Pentagon to Cut Thousands of Jobs

In a broad overhaul of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy and business practices, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen plans to announce today a one-third cut in his 3,000-person office, other large reductions in employment in the Pentagon’s joint staff and supporting defense agencies and the opening of tens of thousands of additional defense jobs to competitive bids from private firms, officials said Sunday.

Under the plan, numerous offices will be shuffled into new alignments with others, resulting in the elimination of two of 11 assistant secretary positions and the slashing of 28,000 out of 141,000 civilian jobs in the targeted organizations. Among the groups affected are the secretariats for policy, acquisition, finance, personnel and intelligence as well as agencies responsible for commissaries, security, financial accounting and information services.

Defense officials said the changes are intended not just to save money but to focus the department better on such post-Cold War concerns as blocking the spread of nuclear weapons and guarding against terrorism in the United States. Although the restructuring does not bear directly on how the Pentagon prepares for major wars, it is meant to have a sweeping impact on how the defense establishment does business, officials said.

In addition to the job changes, Cohen has also decided on measures to streamline Pentagon contracting, travel planning and household goods transportation. Central to this effort will be a push to reduce the department’s reliance on paper and greatly expand its use of computers. Cohen’s plan, for instance, envisions a sharp rise in purchasing through electronic catalogs, a halt by July in routine Pentagon printing of regulations and achievement within three years of entirely paper-free contracting for all major weapons systems.

The initiatives represent the next chapter in an ongoing reassessment of defense staffing and resource requirements that began last spring with the Quadrennial Defense Review, which Cohen headed soon after taking over as secretary. That effort produced only modest reductions in uniformed personnel and military units and preserved all major procurement programs. It also did little to tackle what many experts regard as the bloated bureaucracies that have sprouted under the Office of Secretary of Defense and in 13 defense agencies that provide supplies or services common to more than one military department.

Vowing to revamp these structures, Cohen established a separate task force staffed with outside experts who labored through the summer. Another group, internal to the Pentagon, has been working on other changes.

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The results of these efforts were merged to produce the wide assortment of job cuts, organizational changes, new business practices and intensified competitive bidding procedures to be unveiled today. While the reforms deal with only a portion of the total 767,000 civilians employed by the Defense Department--and do not shrink the military force of 1.4 million--their scope appears to exceed previous attempts to transform the Pentagon’s management structure and practices.

Even with these changes and accompanying savings, Cohen has concluded that two more rounds of base closures are needed to help eliminate a projected multibillion-dollar gap between planned defense spending and military procurement plans, according to defense officials.