Converted military jobs could go to contractors

Contractors could end up with some of the 320,000 military jobs Defense Department officials seek to switch to civilian positions, a top Pentagon official said Tuesday.

"Not all [the jobs] will necessarily go to [the] civil service, some might go to contractors in some fashion," David Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, said at a meeting with reporters Tuesday morning. "There is a large role for the civil service in this transition, but it will not be 100 percent."

Chu, the Pentagon's chief human capital officer, has spent more than two months pushing the department's proposal to create its own personnel system for 730,000 civilian employees, complete with a pay-banding system that would more closely link salary increases to job performance, generous flexibility to craft collective bargaining relationships and broad authority to hire and fire employees. The proposal also includes a plan to shift up to 320,000 military jobs to civilian positions.

"To have 320,000 military personnel doing jobs that are not military tasks is not a good thing for the department," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Senate lawmakers at a June 4 hearing. "It's not right, especially at a time when we have to call up the National Guard, when we have to call up Reserves, when we're telling people on active duty who are due to get out and have plans that we have to … not allow them to get out."

According to Chu, the services would perform reviews using guidelines created by Pentagon leaders to determine what, if any, military jobs should be performed by civilians. "We are not saying we are necessarily going to decide to convert all these slots," cautioned Chu. Most of the jobs up for review are in administrative and technical career fields. The services would have to determine why some jobs are classified civilian in one service, but not in another. For example, some services staff military hospitals with military personnel while others use civilian employees.

The Defense Department would use the free slots to add positions in other key military job areas where there are shortfalls, such as surveillance and reconnaissance, civil affairs and communications.

One union official called the job conversion plan a red herring to draw attention away from what he described as a "proposal full of holes."

"All of this rhetoric about 320,000 soldiers hasn't got anything to do with personnel reforms, it's just some bait they threw out there to distract us," said Bobby Harnage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 200,000 civilian employees at the Defense Department. "I don't expect to see a lot of federal civilian employees come out of that."

Harnage said there are many parts of the Defense personnel transformation proposal that the union would be open to discussing with Pentagon officials.

"There's quite a bit of it that we would be willing to work on, but we haven't been asked to," Harnage explained. "In 1998, we asked President Clinton to sit down with us, [saying]'Let's talk about pay.' He never did. In 2001, we asked President Bush to sit down with us, [and said]'Let's talk about pay.' He never did and now two years later they drop this one us. They could have this situation worked out if they had sat down with us."

Harnage questioned how Pentagon officials expected to hire a huge influx of employees with or without added personnel flexibilities, given budget constraints.

"They can hire all the people they want, as long as they have the money," Harnage said. "This will happen in dribs and drabs over about 20 years; you'll never notice it."

Jayson Spiegel, senior national defense counsel at the law firm Ball Janick, voiced similar concerns about the expense of adding civilian jobs without eliminating military positions.

"It absolutely costs more money, because if you don't cut your end strength than you end up with more people," Spiegel said.

Chu admitted that it would take years to transfer all the positions, but said increased personnel flexibilities would ease hiring restrictions for Defense civilian personnel and help make the job transfers happen more quickly and smoothly.

House legislators included the Pentagon personnel overhaul in the fiscal 2004 Defense authorization bill (H.R. 1588). Senate lawmakers modified the legislation and offered it as the "National Security Personnel System Act" (S. 1166). The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee approved the legislation on Tuesday.

George Cahlink and Jason Peckenpaugh contributed to this report.