Lambert here: Apparently, one can Bowdlerize an Easter Egg. Who knew?
President Trump recently issued an executive order directing executive agency heads to submit annual headcount plans to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This is an important step in ensuring the government is working on behalf of the American people, focused on the most important objectives with maximum efficiency.
[W}e all know that there are organizational changes, process changes, and/or technological changes that could enable the federal government to deliver great services to the American people with greater efficiency. Each agency will create a Strategic Hiring Committee to help drive this behavior. In some cases, adding heads may be the appropriate path, but the Strategic Hiring Committee will ask the right questions of hiring managers: making sure that highly skilled people are being hired into the agency and ensuring that they are thinking about a broad set of solutions with efficiency in mind.
To the extent there are job categories that are reflected across many agencies – e.g., collectively as a government, we are trying to hire 10,000 engineers – OPM will use this information to drive more efficiency by centralizing recruiting programs along with shared certificates.
[B]ecause the entire goal here is to better serve the American people with maximum efficiency, there are no prescribed reductions in headcount. Rather, we want to make sure we are prioritizing our resources appropriately and that we are incorporating efficiency as a first-class citizen in the planning process.
[C]onsistent with that, the goal is not to focus on the raw number of FTEs, but rather to focus on great service delivery with maximum efficiency.
For those of you who have been in the private sector, much of this will seem like motherhood and apple pie. We are now inviting the federal government to join the planning party.
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