Replacing Military Personnel in Support Positions With Civilian Employees
Abstract
Only military personnel engage in combat operations, according to U.S. government policies. However, either military personnel, civilian employees of the Department of Defense (DoD), or contractors may carry out support functions, such as accounting services. In 2012, about340,000 active-duty military personnel were assigned to commercial positions that perform support functions. Those functions require skills that could be obtained from the private sector so that, in principle, those same positions could be filled by civilian employees. To cut costs, DoD could transfer some of those positions to civilian employees and then reduce the number of military personnel accordingly. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that doing so for 80,000 full-time positions could eventually save the federal government$3.1 billion to $5.7 billion per year. (Those savings are measured in terms of annualized costs. That term encompasses all liabilities, current and future, that the federal government incurs by employing a military service member or a civilian today, expressed as annual amounts. All annualized amounts are in real terms, meaning that they have been adjusted to remove the effects of inflation.)Some costs of hiring military personnel are paid from accounts outside DoDs budget, so the department would not realize all of those savings.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2015
- Accession Number
- AD1000189
Entities
People
- Christian Howlett
- Jeanine Rees
Organizations
- Congressional Budget Office