The latest step in the Trump administration’s plan to shrink the federal government, released Wednesday, directs agencies to base their fiscal 2018 headcounts on a budget proposal that prescribes an almost 10-percent funding increase for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management.
The Environmental Management (EM) office, which cleans up nuclear waste created by Cold War-era nuclear weapons programs, has a headcount of about 1,400 federal employees and an annualized budget of roughly $6 billion for fiscal 2017.
Assuming that ratio of full-time-feds-to-funding remains constant for the next budget, EM staffing could rise by more than 100 employees if Congress approves the Trump administration’s proposal to increase the office’s budget to $6.5 billion.
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the latest details of the Trump administration’s plan to pare back the executive branch in a 14-page guidance to agency leaders titled “Comprehensive Plan for Reforming the Federal Government and Reducing the Federal Civilian Workforce.”
“What the guidance really does is tell them, look to the budget blueprint and fashion your hiring and the paring down of your workforce consistent with the budget,” Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, told reporters Wednesday afternoon.
The guidance also lifted Trump’s ban on hiring new federal employees, which he put in place on his first full day in office.
This week’s OMB guidance also orders agencies to “develop a plan to maximize employee performance by June 30, 2017.”
The administration further told agencies that their 2019 budget requests should include a so-called agency reform plan “that includes long-term workforce reductions.” OMB wants to see a draft of this plan from each agency on June 30, according to the guidance released Wednesday.
A spokesperson for DOE’s Environmental Management office in Washington did not reply to multiple requests for comment this week.
The White House released its fiscal 2018 budget outline last month, and the detailed funding plan is expected in May. Congress will ultimately set spending levels for federal agencies, and lawmakers from both parties have been pushing back against various aspects of the administration proposals to boost defense spending while slashing the budgets for the State Department, Environmental Protection Agency, and other agencies.
Despite the long-term cloud cast by the administration’s order to plan for eventual workforce reductions, the budget guidance released this week might spell immediate relief for the EM field office created in 2015 to relieve the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s prime contractor of its Cold War cleanup responsibilities.
The Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office, led by Navy veteran Doug Hintze, has been on its back foot from a staffing perspective practically since it was created. DOE stood up the office after 2014, when a shoddily packaged barrel of transuranic waste prepared by a Los Alamos subcontractor leaked radiation into the underground Waste Isolation Pilot Plant some 350 miles south by road of the New Mexico lab.
The Los Alamos EM office did not have its full complement of authorized federal and contractor employees when it was created, and it still did not when Trump froze federal hiring in January. The office has a headcount of about 21 now and is slated to double in size, Hintze said last month at an industry conference.
More bodies should help the office administer the 10-year Los Alamos Legacy Cleanup Contract, which could be awarded as soon as early July, based on the 90-day transition period DOE wrote into its final request for proposals and the end date of the current contract.
