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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm not IT, but I'm a decentralized administrative program. If our department centralized us, it would create enormous waste. Instead of eliminating anything, they'd just create another level of managers (I'm sure GS15s) over all of us and more red tape to get through. My current organizational structure is very nimble and flat. We also know that the Department doesn't know our programs the way that we do, so there'd be a big learning curve. I actually can't think of one single way that we'd be improved by having more people over us. You couldn't get more work out of my team either, we're at max capacity.

I'm a large cabinet level Department, but there aren't 40 of us, more like 10 offices. My colleagues in the other offices are also nimble and flat. [/quote]

I’m against centralization but how would it create waste if they fired redundancies? The centralization and RIF work together. Your team would most likely be let go entirely or reduced considerably. Centralization will leave a hodge podge of staff from all over that know a little bit of something but not enough of other things because that was never their expertise. Sure they can learn it but how long will that take? Centralization and decentralization go back and forth in the private sector all the time. Most times re-orgs are BS and a sign of poor management from the top basically not knowing how to utilize their staff. [/quote]

Take procurement for instance. Even before Trump took office, our procurement team was chronically understaffed, and our own productivity suffered because orders weren't being placed in a timely manner. There wasn't redundancy in the system, so when someone went on sick leave or on vacation, things got delayed even further. With the proposed RIF, we will be reduced even further in capacity - down to one person (or even half a person) doing all the work that a whole team used to accomplish.

Further, procurement looks very different at NIH vs HHS headquarters vs the CDC. What supplies/reagents are needed, and the details/paperwork/systems needed to get orders placed is highly specialized. Heck, it is widely different even between ICs within NIH. So now you'll have drastically fewer people doing the job of many, using a new system that is likely too broad to effectively capture the requirements of each organization.

At NIH, this creates waste by severely delaying the arrival of reagents, meaning that we can't perform experiments within a reasonable timeframe, and our experiments will often fail simply because something didn't get ordered in time. The short-gap solutions are often time-consuming and more expensive.

There you go, creating waste.[/quote]

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