Fed. gov't budget question
July 27, 2020 2:58 AM   Subscribe

I've been tasked with finding what federal agencies of a certain size (relatively comparable to the Bureau of Indian Affairs) spend on their respective Office of Public Affairs (Series 1035). I've googled six ways to Sunday, and I'm going to keep doing so, but I'm hoping some of you good people will be able to help. Thanks!
posted by The Almighty Mommy Goddess to Law & Government (5 answers total)
 
Are you looking just for federal staff, or for the budget as a whole?
posted by rockindata at 3:46 AM on July 27, 2020


Response by poster: The brief from my client: "What federal agencies are comparable in size and and what percentage of their overall budget is for Public Affairs, the 1035 series."
posted by The Almighty Mommy Goddess at 4:03 AM on July 27, 2020


When you say "size" I'm assuming you mean "number of employees." According to OPM they employ about 9,200 full time workers.

Within that range you've got

- The Department of Agriculture's Agriculture Research Service (8,903); Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (8,635); and Food Safety and Inspection Service (10,009)
- Drug Enforcement Administration (9,623)
- The CDC (9,417)
- DHS's Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (10,560)
- The Coast Guard (8,146)
- The Bureau of Land Management (10,320)
- The Department of the Interior's Geological Survey (8,961)
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (9,526)

So the question is how many GS-1035 public affairs employees do each of these agencies/departments/bureaus have (and thus, how much do they spend on employing them), right?
posted by saladin at 5:57 AM on July 27, 2020


1035 is a series in the general schedule (GS), where most feds fit in (I’m in IT, 2210). People in the 1035 series may be scattered throughout an agency, and the office of public affairs of an agency may have quite a few people who are not in the 1035 series. It sounds like your client is looking for the amount of money an agency spends on people in the 1035 series, rather than top line numbers for an Office of Public Affairs.
posted by rockindata at 5:59 AM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


Jeez, digging a little deeper I'm not sure this info is going to be available online. Taking a random sampling of budgets from some of these agencies, public affairs is rarely even mentioned, and there's definitely no line items. BIA's 2018 Greenbook mentions that they eliminated one position within their OPA (but who knows if it was even GS 1035), for a savings of $130,000. That's the most detail I could find among any of these. FWS's budget doesn't even mention public affairs (although it seems like maybe they lump it in to a bigger Office of External Affairs), but they've definitely got an office.

Having been in the position of trying to tease information like this out of federal department websites and budget documents before, my advice would be to just give them a call.
posted by saladin at 6:19 AM on July 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


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