DOI: Planning for the Next 100 Years

Objectives:

Address President’s Executive Order 13781 on Reorganization

• Reduce administrative redundancy and jurisdictional and organizational barriers to citizen service
• Share resources more effectively
• Devote a greater percentage of our budget to the field
• Improve coordination among federal, state and local agencies
• Facilitate joint problem-solving and effective decision-making
• Make more decisions at the region, fewer in Washington DC
• Better stewardship
• Increasing responsibility, resources, personnel and authority in the field

Current DOI Operations:

DOI touches more people, in more ways, than any other organization in the Executive Branch

• 2,400 operating locations
• 70,000 employees
  • 16% of DOI employees are retirement eligible today
  • 40% of DOI employees are retirement eligible in 5 years
• 610,000 volunteers

Organizational Challenges:

• Coordination challenges across agency jurisdictions
• Coordination challenges across departments
  • FWS Trout
  • NMFS Salmon
• Overlapping organizational structures
• Unnecessary bureaucracy in DC and Denver
• Heavy visitor use
  • 500 Million DOI Visitors
  • 320 Million NPS site visitors

Unified Regions:

Why?

• Focuses regional managers on a shared geography
• Improves coordination and communication
• Increases efficiency
• Lowers costs
• Leverages available expertise across bureaus
• Promotes teamwork
• Facilitates local multi-agency partnerships
• Better stewardship
• Increases authority, resources, and staff to the field
• Focuses on local and regional issues and infrastructure improvements

What this would accomplish:

• Improve federal land and water management
• Unified regions to facilitate mission delivery
• One-stop services for public
• Enhanced partnerships among federal, state, tribal and local agencies
• Reduce conflict across jurisdictional boundaries
• Demonstrate the courage of Roosevelt to organize for a better public lands future

Next Steps:

• We have a final map,  which depicts 12 unified regions.  This map was created by USGS and is based on watersheds and follows state lines wherever possible.
• Regional senior leaders from all bureaus will organize themselves into teams to begin the virtual reorganization process during the remainder of FY 2018 and into FY 2019.
• We are striving for better communication and coordination.  Virtual communication options are being explored.
• In the next few months, many of our senior executives will be working in each region and focusing on and designing core elements of its operations, depending on the actual circumstance on the ground.  
• The implementation of these new regions will be a thoughtful, Department-wide effort driven by leadership and employees in the field.  
• This ground-up approach will tap into the expertise and experience of our most dedicated career civil servants.