Summary

GAO reviewed the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) personnel management, focusing on the effectiveness of its workforce planning efforts.

GAO found that: (1) USDA was experiencing problems in recruiting, training, and managing its personnel, primarily because it lacked an effective strategy for determining and meeting workforce needs; (2) USDA needed a departmental recruiting program to avoid intra-agency competition for the same personnel and to improve general awareness of USDA as an employer; (3) USDA needed to focus its recruitment efforts on employees with marketing management backgrounds to address agriculture's emergence as a consumer-driven economy; (4) inadequate employee and supervisory training was responsible for many existing operational problems within USDA; (5) USDA was well behind most other federal agencies in affirmative action efforts; (6) most USDA agencies were developing personnel systems that were not comprehensive and did not address long-term needs; and (7) USDA policymakers were not taking the lead in developing workforce planning guidance and initiating a system for monitoring individual agencies' planning systems to ensure departmentwide compatibility.