Chair Krishnan on staff retention, promotions, and OMB approval barriers

And a few other questions that I have too before turning it over to our colleagues.

We touched on this a bit before, but when positions are affected, whether it's vacant lines or existing positions,

It doesn't seem to me, and as you testified to, the impacts are much broader than this, this specific number of positions on the table.

But it could actually affect staff retention, too, more broadly speaking.

Does the department have the funding to promote staff?

Are there opportunities for promotions, increases in salaries?

If not, are these requests you are working on to explore how to

Achieve that goal.

How do you think about staff retention more broadly?

So I agree with you that promotion and growth opportunities are essential for hiring and retention.

At this point, we do not have funding to promote staff.

And it's my understanding that OMB does not approve merit-based promotions and raises.

DOI has 25 vacancies as of May 27, 2026.

However, we only have funding to support 16 of those vacancies.

In the past, we have made requests to OMB for additional funding.

In the past administration, we made such requests for promotions and staff retention, and we did not receive any funding from OMB.

All of our retention efforts that DOI has made have been self-funded by reallocating resources from vacancies.

And in the last administration, even though OMB did not allocate new funding for these efforts, the approval to be able to use our existing funding still took over a year to receive.

We have, several years ago, DOI determined that our significant attrition in our investigative ranks was largely due to an absence of a path to promotion and salaries that are not competitive with other public sector

opportunities or the private sector.

And as a result, DOI implemented a plan that gave raises and promotions to individual confidential investigators based on merit to appropriately reflect each of their levels of experience, responsibility, and performance, and

address pay disparity among our deputy inspector generals.

All of whom generally did the same type of work, had similar expertise, and perform at comparable levels, but were paid at different salaries.

And we created a clear promotional path for investigators.

But again, this was, in order to do that, we had to repurpose funds from vacancies.

So we did not receive additional funding for that.

But clearly it's an issue, and we've tried to address it, but it's going to continue to be an issue, and we don't have additional funding to continue to be able to address it.

It's very concerning.

And I think, you know, for lack of a better word, it seems like the agency is robbing Peter to pay Paul.

In other words, using pulling from one area to keep staff and pay for increased salary needs in the other.

Isn't that the case?

I think that's a good way of putting it.