Chair Lee questions OMB on streamlining hiring approvals and PAR delays

Really quickly going into streamlining OMB hiring approvals to reduce the staffing delays.

I know that one of the things we've heard across a lot of the agencies and just is around the staffing and the report that it does take a while to obviously go through the approval process.

And that it sometimes causes internal bottlenecks to hire folks in the social services.

And so what steps have you taken to streamline the hiring and budget approval process so agencies can fill positions in a timely manner and maintain the staffing levels needed to deliver essential services?

Sure.

One of the first things...

that I heard when I came to OMB was that, you know, one of frustration from agencies about the personal action request forms not moving at an expeditious way.

So we, you know, immediately went to work to try to figure out where those bottlenecks were.

And we've been making significant improvements.

One of the main things we've done is eliminate the two-for-one hiring restriction.

Under the two-for-one hiring restriction, you would need to wait to get a monthly allotment after we understood what your attrition rate was, right?

So that is effective.

That's eliminated.

And so agencies are now able to hire up to their PS budget.

What we sometimes encounter when we're looking at personnel action requests is that there is a misalignment between the vacancy and between the appropriate funding, or maybe there are different levels of sources of funding.

That may tie to a particular employee line where we have to go, we'll have a little bit of a back and forth with the agency on that.

But we're committed to streamlining the process as much as possible.

In fact, we're looking at, and this has been in the works, to look at a system that we can have where we can really look at

where a par is across the system to see if there are bottlenecks.

and looking at if there are particular agencies that have an issue where we have, you know, funding issues because they have more capital funding, for example.

So all of that's on the table.

We are looking to move it quickly.

And in fact, we have moved it quickly.

I think between May 1st and May 1st and June 6th, I think we moved forward and approved about 1,400 PARs.

I think in fairness, a couple of those have, I mean, a piece of those 1,400 have been for new classes.

You know, in terms of civil service titles that are coming online, but there have been, you know, agency PARs that have been met.

And so we're continually working on that and committed to improvement.

Okay.

And sometimes I know the delay can happen with the background checks.

And sometimes the background checks can take about upwards of six months to complete.

And so how have you factored that part into the sort of streamlining of the hiring process?

And is there a way to truncate that sort of timeline?

And do agencies manage the background checks themselves or does DOI manage them?

I know some cases external contractors are involved in the background check process as well.

Yeah, so OMB is not involved in the background check process.

And so when we get a PAR, we're looking to move it forward as quickly as possible, as I noted.

Okay, and then just in terms of the same sort of line of thought around streamlining, one of the