The Army is feeling the pinch of the Trump administration’s civilian hiring freeze and is being forced to find efficiencies that can compensate for attrition in its civilian ranks.
Lt. Gen. Edward Cardon, director of the Army’s Office of Business Transformation, said the service is feeling the effects of the mandatory 120-day hiring freeze and those effects are compounded by unpredictable funding under a series of continuing resolutions.
“Right now we are under a CR that runs through April, but we don’t know where we go after that,” he said. Cardon spoke March 28 during a breakfast at the Association of the U.S. Army’s headquarters outside Washington, D.C.
The Defense Department released a statement in February stating its intention to abide by the letter of Trump’s hiring freeze order except for matters where personnel are essential to national security. Cardon praised acting Army Secretary Robert Speer for establishing an efficient process to consider and approve the many waiver requests the Army has received to hire around the freeze.
The Army employs more than 200,000 civilians that perform essential tail-oriented tasks in support of uniformed service members. With such a large force, the rate of attrition even within the span of a few months outpaces the rate at which it would normally hire new civilians, Cardon said.
Cardon moved to his current position about six months ago from the top job at Army Cyber Command and has spent much of that time gearing up for the Trump administration’s expected focus on reforming government business practices.
“The Army’s business transformation has to go as fast as our warfighting innovations,” Cardon said. “The question is, how do we organize now for what we know is going to come?”
Cardon called for consolidation and or simplification of the Army’s disparate array of 800 or so individual information technology systems. Such complex systems “make it very difficult to see the Army.” Cardon is working on shining a light on ideas from lower-ranked soldiers that “never make it to the top” like geo-locating vehicles and equipment and organizing the data into a searchable database.
The Army also can harness the data it already has in new and innovative ways, many of which already are commercial-sector best business practices. Instead of simply counting the number of tanks the Army has, each vehicle should have data showing whether optimizing its engine to operate efficiently in certain climates should be possible.
“Intuitively I think that’s possible but we have no data that says that,” he said. “A lot of our data right now is subjective in nature.”
Cardon repeatedly offered public-private partnerships as a good way to drive efficiency within the Army’s business practices. By studying Fortune 500 companies and other large organizations, the Army could learn and benefit from their success, he said.