Originally published ‘How you do it matters’: GAO heightens concerns about federal workforce on by https://federalnewsnetwork.com/federal-report/2025/03/how-you-do-it-matters-gao-heightens-concerns-about-federal-workforce/ at Federal News Network
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Comptroller General Gene Dodaro’s very last congressional hearing on the Government Accountability Office’s high-risk list went back over some familiar yet urgent ground, as the long-time head of GAO repeatedly warned Congress about the future of the federal workforce.
“I’ve been very concerned about the federal workforce,” Dodaro told lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee during a hearing last week. “It doesn’t have the proper skills that are needed to address many of these important areas that are providing critical services to the American people, and at the heart of providing public safety.”
GAO’s high-risk list serves as a biennial “blueprint” to identify areas in the federal government vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse. The list names prime targets for reaching federal efficiencies and cost savings. If all the report’s recommendations are implemented, GAO estimates the federal government could see $200 billion in savings.
“And that’s a very conservative estimate,” Dodaro said during the hearing. “I think it could be more — much more.”
But among the 37 problem areas on GAO’s 2025 list, one longstanding and key high-risk area continues to be “strategic human capital management” — or the ability to address mission-critical skills gaps in the federal workforce. The challenge has remained on GAO’s list since 2001.
Strategic human capital management crosscuts many other problems in government operations. In fact, 20 out of the 37 items on GAO’s 2025 high-risk list stem from agencies either not having the right skills in their workforces — or not having enough employees in the first place. The trend echoes what GAO has seen for years.
For instance, GAO’s report found that human capital management challenges are impacting the government’s ability to deliver federal disaster assistance, address public health emergencies, manage the federal prison system, enforce tax laws at the IRS, improve Social Security’s disability programs and reform the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system — just to name a handful.
“You need guards that are well qualified at the Bureau of Prisons. You need good people managing our nuclear weapons complex, security experts — you need software engineers at DoD,” Dodaro said. “I could go on and on.”
Dodaro’s testimony last week on GAO’s 2025 high-risk list was his last congressional hearing before he retires at the end of the year from a decades-long career in public service. During the House hearing, Dodaro warned that not addressing human capital challenges will mean agencies continue facing risks to their ability to deliver essential government services to the public.
“These are the reasons that we have this issue on the high-risk list, because they don’t have the right people or enough skills in order to execute their mission to protect the American people,” Dodaro said.
“How you do it matters,” GAO’s Dodaro says
The warnings from GAO come as the Trump administration and Department of Government Efficiency are taking major steps to reduce the federal workforce’s headcount through widespread layoffs and large-scale reductions in force (RIFs).
In some ways, the stated end goals of DOGE and GAO are similar: achieve cost savings and improve efficiencies across government. But during the hearing, Dodaro said while there is certainly a need for change, the Trump administration’s blanket approach so far is “not a best practice.”
“How you do it matters,” Dodaro said. “Going about it in the way that’s being done now can cause some short-term problems for the government because it can create other vulnerabilities — unintended vulnerabilities. [The government should] figure out what functions it does not want to do anymore, then you can deal with the people in those functions or ones that don’t have the skills that you need anymore. But it should be done in a respectful way, and it should be done also in a way that does not hurt the federal government in the long-term.”
As agencies’ plans for large-scale RIFs get underway, Dodaro cautioned agencies to take a more strategic approach to workforce planning.
At the IRS, for example, “it depends on what their jobs are, but they need more revenue agents. They need more training. They need people for customer service,” Dodaro said. “You’d have to look at what functions those people do and decide whether they’re important or not.”
Dodaro said throughout his career, he has seen “good policies that don’t get implemented effectively because you don’t have the right people.”
“Any administration decides what to do with their policies and what they want the government to do. But at the end of the day, they’re going to need good people to be able to do it,” Dodaro said. “Not enough younger people have been coming into the government with the kind of skills that are needed going forward. You have to be careful that you don’t disincentivize people to want to give public service, because public service is important to implementing any policy initiative by any administration — no matter what the policy is.”
Dodaro also told lawmakers he has so far not met with any DOGE officials on possible solutions to reach better cost savings or efficiencies in the federal government.
“They had some questions about our report. That’s the extent of it so far,” Dodaro said. “We have a number of requests from Congress to begin looking at their access to systems, and we will begin that work at a number of agencies across government.”
OPM itself faces shortages in workforce skills
For 2025, GAO reported that agencies have made progress in 10 high-risk areas, resulting in approximately $84 billion in financial benefits since GAO’s last update two years ago. At the same time, three areas on the high-risk list regressed in their progress. And GAO added one new risk area to the 2025 list: federal disaster assistance.
Along with governmentwide workforce challenges, GAO also reported that the Office of Personnel Management, tasked with overseeing the governmentwide workforce, is itself facing internal human capital issues. GAO has said for years that OPM, like many agencies, struggles to recruit and retain talent, particularly in project management, organizational performance, leadership development and data analytics.
“By closing these gaps, OPM could improve capacity to provide human capital services and guidance to agencies and address government-wide skills gaps,” GAO said in its report.
That said, there has been some progress toward closing federal skills and gaps over the last several years. For instance, GAO said that in June 2024, OPM identified the risks and mitigating strategies associated with its skills gaps.
“As a result, OPM is better positioned to monitor skills gaps across the agency and determine if risk mitigation strategies are successful,” GAO said. “In addition, in 2023, OPM conducted an analysis to identify common hiring needs across multiple agencies. OPM’s analysis helped establish a pooled hiring strategy that saves time and resources through a centralized coordination of federal government hiring to address skills gaps within the IT and human capital management workforce.”
Democrats, Republicans clash over workforce approach
Still, Democrats on the Oversight committee said there remains a critical need to improve federal talent. During last week’s hearing, Ranking Member Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) called the approach of the Trump administration “injurious” to the skill sets the federal workforce needs for the future.
“We need higher skill sets. We have to replace a number of workers in the government who are going to retire and are eligible for retirement,” Connolly said. “Unfortunately, the approach of this administration so far does not do that at all.”
But many Republican lawmakers during the committee hearing backed the Trump administration and DOGE’s efforts so far to overhaul the federal workforce.
“If I had to highlight just one of the Department of Government Efficiency’s accomplishments so far, it would be proving that the waste, fraud and abuse infecting the federal government is not just isolated to one department — it’s governmentwide,” Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) said during the hearing.
Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) expressed concerns about GAO’s recommendations on strategic human capital management, arguing that the report’s solutions all “have to do with basically more government.”
“It continues to fall into this thing that we see continually throughout the bureaucracy where the answer to failed government is more government,” Cloud said. “Sometimes that can be the case, but there’s nothing addressing the fact that it takes two years to fire a bad employee.”
“We’re not saying you need more government,” Dodaro replied. “What we’re saying is, you don’t have the people in order to accomplish what Congress has set in statute and what the administration’s priorities are. We’re not determining the size and scope of government. That’s up to elected officials. We’re saying, however you define it, it’s not being implemented properly.”
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Originally published ‘How you do it matters’: GAO heightens concerns about federal workforce on by https://federalnewsnetwork.com/federal-report/2025/03/how-you-do-it-matters-gao-heightens-concerns-about-federal-workforce/ at Federal News Network
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