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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In government, on the other hand, deliberative strategic planning around learning happens far too rarely. Even though the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act requires agencies to develop strategic plans, its implementation has never met the original expectations. There are good reasons why learning approaches differ between the public and private sectors, but every organization can learn and apply that knowledge to improve results.
Examining 1,154 contractors recently investigated by the Department of Labor, the Center for Public Integrity found that between January 2015 and July 2016 federal contracts were modified or granted with 68 contractors with substantive violations, according to an exposé by Talia Buford and Maryam Jameel.
