Army Corps to launch reorganization in fall

In October, the Army Corps of Engineers will unveil plans for a major reorganization, the agency's chief told employees on Tuesday.

In an April 29 e-mail to Corps workers, Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers said the agency would collect feedback this summer on a draft restructuring plan already prepared by employees at the agency's headquarters in Washington. The Corps would then decide on a final reorganization strategy by Oct. 1, Flowers wrote in his e-mail.

The draft plan, "USACE 2012: Future Corporate and Headquarters Design Study," is based on interviews with lawmakers, Corps customers, senior leaders at the Corps' headquarters in Washington, and more than 350 employees at the Corps' regional offices. Preliminary drafts went through an extensive review process, according to the final version of the draft.

After speaking to Congress, the military and other Corps stakeholders, senior Corps leaders decided the agency needs to either "change or be changed," Flowers said.

The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), an AFL-CIO affiliate representing 75,000 technical and administrative workers, called the plan introduced in the study "hastily conceived" and said the Corps had not conducted a thorough enough analysis of the structural levels where jobs and missions are best performed. The Corps, which has roughly 35,000 employees, has gone through various restructurings since 1988. In 1997, leaders consolidated 12 divisions into eight.

"The plain but sad fact is that the Corps never gives the changes they implement a chance to work," IFPTE President Greg Junemann said in a statement. "They're already tinkering with the next change before the ink is dry on the newest changes."

The study looks for ways to streamline Corps operations by ensuring that division or district offices do not duplicate work performed at headquarters. Streamlining is crucial to the Corps' continued success, especially considering the agency's tight budget, the study said.

Funding for Corps management has remained "essentially level" since 1994 and, when inflation is factored in, has been effectively reduced by 30 percent over the past eight years, resulting in cuts of about 500 full-time positions, the report said. The Corps currently lacks money to fill roughly 10 percent of its jobs.

To make the best of limited financial resources, the study suggests the Corps' national headquarters focus on strategy and national policy issues that affect the entire agency, while division and district offices concentrate on implementing instructions. Division offices, which report directly to the Washington headquarters, would act as go-betweens, helping district offices act on orders from Washington.

This structure would keep "technical engineering and construction expertise close to the work," the study said. The Corps would "retain a small cadre of world-class experts" in Washington to help guide headquarters policy, but keep the highest numbers of technical experts at the district offices, where their knowledge would be "constantly used [and] continuously honed."

But IFPTE viewed the study as a means of centralizing power at agency headquarters, while eliminating human resources and contracting and logistics support jobs at division offices. "The report calls for a new layer of bureaucracy in the Washington headquarters to fill the gap," Junemann said. As currently recommended, the reorganization would have "severe repercussions" for the Corps' eight U.S. division offices and for offices in Europe and the Far East, he added.