Strategic Human Capital Management
What We Found
Skills gaps within the federal workforce persist despite the continuing efforts of the Office of Personnel Management and federal agencies.
Since our 2019 High-Risk List, the rating for one criterion—leadership commitment—declined from met to partially met. The other four criteria remain unchanged.
Leadership commitment: partially met. Since our last high-risk update in 2019, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has had three different directors, only one of whom was confirmed by the Senate. As of January 2021, OPM has been led by an acting director for 18 of the last 24 months. The absence of Senate-confirmed leadership meant the federal government lacked the attention from the highest levels needed to address longstanding and emerging skills gaps.
For example, OPM canceled its annual Human Capital Review meetings with agency officials for 2020. These meetings are used for agencies to report, among other things, their progress on closing skills gaps to OPM officials. According to OPM, these meetings were cancelled due to work demands related to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. OPM did hold weekly government-wide teleconferences to share information and strategies on current human capital challenges. However, the regulation-required annual Human Capital Reviews are important to show leadership’s commitment to addressing this issue and holding agencies accountable for taking action to close skills gaps.
While OPM has established an agency priority goal for fiscal years 2020 and 2021 to support agencies’ efforts to address skills gaps, mission-critical skills gaps are a root cause in high-risk areas across the government. Of the 35 other high-risk areas, skills gaps played a significant role in 22 areas.
Capacity: partially met. OPM continues to provide technical support and monitor the work of Federal Agency Skills Teams (FAST)—teams of subject matter experts and human capital management professionals established in most agencies to address their skills gaps.
Regarding government-wide skills gaps within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations, OPM officials stated they are initially focusing their efforts on addressing the shortage of cybersecurity professionals. Focusing on cybersecurity may help close this skills gap. However, there are STEM occupations that are critical to agencies’ missions—such as medical professionals and biomedical researchers—that also need to be addressed.
Action plan: partially met. As part of addressing the agency priority goal to address workforce needs, OPM is working to provide agencies with 48 different tools and flexibilities to mitigate skills gaps in 80 percent of identified high-risk, mission-critical occupations by September 2021. OPM has reported that, as of September 2020, it has made available 43 of the tools and flexibilities to assist agencies in mitigating skills gaps and is on track to provide the remaining five by the end of fiscal year 2021.
Since our 2019 report, OPM officials reported that FAST teams have improved the quality of agencies’ action plans for closing skills gaps by ensuring that they describe the root causes for the occupation’s skills gap, as well as outline the goals and strategies for addressing them.
While these individual action plans enable OPM and agencies to track progress toward closing agency-specific skills gaps, no similar action plan exists for closing government-wide skills gaps. Such a plan could provide greater transparency about OPM’s and agencies’ efforts to close the six government-wide skills gaps OPM originally identified in 2015.
Monitoring: partially met. OPM has improved its ability to monitor FAST teams’ efforts by developing a set of four common metrics to identify current and emerging skills gaps. OPM’s use of these metrics across all FAST teams implements our January 2015 recommendation that OPM create an approach for identifying and monitoring skills gaps across multiple agencies. However, as mentioned above, by reinstating the regulatory-required annual Human Capital Review meetings, OPM would provide agencies with more structure and accountability for progress on closing skills gaps.
Demonstrated progress: not met. The shortage of staff and the lack of skills among current staff occurs across multiple federal agencies and responsibilities. For example, due to a lack of workforce planning and skills, none of the 24 Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act agencies have fully implemented best practices for information technology (IT) or cybersecurity workforce planning, including ensuring staff have the skills to address cybersecurity risks and challenges in areas such as industrial control systems supporting the electric grid and avionics cybersecurity.
Further, as noted, skills gaps caused by an insufficient number of staff, inadequate workforce planning, and a lack of training in critical skills are contributing to our designating 22 of the 35 other areas as high risk. The table below provides examples of the high-risk areas in which skills gaps played a role; the causes of these skills gaps are grouped into four broad categories—Skills, Staffing, Training, and Workforce Planning.
Table 6: Examples of Skills Gaps Related to High-Risk Areas
|
High-risk area |
Examples of skills gaps and causes |
|
Department Of Defense (DOD) Financial Management |
Workforce Planning and Skills:. DOD acknowledges that workforce planning across the department is inconsistent, and it has difficulty competing with industry for financial management talent. |
|
DOD Weapon Systems Acquisition |
Staffing and Skills: Many major defense acquisition programs reported difficulty in hiring software development staff with the required expertise and in time to complete the required work. |
|
Department of Energy’s (DOE) Contract and Project Management for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Office of Environmental Management |
Workforce Planning and Staffing: DOE’s NNSA does not have a process to determine the number of acquisition professionals it needs to award and oversee contracts. |
|
Enforcement of Tax Laws |
Workforce Planning, Staffing, and Skills: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has not fully implemented strategic workforce planning initiatives which could help address the challenges of carrying out ongoing enforcement and taxpayer service programs. IRS also faces mission-critical gaps for enforcement staff to investigate underreporting and noncompliance. |
|
Ensuring the Cybersecurity of the Nation |
Workforce Planning and Skills: None of the 24 Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act agencies have fully implemented best practices for information technology (IT) or cybersecurity workforce planning, including ensuring staff have the skills to address cybersecurity risks and challenges in areas such as industrial control systems supporting the electric grid and avionics cybersecurity. |
|
Ensuring the Effective Protection of Technologies Critical to U.S. National Security Interests |
Staffing: The Department of the Treasury and DOD do not have the necessary workforce in place for handling the increasing workload of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to identify and protect technologies critical to national interests. |
|
Government-Wide Personnel Security Clearance Process |
Workforce Planning: The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency has not developed a workforce plan that identifies the workforce required to meet demands for background investigations. |
|
Improving and Modernizing Federal Disability Programs |
Workforce Planning and Staffing: The Department of Veterans Affairs has not completed the hiring of medical officers and data analysts, (including those needed for making cost projections) and other planning efforts to ensure it has the capacity to comprehensively update its disability benefits eligibility criteria. |
|
Improving Federal Management of Programs that Serve Tribes and Their Members |
Workforce Planning: The Bureau of Indian Affairs needs to develop a workforce analysis to gauge workforce composition needs, assess gaps, prepare a workforce plan, and identify competencies for mission-critical occupations. |
|
Improving the Management of IT Acquisitions and Operations |
Workforce Planning and Skills: Twenty-one of the 24 CFO Act agencies have not implemented IT management policies that fully address the roles of their chief information officers which includes ensuring that program staff have the necessary knowledge and skills to effectively acquire IT. Progress in establishing key IT workforce planning processes is also lacking. |
|
Management of Federal Oil and Gas Resources |
Workforce Planning and Training: The Department of the Interior continues to experience challenges in workforce planning, including hiring, training, and retaining sufficient staff to oversee and manage oil and gas operations on federal lands and waters. |
|
Managing Risks and Improving Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Care |
Training: VA has not developed an enterprise-wide annual training plan. VA also has not sufficiently trained compliance officers or independent auditors on reviewing disbursement agreements for its Graduate Medical Education program. |
|
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Acquisition Management |
Staffing and Skills: The skill set required of NASA’s Schedule Analysts is in high demand and is a difficult position for which to recruit and retain talent, especially when competing with the private sector. |
|
National Efforts to Prevent, Respond to, and Recover from Drug Misuse |
Staffing: Availability of medical professionals and facilities for substance use disorders has not kept pace with needs. |
|
Protecting Public Health through Enhanced Oversight of Medical Products |
Staffing: The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) inspection of foreign drug manufacturing establishments decreased, in part, due to a lack of staff available to conduct inspections. |
|
Resolving the Federal Role in Housing Finance |
Workforce Planning: The Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) relies heavily on contractors for many functions, but has not determined whether it has an optimal mix of contractor and in-house staff. |
|
Strengthening the Department of Homeland Security Management Functions |
Staffing and Skills: Criteria for appointing qualified staff to oversee acquisition programs are not being consistently applied. |
|
Transforming the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Process for Assessing and Controlling Toxic Chemicals |
Workforce Planning, Staffing, and Skills: EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics has neither completed a workforce nor a skills gap analysis to ensure it can meet agency deadlines. |
|
U.S. Government's Environmental Liability
|
Workforce Planning and Staffing: Federal agencies have significant gaps in their ability to effectively address their portions of environmental liability, including backlogs of work that are greater than what can be done with available staff. |
|
VA Acquisition Management |
Training: Implementing a comprehensive and consistently offered Federal Supply Schedule training curriculum could enable VA to provide its staff with the tools and clarity needed to perform their roles and increase efficiency. |
Source: GAO analysis. | GAO‑21‑119SP
Note: Two additional high-risk areas with skills gaps are Decennial Census and DOD Business Systems Modernization.
Mission-critical skills gaps both within federal agencies and across the federal workforce pose a high risk to the nation because they impede the government from cost effectively serving the public and achieving results. This area was added to the High-Risk List in 2001. Causes of these skills gaps vary; however, they are often due to a shortfall in one or more talent management activities such as robust workforce planning or training.
Skills gaps have been identified in government-wide occupations in fields such as science, technology, engineering, mathematics, cybersecurity, and acquisitions. Currently, OPM has stated that it is assisting agencies in addressing emerging workforce needs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the years since we added this area to our High-Risk List, we have made numerous recommendations to OPM focused on this high-risk area and related human capital issues, 67 of which remain open as of November 2020. Additional progress could be made if OPM were to complete actions to implement open recommendations, such as:
- examining ways to make the general schedule system’s design and implementation more consistent with the attributes of a modern, effective classification system; and
- assessing information on agencies’ use of hiring authorities to identify opportunities to refine, consolidate, eliminate, or expand agency-specific hiring authorities to other agencies and implement changes where OPM is authorized.
Agencies also need to take action to address recommendations we have made regarding mission-critical skills gaps within their own workforces—a significant factor contributing to many high-risk areas. For example, FDA should address staffing challenges associated with conducting inspections of foreign drug manufacturers at an appropriate frequency—a situation that has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. At EPA, officials need to carry out workforce planning efforts to ensure that the agency has the resources in place to conduct chemical risk evaluations and implement the Toxic Substances Control Act.
