More than 200 employees are leaving the National Credit Union Administration under a voluntary separation initiative that agency leadership says will reshape operations as it aims to reduce its roughly 1,200 staff by 20% by the end of the year.
Acting NCUA Chair Kyle Hauptman confirmed the ongoing plan at Thursday's board meeting, outlining a two-stage restructuring that he says aims for cost savings for credit unions and long-term operational reform, while acknowledging the difficulty of terminating workers.
"We need to make changes that allow us to focus on job one: protecting the Share Insurance Fund. Everything else is less important," he said in remarks. "Stage 2 of the future NCUA starts in January when we have millions in cost-savings to work with [and] a lot of that cost-savings needs to be returned to the folks who earned it in the form of NCUA charging credit unions less money."
In addition to operational streamlining, the voluntary separation program — built around both a deferred resignation option and a retirement incentive — was designed in response to Executive Order
Hauptman said his priority is to create a fair, voluntary process that gives staff clear directions while ensuring the agency continues to meet its regulatory mission. He acknowledged that the NCUA's work will inevitably look different, but that ensuring the share insurance fund is properly managed is his top priority.
"We're not going to try to do the cliché of 'doing more with less.' That doesn't really work," Hauptman said. "We know we can't lose more than 200 employees and think we're going to have the same people do the same things in the same manner and at the same intervals."
In the near term, the agency says it is focused on cutting costs in various areas. Departments have been told to identify work that can be put off, combined or dropped completely. Hauptman cited small, "unsexy" fixes — like speeding up the process for logging into computers and timekeeping — as early gains.
Next year, Hauptman said, the agency will reinvest the expected savings in technology, contractors and strategic hires. The agency will be under a hiring freeze in the meantime, and once the freeze is lifted, the agency will be allowed to hire only one new employee for every four staffers that depart.
The reduction in force at the NCUA aligns with similar initiatives happening at another financial watchdog, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which
Force reductions at a number of federal financial regulators follows a wave of contract terminations and spending reductions across federal housing and financial oversight agencies. Since early March, the Department of Government Efficiency has eliminated a broad range of vendor contracts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
