050 National Defense:Reduce Civilian Overhead in Department of Defense

Sources

Savings are expressed as budget authority and were calculated based on civilian reduction projections found on page 9 in Assistant Secretary of the Army, Manpower and Reserve Affairs, “The Department of Defense Report on the Civilian Personnel Workforce and Contracted Services Reductions in the Fiscal Year 2015 Budget,” September 16, 2014. The Heritage proposal accelerates the proposed reductions by one year, realizing the 2016 and 2017 reductions in 2016, and also adding an additional reduction of 5,000 FTEs in 2020. The number of FTE reductions is multiplied by the average FTE cost of $91,178.

Technical Notes on Scoring

CBO Baseline

Unless otherwise noted, calculations for savings for each recommendation relies on the most recent Congressional Budget Office baseline, as found in “An Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2014 to 2024,” published August 27, 2014, has been used.

Savings “Totals”

While totals for the five and 10 year savings are provided by section and for the complete set of recommendations, there are two reasons they should not be viewed as representing total savings for The Budget Book.

First, as noted in the introduction, The Heritage Foundation would recommend that the savings realized in the Function 050 Defense section would stay within the Department of Defense to strengthen the nation’s defense capabilities.

Second, the numbers cannot be deemed to represent the realized savings if every single recommendation were adopted because policy changes made in one program can impact spending levels in other programs.  Thus, the numbers in the table do not reflect any potential interactions between the various policy changes affecting spending or savings.