The Environmental Protection Agency is bleeding workers.
“I do have a concern absolutely. Forty percent of our workforce is eligible to retire over the next five years. While I don’t expect them all to retire in the next five years, I expect them to be gone in the next 10 years,” said Administrator Andrew Wheeler.
“I consider it a human capital crisis,” he added.
The issue is one being felt throughout government and business as baby boomers retire and younger workers come and go with much more regularity.
Wheeler, for example, said the EPA has always budgeted for workers to stay for decades. “We have a history at the agency of hiring people out of school and expecting them to stay 30, 40 years. We have 10 employees who have been here 49 years,” he said in an interview.
But that’s not happening anymore.
And, he added, government rules make it hard to start looking for a new employee before a retiring worker leaves the building. “You lose that institutional knowledge because they aren’t there to train their replacement.”
The White House, he said, is trying to give agencies more flexibility in hiring. But Wheeler said he is also taking charge, noting that he helped in the interviewing process of new EPA human resources director.
“Administrators don’t typically interview at that level,” he said, but added, “I want to meet who we’re going to hire before we hire them because on Day One I’m going to hit them with a dozen things and I want to make sure that they don’t get scared off.”
