Improve efficiency of HHS federal employee time-to-hire from current average of 6 months or more to less than 3 months

It currently takes an average of 6 months or more to hire federal employees in the Department of Health and Human Services. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to attract and hire the top physicians, scientists and epidemiologists, to HHS organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We frequently lose top applicants, including many Veterans, to other industries because of the hardship that this long and laborious hiring period imposes on applicants and their families. The current system for hiring in HHS is inefficient and ineffective. HHS hiring should be re-calibrated to more closely match private industry and academia. We urgently need an evaluation and overhaul of our HHS hiring processes and practices.