership team. Feulner also 

anticipated the danger of his new think tank's being dismissed as a tool of rich 

Republicans. To build a Heritage member base that would assert the 
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foundation's anti-establishment identity, he turned to Richard Viguerie, the 

conservative marketing pioneer known for his high-quality mailing list and his 

uniquely apocalyptic warnings of imminent national collapse. 

Think tanks are sometimes referred to as universities without students, 

suggesting intellectual diversity within a general philosophical orientation. 

Heritage, by contrast, was strictly results-oriented. Feulner once likened his 

strategy to Procter & Gamble's approach to Crest toothpaste: "They sell it and 

resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer's mind." One 

way to promote Heritage's brand was to inundate Congress with an unending 

barrage of bite-size "backgrounders"; another was by networking. Heritage 

hosted weekend retreats for lawmakers, study groups for young congressional 

staffers and semester-long internships for college students, complete with 

Heritage housing. In its early years, Heritage took up numerous political 

battles: It published papers advocating making Social Security voluntary, 

argued against giving striking workers access to food stamps and warned 

parents about the danger posed by the advancement of "secular humanism" in 

public schools. To Feulner, they were all worthy fights, but they were just a 

prelude to what Heritage's official history calls "the Big Gamble" - its decision 

to invest in the presidential candidacy of the 68-year-old Ronald Reagan. 

Feulner saw something in Reagan long before he became president. "We had 

met with him when he was governor in California; we had visited his ranch 

and seen copies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek with marginal notes 

in the book," Feulner told me. "So we knew that he was one of us." In the runup to the 1980 election, Heritage spent $250,000 to assemble a 

comprehensive guidebook for conservative rule that it called "Mandate for 

Leadership" and aggressively marketed it to members of Reagan's transition 

team, in particular Edwin Meese, who was Reagan's chief of staff in California 

and later became his attorney general in Washington. The big gamble paid off: 

Meese told me that Reagan asked that the 1,093-page document be distributed 

at his first cabinet meeting. Reagan also turned to Heritage and Feulner to 

help staff and organize his administration. An enduring, mutually beneficial 

friendship was born. Meese wrote a letter on White House stationery stating 

that members of Heritage's President's Club- at the time, donors of $1,000 

or more - would "provide a vital communications link between policymakers 

and those key people who made possible Reagan's victory," as Sidney 

Blumenthal reported in his 1986 book "The Rise of the CounterEstablishment." The relationship worked both ways. When Reagan's second 

term ended, Meese joined Heritage as its first Ronald Reagan Fellow in Public 

Policy, with an annual salary of more than $400,000. Now 86, he remains at 
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the think tank as distinguished fellow emeritus of the Meese Center for Legal 

and Judicial Studies. 

Image 

Reagan's image is everywhere at Heritage, the informal poses and settings -

on a horse, on a putting green, relaxing at his ranch - suggesting less a 

political actor than a beloved family member. But Heritage had its complaints 

about Reagan at the time. On the first anniversary of his presidency, the think 

tank issued a report characterizing his tenure as a disappointment to 

conservatives. Heritage laid much of the blame on personnel who were 

insufficiently committed to the president's agenda. "They were looking for 

competent people," Nofziger, who had gone on to become a key political 

strategist for Reagan, later recalled. "I tried to explain to them that the first 

thing you do is get loyal people, and competence is a bonus." 

Over the following decades, Feulner continued to pursue his dream of turning 

the counterestablishment into the establishment. The prospects had perhaps 

never looked bleaker than they did in 2012, when Obama was easily elected to 

his second term. Having just turned 70, Feulner decided that it was time to 

retire. At that moment in conservative history, it was not difficult for him to 

see where the future of the think tank lay: the Tea Party. Heritage had helped 

organize and undenvrite the anti-tax, anti-government- and, most of all, 

anti-Obama -movement, even creating a lobbying organization, Heritage 

Action, to help harness the energy it unleashed. 

A couple of years earlier, in 2010, Feulner heard a talk given by one of the 

movement's leading figures, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, at a 

meeting of a conservative dinner group in Georgetown. "When it was over, 

Richard Viguerie said to Jim: 'That was such a fantastic speech. Why don't you 

run for president?' " Feulner told me, recounting the events of the evening. 

"DeMint locked eyes with me and said, 'The only thing I've ever wanted to be 

president of is the Heritage Foundation.' " 

Feulner decided DeMint was someone to watch, and the next year, the senator 

earned the highest possible rating on Heritage Action's new congressional 

scorecard, which evaluated lawmakers' voting records on the think tank's 

principles - higher than Michele Bachmann and much higher than Paul Ryan 

or Mitch McConnell. ("With each vote cast in Congress, freedom either 

advances or recedes," Needham said when Heritage Action unveiled the new 

rating system.) DeMint had fought the federal bailouts of the banks and 

carmakers, supported school prayer and opposed abortion and Obamacare. 

No less important, DeMint, who had an M.B.A. from Clemson University, 
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shared the Heritage belief that politics was as much about sales and recruiting 

as it was about legislating or governing. Before running for office at the age of 

47, he had operated his own marketing company; as a senator, he created a 

political-action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, to raise cash for 

select conservative candidates. He was clearly a skilled fund-raiser, which was 

a big part of the Heritage job. He would have to be willing to give up his Senate 

seat to run a think tank, which was maybe not as far-fetched as it sounded. In 

addition to influence, Heritage offered something the government couldn't: 

money. Without even having to taint his reputation by becoming a lobbyist, he 

would get a roughly 400 percent raise from his government salary, to nearly 

$900,000 in his first full year. 

DeMint started at Heritage in 2013. He created a new layer of senior staff that 

included allies from Capitol Hill, in the process effectively demoting many of 

Heritage's veteran leaders. He also went on a hiring spree of young 

conservatives for the think tank's media and internet operations. 

"Conservative ideas are invigorating," DeMint told The New York Times in 

2014. "We had allowed them to become too serious." (DeMint declined to be 

interviewed for this article.) 

While Feulner and his senior staff had reserved the right to review policy 

papers, they generally avoided intervening in the research and publication 

process. DeMint and his leadership team were much more aggressive. Papers 

were heavily edited or even withheld from release altogether. Several scholars 

quit. DeMint replaced them, bringing in as Heritage's chief economist Stephen 

Moore, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and a founder of the Club for 

Growth, a lobbying group that advocates cutting taxes. 

DeMint intensified the think tank's marketing efforts, targeting Obamacare in 

particular. A Heritage billboard went up in Times Square- "Warning," it 

read, "Obamacare may be hazardous to your health" - and DeMint led a 

"Defund Obamacare Tour" across the country. In Congress, he had been 

something of a one-man ideological enforcer. Now he had at his disposal the 

power of an $So million institution whose name was a one-word shorthand 

for movement conservatism; the backing of some of the country's richest, most 

politically engaged Republicans; and a significant slice of the conservative 

base. Within months of his arrival, he was pressing House Republicans to send 

the president a spending bill that wouldn't fund the Affordable Care Act, thus 

inviting a government shutdovm. "There's no question in my mind that I have 

more influence now on public policy than I did as an individual senator," he 

said in an interview with National Public Radio in 2013. 
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But his most audacious bid for influence came the following year, when he 

inaugurated the Project to Restore America. "What we learned from talking to 

Heritage folks who had been in the Reagan administration was that we needed 

to be in the game early," Ed Corrigan, one of DeMint's Capitol Hill hires, told 

me. With its focus on staffing, the new effort was the logical extension of his 

fixation on recruiting the right conservatives for Congress, not to mention the 

concept at the very heart of Feulner's vision for Heritage. To lead the project, 

DeMint turned to a woman who had spent decades building Heritage's 

network and knew just how to staff a government: Becky Norton Dunlop, a 

former deputy personnel director for Reagan. "I know this is going to be hard 

to believe, but he said - and I agreed - that it was highly likely that a 

conservative would be elected president," Dunlop told me, recalling her first 

conversation about tbe effort with DeMint. "We needed to be prepared." 

Dunlop's name may be unfamiliar to most Americans, but she is something of 

a legend among movement conservatives. She came to Washington in 1973 

straight from college to work for the American Conservative Union, the 

lobbying group best known for organizing the annual Conservative Political 

Action Conference, and later married an aide to Senator Jesse Helms of North 

Carolina, who gave her away at their wedding. (Her father, a Baptist minister, 

officiated.) Congress eventually pushed her out of the Interior Department for 

trying to demote or fire several National Park Service employees and replace 

them with political appointees. Years later, after a controversial stint as 

Virginia's secretary of natural resources - "Gunning for the Environment?" 

was the headline of a 1997 Washington Post profile in the Style section- she 

landed at Heritage as its vice president for external relations and has been 

there ever since. 

Dunlop tapped her extensive network, groups like the Family Research 

Council, Liberty University and the Council for National Policy, an 

organization that brings together advocates of various conservative causes. "I 

talked to them all," Dunlop said." 'You need to think about this, and you need 

to spread the word. If you're interested, get your house in order, talk to your 

spouse and get ready, because we need to save our country.' " 

Not only was Trump an awkward fit for a staunch conservative like DeMint, 

but the Heritage president had strong ties to two of his primary opponents. 

His PAC had raised close to $6oo,ooo for Marco Rubio's 2010 Senate 

campaign, and he and Rubio were both associated with the C Street house, a 

group residence on Capitol Hill affiliated with the Fellowship Foundation, the 

nonprofit organization that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast. Ted Cruz 
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-to whom DeMint's PAC had given nearly $1 million for his 2012 Senate run 

- had been a featured speaker on DeMint's "Defund Obamacare" tour. 

Trump's campaign promises to punish American companies that export jobs 

were anathema to Heritage's 45-year history of support for free trade, not to 

mention the interests of some of its biggest donors. Even as Trump was 

gaining momentum, some senior staff members continued to resist the idea of 

embracing him, arguing that it would damage Heritage's reputation, but 

DeMint decided to get out ahead of the rest of his party and work with 

Trump's insurgent campaign. 

DeMint understood better than most what lit up the conservative base; after 

all, he had spent years stoking its anger at the Republican establishment. At a 

private dinner on Capitol Hill in January 2016, two weeks before the Iowa 

caucuses, DeMint was the only one of a group of a dozen conservatives, 

including Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Fred Barnes 

of The Weekly Standard, who predicted that Trump would win the 

nomination. 

Trump's political views were less important than his approach to hiring. With 

DeMint's guidance, he could bring in trusted conservatives who supported a 

Heritage agenda that included opening offshore drilling on federal lands; 

opposing mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food; reducing 

regulations on for-profit universities; revoking an Obama executive order on 

green-energy mandates for federal agencies; phasing out federal subsidies for 

housing; and opposing marriage equality and nondiscrimination protections 

based on sexual orientation and gender identity. "The watchword of personnel 

is: Get people who you want on the bus, and then figure out what seat you 

want to put them in," Dunlop said. 

In March 2016, the Republican establishment stepped up its effort to stop 

Trump. More than 100 Republican national-security experts signed an open 

letter publicly committing to fight his election, calling him a "racketeer" and 

denouncing his dishonesty and "admiration for foreign dictators." A number 

of the signatories were fellows of conservative think tanks; none were 

affiliated with Heritage at the time. Heritage treated Trump as it would any 

other candidate, giving his campaign staff more than a dozen briefings and 

sending them off with decks of cards bearing Heritage policy proposals and 

market-tested "power phrases." At the same time, Heritage's leaders were 

lobbying furiously behind the scenes to secure senior appointments to 

Trump's post-nomination transition team. "It was the top priority 

for everyone at Heritage," Dunlop told me. 
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Later that month, Trump's campaign lawyer (and future White House 

counsel) Donald McGahn convened a gathering of conservative leaders at the 

Capitol Hill offices of his law firm, Jones Day. Only a small group attended: 

Newt Gingrich, Senator Jeff Sessions, a handful of other sitting lawmakers 

who were supportive of Trump- and DeMint. "At that time," Gingrich told 

me, "Trump's views were so unknown to the average conservative the concern 

was, is he going to be reliable?" As the conversation evolved, an idea emerged: 

What if Trump could present to the public a list of Supreme Court nominees? 

DeMint enthusiastically volunteered to help provide one. When he returned to 

Heritage's offices, though, some senior staffers balked. One concern they 

raised was that it would be counterproductive for Heritage to explicitly 

endorse possible judicial appointees: Because the think tank was considered to 

the right of the Republican mainstream, its approval of candidates could make 

them toxic in the confirmation process. But DeMint was adamant, insisting 

that this was an opportunity Heritage should not pass up. The head of 

Heritage's Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, John Malcolm, ultimately 

wrote the list in the form of a post for Heritage's news and commentary 

website, The Daily Signal. By then, Trump had already singled out Heritage at 

a news conference, announcing that it was one of the groups he was working 

with on a Supreme Court list. 

Feulner, still active at Heritage as a member of its board, was the first from the 

think tank to join the Trump transition after the Republican National 

Convention. "August 2016, Christie calls, and then candidate Trump calls to 

confirm: Would I take over the domestic side?" Feulner told me. As he saw it, 

Trump held even more promise for Heritage than Reagan had. "No.1, he did 

clearly want to make very significant changes, and No.2, his views on so many 

things were not particularly well formed," Feulner said. "And so if he somehow 

pulled the election off, we thought, wow, we could really make a difference." 

Yet even as he was drilling further into the Trump team, DeMint was running 

into trouble inside his own building. Over the summer, complaints about his 

heavy-handed management style started to reach some members of Heritage's 

22-person board. DeMint and his loyalists rejected the criticisms of his 

leadership, suggesting that they were the work of Mike Needham, the 36-yearold chief executive of Heritage Action. Needham came from a different world 

than DeMint. He grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and joined the 

think tank straight out of Williams College, beginning as Feulner's research 

assistant and rising to become his chief of staff. He left in 2007 to work on the 

presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani and then went on to attend 

Stanford Business School but returned after he graduated. As DeMint and his 
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allies saw it, Needham was trying to orchestrate a palace coup, turning a 

handful of isolated complaints about his hiring practices and handling of 

Heritage's research into a major case against DeMint as part of his own 

campaign to take control of the think tank. They knew, too, that Needham and 

Feulner were close and were convinced that Needham was trying to 

undermine DeMint with Heritage's founder. 

By early November, the tension between DeMint and Needham had escalated, 

and the senior staff was divided by their respective loyalties. It was just the 

sort of factionalism that would soon come to define the nascent Trump 

administration, with its personnel conflicts and firings. As the election 

approached, it seemed to some at Heritage that DeMint's future was 

uncertain. The Republican Party appeared to be headed for defeat and years of 

soul-searching, which might present a natural occasion for new leadership at 

the think tank. 

On election night, Heritage turned its first floor over to a viewing party with 

an open bar, chicken wings and red, white and blue cupcakes. The mood grew 

increasingly celebratory as the evening wore on and Trump's tally of electoral 

votes built toward 270. Some staff members stayed until dawn, went out for 

breakfast and came back for an all-staff meeting called by DeMint in the larger 

of Heritage's two auditoriums. "As you know, I'm kind of a serious guy, so it's 

rare that I feel giddy," he began. DeMint said that Heritage had taken a huge 

risk - "we were criticized by a lot of our friends in the movement for even 

going to meetings with Trump" - but that it had paid off. "Most of you are too 

young to remember the old 'Mission: Impossible' series on television, but after 

they had accomplished their impossible mission, they were all sitting around 

lighting cigarettes, and the commander would always say, 'I love it when a 

plan comes together!'" (He was most likely recalling another television 

program, "TheA-Team.") 

Corrigan had been in close contact with the Trump campaign for months. Now 

he told the assembled crowd of about 200 people what Heritage had been 

doing for the campaign and previewed the opportunities ahead. There were 

thousands of jobs to fill, and the priority was to fill them with "change agents," 

he said. "When it comes to personnel decisions, that is the most frequently 

asked question, even before 'Are they qualified?' 'Are they a change agent?'" 

In the coming days, employees were encouraged to join the transition and 

were assured that as long as they were working as volunteers, Heritage could 

continue to pay their salaries and hold their jobs for them. 
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The Trump transition offices quickly filled with Heritage staff members 

recruiting and vetting hires for the administration. The upheaval inside the 

transition caused by Christie's firing worked to DeMint's advantage: Pence 

was an old friend and conservative ally on Capitol Hill. Christie's departure 

also opened the way for Rick Dearborn to take control of the daily decisionmaking. Dearborn, the longtime chief of staff to Jeff Sessions, had already 

been a strong presence on the transition team. He went back years with 

Corrigan, who was the director of the Senate's conservative caucus for nearly a 

decade before joining Heritage with DeMint. Corrigan had been informally 

feeding Dearborn names for months. 

Matthew Buckham, a project administrator in Heritage's communications 

department who joined the transition to vet ambassadors and diplomats, told 

me that he and the rest of Heritage's staff on the transition tried to put 

forward every Heritage employee who wanted to work for the administration, 

whether in policy, administration or management jobs. "Any list we touched 

we made sure had as many Heritage people as possible," he said. One of 

Heritage's labor economists, James Sherk, an advocate of rolling back labor 

rights, joined the White House domestic-policy council; another, David 

Kreutzer, who was a co-author of a Heritage policy paper arguing that "no 

consensus exists that man-made emissions are the primary driver of global 

warming," joined the Environmental Protection Agency. Roger Severino, the 

director of Heritage's DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, who has 

opposed extending civil rights protections to gay, lesbian and transgender 

people, joined the Department of Health and Human Services to run its Office 

for Civil Rights. Sean Doocey, a former Heritage employee who had worked at 

the think tank's Training and Recruitment Center, joined the Presidential 

Personnel Office -the little-known agency responsible for recruiting and 

vetting appointees for the executive branch as its deputy director. 

Heritage helped place countless others, from staff assistants to cabinet 

secretaries. In some cases, DeMint intervened directly, calling Pence to argue 

for Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman whose political career DeMint 

helped start years earlier in South Carolina. Mulvaney is now the director of 

the Office of Management and Budget, and as this article went to press, he was 

serving out the remaining time in a stint as the acting director of the 

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a consumer-protection watchdog 

agency that he had voted to disband in Congress. (He recently fired all 25 

members of the agency's advisory board.) "Not only were we not going to bash 

the president," Buckham told me. "We were going to help him and push our 

friends into positions of policy and influence." 
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In the spring of 2017, just a few months into his tenure, President Trump 

expressed his gratitude to both DeMint and Heritage in a speech at the 

National Rifle Association: "Those people have been fantastic; they've been 

real friends." And yet even in this moment of triumph, DeMint was losing the 

battle to keep his job. Emboldened by Trump's victory, he asked for a new 

contract on the eve of the inauguration. (He earned $1.2 million the previous 

year.) Heritage's three-person leadership team- Barb Van Andel-Gaby, a 

member of one of the families that founded the multilevel-marketing company 

Amway; Thomas A. Saunders III, a private-equity executive; and Nersi Nazari, 

a Silicon Valley entrepreneur were noncommittal. Soon after, they came to 

Washington for a few days to perform their own internal investigation of the 

personnel problems, interviewing various staff members about DeMint's 

leadership. 

By the time the foundation's largest donors - $10,000 or more a yeargathered in April 2017 for their annual retreat at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar 

in San Diego, Heritage's senior management, like that of the administration it 

was staffing, was consumed by chaos, confusion, resentments and infighting. 

DeMint, by now, was blaming Feulner as well as Needham; he was certain that 

Feulner still effectively controlled the board and was turning it against him. 

Shortly after DeMint and his management team returned to Washington, he 

was stripped of his power while his severance package was negotiated. Many 

of the people he had brought in, including Corrigan, James Wallner (a 

research executive), Wesley Denton (a communications executive) and 

Buckham, soon left, too. Rumors swirled that Stephen Bannon would be 

taking over. He was still at the v\Thite House at the time, but he was close to 

Mercer, and it was no secret that Trump was turning on his power-hungry, 

attention-seeking chief strategist. 

Amid the upheaval, Saunders, the board's chairman, issued a statement on the 

ouster. "Heritage is bigger than any one person," it read. In his first address to 

the staff, the think tank's new interim president, Ed Feulner, assured them 

that Heritage would continue to be "Donald Trump's favorite think tank." 

Heritage's longer-term future was placed in the hands of an 11-person 

presidential search committee, made up of trustees. They spent months 

looking for a candidate who could provide continuity, building on the 

relationship with Trump that DeMint had established, but also signal a 

departure from the DeMint era. By last fall, they had assembled a short list 

that was leaked to The Washington Post. It included Marc Short, the White 

House legislative director and longtime aide to Mike Pence; Todd Ricketts, the 

Chicago Cubs co-owner and major Republican donor who had recently been 
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nominated as deputy commerce secretary; and David Trulio, then the vice 

president for international government affairs at the defense contractor 

Lockheed Martin. None of them got the job. Just as Dick Cheney had once led 

George W. Bush's search for a vice president before securing the position for 

himself, the presidency of Heritage went to the chairwoman of the search 

committee, Kay Coles James. 

James, who is 69, is an almost total anomaly in the political world: a black 

female Republican who supports Donald Trump. In her first address to the 

Heritage staff, she spoke about her difficult childhood in Richmond, Va., ·with 

an absentee father and a mother on welfare. The hiring of a black woman as its 

president seemed like a coup for an institution that has been widely accused of 

representing only the interests of white men. "She did not get the job because 

of her gender or race," Feulner told me. "She got it because she's such an 

extraordinary individual. My only regret is that she's not 10 years younger." 

In many respects, James does have the perfect resume for Heritage. She 

served under Reagan and George Bush and was the director of the office of 

personnel management for George W. Bush. Along the way, she worked for 

several conservative organizations, including Pat Robertson's Regent 

University, and served on the board of Focus on the Family, the evangelical 

group known for its opposition to abortion, premarital sex and gay and 

transgender rights. In 2005, she did a brief stint with a defense contracting 

firm whose founder, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty a year later to bribing a 

congressman with more than $1 million in reh1rn for favors and earmarks. 

James went on to start her own nonprofit, the Gloucester Institute, which 

describes itself as a leadership training center; it offers men to ring and 

networking programs to black and Latino undergraduate and graduate 

students. According to Gloucester's 990 tax form, she earned $50,000 as 

president of the organization in 2016, the year before she became president of 

Heritage. 

James worked on the Trump transition, overseeing the White House's budget 

and personnel management offices. In March, on a Politico pod cast, she said 

that she had been eager to join the administration to work on the president's 

"urban agenda." She was blocked by Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former 

"Apprentice" villain and director of communications for the White House 

Office of the Public Liaison, who during the campaign was charged with 

African-American outreach. "The way it was described to me is she 

approached the whole thing like it was 'The Apprentice,'" James said on the 

podcast. "So she looked around Washington and said, 'O.K., who do I need to 

get rid of first?'" (Newman herself was pushed out last year.) 
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I met James, who has sh01t, graying hair and favors colorful blazers, in May in 

her new Heritage office, which is enormous and looks out at the Capitol. After 

we settled onto a large, comfortable couch, she described her new job at 

Heritage as "the crown jewel" of her career in the conservative movement. I 

asked James how she thought Trump was doing. "People are focused up here 

on the trouble and all of the noise that you hear in Washington," she said, 

gesturing at eye level. "But down here, the bass notes are strong and loud. 

There's a lot of good that is going on, but we are in such a partisan, vitriolic 

atmosphere in this town right now that very often we overlook the bass notes." 

In recent months, James has applauded Trump's tax cuts and deregulatory 

agenda; his crackdown on illegal immigration; his choice of the hard-liner 

John Bolton as national security adviser; his effort to rescind funding for a 

variety of federal programs, including the Children's Health Insurance 

Program; and an executive order that will curtail the amount of time that 

federal union representatives can spend helping colleagues file claims for 

workplace grievances, including sexual harassment. Part of her task at 

Heritage, James told me, will be to expose a more diverse audience to the 

think tank's ideology. "If you talk to anyone about shaping the future of this 

nation, they will tell you that there are certain demographics that must be 

touched- millennials, women and minorities," she said. "And so I tell people 

that unless our ideas are reaching those demographics, then we are going to be 

looking at a shrinking minority view in this country." 

A few weeks later, on a rainy morning in Washington, Heritage held a party 

for the dedication of a new dormitory for its interns, a gift from the family of 

E.W. Richardson, a World War II bomber pilot who went on to become a 

successful Ford dealer. Donors ate finger food and drank mimosas under a 

tent on Heritage's rooftop. Some wore name tags on their lapels and dresses 

identifYing them by their level of giving; those who had added Heritage to 

their ,,vills wore an extra ribbon: "Legacy Society." James was the only person 

of color I saw in a crowd that easily exceeded 200 people. 

Forty-five years after its founding, Heritage may finally be the establishment, 

but its self-image remains fixed in time. It is, as ever, the nation's last line of 

defense against the advancing forces of progressivism, perpetually in need of 

financial reinforcements. Speaking to the gathered group of donors and 

Heritage staff members, James, standing beside an American flag and a large 

portrait of Richardson in his flight gear, described the new intern dorm as an 

expansion of the think tank's "base of operations" against what she 

characterized as a "very determined and very well-resourced foe. They want to 
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change America into something she was never intended to be. And they might 

succeed if we don't fight every single day of our lives." 

On the first anniversary of Trump's inauguration, Heritage marked the 

occasion with news releases and a hooklet, "Blueprint for Impact," promoting 

how much of Heritage's agenda Trump had already embraced- 64 percent, 

according to the think tank's analysis. Heritage's director of congressional and 

executive branch relations, Thomas Binion, went on "Fox & Friends" to 

discuss the report, saying the think tank was "blown away" by Trump's 

performance. The president, apparently watching in the White House, 

promptly tweeted, inaccurately: "The Heritage Foundation has just stated that 

64% of the Trump Agenda is already done, faster than even Ronald Reagan." 

The president and his favorite think tank continue to draw closer. 

Administration officials speak regularly at Heritage and give frequent 

interviews to The Daily Signal. In April, Pruitt and Attorney General Jeff 

Sessions were both scheduled to speak at a Heritage donor conference in Palm 

Beach, Fla. (Sessions, under fire from the president because of the Russia 

investigation, dropped out.) 

Even with DeMint gone, Feulner is enjoying unique access to the Trump 

administration. During one of our conversations, he told me he had recently 

accompanied the vice president on Air Force Two to Hillsdale College, a 

Christian stronghold of conservative thought in Michigan. And last year, he 

was the lone think-tank head invited to a White House dinner for the 

conservative movement's "grass-roots leaders." He was seated right beside the 

president. Feulner's dream had finally been fulfilled. I asked him if he believed 

the Trump presidency would be transformative for the country. "I think we're 

very, very optimistic," he said. 

There is still a huge number of vacancies across the administration. At this 

point in their presidencies, Obama had filled 584 of his politically appointed, 

Senate-confirmed positions, and George W. Bush had filled 652; Trump has 

filled just 450. The Presidential Personnel Office was portrayed in a recent 

Washington Post article as a frat house, with vvidespread workplace vaping 

and happy-hour drinking games involving Smirnoff Ice. 

The turnover rates have also been historic. In March, The New York Times 

reported that nine of the top 21 White House and cabinet positions have been 

emptied and refilled at least once; neither Obama nor Bush had lost a single 

cabinet member by that point in their administrations. Since taking office, 

Trump has replaced more than half of his 65 most influential advisers, 
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according to a tracker created by the Brookings Institution. Christie recently 

laid the blame for the turnover on what he described as a "brutally 

unprofessional" transition, saying that proper vetting would have caught a lot 

of Trump's most problematic appointees. A number of other senior advisers 

seem to be on shaky ground with the president, and an exodus is anticipated 

after the November midterm elections. 

Churn is a central feature of this administration, even for its unofficial staffing 

agency. Paul Winfree, a Heritage economist who helped draft Trump's first 

budget, is back at the think tank. So are Stephen Moore, who worked on the 

Trump tax cuts; David Kreutzer, who played a key role in dissolving a White 

House working group that was studying the monetary costs associated with 

climate-warming carbon dioxide; and Hans von Spakovsky, who helped run 

the now-defunct voter-fraud commission, which was created to find evidence 

to support Trump's baseless claim that millions of people voted illegally for 

Hillary Clinton. 

In a sense, the transition is still going, and as long as Trump remains in office 

it may never end. "I get calls from people every day who still want to go in," 

Dunlop told me. "Or I'll hear from the White House, or I'll run into someone 

at a reception or over coffee, and I'll say, 'I've got a name for you. I'll send it 

along.'" 

Correction: June 20, 2018 

An earlier version of this article did not fully identify two employees who left 

the Heritage Foundation soon after the departure of Jim DeMint, its 

president. They are James Wallner, who was a research executive, and 

Wesley Denton, who was a communications executive. 
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Questions from Chairman Mark Meadows 

Subcommittee on Government Operations 

June 27 2018 Hearim,r "Examining the Administration's Government-wide Reorganization Plan" 

I. Question: Of the thirty-two reorganization proposals contained in the government 

reform plan, what actions can be implemented without congressional action? What is 

the timetrame for implementation of those actions? 

Answer: The Administration continues to examine what additional statutory authorities 

are required to implement elements of the reorganization proposals. We believe that 

many of the proposals can be implemented in whole or in part through existing 

administrative authorities. Plans to put several of these proposals into effect are 

actively underway. For instance, on July 24, the White House issued a Request for 

Information (RF!) to devise a strategy to create and maintain the GEAR Center 

(Government Effectiveness Advanced Research Center)', a non-governmental publicprivate partnership to address operational and strategic challenges facing the Federal 

Government, both now and into the future. The RF! explains that the GEAR Center's 

initial focus would include reskilling the workforce and improving citizen services. 

Similarly, the Administration is leveraging the Performance Accountability Council 

(PAC)2 process to work through the administrative process for implementation of the 

proposal to Transfer Background Investigations from the Office of Personnel 

Management to the Department of Defense-' 

2. Question: For those reorganization proposals which require congressional action, 

does the Administration want Congress to re-authorize the presidential reorganization 

authority which provides for an expedited congressional approval process? Or would 

the Administration prefer to submit individual legislative proposals? 

Answer: I appreciate the recent introduction in the Senate of a bill (S. 3137) renewing 

Presidential reorganization authority, which existed for most of the 20'h Century, until 

expiring in the mid-1980s. Such authority could facilitate Congressional consideration of 

elements of the President's Reorganization Plan. Similar legislative authority was used 

hy a series of Presidents- Republican and Democrat who worked in conjunction with 

1 Delivering Government Solutions in the 21" Century: Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations, June 

2018, pp. 112,114. 2 The Suitability and Security Clearance Performance Accountability Council (PAC) is the principal interagency 

forum for ensuring the alignment of security clearance and suitability processes across the Executive Branch. This 

council is chaired by the Deputy Director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget, and includes as 

its principal members, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, 

the Director of the National Security Council, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Deputy 

Secretary of the Department of Defense. 3 Delivering Government Solutions in the 21" Century: Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations, June 

2018, p. 115. 

1 
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Congress to enact lasting changes in Executive Branch structure and management. My 

understanding is that the authority inS. 3137 would be in effect for two years from the 

bill's enactment date, and would allow for expedited Congressional consideration of 

either an omnibus reorganization package or a series of discrete proposals that could be 

taken up individually. I expect that the Administration would utilize such reorganization 

authority if granted by Congress, while remaining open to other appropriate vehicles for 

advancing reorganization proposals through the legislative process. 

2 
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Questions from Representative Dennis A. Ross 

June 27.2018. Hearing: "Examining the Administration's Government-wide Reorganization Plan" 

I am a cosponsor of Rep. Royce's HR 5381, the Government Risk and Taxpayer Exposure Reduction 

(GRATER) Act. This bill would direct federal agencies to consider using private risk capacity to 

reduce risk to federal credit, guarantee, and insurance programs. 

I. Question: Has OMB identified areas of the federal balance sheet where risk transfer could 

be used to protect taxpayers? If not, what sectors of the government services are most 

right for risk transfer? 

Answer: The Administration shares the goal of achieving policy outcomes at the lowest 

cost to taxpayers and that the Government should look for opportunities to transfer cost 

and risk to the private sector where possible, prudent, and cost-effective. We are happy to 

work with you to explore a targeted approach to reducing the Federal Government's risk 

exposure and ensure the GRATER Act effectively complements existing guidance and 

legislation. 

2. Question: Has OMB conducted studies to estimate how much taxpayers could save if 

it shared some of the risk with the private sector? 

Answer: The Administration shares the goal of achieving policy outcomes at the lowest 

cost to taxpayers and that the Government should look for opportunities to transfer cost 

and risk to the private sector where possible, prudent, and cost-effective. We are happy to 

work with you to explore a targeted approach to reducing the Federal Government's risk 

exposure and ensure the GRATER Act effectively complements existing guidance and 

legislation. 

3. Question: What lessons has OMB learned with the successful pilot program at NFIP? 

I low about Export-Import bank and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? 

Answer: The Administration shares the goal of achieving policy outcomes at the lowest 

cost to taxpayers and that the Government should look for opportunities to transfer cost 

and risk to the private sector where possible, prudent, and cost-effective. We are happy to 

work with you to explore a targeted approach to reducing the Federal Government's risk 

exposure and ensure the GRATER Act effectively complements existing guidance and 

legislation. 

4. Question: Could you provide the Committee with any feedback on ways to improve or 

strengthen the GRATER Act to meet the Presidents goal of rethinking the way 

government operates? 

Answer: The Administration shares the goal of achieving policy outcomes at the lowest 

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cost to taxpayers and that the Government should look for opportunities to transfer cost 

and risk to the private sector where possible, prudent, and cost-effective. We arc happy to 

work with you to explore a targeted approach to reducing the Federal Government's risk 

exposure and ensure the GRATER Act effectively complements existing guidance and 

legislation. 

4