Our most recent election sent a clear message that voters want change. People are fed up with politics, politicians, deficit spending and tax dollars being wasted. The Trump Administration, mainly through Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, is moving to sharply cut the workforce at both the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration (GSA) and to move contracting functions from several agencies to GSA, while making unprecedented cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, the NationalPark Service, and many others. These cuts are not the result of careful analysis of options and their potential impact. In fact, there appears to be no analysis at all. The people making the cuts have little, if any, understanding of how government works and the need to be careful when cutting vital services.
That does not mean cuts should not or cannot be made. One area that is ripe for a dramatic makeover is the management overhead of government agencies. It is time to consider a more ambitious plan to address government management issues. I have advocated for years for a Cabinet-level Department of Management Services.
The federal government has many management problems, highlighted by a long list of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports. For example, the government buys the same systems over and over (even with efforts by agencies to curb buying), struggles to deploy complex systems, uses outdated Human Resources practices with redundant HR offices throughout government, has agencies that cannot get a clean opinion on their books, has outdated and poorly maintained facilities, and technology programs that still fail at alarmingly high numbers. The list goes on and on. Tremendous savings and improved services can be implemented, if both the White House and the Congress take the time to do it right.
GSA has focused on shared services in an attempt to reduce costs and drive efficiencies, but “shared services” is still a four-letter word in most agencies. Even getting an Enterprise approach to such services within a single Department or Agency is often asking too much. The result is redundant, inefficient and overpriced services that do not deliver the support needed and drain resources away from agency missions. Rather than operate as an organization with two million employees, the federal government operates as a loose confederation of large, medium, small and micro agencies.
The first argument I hear when I talk about a Management Department is that we already have one. After all, the Office of Management and Budget has Management as its middle name. The reality is that OMB is the Office of Budget, with Management being the stepchild.
The idea of creating an agency to focus on management is not new. The Trump, Obama and Clinton Administrations considered a GSA/OPM merger at various times. Every time I have been in the room for that type of discussion, the answer has always been the same. It is too hard. It will not fly with the Republicans, who do not want new agencies. It will not fly with the Democrats, who want to protect the Civil Service and see changes to agencies like OPM as a threat to an independent, merit-based Civil Service. It will not fly with OMB, because it would reduce OMB to a much smaller budget-focused agency. It won’t fly with oversight agencies such as the Merit Systems Protection Board or the Office of Special Counsel, because their independence is sacrosanct. It won’t fly with Cabinet officers, because they want to own their support services.
Of course it is hard to do. As President John F. Kennedy said the he set the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win….” Compare the difficulty of creating a management department with the turmoil of the DOGE-driven cuts happening in agencies today. They are not cutting just the fat – they are cutting muscle and bone. Agency missions will suffer and the American people who rely on Social Security, National Parks, Medicare, and other vital services will suffer. A far better course is to reap the massive savings that would come from consolidation of management functions across the entire government.
Federal agencies spend too much on HR systems and services, but complain about what they get for their money. They complain that the financial management practices and systems are not up to the challenges they face. They complain that they spend too much on facilities, but are not happy with them. They complain about taking money from the mission for “overhead” services, but balk when you offer them a less costly option that would work better. Agencies would rather have poor quality services that they own than good services they buy from someone else. In my own experience, the Defense Logistics Agency had repeated complaints about the quality of HR and other mission support services, but field commands were unwilling to consider restructuring that would take away their control of poorly performing HR offices. We had to force them to accept the change.
I believe the real solution is a cabinet-level Department of Management Services (DMS) focused on all aspects of government management. Such a Department could bring needed focus to management issues and, over a period of just a few years, consolidate systems, services and policies in a way that relieves burdens on the other Departments and Agencies and allows them to devote more of their resources directly to their missions.
Here is how I think it could look:
Every one of those moves is likely to cause someone to howl in protest, but the changes would bring the government’s various management agencies under one roof. Many of the problems the government faces cannot be solved by any of the existing agencies without significant interagency cooperation. This approach would jump start the interagency process by at least putting the management agencies together with a common leader who can drive change.
I am certain some advocates for the Civil Service will say that the oversight agencies cannot be in the same organization as the policy agencies, but that is not really true. Today much of merit system oversight rests not with the Merit Systems Protection Board, but with OPM’s Merit System Accountability and Compliance Division. It is already under the same roof as the policy organization and the Human Resources Solutions group that sells HR services. Merging all of these management agencies into a cohesive whole is far more likely to lead to improvements than cutting blindly and hoping a miracle happens.
If we really want to protect a merit-based career Civil Service, we need Human Resources policies that work. We need modern facilities and technology. We need to spend money wisely and stop duplicating services and systems over and over.
A Department of Management Services (DMS) could end the duplicative acquisition of software to support management functions. The Secretary could drive consolidation of management services from smaller departments and agencies into DMS, and mandate that larger departments and agencies consolidate internally. Rather than a hundred or more HR offices, the Department of Defense could have a dozen or fewer. HR is not the only function that is ripe for consolidation. Information technology, procurement, facilities, and more can also be consolidated and significant dollars saved. We could outsource some support offices and keep others in-house. That would allow us to do a real apples-to-apples comparison of cost and performance of federal staff versus contractor staff, with more work flowing to the less costly and higher performing offices.
It certainly would not be easy, but a real focus on Management could lead to changes that everyone, including the most conservative and the most progressive wings of both parties, ought to be able to support. Would either get everything they want? No. But what they might get would be a big improvement over what we have today, would save money, and perhaps provide a means of saving the more critical mission work of the federal government.
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