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The federal government's latest survey of its work force appears to show growing concerns about insufficient staffing and other resources and a work force that may not have the right knowledge and skills to do the job.

And those problems are surfacing in different ways throughout the government.

At the Veterans Affairs Department, senior officials are worried they can't lure enough specialized doctors such as oncologists to work in rural areas.

At the U.S. Agency for International Development, some employees risk burnout by wearing two or three hats at a time, while some important duties fall between the cracks.

And — reflecting both a cause and a symptom of the understaffing problem — human resources officials are overstretched and scrambling to meet their agencies' demands.

In the case of USAID, the problem stems from insufficient work-force planning as the agency failed to hire new employees as experienced employees retired. Now, USAID is hiring again, but it lacks midlevel officers who ought to have been developed over the last several years.

"We've gone more than a decade without replacing attrition," Mary Beth Zankowski, USAID's senior adviser for strategic work-force planning, said in an interview. "In a way, we're playing catch-up. The bill has come due."

A June report from the Government Accountability Office found that USAID's work force dropped 2.7 percent — from 7,626 to 7,421 — between 2004 and 2009. Meanwhile, USAID's program funding nearly doubled to $17.9 billion as its missions have increased in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. USAID doesn't have data on work-force gaps, but a GAO review found that 66 of 546 authorized positions in six countries were unfilled.

Read More at Federal Times

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