The Labor Department (DOL) is consolidating its procurement services into one office this quarter, after making headway streamlining human resources and information technology support, the department’s No. 2 official states.

This is part of a push from the Trump administration for more shared services, where one office provides administrative support for multiple agencies within a department or across government.

Deputy Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella, who also worked at the department under the George W. Bush administration, made his remarks about shared services during an event hosted by the nonprofit National Academy of Public Administration. Upon returning to the department in 2018, there were 19 human resources offices, four procurement units and four information technology offices, he said, leading to a “patchwork quilt of administrative professionals scattered across the agency.” The department fully implemented human resources shared services in fiscal 2019 and is almost done with consolidating information technology.

Pizzella said shifting to a shared services model was an “intentionally slow and deliberate” move, which is part of the department’s fiscal 2018-2022 strategic plan. “[Labor Department] agencies would be giving up their own administrative offices and we needed to centralize that in a way that freed up resources for them to focus on mission and ensure that they receive the same, if not better services under the new model,” he said. “We spent nearly 18 months in discovering and planning stages…[which] allowed us to identify both challenges and best practices.”

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