The House is considering requiring that any future troop cuts by the Pentagon be matched with cuts to the Defense Department’s civilian and contractor staff, to “appropriately balance the workforce.”
The language is expected to be in the fiscal 2016 defense bill the House Armed Services Committee will consider and vote on next week. While the details are being finalized, the goal of the legislation is to get the Pentagon to stop cutting military personnel while leaving its civilian force intact.
The proposal is considering the use of the performance-based standards of the previous National Security Personnel System to identify personnel for cuts, by weighting an employee’s performance top among all criteria. It also would require each of the Defense Department’s headquarters to cut a still-undetermined percentage of personnel.
On Tuesday, the Senate also said it would target Pentagon overhead in its version of the defense bill.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter told House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, in March that he welcomed congressional assistance in dealing with the Pentagon’s growth in overhead.
“We’ve got to, got to, got to get after these headquarters,” Carter said. “These offices that were set up at a time…it seemed like a good idea at the time but have lost their purpose or lost their way…we need to be aggressive with ourselves.”
If passed, the provisions would raise the stakes for both parties to address the real-world costs of the Budget Control Act it passed in 2011, which forced the Pentagon and all other federal agencies to dramatically slash spending starting in 2013.
Since sequestration took effect in 2013, the military has cut about 77,000 troops. Meanwhile, the number of civilians has slightly increased by 3,000 positions. As a result of the growth in civilians and contractors over the years, and the shrinking troop strength, the number of uniformed military personnel — about 1.3 million — is matched almost one-for-one with the approximately 1.36 million civilians and contractors.
Update: An earlier version of this article reported the proposed bill would require a 1-for-1 ratio for any reductions in force, meaning that if the Pentagon cut one military member, it would need to cut one civilian and one contractor. A spokesman for the committee said that description of the legislation was not correct. Another committee staffer said, however, that that was the intent of the legislation, even if the specific one-for-one language was not in the text.
