The Crumblestones Of Acquisition: Manning, Staffing, and Resource Constraints (Part 7 of 7)

Where Innovation Collides with Capacity

Serialized from Contracting for Rapid Acquisition: A Practical and Personal Guide to Disrupting the Status Quo for a More Responsive Future

By Lorna E. Tedder

The first five Crumblestones have shown how culture, communication, governance, requirements handoffs, and tracking systems can sabotage even the boldest plans. But none of those weaknesses can be fixed if the people who must do the work are exhausted, outnumbered, or missing altogether.

This final Crumblestone—Manning, Staffing, and Resource Constraints—is where brilliant ideas go to die for lack of hands to carry them out.

The Perennial Shortage

Here’s a truth that keeps me up at night: we never have enough resources for our requirements. Ever. I heard a government leader say this in a public briefing, and it hit home because it means we only have time to put out fires, right?

When you’re constantly in crisis mode, you can’t plan ahead or think strategically. You end up making decisions based on what’s urgent, not what’s important. That’s exactly what I’ve seen happening across acquisition organizations, even before the Department of Government Efficiency cuts to personnel.

It’s not just about money—though funding is always tight. It’s about personnel. The right personnel, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time.

What happens if you don’t plan ahead to have enough Contracting personnel?

Though it happens often enough in existing organizations, lack of planning for Contracting personnel seems baked into the entire thought process for creating new organizations. I’ve watched innovation hubs hold ribbon-cutting ceremonies with 25 personnel—technical folks giving or receiving demos—and zero Contracting Officers to write the financial agreements. There’s a certain lack of awareness that has repeated itself among many of these hubs that collaborate with industry to bring in smart new technology. Eventually, industry wants to see contracts result from their time investment, but the hubs have no one authorized to write those contracts and bind the government to the agreement with the chosen vendor.

This “oopsie” realization usually happens about two years in, after all the excitement of standing up the new organization. Leadership “borrows” some other organization’s Contracting Officer who’s already at 130 percent capacity. That Contracting Officer burns out, and suddenly the hub is calling Contracting “slow.” Meanwhile, the Contracting Officer is staring at a tidal wave of new work coming in from the hub and has no idea how a single Contracting Officer will get it all done.

What happens when you lose personnel but not work?

In my own career, it’s been common to see personnel cuts. Not so common to see workload cuts. When workload cuts do happen, those cuts usually lag the elimination of personnel. I’ve seen the lag by as much as a year. Someone decides, “Oh, the budget for that program’s been cut, so let’s remove all the personnel who have at least a year’s worth of work to negotiate downscopes and terminations for the workload that won’t be done.” I’m not sure if that’s poor planning or being oblivious, but the outcome is the same.

More often, the reduction of personnel seems more haphazard. I’ve worked closely at a couple of points in my career to help decidehow to reshape the workforce, and it was unfortunately not as well-planned as you might imagine—without ever working behind the scenes in government functions—that it might be. Chaos would be a good way to describe a lot of personnel decisions I’ve witnessed.

Yet, the work must still be done. How do the workers in the trenches manage?

In one of my early assignments, we went from four procurement clerks to one—a septuagenarian who refused to do anything except answer the phone for the Colonel. Out of an office of approximately 40 people, we lost good personnel to attrition and reductions in force, and we had no idea how to provide the same level of support we had the previous year. That year, we had 40 percent more work and 45 percent fewer people. Or maybe it was 45 percent more work and 40 percent fewer people. At that gap, it doesn’t matter much. Under a hiring freeze, when personnel left or retired, the vacancies stayed open.

Desperate times call for creative measures. As of 2020, we are inclined to call that “innovative thinking.” We didn’t have a name for it back then.

I looked into our legal office’s work program—they used three prisoners from “Club Fed” to handle legal administrative work. I got their top recommendation: a model prisoner who wasn’t allowed computer or phone access, but he could fix broken furniture, move heavy boxes of proposals, maintain equipment I’d traded for with engineers because we didn’t have a budget, and distribute sealed mail. That last simple task included hundreds of envelopes daily, mostly contractor correspondence that had to be read and filed, addressed to people no longer there. The envelope would have the name of a Contracting Officer who retired the year before and the contract number, then address. Our model prisoner would look up who the contracts had been reassigned to and put them in that person’s mailbox. Silly stuff, but time sinks, nonetheless.

He didn’t have to work in the hot sun in Florida in this assignment. It was a plum assignment for him, and one he didn’t want to mess up. He was closely supervised and with us until his transfer. Then our big boss found out and was apoplectic, even though it was already okayed by our legal counsel. We weren’t sorry: for those few months, we were semi-caught up with the mundane stuff and had more time to focus on impactful work.

Necessity, as they say, was the mommy of invention for us. I’m not sure what desperation is the mother of.

Trying to get everything done with almost no one at all is not sustainable. Heroics aren’t a workforce strategy.

I usually hear, at this point, that AI will replace personnel, and it may eventually, but we’re not there yet. AI will help fill in the gap in some types of work, maybe even with evaluations, but it’ll also increase the number of proposals. A full plate is still a full plate if you pile more food on top, even if it’s better balanced. I expect us to be in a very different place with AI tools in a decade, maybe in five years, but meanwhile, we are in a transition time, and transitions are always difficult because you’re no longer in the past you’re comfortable with and not yet settled into a future you’re comfortable with.

What You Can Contract Out (And What You Can’t)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I watched Advisory and Assistance Services contracts, lovingly called “manpower support” contracts, take hold in the Federal Government. In the 1990s, the government decided to cut the number of Federal employees, but the workload remained. They began contracting out work that wasn’t inherently governmental, like engineering. Contracting was deemed inherently governmental because only a government employee could make decisions that bound the government contractually. Program Managers and other decision-makers weren’t usually contracted out, but they could have these manpower support contractors prepare their letters for signature. Whenever a budget cut came, the Program Office might lose a bunch of engineers, but the work might end up being done by engineers who were contracted out. When that same budget cut hit Contracting, engineers and other acquisition functionals couldn’t bridge the gap.

Personnel cut after cut, I saw the same number of engineers in my weekly meetings, but fewer Contracting faces. Every time I begged for help, the answer was, “Sorry, but we cannot contract out inherently governmental duties.” I watched my hours get longer to maintain the same level of service my Program Managers were used to.

Contracting leaders and their legal counsel have long believed that you cannot outsource the warranted decision-making of a Contracting Officer. That’s inherently governmental, and for good reason, but you can absolutely buy relief in adjacent areas that are currently overwhelming your personnel. Whether a Contracting Officer’s chain of command is willing to contract out any of these areas is another matter.

Closeouts

Many Contracting organizations will contract out closeouts—that’s more acceptable and more common. I could also, for the record, see much of this process moving to AI tools with little problem. Somewhere in my past is literal pennies remaining on a contract that wasn’t among my top 3,000 tasks at work. The cost-benefit analysis took a split second for me to decide where to spend my time, and it wasn’t on that kind of time-consuming minutiae. My general rule for believing it’s okay to contract out or to hand off to a new AI tool is that the more mundane the task, the less brainpower I want a Contracting Officer putting into it.

Which is why I once took a quarter and a dime out of the change dish on my desk, taped them to a letter demanding I prioritize closing out the contract, and scrawled a note to please send this to the Treasury and call it done. Not where I wanted to put my time.

I was really happy to hear some leaders agree that closeouts could be contracted out, but if that’s as far as they’re willing to go, they’re missing five other functions that could free up massive capacity. I do believe that most of these are interpretations, and while some organizations are more progressive than others, these are worth considering:

Price and cost analysis support
Bring in specialized firms for complex pricing models. Yes, leaders fear “third-party influence” on negotiations, but the Contracting Officer still makes the final call.

Market research and industry engagement
Contractors can compile vendor databases, run Requests for Information, and host industry days. There’s a misconception that only the government can talk to industry—not true. Only the government can represent the government, approve decisions, and bind the government. Contractors can still gather information.

Acquisition document drafting
Contractors can prep Statements of Work, cost estimates, and acquisition plans for government sign-off. People get confused about what’s “inherently governmental,” but drafting isn’t deciding.

Contract file maintenance and data entry
Outsourced help can keep FPDS, contract writing systems, and databases current. It’s often seen as “too small to bother with” until the audits show up.

Training and policy support
Subject matter experts can build courses, playbooks, and toolkits for Commercial Solutions Openings and Other Transaction Agreements. This one gets used but is treated as a luxury, not a necessity.

Most organizations happily pay for training and sometimes closeouts but ignore the middle four—then wonder why their Contracting Officers are drowning.

You may have noticed that everything I see as possibilities to contract out are also tasks that AI tools should be able to take over or accelerate. If you weren’t thinking that, take a minute to consider it because properly trained and prompted AI tools can save a lot of time.

Back in December 2021, I was staring at a personal to-do list that stretched back eleven months. Estate tasks for my mother, moving logistics, content creation that only I could do. None were urgent, but all represented opportunities slipping away. I was working full-time and super-stressed by this new personal workload—burden, if I’m honest with myself—that took every spare minute.

So I hired out five tasks in the first week—37.5 hours of work that I had been avoiding that had to be done. I intentionally eliminated what didn’t matter and automated or outsourced things that did unless no one could do those things but me.

If I can contract out bookkeeping and video transcripts, why can’t agencies contract out data entry, market research, or price analysis?

New AI transcription still mangles my Southern drawl, but each technological leap frees up more hours. I’d love to see more AI tools specifically designed for Contracting Officers. Imagine tools that could pull Section L & M requirements from a draft RFP, build compliance matrices, alert COs to missing clauses, predict workload surges three months out, or auto-populate contract databases with structured award data.

It’s coming. It would be better if Contracting personnel gave input to shape those tools. Contracting personnel, better than anyone else, know what’s needed.

Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going

This closes the Crumblestones series, but the work continues. Each of these six structural weaknesses—culture, communication, governance, requirements handoffs, tracking systems, and resourcing—connects to the others. Fix culture without addressing resource constraints, and you’ll burn out your change agents. Improve tracking without fixing governance, and you’ll just measure dysfunction more accurately.

The Trifecta of Effectiveness—tools, mindset, relationships—threads through every solution. Tools without mindset become shelfware. Mindset without relationships becomes lonely heroics. Relationships without tools become polite stalemates.

We may not fix everything at once, but we can start today by properly resourcing the personnel who turn policy into performance and vision into velocity. Start looking now at how to incorporate the very best that AI can do for us to make these Crumblestones more crumble-proof. Let’s reinforce what’s crumbling and build smarter, stronger systems. The future of rapid acquisition depends on it.