Excerpt from Restructuring of the Federal Government The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10 a.m., in room 311, Cannon House Office Building, the Honorable Eleanor Holmes Norton and Frank McCloskey, Co-Chairpersons presiding. Members present: Representatives Norton, McCloskey, Ackerman, Burton, Byrne, Morella, Kanjorski, Schroeder, and Young. Mr. McCloskey. Good morning. This hearing is generating a lot of interest, and I might say a word or two about scheduling. This will be a semi-marathon session, and we are particularly honored to have three major cabinet secretaries to lead off on this important issue. We are going to hold to the schedule as far as morning and afternoon meetings, but with all of the interest and different members expressing an interest to come by somewhat spontaneously, I think we will go through the lunch hour, but keep to the afternoon schedule as much as possible for the afternoon witnesses to start at two o'clock. So with that said, this hearing of the Civil Service and Compensation and Employee Benefits Committees is underway. The Washington Post had two major stories in the last week, and that, among other things, is generating turnout for this most important topic. Reductions in force or RIFs, as we all know, are time consuming, demoralizing to the work force, and provide little benefit to agency or the employees. They hamper productivity and wreak havoc on the diversity of the work place. The simple fact is that we cannot reduce the work force by 250,000 employees without providing federal agencies the flexibility to make their work force reductions in an intelligence and humane way. There are some six proposals pending in Congress that mandate the reduction of work force by 252,000, two of which have been passed by Congress. The purpose of this hearing is to analyze the implications on the federal work force of eliminating these quarter million-plus positions without utilizing buyouts or VSIPs. Congress must act on the urgent buyout legislation. I expect that to be the main theme from our three secretaries this morning. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.