The National Association of Postal Supervisors, in a recent post on its website, raised the alarm about a “crisis in leadership retention.”

NAPS National President Ivan Butts wrote earlier this month that a “significant number of EAS employees are leaving the USPS for other federal agencies, enticed by better pay and less-demanding working conditions.”

“That’s work objectives they’re trying to achieve,” Butts said in a recent interview. “And then they’re being viewed by the leadership in these other agencies as superstars, just because of how they were so overburdened. Working at this agency, I guess, made them tend to go at it harder at what they do.”

Butts, speaking last year at a summit on labor issues hosted by the USPS Office of Inspector General, said USPS is losing candidates to private-sector businesses that can offer better starting pay and better hours, at a time when unemployment rates are historically low.

The Postal Service disputes NAPS’ claims. USPS spokesman David Walton told Federal News Network that the agency has a retention rate of more than 96% for management employees.

“Historically, we develop and promote from within the organization and have an excellent retention rate when it comes to our management employees, particularly our front-line supervisors and managers,” Walton said.

Edmund Carley, national president of United Postmasters and Managers of America (UPMA), said he’s seen some colleagues leave USPS to take jobs at other agencies, such as the Social Security Administration. However, he said USPS isn’t seeing problems retaining management-level employees.

“They take a little bit less money, but it’s steady hours, no weekend work, a lot less stress,” he said about managers at other federal agencies. “It’s not easy being an entry-level manager in the [Postal] Service. It never has been. The difference now, especially if you’re in D.C., there’s other opportunities to go into federal employment.”

Among its concerns, NAPS said USPS is promoting newly hired employees to EAS roles with little to no knowledge of USPS operations, and that supervisors are rapidly promoted into mid-level and senior leadership positions with little-to-no knowledge of agency operations.

Butts said new supervisors may get an initial two or three weeks of training before running operations.

“After that, they’re on their own. They need them on the floor to run their operations. They’re short-handed already,” Butts said. “As some of these people are coming in, they’re getting no training at all, and the first time they make a mistake, they’re being fired with no recourse.”

Carley, however, said nearly all USPS managers started off as craft employees — letter carriers, mail handlers and postal clerks — and understand the agency’s frontline work.

“Nobody walked in off the street,” Carley said, adding that supervisor skills are “something you have to learn on the job.”

“You can’t teach somebody. I don’t know how long a training course would have to be to qualify somebody to be a delivery supervisor. You’ve got to learn on the job. You’ve got to have some rudimentary knowledge of how carriers operate and how the routes are set up. And then you’ve just got to do it, and you have to learn by doing,” he added.

USPS supervisor vacancies shrinking

The USPS inspector general’s office, in a report released Friday, said the Postal Service saw a 7% vacancy rate nationwide in fiscal 2023, its lowest point in recent years.

The watchdog report states USPS is close to meeting its goal of hitting a 5% nationwide vacancy rate for frontline supervisors, but said vacancies can vary widely by region.

“Although the nationwide vacancy rate is relatively low, some locations are experiencing vacancy rates three times as high as the goal,” the report states.

USPS, for example, is seeing a 17 to 18% vacancy rate for supervisors who oversee processing operations in the Great Lakes, and a 15% vacancy for retail and delivery supervisors in northern Illinois.

USPS ended fiscal 2023 with more than 22,000 supervisors. About 88% of them oversaw customer services, distribution operations, maintenance operations and logistics.

The agency also hosted four virtual frontline supervisor job fairs and 55 career conferences for current employees to learn about frontline supervisor positions last year.

USPS added about 2,300 new relief supervisor positions in June 2023. Eligible facilities can receive a relief supervisor for every full-time supervisor authorized.

Relief supervisors are meant to cover for regular supervisors during their scheduled days off and annual leave and are meant to reduce USPS reliance on acting supervisors.

“Relief supervisors work a non-standard, flexible schedule to cover tours and facilities within a designated commuting distance, all with potential minimal advance notice,” USPS OIG wrote.

Carley said new supervisors often feel pressure to perform early in their positions, and that higher-ups now have more real-time data on how any USPS facility is performing.

“What technology has wrought is the ability for my boss, my boss’s boss, my boss’s boss’s boss and his boss too up in headquarters to get on a spreadsheet, click twice, and now they’re looking to my office and want to know why that carrier was sitting at that gas station for 22 minutes, when they should only have been 20 — and I need to know an answer right now, he said.

“The pressure is heightened. Now that’s a good thing, too, because now you can create efficiencies with your workforce, because they know they’re being supervised at all times,” he added. “The art is, how do you disseminate that information, without threatening people’s jobs — which they do way more often than they should, or making somebody feel less than.”

NAPS is requesting access to “exit forms” EAS employees are required to submit before they leave USPS — to see how many supervisors the agency is losing to retirement, terminations or leaving for another federal agency — but Butts wrote that the group has been “thwarted in our attempts to validate this trend.”

“Those two kinds of narratives really point to a bigger problem,” Butts said. “One that leadership has the staff to do the job, and one that EAS leaders have in being felt like they’re valued in all aspects of their job.”

USPS management faces Reduction in Force

Butts said postal supervisors are also dealing with a Reduction in Force (RIF) that’s eliminating some positions.

Federal News Network first reported in May 2021 that USPS started sending layoff notices to non-bargaining unit employees after sending voluntary early retirement offers to its eligible management employees.

Management-level employees who receive a RIF notice, however, are able to apply for similar positions to avoid leaving the agency altogether.

“There are so many vacancies in the ranks of EAS and managers that there should be landing spots as we move forward,” Butts said.

The RIFs, he added, may affect about 70 to 80 supervisor positions. However, Butts said the association isn’t clear on the full extent of the RIFs, especially after USPS announced it would pause some network modernization changes until at least January 2025.

“They issued these RIF letters to these employees and disrupted their whole life. Then a week later, they issued rescinding letters to some of them, because their methodology was wrong. Now they say their methodology was right,” Butts said.

Walton said USPS “has a strong track record of finding job opportunities for RIF-impacted employees through RIF avoidance processes and we believe that will be the case with the current RIF process.

“As infrastructure and operating plans are made there is a need for staffing changes. We implement the changes in accordance with the federal Reduction-in-Force (RIF) regulations,” he added. “With the latest operational changes, there have been adjustments to the allocation of management employees in certain designated postal operations.”

Butts linked supervisor retention challenges to recent problems with on-time mail delivery in areas where USPS is modernizing its network modernization plans.

However, lawmakers representing regions that saw the worst of these delays — such as Atlanta and Richmond, Virginia — say on-time performance is improving.

“We’re not hearing much of anything like we were in the past, because we’re at the lowest volume period of the year,” Butts said.  “But my prediction is that when the fall mailing season comes in, all those issues that we had will rear their heads again, because the leadership of this agency has still continuously failed to address its staffing problem.”

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Congress members are continuing a push to change how agencies view individuals’ past marijuana use in the security clearance and federal hiring processes.

A new bill that Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, introduced last week aims to limit how much weight agencies can place on past marijuana use when considering applications for federal jobs or security clearances.

“Current federal law allows highly qualified individuals to be denied federal employment or security clearances based on past use of marijuana or cannabis products, despite legalization at state levels,” Peters wrote in a press release Wednesday. “This misalignment between evolving state laws, federal guidance and actual hiring practices has created a barrier for talented individuals seeking federal employment, which could limit the government’s ability to compete for top talent.”

The new bill, nicknamed the “DOOBIE” Act, focuses on easing restrictions for those who have used marijuana in the past, either recreationally or for medical reasons. Under the legislation, agencies wouldn’t be able to deny a federal job application, security clearance application or other federal credentials based solely on an individual’s prior use of marijuana.

HSGAC is expected to take up the bill for consideration and possible advancement during an upcoming hearing on July 24.

The proposed changes outlined in Peters’ bill, however, are already largely in place at agencies. Both the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of Personnel Management published updated guidance on the topic back in 2021.

ODNI’s guidance, while saying that the illegal use of controlled substances can raise security concerns, also says an individual’s prior use of recreational marijuana shouldn’t be the determining factor in granting a clearance. Similarly, OPM’s guidance directed agencies not to automatically preclude federal applicants from job opportunities solely based on past, discontinued use of marijuana.

“While federal agencies, including OPM and ODNI, have issued guidance stating that past marijuana use alone should not disqualify candidates, many potential applicants remain hesitant to pursue federal positions due to a fear of automatic disqualification,” Peters wrote. “The DOOBIE Act would align federal hiring practices with current guidance on past marijuana use, broaden the applicant pool by providing clarity for prospective federal employees and help the government compete with the private sector for talent.”

The DOOBIE Act aims to take the practices outlined by ODNI and OPM a small step further by codifying them, Ryan Nerney, managing partner of the Ladera Ranch, California, office at law firm Tully Rinckey, told Federal News Network.

“This bill would just solidify that, because [right now] that’s just guidance within various different agencies,” Nerney said in an interview. “Especially intelligence agencies, even though this guidance came out, they still have stricter views on marijuana use when it comes to that. So, potentially codifying this in an actual bill from Congress, might make this guidance that has been in place since 2021 a little bit more expansive.”

House efforts to lift restrictions in clearance process

Peters’ bill is the latest effort in Congress, but it dovetails with several other members who have been pushing to ease restrictions on marijuana use by federal employees and government job applicants.

Last fall, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee took up a companion bill to the DOOBIE Act. The House legislation, nicknamed the “CURE” Act, similarly aims to prohibit agencies from considering past marijuana use while hiring for federal jobs, or during the security clearance process.

But the House bill, if enacted, would take things a further step by requiring agencies to create a review process to look back at past security clearance and job applications. Agencies could reconsider previously denied applications based solely on an individual’s marijuana use, according to the bill.

The bipartisan CURE Act, first introduced by Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) last July, advanced out of the Oversight committee in a vote of 30-14 last fall. But the legislation so far has not been slated for a House floor vote.

“The CURE Act will ensure that talented individuals seeking to honorably serve our country are not precluded from doing so simply because they admit to having once used marijuana,” Raskin said in a 2023 press statement following the Oversight committee’s advancement of the legislation.

Confusion continues around federal weed policies

The question of whether marijuana use prevents eligibility for a federal job or a clearance has become a prevalent topic in recent years, as more states continue to legalize or decriminalize marijuana, and recreational marijuana use grows. One recent study found that daily marijuana use has surpassed daily alcohol use in the United States, according to an Associated Press article from May.

At the federal level, marijuana is considered illegal and currently classified as a Schedule I drug, alongside substances like heroin and LSD. But given changing state laws on marijuana use, Nerney said there’s still a lot of confusion — even today — around how that impacts the federal security clearance process.

For instance, a 2023 survey of young professionals found that about a quarter of respondents didn’t understand the government’s policy on marijuana use. Out of about 900 respondents in the survey, conducted by ClearanceJobs and the Intelligence and National Security Foundation, 40% said they had used marijuana within the past year. Additionally, 21% said that their use of marijuana, alcohol or other drugs, would prevent them from applying for a clearance.

Right now, agencies generally follow guidance that says past marijuana use is “relevant,” but not “determinative.” Using marijuana won’t automatically lead to a security clearance denial, and agencies are still expected to consider the individual’s specific circumstances.

“Agencies take this into account, and they follow this, but there’s still gray area that they can use,” Nerney said. “You can’t be disqualified just because you use marijuana. It has to take into account a whole bunch of different things.”

For instance, in the security clearance process, agencies may consider how recently individuals have used marijuana, how often they’ve used it and whether they plan to continue using marijuana in the future. ODNI’s guidance, however, still directs personnel to refrain from using marijuana once they’re granted a clearance.

How much leeway should agencies have?

The question of how specific the guidance should be on marijuana use in determining clearance remains up in the air as well. Having some gray area may be beneficial, Nerney said, by giving agencies flexibility to decide clearance process applications on a case-by-case basis. But at the same time, he said a more specific approach would make the policy easier to interpret.

“It goes both ways, but I think overall, it probably would be better if everything was a little bit more specific. But not everybody is the same. There’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all,” Nerney said. “[Some gray area] gives us a little bit more leeway. If [agencies] feel that there’s a threat, they can make that determination to deny or revoke clearance.”

There may be more changes on the horizon at the federal level as well. The Drug Enforcement Administration recently said it’s looking to take steps to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug.

Even if DEA reclassifies cannabis, though, legal experts have said it wouldn’t have much effect on marijuana’s role in federal hiring or the security clearance process, since the drug would still be considered a controlled substance and illegal at the federal level.

Regardless of the current legislative and administrative efforts to make changes, Nerney said there likely won’t be a comprehensive update to the security clearance process until marijuana is decriminalized or made legal at the federal level.

“It’s kind of slow steps, little steps, things that are helpful I think, but ultimately, major changes aren’t going to happen until it’s legalized,” Nerney said. “Once that happens, then there’s going to be a snowball effect. They’ll have to update the security executive agent directive and the security clearance guidelines.”

The post ‘DOOBIE’ Act looks to ease security clearance restrictions on past marijuana use first appeared on Federal News Network.

House VA Committee Chairman Mike Bost (R-Ill.) says chief financial officers from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) told the committee Monday that they face a $2.88 billion shortfall for the rest of this fiscal year, and a nearly $12 billion shortfall for fiscal 2025.

The VA gets funding for its mandatory health and benefits programs a year before the current fiscal year to avoid any disruption from a government shutdown.

The CFOs, Bost added, attributed the funding discrepancy to increased hiring and pharmaceutical costs.

In a letter to VA Secretary Denis McDonough, Bost said the $15 billion funding gap is the VA’s largest budget shortfall, “and a repudiation of the FY 2025 budget request that the Biden-Harris administration presented just four months ago.”

“Not only have your chief financial officers thrown out the dollar amounts requested for many key accounts, they have abandoned many of the estimates and projections that underpinned their budget. This is not just fiscal mismanagement; it is strategic whiplash,” he wrote.

VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes confirmed the department’s projected budget deficits in a statement to reporters Thursday morning.

“VA is working closely with Congress and the Office of Management and Budget to resolve these potential shortfalls in a way that prevents any adverse impacts on veterans — and allows us to continue to deliver care and benefits to veterans at record rates,” Hayes said.

The VA, he added, is delivering record levels of health care and benefits to veterans under the 2022 PACT Act, which expanded veterans’ eligibility for VA health care and benefits if they were exposed to toxic substances during their military service.

Since President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act, more than 710,000 veterans have enrolled in VA health care, a more than 34% increase compared to the same period before the legislation.

VBA also expects to break new records this year for the volume of disability benefits claims it’ll pay out to veterans.

“These important results for veterans and survivors exceeded initial expectations,” Hayes said.

The VA, in its FY 2025 budget request, planned to reduce its workforce headcount by 10,000 employees — with most of those jobs coming from VHA.

However, Bost said VHA is now looking at a staffing increase of 22,000 full-time employees over the same period. About 17,000 employees, he added, have already been hired, and VHA is looking to hire another 5,000 employees.

“Hiring quality health care workers is difficult enough without a constantly moving target,” he wrote.

VHA hired more than 61,000 employees last year — its fastest rate of growth in 15 years. The agency grew its total workforce by more than 7% and now has more than 400,000 employees for the first time in its history.

In addition, efforts to boost retention also led to a 20% decrease in turnover between 2022 and 2023.

McDonough told reporters in February that VHA is managing its workforce with a “tighter fiscal picture,” but added that the department is taking a more targeted approach to hiring, after the agency exceeded its hiring targets last year.

“Where we’re not hiring, it’s not because we haven’t been able to hire. It’s because we don’t have a need. Why would we not have a need? Because we just had a great year of hiring,” McDonough said Feb. 26 at a monthly press conference at VA headquarters.

VHA, in some cases, has rescinded tentative and final job offers it made to prospective hires. But the agency ordered a “strategic pause” on rescinding job offers in January, and later issued a memo directing VA health care facilities to only rescind job offers “as an action of last resort.”

VA officials have repeatedly stated the department isn’t under a hiring freeze. However, a lengthy hiring process — even by the federal government’s standards — is frustrating job applicants, especially those who have accepted tentative job offers, but have yet to receive a final job offer.

Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal told VHA employees, in a Feb. 5 email obtained by Federal News Network, that following last year’s record hiring, “we have the nationwide staffing level we need to accomplish this important mission — and we have the funding we need to care for veterans through 2024 and into 2025.”

“As responsible stewards of these funds, we must make thoughtful decisions about resource use at every level of the enterprise,” Elnahal wrote. “This means that we will not be hiring at the same rate we did last year but let me be clear: there is no hiring freeze, we will continue to hire in key areas, and we will do everything in our power to continue supporting our current workforce.”

Bost is asking McDonough if the VA is seeing “significant, unexpected changes in demand for in-house care” since Elnahal’s email to employees. If the agency isn’t seeing a sudden change in demand, he’s asking the department to explain the need for increased staffing.

“Given Under Secretary for Health Elnahal’s announced policy of nationwide hiring restrictions and managing by attrition, I think veterans and employees deserve a much better explanation of where these 22,304 FTE are being hired,” Bost wrote.

Bost said the VA has repeatedly shifted regular expenses out of its base budget and into the Toxic Exposures Fund, which was created under the PACT Act.

“VA’s budget has become increasingly complicated and reliant on gimmicks, apparently to compensate for the expiration of one-time, pandemic-related supplemental funding,” Bost wrote. “This has created a situation where one bad estimate or unanticipated event can create a shortfall in multiple accounts.”

The VA, for example, is seeing an increase in community care costs for veterans to receive health care outside the VA medical system.  But Bost said the department isn’t covering those increased costs in its base budget — “seemingly straining, if not breaking, the limits of what the Toxic Exposures Fund can pay for.”

Bost said VA’s compensation and pension costs are running below its budget projects, so far this fiscal year. But VBA typically sees those costs surge at the end of the fiscal year — especially with an increase in claims submitted under the PACT Act.

VBA processed 1.98 million disability benefits claims and issued $163 billion in total benefits in FY 2023. Under Secretary for Benefits Joshua Jacobs recently told reporters that VBA is on pace to process 30% more claims in fiscal 2024 compared to last year.

The agency, so far this year, has awarded $112 billion to veterans and their survivors in compensation and benefits. VBA also recently granted its millionth benefits claim under the PACT Act.

VA told the committee it anticipates a more than $3.8 billion increase in pharmaceutical and prosthetics spending across FY 2024 and 2025.

Bost said VHA’s chief financial officer also suggested that the Change Healthcare ransomware attack may be to blame for some of VA’s budget shortfalls. The ransomware affected many public and private health care systems across the country.

The VA is shifting $700 million in medical collections from this fiscal year to FY 2025 because of the ransomware attack.

The post VA warns of historic $15B budget shortfall. House committee says more hiring ‘above all’ is driving up costs first appeared on Federal News Network.

The impact of the U.S. Digital Service is difficult to measure in real numbers or data sometimes.

Sure, USDS’ work with the Social Security Administration to improve its website and customer satisfaction saved an estimated $285 million over five years in infrastructure costs.

But the true measure of USDS comes in ways that don’t always lend itself to numbers, said Mina Hsiang, the administrator of the USDS.

“Every single day that I work with each of our agencies, we get to see the tremendous shifts as a result of small coherent interdisciplinary teams of feds, USDSers and contractors working together can really make these changes. I think it moves everyone’s frame of expectation for how things should be able to shift right,” Hsiang said on Ask the CIO. “The people who rely on Medicaid for their health care and the extent to which the continuity of our health care can sometimes be subjected to bugs and small changes in technical systems that aren’t what the states intended, but aren’t the kind of thing that most of us get to see because technology lives inside of a black box. It is just really nice to be able to share the human, the efficiency impacts of a lot of the work we get to do. So being able to help states preserve continuity of healthcare coverage for 5 million people who really deserved it is an incredibly meaningful number to be able to put a pin on something that feels like a very wonky, like code change, and working through of like technical requirements in collaboration with policy.”

USDS’ annual report tries to detail its impact through stories, examples and other approaches than pure data.

Hsiang said just because cost savings or avoidance data isn’t obvious, it doesn’t mean the organization impact isn’t real to dozens of agencies and millions of citizens.

One example of USDS’ impact is the Digital IT Acquisition Professional Training Program (DITAP). It has trained more than 900 federal acquisition workers across more than 50 agencies on how to buy and manage technology acquisitions. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy had set a 2022 deadline to get all contracting officers who buy technology trained. It’s unclear if OFPP and agencies met that deadline, but DITAP is well regarded as a success in the community.

USDS collaborated on new hiring program

“It has a major hands-on component where the students come in and work on digital services programs and procurements with us sometimes and with agencies. It’s a really practical education, and it means that there are DITAP graduates that we get to work with across government who can be doing a better job of working with contractors and vendors on building out digital services,” she said. “DITAP is a great program, and we are actually refreshing and continuing to update some of that curriculum right now.”

OFPP USDS launched the DITAP program in 2015 through Challenge.gov. The two agencies and the Office of Personnel Management recently built on the concept of DITAP with another challenge to improve how agencies hire and train technology workers.

“USDS, PPM, and OPM aim to create a specialized and immersive training and development program for federal hiring professionals so that they can better understand the rapidly-changing market for technology talent and learn how to implement and scale modern practices for recruiting, implementing hiring authorities and flexibilities, and candidate management at their agencies,” the agencies stated in the challenge.

USDS, OPM and OFPP are about to move into Phase 3 where the Phase 2 winner, Mediabarn, will receive $100,000 to implement at pilot.

$10M rescission ‘disappointing’

Hsiang said DITAP and other examples of how USDS doesn’t just come into the agency, but ensures there is a long-tail of success.

“We never just come in and like do the work for an agency and then leave, both because that wouldn’t work literally at all as there’s nothing about that that would be tenable. They own and run their systems and are the key decision makers for the long term. We ended up doing always in our programs is coming in building an integrated team with agency and their vendors and really running the program together to improve the digital services,” she said. “Through the course of working together, there’s a tremendous amount of knowledge that’s transferred. We give them a hands on training and how to build digital services, and a lot of them have a lot of experience so some of it is just updates to some pieces of IT. But we definitely focus very much on leaving agencies with the tools that they need to continue doing this work.”

Of course that work will become more difficult the rest of this fiscal year as Congress rescinded $10 million from the $200 million in funding USDS received through the American Rescue Plan Act.

Hsiang said the rescission, of course, was disappointing, but it will not prevent USDS from doing its work.

“It’s something that was broadcasted early so we can do some planning around it. Ultimately, this impacts and impedes our ability to invest, particularly in some of the major programs that we were working to update and improve for all of the agencies,” she said. “This will result in a slight decrease in our program for interagency hiring initiatives and supporting agencies in that way.”

The post USDS measures its impact in longevity, not just raw numbers first appeared on Federal News Network.

Derace Lauderdale |

In just the last couple years, shared certificates have become an increasingly popular recruitment practice across government — and the impact is hard to miss.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, using shared certificates in some instances has cut the agency’s time-to-hire in half.

“We are seeing significant impacts in terms of hiring efficiencies, and we seek to further increase that share of hiring that takes place, not just for the HR shared service centers, but across the department,” HHS Chief Human Capital Officer Bob Leavitt said on Federal Monthly Insights —Trustworthy AI in the Workforce.

Over time, HHS has increasingly relied on shared certificates, particularly for the types of positions that are similar across many of the department’s organizations, Leavitt told Federal News Network. He called shared certificates “an extraordinary opportunity.”

“One, it uses our resources more productively, and two — and more importantly — from a candidate’s perspective, the sooner we’re able to follow up and eventually onboard a candidate, the better,” Leavitt said.

With shared certificates, agencies or offices that make a hire can then give their list of un-hired candidates, already determined to be qualified for a position, to another agency or office hiring for the same position. And hiring for the same type of job happens quite often, Leavitt said.

“There really are fewer unicorn positions out there than we all imagined,” he said.

Using shared certificates shortens the hiring process by using candidates who are already vetted and assessed by hiring managers and deemed qualified for a position. If multiple candidates are hired off of one certificate, that can cut time-to-hire even further.

“It affords selecting officials a quicker mechanism to bring people into the workforce and meet their needs more efficiently,” Kimberly Steide, associate deputy assistant secretary for human capital at HHS, said in an interview with Federal News Network.

That then allows HR managers to focus more strategically in terms of how they spend their time, Steide added.

And the process isn’t only helpful for hiring managers — using shared certificates benefits job candidates as well. They can be considered for positions they might not have otherwise known were out there.

“You can apply once and be considered for multiple vacancies as they come up open,” Steide said. “That expands that applicant’s reach in terms of what’s available to them.”

HHS shared certificates by the numbers

The idea of sharing certificates isn’t new, as it stems from the 2015 Competitive Service Act and subsequent guidance published in 2018. But the practice has gained much more traction in just the last few years.

At HHS, the use of shared certificates began years ago in just a handful of components, like the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But it’s more recently become a fully departmentwide effort.

Between 2020 and 2023, HHS hired nearly 12,000 employees off of shared certificates, and increased its shared certificate hires by 33%.

HHS hires made from shared certificates

Note: Hiring numbers exclude FDA data, which was not immediately available.

Currently, HHS’ Office of the Secretary is the greatest user of shared certificates. Nearly half of all hires made from shared certificates in the last four years have gone through that office, including all of its staffing divisions.

This year, 11% of hires made through the Office of the Secretary’s HR shared servicing center have been pulled off of shared certificates.

“It might seem like a small number, but that’s coming from a vastly smaller number, and it is increasing significantly,” Leavitt said.

HHS involves SMEs in recruitment

For HHS, like many agencies, a crucial part of the recruitment process is involving subject-matter experts (SMEs) when writing job announcements and assessing candidates. Federal hiring experts say SMEs — usually officials working directly in the office that’s recruiting — offer a helpful perspective on what hands-on skills a candidate would actually need to be qualified for a position.

Especially with recruitment efforts that use shared certificates, HHS involves SMEs when writing solicitations, as well as when reviewing candidate pools.

There are, however, busier or more challenging times of the year for SMEs to be able to take the time to get involved in recruitment. But Leavitt and Steide said they’ve found the officials to be generally willing to offer their support, as it helps their office land a better job candidate at the end of the process.

“We do have to be attuned to the broader environment, but overall, people appreciate the opportunity to engage,” Leavitt said. “But we have to do our bit as well to make sure that the timing works.”

‘HireNow’: The back-end of sharing certificates

HHS’ recruitment arm is massive, involving thousands of hires annually. Underlying the entire recruitment process, HHS uses a platform called “HireNow.” The site compiles tens of thousands of active resumes for hiring managers to sift through when looking for a good fit for an opening at the department.

Right now, there are about 3,000 active job announcements on HireNow that are open to shared certificates, with another 600 or so upcoming announcements. And so far for 2024, HHS hiring managers have selected nearly 900 candidates from shared certificates on HireNow, along with dozens more pending selections.

Currently, there are more than 103,000 active resumes available on HireNow that are open to shared certificates.

“Of course, that’s a large volume to go through,” Leavitt said. “But we’re able to filter that by job series, by grade, and other factors, to help really narrow in on the available pool of candidates that hiring managers across the organization can refer to, rather than starting afresh.”

Once logged into HireNow, HHS hiring managers can view both current and upcoming job announcements employing shared certificates, as well as job announcements that won’t be using shared certificates.

For instance, right now, HHS is actively searching for supervisory physicians, health science administrators and data scientists — all of which have a shared certificate available for hiring managers to use. And coming soon, HHS is opening job announcements for management analysts and administrative specialists.

A list of several current job announcements, shared with Federal News Network, show many originating at the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA). But with the use of shared certificates, those announcements could later be opened to other HHS components for hiring managers to review and select other candidates.

Application data on HireNow gets fed in through USA Staffing, a talent acquisition system run by the Office of Personnel Management. The system manages federal job applications that come in, and lets hiring managers track and assess applicants. On top of job applications sent directly to HHS, HireNow also intakes information from OPM’s broader talent pools portal meant for sharing certificates governmentwide.

Combining data from the two platforms “makes it easier for our selecting officials, so that they don’t have two places that they need to go to look for resumes,” Steide said.

When creating job announcements in HireNow, HHS staffing specialists will denote whether submitted applications will be shared more broadly. For announcements using shared certificates, candidates are automatically opted into the process, but have the ability to opt out. Once a shared certificate is issued, it remains active in HireNow for 240 days.

“That means that a candidate can apply and be considered for the next 240 days for anything that might come up across the department, which could be quite expansive,” Steide said.

Even with the success, HHS said it’s still working to consolidate the data and processes for sharing certificates. Although the HireNow platform is available for all HR offices to use, not all of them actually use it when going through the shared certificate process.

Shared certificates across government

Of course, HHS is far from the only agency that uses shared certificates — and for all agencies, the process of sharing certificates generally happens one of two ways.

One option is for OPM to initiate a governmentwide pooled hiring announcement. Agencies can then sign onto the announcement and select from a list of qualified job candidates for a common position.

The other option involves a specific agency initiating its own shared certificate announcement. That announcement can either stay internal to share just among different components within a large department, or otherwise get shared more broadly with agencies across government.

HHS uses shared certificates in multiple ways, and the announcements are not always departmentwide. For example, different divisions can also move shared certificates from job announcements they’ve already done in their specific office, and later post them to HireNow for other components to view and make selections.

To decide where and what positions to use shared certificates for, Steide said HHS often looks at where the most vacancies are. But it’s also not as simple as that.

“We’ve had a lot of success with pooled hiring for military spouses [and] for public health associates, which is a huge occupation that spans across the department,” Steide said. “So it really depends on where we have vacancies, where we have the most need, and … unique situations, where we can have one certificate that we can maximize across the department.”

For internally shared certificates, Steide said HHS will look across the department to figure out which occupational series would be the best fit for a pooled hiring effort.

Once an HHS component or office creates an announcement with a shared certificate, that component then has about 40 days to assess and select candidates, before the candidates become available for selection at HHS more broadly.

Depending on the number of certificates that are available on a job announcement, it can be a time-consuming process, but the value is clear.

Steide said, “the amount of effort and time that you put in on the front end just yields you a better product at the outcome.”

The post ‘An extraordinary opportunity’: How HHS uses shared certificates in hiring first appeared on Federal News Network.

The National Science Foundation, right now, has the most federal interns it’s ever had.

And those interns, many of whom come in through the government’s Pathways Program, don’t exist in a vacuum. Pathways interns have comprised more than 20% of all General Schedule hires that NSF, a relatively small agency, has made this fiscal year. In total, 40 of NSF’s 195 new GS recruits have come in through Pathways.

“It’s tremendously exciting,” Elicia Moran, NSF’s Pathways Program officer, said during a July 10 President’s Management Agenda event. “We haven’t seen numbers like that before.”

For NSF, managing the Pathways Program goes beyond hiring interns just for a couple months at a time. NSF has a 97% conversion rate for those moving from the early-career program into full-time federal jobs, said Moran, who herself began her federal career as an intern.

With its own special hiring authority, the Pathways Program is one of the easiest ways for agencies to onboard early-career talent, Moran said. Through the program, early-career employees take a temporary position at an agency, with the potential to later convert into a full-time position in the career civil service.

NSF uses all three components of the Pathways Program: interns, recent graduates and Presidential Management Fellows. Pathways internships, though, are the area NSF focuses on the most, employing both year-round and summer interns.

In an effort to encourage interns to remain with the agency after the program ends, NSF is working on revamping its training and development program specifically to support interns.

“We’re trying to be a little bit more intentional about what students need,” Moran said. “If they’re coming in with no experience, do they need particular trainings on Microsoft Teams and Outlook? Do they need problem-solving skills, or networking? And then, really focusing on the competencies for the job path that they’re going onto for the future within NSF.”

Taking advantage of the program is especially important, Moran said, since 30% of the federal workforce will be retirement-eligible in less than five years.

“As agencies, we all have a responsibility to start training and developing new talent from the ground up and filling in those gaps that we’re soon going to have,” Moran said. “Or else we’re going to have a really hard time bringing on talent in general into the federal government and meeting our mission requirements.”

Pathways updates changing the game for agencies

There are also plenty of changes on the horizon for agencies using the Pathways Program. In April, the Office of Personnel Management finalized new Pathways regulations, which officially took effect June 11. The overhaul to the program aims to open the doors to more diverse candidates, while making it easier for agencies to use the program and convert Pathways participants into full-time feds.

The new regulations, for example, lower the requirements needed for conversion into a full-time position, give agencies more time to convert interns into full-time feds, and create options to offer higher pay rates to Pathways participants.

But one other important change OPM made with the new regulations, Moran said, was expanding eligibility for the program. Under the new regulations, agencies can now count a candidate’s completion of an apprenticeship program or a vocational school toward fulfilling Pathways eligibility requirements. Previously, only college graduates were eligible to apply and participate in the recent graduates Pathways Program.

“Not only are you already picking from an immense candidate pool, it’s only gotten larger and more diverse,” Moran said.

Agencies have until Dec. 9 to be in full compliance with the new Pathways regulations. Many of those flexibilities, though, are optional rather than mandatory. In many cases, that means agencies will have to think creatively as they look to implement many of the optional changes.

NSF turning to high school students

NSF, though, is already working through some of those flexibilities. For example, although Pathways is often reserved for college students and young adults, NSF is starting to look at hiring high school students as Pathways interns as well. The agency has just recently opened options for Pathways participants to come in as a GS-1 — an uncommon, but not unheard of, level of entry into federal service.

“We did that intentionally,” Moran said. “This allows students to really make an impact, even when they’re in high school, so that they can see the possibilities that are available to them — and maybe continue their education, whether it’s community college or vocational school or trade school.”

While ushering interns through the program, Moran said NSF also maintains a central pool of full-time agency positions, in cases where there may not be a full-time position immediately available for a graduating intern.

“I think that the misconception is often that the student isn’t ready, they don’t have the tools to work in an office. Especially if they’re younger, that they don’t have the ability to problem solve, or they don’t have the ability to do the level of work that we’re doing,” Moran said. “When folks [say], ‘Oh, a GS-5 can’t do this level of work, a GS-5 is not going to be able to do this — Well, yes, they are, especially if you take the time to invest in them.”

Maintaining the central pool of full-time roles also aims to make it easier on hiring managers, who can then keep a list of available early-career candidates who might be a good fit for a role that opens up.

“It allows offices to recruit talent and to get talent in the pipeline, so that when eventually those early-career positions are available for their divisions or offices, they are able to then put those interns on their own [full-time positions],” Moran said.

“Students here are willing and ready to invest in your agencies, they want to know that there’s opportunities for them to grow with you, and they want to learn,” Moran added. “I’m a product of the Pathways Program. And I can tell you that if you are nurtured and you are mentored and you’re trained from the ground up, you can really make an impact within your agencies.”

The post With record number of interns, NSF is ‘intentional’ about career growth first appeared on Federal News Network.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says his department’s advancement in the federal government’s workplace rankings did not happen by accident.

Instead, Mayorkas said the Department of Homeland Security climbed out of the bottom of the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings over the past two years because officials have been “intensely engaged” on workforce issues.

“It is the product of significant focus on employee wellbeing and investing in our workforce in a number of different ways,” Mayorkas said in an exclusive interview with Federal News Network. “We really have made the wellbeing of our workforce our top organizational priority.”

Several DHS components made improvements in their 2023 Best Places to Work rankings, most notably the Transportation Security Administration. TSA saw a more than 12-point boost in its employee engagement and satisfaction score, bolstered by a historic pay increase for airport screening officers that began in 2023.

On the other hand, several DHS components still struggle with employee morale. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for instance, are two major frontline organizations that continue to place close to the bottom of the Partnership’s subcomponent rankings.

Out of the 459 agency subcomponents on the Partnership’s list, CBP ranked as number 432, while ICE came in as number 437.

“I think we have to be very clear-eyed and fair in understanding some of the pain points,” Mayorkas said.

The Best Places to Work series, based on data from the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), shows that DHS performed well on questions related to the agency’s mission and supervisors, but received the most negative feedback from employees regarding their views on management decisions and performance recognition.

DHS jump teams aim to resolve problems quickly

Despite the uptick in its overall ranking, DHS is still struggling in a few key areas that the Partnership measures, such as employee input and recognition. Departmentwide, DHS received a score of 50 out of 100 on employee input, and 47.4 out of 100 on recognition. Both scores fall into the lowest quartile amid agencies featured in the Partnership’s rankings.

One way DHS is attempting to combat some of those ongoing challenges is by deploying “jump teams” to try to address concerns from frontline employees more quickly and effectively.

“Jump team members are responsible for helping to solve immediate issues, guide how funding is allocated and to assist in developing solutions to deliver support most effectively to our front line,” DHS explained in a May 20 press release.

Mayorkas, who’s responsible for initiating the jump teams, said the idea came after he visited a CBP facility in Miami, Florida, early in his tenure — a worksite that he called “woefully inadequate.”

“The employees who work there actually affectionately called it the ‘house of pain,’” Mayorkas said. “The lighting was poor, the connectivity was poor, some of the facilities were just awful.”

After the visit, DHS fixed the lighting, strengthened internet connections, along with adding many new amenities, such as a break room and fitness center, as well as upgrading the floors, ceilings, paint, furniture and roof. DHS held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new facility in April.

“The principle really underlying [that] is that we don’t have a monopoly on what the workforce needs,” Mayorkas said. “We want to hear directly from them and involve them as a team in addressing the challenges.”

Improving DHS recruiting and hiring

One of Mayorkas’ major priorities this year is improving the hiring process. Staffing has been a challenge at several DHS components, including CBP and ICE. The DHS inspector general last year reported on how staffing challenges at those agencies has led to burnout and morale issues amid rising migrant encounters at the southwest border.

Mayorkas acknowledged the hiring process at DHS can take a long time, especially for positions that require a security clearance and a polygraph exam.

“Without curtailing security thresholds, we can drive a far greater amount of efficiency in those processes,” he said. “And we lose candidates, sometimes because of the length of time it takes to onboard them. That’s especially true in the in the tech sector, but also in law enforcement and elsewhere. And also, a vacant position is a drain on morale, because the work needs to get done. And that means others are shouldering more.”

He said DHS is working on “innovative ways of recruiting talent.” During a recent two-day career expo in Chantilly, Virginia, DHS conducted more than 1,200 interviews and extended more than 400 tentative job offers. The career expo also let job candidates get started on some of the early steps of the clearance process, like fingerprinting, in an effort to reduce DHS’ time-to-hire by several weeks.

The department is additionally looking to hire from “places that we might not otherwise have gone to,” Mayorkas said. He pointed to DHS’ goal to have its law enforcement ranks comprise 30% women by 2030.

“We’re going to exceed that goal,” Mayorkas said.

Meanwhile, DHS has a long way to go toward improving “mobility,” or the ability of an employee to move between different jobs within the department.

“If somebody has been cleared, has received a security clearance in one agency, and they want to move to another agency, we still haven’t eliminated the redundancies entirely,” Mayorkas said.

DHS sees ‘tremendous’ interest in AI jobs

DHS is also putting all hands on deck to onboard more staff expertise in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

In June, the department announced its first “AI Corps” cohort, comprising 10 new recruits with various AI expertise. DHS has more plans on the way to expand the program, aiming to recruit a total of 50 experts by the end of the year.

“It’s been tremendous,” Mayorkas said. “We see a greater thirst for public service in the tech sector.”

So far, there have been about 6,000 “expressions of interest” in AI Corps positions at DHS, Mayorkas said.

Soon, there may be even more opportunities opening for a broader array of candidates who are looking either at DHS or elsewhere across government for AI-related positions. The White House is aiming to shift federal tech positions in the government’s main IT job series away from relying on degrees, and instead focusing more on skills-based hiring.

Supervisor scores driving upward

One key part of improving engagement and satisfaction scores from DHS employees has been focusing on supporting agency managers and supervisors.

“Engagement begins at the top and must cascade throughout,” Mayorkas said. “Whether it is your first-line supervisor, which is where the rubber meets the road, but [also] upwards and sideways and every which way, it has to be cascading.”

DHS’ efforts to support supervisory employees are gradually starting to pay off. Employees’ views of their supervisors across DHS have continually increased, on average, over the last several years. Currently, DHS has a score of 77.4 out of 100 when it comes to agency supervisors.

The ‘Patron Saint of Admin Leave’

Mayorkas has also been lauded online in places like the Fed News subreddit for his generous granting of administrative leave to DHS employees around the holidays. His affinity for giving extra time off to staff has even led some to jokingly dub him the “Patron Saint of Admin Leave.”

Most recently, Mayorkas doled out eight hours of paid administrative leave ahead of the Fourth of July holiday.

“It’s a small gesture of recognition and appreciation,” Mayorkas explained. “When one travels around the country and the world and sees how incredibly hard our people work and their unbelievable skill and talent, admin leave is a tool that I have to say, ‘We recognize that, we appreciate it. And here is an expression of gratitude.’”

The post Mayorkas details DHS workforce gains, future plans first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Veterans Benefits Administration is shifting to a system of mostly voluntary overtime where employees can work for a maximum of 20 hours of overtime each month.

VA Under Secretary for Benefits Joshua Jacobs told reporters VBA has relied on mandatory overtime for the past seven years to keep up with its increasing workload.

“We’re producing and delivering veteran benefits at a very high level. But as I’ve said before, I have never thought that mandatory overtime is a sustainable operating practice,” Jacobs told reporters in a call Tuesday.

VBA has delivered record-breaking level of benefits to veterans for the past three years, and is on track to break yet another record by the end of this fiscal year.

The agency processed 1.98 million disability benefits claims from veterans and their survivors in fiscal 2023 — a nearly 16% increase from the year prior. VBA issued $163 billion in total benefits in FY 2023.

VBA is seeing a higher volume of claims because of the PACT Act, a 2022 law that expanded VA health care and benefits eligibility for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service. VBA recently granted its millionth benefits claims under the PACT Act.

Jacobs said VBA is on pace to process 30% more claims in fiscal 2024 compared to last year. The agency, so far this year, has awarded $112 billion to veterans and their survivors in compensation and benefits.

VBA currently has a claims backlog of about 277,000 — nearly 30% of its total inventory of claims.

VBA is also growing its workforce to keep up with demand.  Since October 2022, VBA has grown its workforce by nearly 33%, to more than 34,000 employees.

“Our growing workforce has gone above and beyond to deliver these earned benefits, and we remain focused on achieving our primary mission, which is delivering timely, high-quality and equitable decisions for veterans and their survivors with a world-class customer experience,” Jacobs said. “At the same time, we’re laser-focused on ensuring that our workforce can achieve these outcomes sustainably in the long term.”

Jacobs said VBA ended mandatory overtime, based on feedback from VBA employees and his own “personal concern about the ability of our workforce to sustainably deliver benefits at the scale that we have been doing for a very long time.”

“My goal is to leave this organization better than I found it. And I was concerned that a continuation of mandatory overtime perpetually would be very problematic for our ability to continue delivering at the levels we have been,” he said.

Jacobs said VBA plans to keep growing its workforce until it reaches 36,000 employees — but added that the agency is “constantly evaluating our numbers.”

“We are very focused on evaluating incoming receipts, the total production, and then making sure we revalidate that our assumptions and our goals remain accurate,” he said.

The Veterans Health Administration is becoming more selective with its hiring, after it saw record workforce growth last year. The agency is also seeing higher workforce retention.

VA is also looking to shed about 10,000 jobs in its fiscal 2025 budget request. Most of those job cuts would come from VHA. VA expects to achieve the reduced headcount through attrition.

Jacobs, however, said VBA has the funding it needs to continue workforce growth.

“We are fine from a discretionary perspective. We have the funds that we need to deliver the historical level of benefits that we have been delivering,” he said.

Jacobs said VBA is also seeing higher retention rates for its employees, compared to its six-year average retention rate. He added that as VBA continues to hire, employees have had opportunities to advance into higher positions.

“As we’ve increased hiring, that hiring has both come from employees outside of VBA, but also employees within VBA,” Jacobs said. “As we’ve provided more opportunities, more employees have chosen to stay — in addition to the mission.”

VBA will keep mandatory overtime in place for some employees. That includes workers who process claims for military sexual trauma, radiation exposure, Camp Lejeune contaminated water and pensions.

“We have a workload that requires more timely decisions, and so we want to focus on continuing to bring that work, the total inventory down to improve the timeliness,” Jacobs said.

“As we’re training those new employees, we’re going to continue the mandatory overtime,” he added. “We will assess, as we watch our work in those areas progress, if and when we can make changes to that policy, and transition them to voluntary overtime. But right now, our assessment is that we need to maintain that policy, to continue making improvements for veterans who have filed those claims.”

VBA held a national quality stand-down and wellness day last month, with a focus on addressing burnout and the mental health of its workforce, as well as improving overall work quality. Jacobs said the agency is also rethinking training for its new employees and “refresher” courses for existing staff.

“Investing in our employees matters and can ultimately yield significant returns for our veterans and survivors. Because we know what’s good for our employees is good for those we serve. This stand-down was a necessary part of our effort to improve the accuracy of our claims decisions and support our employees. But it’s certainly not going to stop there,” he said.

VBA expects its employees to work in the office at least five days per two-week pay period, adhering to a VA-wide policy and the Biden administration’s goal of bringing federal employees back to the office at least 50% of the time.

The post VA ends mandatory overtime for most employees processing benefits claims first appeared on Federal News Network.

Just how many people have been hired across the government over the past, say, five years?

Quick to FedScope we went.

If you’ve never used FedScope, it’s a treat. And I don’t mean that in a nice way. It takes a certain skillset, definite patience and some failures to get the hang of it. Luckily, Federal News Network’s Deputy Editor Jared Serbu has “mastered” that expertise.

The results of our search through FedScope were telling. Between October 2019 and September 2023, agencies hired more than 1 million new employees. There are more than 2 million in the federal civilian workforce in both the defense and non-defense agencies.

FedScope is limited in the data it provides, which is why we are only giving the numbers through September of last year.

We further broke down the data by other categories to give you a sense of how agencies are using the broad authorities to fill open positions.

Given the Department of Veterans Affairs’ push to address workforce challenges to improve its service to veterans, it’s no surprise the agency hired the most people over this five-year period. The biggest surprise may be the Interior Department making the top 10, but some of that may be for seasonal workers.

The Office of Personnel Management describes three types of hires in the federal government:
• Competitive
• Excepted
• Senior Executive Service

Let’s start with competitive service, which as the name suggests, is the way a majority of the new federal workers have been hired over the last five years. In all, OPM data shows 541,156 in total competitive hires.

Moving to Excepted hiring, OPM defines this approach where competitive status is not required. Agencies can hire an employee under excepted status through the Veterans Recruitment Appointment or being appointed to a position defined by OPM as excepted, such as attorneys. Since October 2019, OPM data shows agencies have hired 467,092 employees through this approach.

Finally, under SES hiring, agencies brought in 1,522 new leaders over the five-year period. There are only 8,222 members of the SES as of 2022, the most recent data available, which the Partnership for Public Service put together in June 2023. The Partnership found that on average about 200 new people come into the SES each year, but with the number of current senior executives eligible to retire — more than 62% through 2025 — there are more opportunities for agencies to bring new employees into leadership roles.

Obviously, there is a ton of more data to pull from FedScope. Tell me what you thought of this data dive and what other data would you like to see.

The post Nearly half of all civilian feds are new hires since 2019 first appeared on Federal News Network.

Several years after the end of a hiring freeze, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is still tackling ongoing staffing issues.

Hiring is a “substantial challenge” for USCIS, the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services ombudsman said in its 2024 report to Congress. Lingering effects of the hiring freeze that ended in 2021, as well as staff attrition and funding limitations, have hindered the agency’s ability to staff up, while workloads have grown for current agency employees.

USCIS’ current 21,267-member workforce is more than 3,000 positions short of the total staff size the agency is authorized to have.

“USCIS has said it continues its aggressive hiring to reduce the number of outstanding vacancies,” the ombudsman wrote in its report. “However, the agency is still at only 87.5% of its authorized capacity.”

Other signs, though, indicate that USCIS could be turning a corner for its current workforce. Employee engagement is on the rise. The agency was also one of the better-scoring Department of Homeland Security subcomponents in the 2023 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings from the Partnership for Public Service.

USCIS Director Ur Jaddou is looking to make further adjustments to support a workforce that’s been grappling with many intersecting challenges — and starting by leaning in on more support for supervisors.

“Even where there is great supervisory support, and people are very satisfied with their supervisors, how do we take some of the pressure off the supervisors so they can even do better?” Jaddou said in an interview with Federal News Network. “It’s a very small number of people who naturally are great managers of people. So it is important to provide the support, the proper training — and we do it — the question is, how can we make it even better? And how can we continuously grow our managers, so that they can best serve the people on their team?”

Compared with its Best Places to Work scores from the past couple of years, USCIS appears to be on an upward trajectory. A 4.3-point increase in the agency’s employee engagement and satisfaction score landed the agency at an overall score of 73.5 out of 100 in the 2023 Best Places to Work. That puts USCIS above the Partnership’s governmentwide average score of 72.1 for agency subcomponents in 2023, though it’s still in the middle of the pack compared to other subcomponents across government.

Of all the workforce categories that the Partnership measures, USCIS’ highest scores were in employees’ perceptions of agency supervisors, as well as work-life balance.

On the other hand, USCIS scored relatively lower in Best Places to Work when it came to employee input and recognition. And that’s another area where Jaddou is hoping to make a difference going forward.

To try to encourage more employee feedback, USCIS has made town halls a regular occurrence, hosting them about once per quarter. About half of the agency’s workforce has attended town halls, either in person or virtually.

“It’s an opportunity to listen. People want to know that they’re being heard,” Jaddou said. “If [an employee has] a good idea, then great, let’s adopt it. If we think it’s not a good idea, let’s investigate, and if it doesn’t make sense for the agency as a whole, then we need to get back to the individual and explain why. And I have found that when you do that, it really takes the temperature out of the room.”

Before each town hall, employees can submit questions months in advance to ask to Jaddou and other agency leadership. Those questions are then put to a vote amid the workforce to determine what officials will address during the quarterly meetings.

“It’s a little bit like crowdsourcing. What questions do people want to hear?” Jaddou said. “The highest-ranked questions are the ones that are chosen … Some are bigger picture, larger questions about ensuring that people have flexibilities at work, wellness questions [or] pressures on the work they’re doing every day, wondering about the metrics that they have measuring their production.”

But Jaddou said questions and concerns from employees can also be quite specific. As an example, one common concern from USCIS employees has been the listing of immigration officers’ names on various immigration forms.

“There were some concerns about privacy there for our workforce, and obviously concerns about security [and] safety,” Jaddou said. “People don’t want their name out there potentially on a negative decision, it makes them nervous.”

After getting that regular feedback from staff, Jaddou said the agency made the decision to remove the officers’ names, aiming to better protect employees.

Addressing ongoing USCIS staffing issues

Still, major staffing issues, coupled with a hefty case backlog, have continued to challenge USCIS for years. Recent levels for the agency are unprecedented: Over 1 million asylum cases were pending determination at the end of fiscal 2023, the agency’s inspector general office reported. More than 786,000 of “affirmative” cases — those not involving removal proceedings — have been pending for longer than six months.

“This occurred because USCIS did not have sufficient funding, staffing and planning to complete its affirmative asylum caseload,” the IG said in a July 3 report.

In the absence of direct congressional appropriations, USCIS primarily uses application fees to fund the agency’s work. But in 2023, the IG said the fee-based revenue alone wasn’t enough to support the staffing needed to manage the workload.

“This shortage forced USCIS to prioritize certain types of work over resolving its backlog of affirmative asylum cases and also resulted in USCIS setting performance goals at levels too low to timely adjudicate new claims within the statutory limits and address the existing affirmative asylum backlog,” the IG said.

Adding to the challenge, USCIS staffing in its asylum division is insufficient to address the existing workload, the IG said. the agency still managed to handle more than 40,500 requests for immigration benefits each day. Additionally, during 2023, USCIS reduced the immigration backlog for the first time in a decade, something made even more notable after three successive years of an increasing caseload, the ombudsman said.

“That USCIS was able to decrease its pending caseloads at all is testament to its commitment to increase operational efficiencies and the dedication of staff to the agency’s mission,” the ombudsman said in its report. “A renewed focus on its digitization efforts, years in the making, enabled more accessibility of benefit requests, despite some setbacks. A staffing increase helped as new hires onboarded and were trained.”

The ombudsman said USCIS has faced unprecedented challenges over the last decade, but recommended numerous adjustments, such as reforms to the agency’s structure and staffing models, that may help the agency moving forward.

At the end of the day, the ombudsman said, “USCIS’ strongest asset has always been its workforce.”

The post Amid hiring issues, USCIS’ Jaddou aims to boost current workforce first appeared on Federal News Network.

A recent pay increase at the Transportation Security Administration has cut the agency’s attrition rate in half. But beyond staving off attrition, TSA leaders are also looking to build retention and solve some of the agency’s historic workforce challenges.

Employee engagement and satisfaction at TSA, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, improved by a significant margin in just the last year. Between 2022 and 2023, TSA increased its overall score by 12.3 points in the results of the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings. Moving from a score of 45.2 to 57.5 out of 100 is the highest year-over-year increase TSA has had since the Partnership’s rankings began 2005.

Jason Nelson, chief human capital officer at TSA, credited the improvements in large part to the pay increase TSA employees first received in 2023.

“We were really starting to compete with fast food places, warehouses or big box stores, when really, this is more of a career,” Nelson said in an interview with Federal News Network. “A lot of our staff would walk across the hall go to another agency, because we couldn’t pay as well.”

Of TSA’s 60,000 employees, roughly 42,000 are transportation security officers (TSOs) working at nearly 440 airports nationwide and screening more than 2 million passengers daily. The other about 25% of TSA employees work in back-office functions. With the pay raise that began last year, some TSOs saw as much as a 31% pay boost.

“It’s life-changing,” Nelson said. “People are saying they got the surgery they’ve been putting off, or they moved out of their parents’ house for the first time … It’s just so amazing to get out there and see the faces of the people and the tears of joy. When you see these things on paper, it’s very different.”

The effects of the pay increases shone through in the Partnership’s Best Places to Work results as well. Pay satisfaction scores for TSA employees have more than doubled since 2022.

Before the pay boost, the TSA workforce was paid noticeably lower than many federal employees at comparable levels on the General Schedule (GS). The disparity led to high staff attrition rates at TSA.

But since the raise took effect, and was continued through 2024, TSA has reported more interest in job openings, as well as a 9% drop in staff attrition rates, decreasing from 20% to now roughly 11%. In other words, TSA retained about 88% of its frontline employees — the highest annual retention rate in the agency’s history. TSA also hired over 9,000 new TSOs and security support assistants during 2023, the agency said.

“It’s unbelievable. I mean, to go down and cut your losses by half is really something else,” Nelson said. “Everyone is excited — I’m excited. But as a human capital officer, I also have to be realistic.”

Creating career ladders for TSOs

Nelson described the drop in staff attrition as a “honeymoon phase” — and he’s already wary of how long the high retention rates can be maintained without digging into further workforce challenges at the agency. Compared against other agency subcomponents across government, TSA is still in the bottom quartile of the Partnership’s rankings.

As one way to try to further improve staff retention, TSA is creating “career ladders,” or more defined steps for getting promoted and moving up in the agency. Nelson said he had regularly heard concerns about the lack of career development opportunities from employees who filled out the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) or took other opportunities to offer feedback.

“We’ve heard from the staff very, very clearly that in order to make it a career, it’s about more than just base pay. It’s about advancement,” Nelson said. “It took many, many years of planning, and of course budgeting, but it all came from the feedback from our employees.”

TSA now uses a “pay band” system, which in practice means new TSA employees can come in as a GS-5 equivalent, but can then move up to a GS-7, and eventually a GS-9, within their first three years on the job. The new career ladder system, now about one year in, lets employees move up those steps based on their own performance, rather than having to compete with their colleagues for higher positions.

Nelson said the better predictability of TSO salaries over the first couple of years at the agency, as well as being able to see the pay band system that’s now in place, should lead to better staff retention.

“Now people are saying, ‘I might make a little bit less than another job I’m being offered, but in two years, I’ll be up 50% or 60%. I’m not going to get that with competitors outside of the government,’” Nelson said. “Especially because we hire people in high school, people coming out of the military [and] a lot of people coming out of restaurants and the fast food industry looking for a career, it’s really exciting to show that stability in their life.”

Moving forward, Nelson said he’s also trying to figure out how to incorporate career development and advancement opportunities by creating formalized career paths in TSA, clearer ways for TSOs to get promoted to leads, and then supervisors — and possibly offering career paths for TSA employees to convert to positions elsewhere in DHS.

“We want our leaders to be critical thinkers. We want them to have empathy. We want them to be problem solvers,” Nelson said. “We want to make sure that the people that move up have some of those skills or the potential to learn them, as opposed to just being around the longest.”

Expanded collective bargaining for TSA staff

Many of TSA’s recent workforce improvements have also come as a result of a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the American Federation of Government Employees. The contract, signed in May, is TSA’s first-ever full-fledged CBA. The agreement expands collective bargaining rights through a streamlined grievance process, increased official time, eased restrictions on sick leave, opportunities for local collective bargaining — and much more.

“It’s only going to help morale, especially when management and the union are so in lockstep with the issues and with the things that we want to do, and the successes that we made,” Nelson said.

Even seemingly small changes can make a big difference for employees. Polo shirts, as an example, are now allowed as part of TSOs’ uniform options. Under the new CBA, employees working in warmer climates can wear polo shirts throughout the year to try to get relief on especially hot days.

“That was such a big deal for so many people because that’s their life every day, 40 hours a week or more,” Nelson said. “You’d think that’s not something that would be on a lot of people’s minds, but it was on the employees’ minds.”

Nelson said he also travels to various locations across the country to talk to TSOs in person and try to make the message clear that the agency is listening and trying to make changes based on their direct feedback.

“A lot of times, our frontline workforce [are] on their feet, they’re in the airports, they’re inspecting surface areas, they’re moving around the country, or they’re law enforcement, flying an aircraft or driving vehicles,” Nelson said. “It’s rare that they can get on email, so we try to do this stuff more in person.

What’s next for TSA’s workforce

Beyond the pay increases and new career ladders, Nelson said TSA’s requirement of creating location-specific action plans based on FEVS results will help make even more improvements for the workforce down the line.

Although there is some overlap in what issues TSOs are facing across the country, Nelson said it’s also dependent on the airport and the city where employees are working.

“We do have some locations where you would see some equity and inclusion issues, and other places that we would see work-life balance issues,” Nelson said. “We look at the grand scale, of course, but those action plans by location are critical.”

For instance, Nelson said one crucial issue among more remote locations across the country — like Nome, Alaska; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Key West, Florida; or the Northwestern Islands of Hawaii — is the availability of housing near airports.

“There’s no place to live,” Nelson said. “Even if we pay people double, they just can’t get the housing.”

After receiving the action plans and visiting some of the more remote locations to speak with TSOs in those areas, Nelson said he’s now working with DHS and the Defense Department to try to offer alternative and more affordable housing options for staff.

And in conversations with TSOs, Nelson said he now uses the example of the recent pay increase to show how much of a difference employee input can make.

“We remind our staff that it’s because they talked about it, it’s because they raised it,” Nelson said. “It came up in the survey year over year, and we used those results on the congressional floor and in testimony to show how critical it is for our retention.”

The post TSA looking beyond ‘honeymoon phase’ for frontline workforce first appeared on Federal News Network.

It’s a demographic trend that has persisted for years, but there may be a few early signs of change, according to a July 1 workforce report from the Partnership for Public Service that uses data from FedScope.

Data from fiscal 2023 shows that 60% of the federal workforce is white, 19% of federal employees are Black and 10% are Hispanic. By comparison, for the nationwide workforce, 76% of employees are white, 13% are Black and 19% are Hispanic.

Breaking down diversity by GS level, the Partnership’s data report shows that white federal employees make up a much larger portion of the workforce at GS-7 and up through the Senior Executive Service, taking up many mid- and top-level technical roles as well as many supervisory positions.

By contrast, people of color hold a higher portion entry-level administrative positions between GS-2 and GS-6, the Partnership said.

The long-time workforce trend is beginning to change, albeit slowly, the Partnership said. Between 2022 and 2023, the percentage of people of color in the SES rose 1%, from 25% to 26%.

Similar trends occur when breaking down the workforce by gender. Overall, women make up 45% of the federal workforce, while men comprise 55%. But again, men make up a larger portion of higher-level GS positions as well as SES roles. There appears to be a similar trend toward a more equal balance between men and women in the SES, the Partnership’s report showed.

Over time, the SES has gradually become more diverse as it has grown in size, but it’s still not fully representative of the federal workforce’s overall demographics.

During 2023, the SES grew by 272 members, bringing the total up to 7,753 career SES employees governmentwide. It’s the largest year-over-year increase for the SES workforce in the last decade, the Partnership said.

Along with the net gain in size, the number of workers leaving the SES is increasing too, mostly due to retirements. At the end of fiscal 2020, 40.6% of SES members were eligible to retire within a year. But by the end of 2030, 79.8% of the SES will be retirement-eligible, the Partnership reported last year.

Some employee organizations view the likely retirement surge in the coming years as an opportunity to create a more diverse SES in the future.

“Agencies must recruit young talent and employees with the necessary skills for both current and future needs,” the Partnership wrote in its data report. “Ensuring a diverse workforce is essential, as is developing leadership capabilities within the organization, improving hiring processes and implementing policies to retain high-performing workers.”

Early-career employees in the federal workforce

Along with diversity trends, the federal government’s struggle to recruit and retain early-career employees has also gone on for years.

From 2008 to 2012, the percentage of feds between ages 20 and 29 hovered around 8-9%, a high point over the last two decades. But back in fiscal 2000, just 4.7% of federal employees were under 30 years old.

According to 2023 data, the most recent available, 7.4% of federal employees are under age 30, the Partnership said.

The federal workforce generally trends older than the nationwide workforce. While employees under age 30 represent 7.4% of the federal workforce, they make up 19.8% of the nationwide workforce. Employees between ages 30 and 49 comprise half of the federal workforce, and those over age 50 make up about 43%.

In its Workforce of the Future playbook, the Office of Personnel Management said early-career talent recruitment is a challenge in part because agencies typically view younger workers as short-term hires. That perspective leads to fewer positions being reserved for early-career employees, and less prominence of early-career recruitment as part of agencies’ workforce planning strategies.

Because of the long-term struggle, OPM in recent years has made early-career recruitment and retention a priority. For instance, OPM created an intern experience program in 2023, which it has continued this summer. OPM’s online internship portal, as well as updated Pathways Program regulations, also aim to ease the challenge of early-career recruitment.

As a result of those changes, OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver said there have been early signs of a renewed and increased interest in federal job opportunities from younger employees.

“We want to bring the interns together to help them feel like they’re part of a cohort here, to show that there are people across the government who are working in internship opportunities,” Shriver said in a recent interview with Federal News Network. “[We also] make sure they’re having a good experience, so that they are our force multipliers — they are our recruiters-in-chief.”

In another effort to recruit early-career talent, the General Services Administration created the U.S. Digital Corps, a two-year program aiming to close the early-career technology talent gap in government.

The program, launched in 2022, brings small cohorts of young technologists into agencies, aiming to convert them into full-time positions by the end of their tenure. GSA’s first Digital Corps class graduated from the program on June 26.

“Over the past two years, you have proven yourselves in high-impact areas, whether it’s customer experience or public health, cybersecurity and more,” OPM Deputy Chief of Staff Margot Conrad said at the graduation ceremony. “This program exemplifies the broader work that we are pursuing at OPM to try and attract, develop and retain top tech talent for the whole federal workforce.”

The post Federal workforce diversity still lagging in more senior roles first appeared on Federal News Network.

Government employee recruitment often relies on the appeal of the mission. Still people want to be paid and have some financial security. A recent study of state and local emergency response employment seems to indicate one important factor in attracting job candidates, namely having a defined benefit pension plan. Tyler Bond, research director for the National Institute on Retirement Security joins  the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin
So tell us, I think I know or can guess what the answer is. But are the existence of defined benefit pension plans important to recruiting public sector employees?

Tyler Bond
Yes. The evidence that we’ve seen through a number of reports strongly suggest that defined benefit pensions are essential for recruiting and retaining public sector employees, especially those public sector employees who work in public safety. So police officers, firefighters, corrections officers, other public safety employees really value the reliability and security of a defined benefit pension. And our new report, I think really speaks to that.

Tom Temin
One of the reasons possibly, as you outlined in the report, is that these types of employees tend to complete their career and retire on that benefit that was offered at their point of employment to a much greater degree than those in the private sector.

Tyler Bond
Yes. Certainly, what we saw with the public safety employees is that once they start working for the fire department or the police department, if they make it past the first few years, they’re very likely to stay through a full career and retire from that plan. Now, it should be said that, especially in the case of a firefighter, a career may be 20 years. And so often what you’ll see is a firefighter who has a second career. Sometimes they begin that second career while they’re still firefighting, sometimes they start that second career after firefighting. But yes, we do see that in our research, we found that 52% of 25 year old new hires are expected to retire from the pension plan that they join when they begin their public safety career.

Tom Temin
Now, this was based on survey of those people that are the recipients. Did it also include the view of recruitment viability of the hiring organizations?

Tyler Bond
So we collected data directly from 28 state and local public pension plans. So we’re using the plans own data about the behavior of their employees. But I think we’ve seen in the real world that employers are realizing the value of a defined benefit pension. So in Connecticut, there’s a town called Trumbull, Connecticut that in 2014, close their defined benefit plan moved all their police officers into 401k style defined contribution plan. At the end of last year, after less than a decade of having their police officers in the defined contribution plan. The town council in Trumbull voted unanimously to reopen the defined benefit plan. And so starting this year, police officers will go back into the defined benefit pension plan. And we’ve seen up in Alaska, they closed their two statewide public sector pension plans on July 1 of 2006. So 18 years ago to the day, and most police officers and firefighters in Alaska participate in one of those plans. And they’re reaching crisis levels of staffing shortages in Alaska right now because of the lack of a defined benefit pension plan. So to give you a concrete example, the city of Fairbanks, Alaska does not have police officers on patrol between 8am and noon every day because they’re so understaffed in their police department. And the lack of a pension is not the only factor, but it is a contributing factor to that staffing shortage.

Tom Temin
Well, I guess everything is in the details. That leads to a couple of questions. But first, let me remind people who we’re speaking to. Tyler Bond is the research director for the National Institute on Retirement Security. And briefly, do you have any evidence or hunch as to whether these results are projectable to federal level law enforcement and public safety and first responders?

Tyler Bond
So we’ve seen that the federal government has retained a pension for its employees for decades now, even when the system was reformed in the 80s and the Civil Service Retirement System was closed in favor of the Federal Employees Retirement System. It still retained a defined benefit pension component to that system. So I think at the federal government level, as well as at the state and local government levels, there is a recognition that it’s important to maintain a defined benefit pension in order to recruit and retain employees who want to make a career out of public service. There’s data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that suggests that the average tenure for a public sector employee is twice the average tenure of a private sector employee. I think the public sector, especially in certain professions, has really retained that career employment model. And having a pension helps to bolster that.

Tom Temin
Right. When they went from [Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS)] to [Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS)], the pension got much smaller as a percentage of top three salary years and so forth with the added provision of Social Security, and then the TSP and so forth. So you have that kind of three legged stool which exists in most municipalities, I guess. So the question is, what is the correct percentage for the people that have to bear the burden of this pension cost? Is it 100% of the salary for the rest of their lives. Is it 80%? That would seem to be a crucial question. How much is the pension?

Tyler Bond
So it’s very uncommon, in my experience, to see a pension that awards 100% of salary at retirement, the exact amount varies from plan to plan. And I think it’s important to keep in mind that it’s the local stakeholders, the plan sponsors that set those amounts. And so they look at what their workforce needs, and they determined provisions of their pension plan benefits in accordance with what their workforce needs.

Tom Temin
Well. Let me ask you about the affordability side, because when the federal government doesn’t have an affordability problem, because it can print money without regard to whether it actually raises that money in revenue, that is not available in general to state and local governments, unless they want to float bonds, which are probably not great fiscal policy for paying pensions. But you look at some of the places like Chicago or some of the big Midwestern states where upwards of 25, 35, almost 50% of revenues they raise are going to public pensions and health care benefits. There’s no money left for the schools, roads, bridges, etc. How do we get around that in the long term?

Tyler Bond
So most state and local government pension plans are well funded, a lot of plans have been moving in an upward trajectory in recent years. Most state and local pension plans received the majority of their revenue from their investment earnings. On average, it’s only about a quarter of revenues into the plan that come from taxpayer dollars in the form of employer contributions. Where we see the outliers in places like Chicago and Kentucky and elsewhere. There’s really a history of underfunding the pension plan that goes back decades. And that is largely contributing to the problem there. The money wasn’t put in when it should have been. And that’s contributing to the problems they have now. It’s not really a flaw in the design of the plan itself, because we see so many other plans are doing well. And there’s a number of plans that are at or above 100% funding today.

Tom Temin
So the lesson then is have a funding strategy that doesn’t depend ever and ever increasingly on year to year revenues to keep your pension going.

Tyler Bond
That’s right. Just like anyone saving for retirement, you have to put in the money and let that money grow over time. So it’s there for you when you retire. A pension, the same logic applies, you need to contribute the money so that money can be invested and the investment earnings can grow since they represent such a significant portion of plan assets. If the money’s not put in, then that’s when we see plans tend to get into trouble.

The post How important to recruiting is a traditional pension plan? first appeared on Federal News Network.

Between 2019 and 2023, more than 140,000 employees joined the civil service, an increase of about 7%, according to data that the non-partisan, non-profit Partnership for Public Service compiled and released this week.

The majority of the growth in the past couple of years occurred in 2023 alone — the federal workforce grew by 4% in just that one year, the Partnership said. The latest increase brings the grand total of full-time federal employees to just over 2 million.

“These professionals play a crucial role in protecting our national security, promoting public health, driving economic development and more,” the Partnership wrote in its data report, published Monday. “They are a fundamental part of a well-functioning government.”

But despite the federal workforce growth on the whole, current budget deliberations in Congress could cause the pendulum to eventually swing back in the other direction.

As House appropriators work through a stack of 2025 spending bills, it’s clear the GOP-led committee is eyeing significant spending cuts for many agencies. The committee’s financial services and general government bill, for instance, would put agencies covered by the legislation 20% below the Biden administration’s budget request and 10% below the 2024 allocation.

Some Democratic committee members have warned that limiting agencies’ budgets could lead to hiring freezes and staff layoffs, coupled with worsening federal services as a result.

If appropriations are reduced for 2025, “our agencies have to lay off staff, severely undermining their ability to function at the most basic levels,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said in June. “That has direct consequences on the American people.”

Workforce growth, attrition rates and more

The Partnership’s new report on the federal workforce uses data from FedScope, the Office of Personnel Management’s online data source on federal employees.

Discounting the Postal Service, 71% of the entire civilian federal workforce is housed in defense and national security-related agencies, the Partnership said.

A large portion of government positions are in public health, as well as general administration and office roles.

In total, agencies hired more than 200,000 employees last fiscal year — an increase of more than 45,000 hires over the previous year, the Partnership said. That doesn’t account for attrition due to retirements and others leaving the government. Encompassing all the changes brings the net gain to about 80,000 employees.

During 2023, 52% of those leaving government quit their positions, while 48% retired. Overall, the attrition rate last fiscal year was 5.9%. That’s lower than the 7.6% attrition rate in 2022, but close to the 6.1% attrition rate the government saw in 2021 , the Partnership said.

Notably, though, the attrition rate of federal employees under 30 years old was 9% in 2023, significantly higher than the overall figure.

“Federal agencies must recruit young talent and employees with the necessary skills for both current and future needs,” the Partnership said. “Ensuring a diverse workforce is essential, as is developing leadership capabilities within the organization, improving hiring processes and implementing policies to retain high-performing workers. These measures collectively enable the federal government to effectively address both present and emerging challenges effectively while fostering an environment that attracts and retains top talent.”

Agencies dealing with fluctuating budgets

But due to budget changes and limitations that came out of the 2024 government spending package, the picture is in flux for many agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation and NASA, for instance, all saw large cuts in their 2024 appropriations.

Many agencies are constantly grappling with trying to right-size their staffing. The Department of Veterans Affairs is scaling back hiring for its health care workforce. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is trying to manage under a current hiring freeze.

The Social Security Administration is struggling to rebuild staffing after a hiring freeze that just ended. The Forest Service has just lifted a hiring pause, but for now it’s only planning to fill its most critical vacancies.

Other agencies have big hiring goals for the rest of 2024. The IRS is planning to make 20,000 new hires by this September. But for 2025, IRS is facing a possible budget cut of more than 18%, according to the proposal last month from House appropriators.

Another 2025 spending bill from House appropriators aims to cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget by 22%, or $1.7 billion, while also looking to eliminate 23 of the CDC’s programs.

House appropriators have so far passed three of their 12 spending bills, largely along party lines. With most Democrats opposed to the proposed appropriations levels in the House, agency budgets for 2025 likely won’t be determined for months to come.

The Senate has yet to release or take up its versions of 2025 government spending bills. Various statements of administrative policy from the White House have also threatened to veto several of the House’s spending bills in their current form.

The post The federal workforce is growing, as House appropriators consider agency spending cuts first appeared on Federal News Network.

And yet, at the heart of this escalating threat lies a stark reality: a staggering shortage of cybersecurity professionals — both in the public and private sectors. There are more than 500,000 unfilled cybersecurity positions in the United States alone, according to Cyberseek, and that number is expected to increase. The private sector has already taken steps to address this, but the federal government continues to lag. Despite such a significant talent gap, the Office of Management and Budget has certain educational requirements that prevent skilled cybersecurity workers from getting hired into federal contract positions. With the battle for talent intensifying, the time for change has come.

Today’s threat landscape makes it clear that it’s time to reevaluate this antiquated barrier and embrace a more inclusive and agile approach to cybersecurity recruitment — one that prioritizes skills over diplomas and diversifies our cyber workforce to confront the myriad challenges facing our digital age. And with skyrocketing costs and crushing student debt, thousands of young Americans are opting for alternatives to higher education. It is imperative the federal cybersecurity workforce does not miss out on this cohort.

Fostering a skills-based cyber talent across the federal enterprise has been a key focal point for the new National Cyber Director Harry Coker.

“To secure our nation’s cyberspace, we need to make cyber jobs more available and attainable for groups that traditionally haven’t been recruited,” Coker told a community college in Baltimore earlier this year.

He also has pushed for a series of cyber hiring sprints that aim to bring more people from diverse backgrounds into federal cyber jobs.

And Congress appears to agree with Coker’s approach. Late last year, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill designed to limit the requirement of minimum educational attainment for cybersecurity jobs in the federal government. Largely built on the Biden Administration’s National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy, the bill signals a recognition of the need to modernize hiring practices.

“No part of the federal government should disqualify an individual from winning the competition for a federal job based on whether they have one type of educational credential,” said Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), who spearheaded the bill.

In early May, the White House announced plans to shift thousands of federal IT jobs to skills-based hiring. Both initiatives represent major milestones.

Ultimately, a paradigm shift in hiring practices towards skills-based hiring offers significant promise in closing the talent shortage at the federal level. Government agencies ought to focus more on relevant skills and experience from apprenticeships, coding bootcamps and other non-traditional pathways. IBM has already partnered with ISC2, the world’s leading nonprofit for cybersecurity professionals, to launch an entry-level cybersecurity certificate, allowing candidates with no previous experience to obtain the in-demand skills and hands-on experience required for a cybersecurity specialist role. By following in footsteps like these, federal entities can not only bridge the cybersecurity talent gap but also empower individuals from diverse backgrounds to contribute their unique perspectives and insights to the field.

Facing an onslaught of cyber threats, the federal government must act. By prioritizing skills and competencies over traditional educational credentials, federal contractors can tap into a wider pool of talent and foster a more diverse cyber workforce. Such an approach not only aligns with the dynamic nature of cybersecurity but also ensures that the most qualified individuals get hired. Only then can the nation fill the talent gap and secure our nation’s digital infrastructure.

Suzanne Wilson Heckenberg is President of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and INSA Foundation, a non-profit association dedicated to government-academia-industry collaboration in the Intelligence and National Security. David Mitchell is a military/Skillbridge fellow at INSA

The post Eliminate college degree requirements and secure our nation in cyberspace first appeared on Federal News Network.