Defense acquisition workforce plan called insufficient

The Defense Department's plan to add 20,000 acquisition professionals during the next five years is not ambitious enough, a leading contracting professor testified on Tuesday.

The Pentagon should hire and train every qualified contracting professional available in the marketplace, Steve Schooner, co-director of the Government Procurement Law Program at The George Washington University Law School, told the House Armed Service's Defense Acquisition Reform Panel.

"DoD aimed far too low in terms of restoring the workplace," he said. "DoD's articulated plan … is not only too slow but aspires to too little."

Schooner suggested that the Pentagon's current plan was insufficient to keep pace with the explosive growth of private sector defense contracting, which has more than doubled since 2001. During that same period, the number of federal contracting officials has remained relatively flat.

In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the 11,000 acquisition support positions currently performed by contractors would be insourced and converted into full-time career positions.

An additional 9,000 Defense procurement professionals would be hired by 2015, beginning with 4,100 in 2010. In total, the size of the acquisition workforce would increase from 127,000 to147,000 -- the highest level since 1998.

Defense's top civilian contracting official told the panel that the extra personnel will be enough to augment the current workforce.

"This will create a better balance between our government workforce and contractor support personnel, and ensure that critical and inherently governmental functions are performed by government employees," said Shay Assad, deputy undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and technology.

Defense also is conducting a departmentwide competency initiative to better understand the skills and capability gaps of the acquisition workforce. By October 2010, Assad said, assessments will be conducted for nearly all Defense acquisition disciplines.

Assad suggested that the government's salary structure, particularly for intermediate acquisition levels, was adequate enough to compete with private industry. The government's ace in the hole in terms of hiring, he said, is its ability to support the warfighter.

Others, however, were more skeptical that the department could find enough qualified acquisition professionals to fill its needs.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Lawrence Farrell Jr. said sought-after college graduates with degrees in math, science and engineering likely are not going to turn down more lucrative offers from places such as Microsoft or Google to work for the Pentagon. And with 50 percent of the acquisition workforce eligible to retire in the next five years, he said Defense's problems only will get worse.

"You can't just go out and buy experienced people," said Farrell, who now serves as president of the National Defense Industrial Association. "You need to grow them."

Defense currently uses approximately 52,000 acquisition support professionals who are contractors in a host of positions, representing roughly 40 percent of its procurement workforce, Assad said. Gates plans to reduce that number to the pre-2001 level of 26 percent.

But Schooner argued that for the foreseeable future, the government's reliance on the private sector for acquisition support not only is necessary, but probably should be increased.

"The government faces a stark choice due to the inadequacy of its acquisition workforce: rely heavily on the private sector to attempt to fill the gap, or … continue to squeeze blood from a stone and suffer the consequences," he said.