So, What Do the Biden OFCCP’s First Year Performance Numbers Mean for Contractors for the Rest of FY 2022?
No OFCCP Director would be happy about, or even satisfied with, the disappointing performance results of this first year of the Biden OFCCP, let alone the current OFCCP Director Jenny Yang. While Chair of the EEOC during the last years of the Obama Administration, Chair Yang drove the
Commission to record performance levels and handed over a well-performing agency to the Trump Administration.
But Sir Isaac Newton had it right in his first law of motion:
“An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” (By “unbalanced” force, Sir Newton meant that there was a force pushing in one direction without a countervailing force pushing in the exactly opposite direction causing equilibrium).
It has only been one year of the Biden Administration. There is plenty of time yet for Director Yang to “right the ship.” But when you hit rock bottom, all you can do is get up…and go up. But it is going to take a sober “war council” to sit down within OFCCP and objectively identify everything that slows or stops successful performance within the agency. Performance results do not happen on their own. You need an unbalanced force. And at OFCCP, it usually takes 4-6 months to harvest results from carefully planted seeds. Nothing changes until something changes to force a different result…by creating an unbalanced force which breaks the status quo equilibrium. THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW. FY 2022 is already four months gone and OFCCP is at risk of losing another year of credible and laudable performance.
Prescription for Resurrection: OFCCP needs to immediately develop and install a new Game Plan (title it “Resurrection”) focusing on
- Efficiency,
- Performance (with goals and timetables),
- Managerial accountability (with rewards and sanctions),
- Excellence in every task at every desk on every day, and
- Re-dedication to mission
Certainly, the unusual experience and challenges of the COVID-19 Pandemic have driven a lot of these unsatisfactory results, and as we have seen, the OFCCP is busy preparing for the AAP Verification Initiative processes. The results of that process, and determining if all federal Government contractors do, in fact, have AAPs in place (as well as the subcontractors also responsible for completing AAPs), will have far-reaching effects on the future selection of contractors in the compliance evaluation process. Despite the numbers above, reported directly by the OFCCP themselves, contractors should never sit comfortably and assume “they are in good shape,” because one never knows when the other shoe will drop!