Balancing Contractors and Feds at DHS

The Homeland Security Department has made some notable progress on an initiative that aims to strike the perfect balance between federal employees and contractors within its workforce.

In 2009, the department identified about 3,500 jobs performed by contractors that could either be eliminated or converted to civil service positions. By January of 2011, DHS had eliminated about 77 percent, or 2,700, of those jobs and hired about 1,800 federal employees in their place, said DHS spokesman Larry Orluskie on Monday.

Between 2009 and 2010, he added, DHS reduced contract spending by 11 percent, or $420 million, in large part because of the balanced workforce initiative.

Orluskie cautioned against using terms like "insourcing" to describe the initiative, noting that in many cases, not all of the 2,700 contractors that were eliminated needed to be replaced. "The goal is to make sure that we have a balanced workforce - that we have a federal employee doing a federal employee job and the right level of contract support when we need it," he said. "Insourcing always rubs people the wrong way."

Orluskie did not have details on what types of jobs were eliminated, insourced or created as part of the department's balanced workforce initiative, but noted that several of the jobs were information technology-related. Other jobs were in the information and analysis field, he added.

DHS Chief Human Capital Officer Jeffrey Neal last year set up the Balanced Workforce Program Management Office to steer the initiative and come up with a repeatable process for reviewing outsourced work. In the fall of 2010, the office issued guidance to DHS components and developed a tool for evaluating contracts. That tool will serve as the basis for the next phase on the initiative, which involves reviewing 68 contracts by fall of 2011, Orluskie said.

Meanwhile, the news comes as Customs and Border Protection announced last week that it planned to cut about 1,200 contractors in its Office of Information Technology and replace them with 1,000 new federal employees. The technology office employs more than 3,200 contractors.