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Cutting the CF/DND HQ bloat - Excess CF Sr Leadership, Public Servants and Contractors

No, there's not a lot of deficit reduction happening with that circus.....  :not-again:
 
A bump with the latest - a call via MERX (including a list of qualified vendors) for ".... a Contractor, with a strong background in the planning and management of large business transformation projects, to develop a project charter and strategic plan to be used to guide the execution of the Defence Renewal Transformation Project.  This requirement will be from date of award to eighteen weeks later ....".

You can check out the MERX posting here as well if the link above doesn't work.
 
Some tidbits from a John Ivison National Post column....
.... “There is definitely a value for money concern at DND [Department of National Defence] – from stress balls to jets. There is excessive use of consultants, many of whom used to be former Canadian Forces or bureaucrats,” said one senior political staffer.

The concerns expressed by the Prime Minister and the former general are reflected in moves that will be announced this week by Treasury Board aimed at preventing favouratism in government contracting.

Tony Clement, the Treasury Board president, is expected to unveil new rules aimed at limiting the number of federal bureaucrats who leave the public service and then walk straight into well-paid consultancy gigs working for their former colleagues.

It is understood Mr. Clement will amend government policy so that contracts with former public servants will also be proactively disclosed on departmental websites.

Mr. Clement was moved to make the changes after Ottawa’s Procurement Ombudsman, Frank Brunetta, detailed sole-source contracting between Canada’s School of Public Service and a former public servant who was already receiving a government pension.

While that change is not specifically geared toward DND, other reforms are coming from Mr. Clement’s department that are designed to curb what are deemed “acute problems” in the procurement process – problems that include, but are not exclusive to, the purchase of the F-35 fighter jet.

Treasury Board is working on bringing thousands more public servants under the authority of the Lobbying Act, which would prevent them leaving government and then lobbying their former colleagues for contracts on behalf of third party clients.

Currently, the Lobbying Act bans “designated public office holders” — ministers, political staffers, deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers — from lobbying government for five years after they leave. The new rules would cover anyone with influence over the procurement process.

While there are worries about the power of lobbyists and consultants in the bidding process in Canada, there is also a degree of transparency, in the form of the Lobbyist Registry.

The nepotism within DND is far less conspicious.

Col. (Ret’d) Michel Drapeau, a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa, recalled the case of one senior soldier who retired from the regular force on full pension one day and returned as senior aide to the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff the next.

“Since the war in Afghanistan, money has become a commodity at DND. They just ask and they receive it; $2.7-billion on professional service, contractors and consultants is a huge amount of money. There’s an army of retired officers hired as consultants – they’re everywhere,” he said.

One fact from last week’s Auditor-General’s report that passed almost unnoticed was the revelation that 98,866 members of the Canadian Forces left between 2006 and 2011. That’s a massive number from a standing force of about 68,000, particularly in the midst of a recession.

No-one knows how many, but it’s likely a fair number are still working at DND as hired hands ....
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milnews.ca said:
A bump with the latest - a call via MERX (including a list of qualified vendors) for ".... a Contractor, with a strong background in the planning and management of large business transformation projects, to develop a project charter and strategic plan to be used to guide the execution of the Defence Renewal Transformation Project.  This requirement will be from date of award to eighteen weeks later ....".

You can check out the MERX posting here as well if the link above doesn't work.
Click to expand...

We'll be giving that one a pass. I only take on projects that are set up for success!
 
Why is it when someone becomes "former", all of a sudden they have all the answers?? :-\

http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/dnd-hq-admin-costs-rising-despite-pressure-to-cut-back-pbo-1.1222003


Murray Brewster, The Canadian Press
Published Wednesday, April 3, 2013 7:05AM EDT

OTTAWA -- Spending on headquarters administration at National Defence was 27 per cent higher in the first half of the last budget year, despite the Harper government's insistence the department cut overhead, according to the most recent quarterly forecast by the parliamentary budget office.
The figures look at the first six months of the just-completed 2012-13 budget year, and compare actual expenses with previous years.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper repeatedly insisted last year that Defence have "more teeth and less tail," and reducing the administrative burden should be the department's No. 1 priority.

Yet the budget office forecast, posted online, shows the reverse is taking shape.
Spending on internal services and property management is forecast to rise, while there are major reductions to surveillance, known as situational awareness, readiness within the army, including training, international operations, and environmental stewardship.

A final tally for the last budget year won't be available until this August.
The budget office compiles its figures using reports from the Receiver General of Canada and the Finance Department.
A spokesman for National Defence said the department is a responsible steward of the public purse and increases in overhead spending can be cyclical.

"Year-over-year comparisons can be misleading as spending is not linear and priorities change," said Robert Hawgood, in an email statement.
He attributed the increase to "new funding received for the military pay system project."
But the overall trend seen in the budget office numbers is reflected separately in planning and priorities reports released last week by the Harper government, following the March 21 federal budget.
That set of documents shows the budget axe is expected to fall on civilian support positions that directly serve front-line or base operations through maintenance and planning, including a reduction of 34 jobs at military health services.

Former army commander, lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie, told the Harper government in a landmark 2011 report that National Defence needed to take an axe to its bloated headquarters in order to meet future obligations.
Leslie also recommended the number of private of contractors be slashed by 30 per cent, suggesting that all of his recommendations could save the deficit-minded government more than $1 billion at the Defence Department without affecting operational capability.

Despite that, figures put before Parliament last month show spending on consulting and professional services for the military rose by $500 million between 2009 and 2011.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay has promised over $450 million in reductions to contracting out, but the plan still puts Defence well over the starting benchmark established by Leslie's transformation report.

There has been resistance to following Leslie's advice, prompting Harper to write to MacKay last June with pointed instructions.
The letter, leaked to The Canadian Press last fall, sheds light on the divide between Harper's office, which has been determined to wrestle the deficit to the ground, and a defence establishment resolved to protect its budget gains since 2006.

The three-page letter set out what cuts the prime minister was prepared to accept and what wouldn't work.
"It is important that we reduce the current overhead in regular force military and civilian personnel, and in those activities that do not directly contribute to operational readiness," he wrote.

The country's top military commander, Gen. Tom Lawson, recently told a Senate committee there was almost no fat to cut within the military.
Leslie was specific in the kind of administration he wanted to see cut. He singled out the Ottawa-based National Defence headquarters for the axe and insisted that administration and support at bases across the country, or those jobs that directly impacted on troops, be preserved.

Federal budget planning documents show internal services -- those at national headquarters -- are expected to face reductions starting in 2014-15.
Those same records also outline planned civilian job cuts in areas such as health care, army equipment maintenance, support to air force units on deployed operations, contingency planning staff, and even the people who write course material for training.

The plans and priorities document for 2013-14, released late Thursday, commits to holding the number of full-time military members at 68,000, just shy of the Harper government's promised complement of 70,000.
 
Bruce Monkhouse said:
Why is it when someone becomes "former", all of a sudden they have all the answers?? :-\
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:nod:
 
They may have had the answers all along, but because they were in the position, were unable to speak about them? 

Once they're free of the job, they're free-er to speak of the solutions?

NS
 
..or maybe try and grow a pair when in your in the position??.......just sayin'.

If what you said is truly the way things work then I guess all we will ever have is status quo??

 
Gen Leslie was still in when that report was issued.  So I guess he had a pair.
 
My bad then.

Question,.......wasn't he the guy in position to change things?
 
I have seen in other news reports that the union is attributing some increases of infrastructure & contracting costs back to the ASG closures and the requirement to now contract services that were (until last month) provided by employees.
 
Bruce Monkhouse said:
My bad then.

Question,.......wasn't he the guy in position to change things?
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The changes he proposed were the purview of his peers and superior.
 
Eowyn said:
Gen Leslie was still in when that report was issued.
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And (let's not forget) leaked to the media with no complaints/concerns expressed publicly that I've read/heard about.
 
Bruce Monkhouse said:
My bad then.

Question,.......wasn't he the guy in position to change things?
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One of the major points of his report was the inability of commanders to effect change. The commander will say "X has to changem, I want it to be Y" and the staff will say "yes, sir. We will get to it" and then wait until he is posted. A prime example is the fact that even though the directive from the government is to make cuts to the admin side and not touch the operational or training side, the bureaucrats and agreeing with them, then doing what ever the hell they want.

A number of of snr commanders have made similar remarks in the past. Gen. Hillier couldn't even get medals to people he felt earned them overseas.
 
Tcm621 said:
A number of of snr commanders have made similar remarks in the past. Gen. Hillier couldn't even get medals to people he felt earned them overseas.
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I remember that, he wanted people to get them while still in country so that they receive them while still with all their buddies that they earned it with, but nope civil service strikes. In his Autobiography he also complains about how long the civil service took just to get loaned equipment from other NATO members. Something that would take 2 weeks would take six months because some civil servant wont do his job. Why? cause they change departments every 6 months, and are part of a Union, they just leave it for the next guy, and we cant remove them for not doing their job. The fact that civilians employee's and the civil service have a Union is making the government a burden on DND because their isn't any collective backlash for some one not doing their job.
 
MilEME09 said:
I remember that, he wanted people to get them while still in country so that they receive them while still with all their buddies that they earned it with, but nope civil service strikes. In his Autobiography he also complains about how long the civil service took just to get loaned equipment from other NATO members. Something that would take 2 weeks would take six months because some civil servant wont do his job. Why? cause they change departments every 6 months, and are part of a Union, they just leave it for the next guy, and we cant remove them for not doing their job. The fact that civilians employee's and the civil service have a Union is making the government a burden on DND because their isn't any collective backlash for some one not doing their job.
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H&A are delayed by a military that insists that every level of command has the right and obligation to vet, edit, review and stuff into a pile somewhere, with every nomination.  There is zero civil service engagement below the Director of Honours and Recognition (after it goes through the full Navy/Army/Air Force chain) - who then goes directly to Rideau Hall.

Systematic delays in procurement have many factors, not the least of which is the revoloving door of military personnel posted in with zero knowledge of the system, who invent their own shortcuts, whose shortcuts then fail, and then are obliged to proceed through the system they tried to avoid.

Hillier was good in many ways.  He was poor at understanding systems and identifying ways to streamline them, choosing instead poor work-arounds that had little to no long-term success.
 
dapaterson said:
Hillier was good in many ways.  He was poor at understanding systems and identifying ways to streamline them, choosing instead poor work-arounds that had little to no long-term success.
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Exactly
 
An interesting and cautionary reminder that downsizing does not always mean keeping the best and brightest:

Military Brain Drain

The Pentagon's top brass is driving away all the smart people.

In his recent book Bleeding Talent, Tim Kane joins a growing chorus of serving and former junior officers to deliver a wake-up call to today's military leadership in the face of a major drawdown. Their message: If you ignore the expectations of today's young, combat-experienced leaders as you shrink the force, your most talented officers and sergeants will exit, stage left.

The military bureaucracy's response? "Good Riddance."

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/02/13/military_brain_drain
 
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