Page 12 - FCW, October 2017

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FBI data center plan takes shape
The FBI and local government leaders have broken ground on what the agency said will be a milestone in its efforts to consolidate its data center operations.
The $100 million, 100,000-square-foot facility in Pocatello, Idaho, will be the center of the FBI’s operations in the western U.S., much like its existing data center in Clarksburg, W.Va., is for the FBI’s eastern operations.
The new project will consolidate and optimize dozens of data centers — along with infrastructure, information and services — as part of a broad, multiyear IT transformation, according to an FBI statement.
The Justice Department needs to quicken its pace on data center consolidation, according to a recent “Data Center Optimization” report from the Government Accountability Office. The Justice Department was one of 20 agencies that had not met GAO targets as of February.
Richard Haley, assistant director of finance, facilities and real property at the FBI, told local Pocatello news organizations that the goal of the FBI efforts is to consolidate more than 100 data centers down to just three — the Pocatello site, the Clarksburg site and the bureau’s Washington headquarters.
The FBI said the new facility builds on its 30-year presence in Pocatello, where it currently has components of nine divisions with responsibilities that include investigations, intelligence analysis, IT and human resources management.
$3.1B is the Commerce Department’s projected cost increase for the 2020 census
Just how big is the federal workforce?
The Trump administration has been intent on reversing the federal workforce expansion that took place under President Barack Obama and instead wants to shrink the number of feds and lean more on the private sector.
But according to New York University Professor Paul Light’s calculations of the size of the federal workforce over time, the premise behind the White House’s management agenda might not tell the full story.
Light estimates that the size of the 1984 federal government workforce — federal employees, contractors, grant employees, active-duty military and postal carriers — was just shy of 9.8 million, of which 21.2 percent were full- time federal employees.
The size of the workforce peaked in 2010 at almost 11.3 million employees, mostly due to rises in contractors and grant employees that began under the George W. Bush administration. Light pegs the current number at around 9.1 million blended employees, about 22.4 percent of whom are full-time feds.
Reducing the size of the federal workforce and leaning more on the private sector have been mainstays of the Trump administration’s management agenda, driven by drastic proposed cuts to civilian agencies’ budgets.
At an Oct. 5 National Press Club event hosted by the Volcker Alliance, Light said any reform effort should focus on ways to hire the newest generation of workers, prioritize mission-critical positions and streamline hiring processes rather than rely on a “frivolous” hiring freeze that serves as “a distraction from more realistic and useful reforms.”
“The federal government is not responsive to the market pressures that have made critical skills more rewardable in the private sector,” Light said.
Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, added, “The privatization we’re seeing now is a backdoor to a spoils system.”
He also questioned whether the White House and Congress have an appetite for productive civil service reform. If they do not, and given the ongoing vacancies and the Trump administration’s lack of trust in senior officials, “for some time, we’re going to have inept government at different levels,” Ornstein said. “And you have plenty of people who are perfectly willing to let that happen, and that’s frightening.”
— Chase Gunter
Luke Fretwell
@lukefretwell
Exposes how out of touch it is with modern tech. ‘Oracle rips innovation shops’. @FCWnow fcw.com/articles/2017/10/04/oracle-rips-18f-usds.aspx?s
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10 October 2017 FCW.COM
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