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Washington, D.C. –  Reorganizing the federal government without a corresponding commitment to adequately fund agencies and programs is unlikely to vastly improve services to taxpayers, National Treasury Employees Union President Tony Reardon said.

 “Moving around the offices of the executive branch has the potential to be highly disruptive and costly for taxpayers, and does nothing to address the chronic underfunding and understaffing that many agencies are experiencing,” Reardon said. “And it doesn’t even attempt to tackle the glaring training and professional development needs of the federal workforce.”

NTEU continues to evaluate the details of the president’s plan to shuffle agency programs and missions and will be especially attuned to how each proposed move affects federal employees and the taxpayers they serve.

The union supports making government and its services more effective, efficient and responsive for the American public, but NTEU and its members who interact with taxpayers every day were not consulted in this process.

“Federal agencies are not pieces on a chess board that can just be moved around at will. They are institutions, shaped over time to meet the changing needs of the American public,” Reardon said. “Our 80 years of experience tells us that government reorganizations work best when employees help inform them.”

Reardon testified to Congress last year that NTEU voluntarily collected the ideas of employees at every agency with represented employees and presented them to agency leaders, but only one agency acknowledged their contributions.

“We remain open-minded, but this reorganization cannot be considered in a vacuum,” Reardon said. “This administration has said all along that its stated goal is to shrink the size of the federal government and its workforce, so our union will be prepared to fight on Capitol Hill to keep trained and dedicated employees in service to the public.”

One area of the plan that is especially concerning is the apparent gutting of the Office of Personnel Management. This proposal would in fact create a fragmented federal workforce policy, oversight, and management structure with various pieces going to the White House, the General Services Administration and the Department of Defense.

“Removing the necessary and purposeful independence of OPM is yet another power grab by the White House,” Reardon said. “In order for the nation to maintain a merit-based, career civil service, outside of the political appointee process, it must be headed and overseen by an independent authority. To use events at OPM—including the serious data breach and retirement processing backlogs, which stem from a variety of funding and management challenges—as evidence of the need to move certain policy functions to the White House is misguided, unfair, and counter-productive.”

Further, GSA lacks the health care and policy expertise to manage the well-administered Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and to oversee retirement policy that must be coupled with retirement operations.

“Congress should carefully review and assess the funding and staffing needs at OPM, as well as at other agencies, but also ensure that the Executive Branch maintains a personnel system free from politics and interference,” Reardon said.

NTEU represents 150,000 employees at 32 federal agencies and departments.