Swell in Contracting Officers May Not Keep Pace With Retirements

The number of contracting officers in the government increased to 28,434 in 2007, up 6.8 percent since the Bush administration began, officials said yesterday.

But how many contracting officers the government actually needs has not been determined, despite efforts by federal agencies, the Office of Personnel Management and the OMB over the past two years to develop plans for hiring and training contracting officers and specialists.

"We are still working real hard with OPM and the departments to try to figure out what the right number is," said Paul A. Denett, an Office of Management and Budget official in charge of government procurement policy.

For his part, Denett added, "I believe we need to increase the hiring even more."

Members of Congress have been concerned that the government has not done enough planning to get a handle on staffing and training needs of employees.

Spending on contracts has surged since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to more than $400 billion a year.

As the numbers have increased, some agencies have found it difficult to manage their contracts to avert fraud and abuse.

For example, a 2007 independent commission on Army contracting, headed by acquisition expert Jacques S. Gansler, found that the Army's contracting operations in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones were not properly staffed, supported and trained.

Other studies have pointed out that statistics about the acquisition workforce have not been collected in a consistent fashion, creating some confusion about the status of the workforce. Experts have emphasized that personnel cuts, ordered by Congress in the 1990s, left many acquisition employees overworked or without necessary training.

In recent years, Congress and the Bush administration have tried to learn more about federal acquisition, with officials paying more attention to an annual demographic report on the acquisition workforce. The report is prepared by the Federal Acquisition Institute, which has published workforce data since 1977.

Yesterday, the OMB and the institute released the 2007 report, showing an increase of about 500 contracting officers in the government last year compared with the previous year. Most -- 19,119 -- worked for the Defense Department, with an additional 9,315 spread across the rest of the government.

According to the report, the number of contracting officers has been rising steadily since 2002, primarily in civilian agencies, where numbers increased from 7,995 in 2000 to the high of 9,315 last year.