| (in $ millions) | FY 2013 Actuals* | FY 2014 Enacted | FY 2015 Request |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Appropriation | 852.7 | 898.2 | 1,000.0 |
| Total Admin Budget | 99.7 | 105.0 | 105.0 |
| Human Capital | 51.6 | 54.2 | 55.3 |
| Training | 0.5 | 1.2 | 1.2 |
| Overseas Operations | 13.9 | 14.1 | 16.7 |
| Contracted Services | 8.6 | 8.6 | 9.8 |
| Information Technology | 9.2 | 12.8 | 12.7 |
| Rent, Leasehold & Improvements** | 9.7 | 6.6 | 1.1 |
| Travel | 5.1 | 6.3 | 6.9 |
| Other Admin*** | 0.8 | 1.2 | 1.3 |
* The FY 2013 admin budget totaled $99.7 million, but the column adds to $99.4 million, due to $0.3 million remaining unspent at this time.
** Please note that the rent costs above differ from new lease justification materials previously submitted to Congress due to the timing of the payments for each year. Clarification is provided in the “Rent” section herein.
*** Other Admin includes funding for translation services, printing, MCC Board expenses, representation funds, and other minor administrative expenses.
In FY 2015, MCC plans to use $105.0 million for administrative expenses. The flat administrative expenses budget reflects MCC’s focus on gaining efficiencies while at the same time making necessary, prudent investments that increase overall productivity and organizational effectiveness.
Important investments in FY 2015 are addressed in this section, including human capital and overseas operations, which comprise 68.6 percent of MCC’s administrative budget.
Human Capital
MCC plans to use $55.3 million in FY 2015 for human capital, a 2.0 percent increase from FY 2014. Given the budget constraints for FY 2015, MCC will seek to maintain an average annual headquarters full-time equivalent (FTE) level of 274, despite increasing program needs. MCC froze its salary tables for calendar years 2011, 2012 and 2013, and revised them to effectively compete for talent based on Executive Order 13655, which adjusted pay rates for calendar year 2014 throughout much of the Federal government.
| FTE | FY 2013 | FY 2014 | FY 2015 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Washington, DC Headquarters | 268 | 272 | 274 |
| Overseas | 25 | 25 | 24 |
| Total | 293 | 297 | 298 |
MCC is a performance-based organization, and MCC employees do not receive automatic pay raises when the General Schedule for pay overseen by the Office of Personnel Management is increased or step increases based on years of service. Employees must work at MCC at least 90 days before the end of the fiscal year to be eligible to receive performance merit increases based solely on the prior year’s performance.
Additionally, MCC provides a standard package of benefits that is commensurate with other USG entities. Based on prior years’ actuals, total benefits for FY 2015 are expected to cost an average of 27 percent of salary.
While MCC continues to maintain a very small in-country footprint of only two U.S. direct hire staff and three locally engaged staff, the cost of maintaining this staff continues to face upward pressure.
Overseas Operations
MCC plans to use $16.7 million for overseas operations in FY 2015. While MCC continues to maintain a very small in-country footprint of only two U.S. direct hire staff and three locally engaged staff, the cost of maintaining this staff continues to face upward pressure.
International Cooperative Administrative Support Services (ICASS) and Capital Security Cost-Sharing (CSCS) costs to support overseas staff are expected to increase due, in part, to the Department of State’s need to maintain and operate newer embassy compounds. Also, starting in FY 2015, the Department of State will implement its new Furniture and Appliance Pool (FAP) Policy. Participation in overseas posts’ furniture pools will result in significantly higher furniture buy-in costs and subsequently higher ICASS charges for MCC. However, MCC has successfully argued for an exemption of the annual assessment fee because of its short-term (less than seven years) presence in-country.
ICASS, CSCS and other fixed overseas expenses result in an average annual cost of approximately $500,000 to maintain an MCC employee overseas at a U.S. Embassy. Such costs include office space, housing, support services, locally engaged staff, educational allowances and other family costs, home leave, in-country travel, consultation travel, medical evacuations, information technology support, relocation, storage of household effects, and security.
MCC will complete two compacts during FY 2014 (Burkina Faso and Namibia), which will impact overseas spending through relocation charges for travel and shipping in FY 2015, during and immediately after the compact closeout period. Also in FY 2015, MCC is budgeting for establishing in-country presences for four new compacts. In addition to relocation travel and shipping charges for eight U.S. direct hire staff and their families, MCC will incur one-time startup costs for office furniture and equipment, residential furniture, official vehicles, transfer allowances, and other costs.
Other Administrative Investments and Cost Controls
Although human capital and overseas operations comprise 68.6 percent of the administrative budget, MCC is making sound investments and controlling costs in other administrative areas, including information technology (IT) and rent.
Information Technology: MCC plans to use $12.7 million to maintain and invest in IT for FY 2015. The request will support a variety of activities, including the following:
- Continuation of steady state operations and maintenance support, including contract support for all MCC network services, telecommunications, video teleconferencing, end user support, voice services support, and security operations as well as infrastructure support for mission critical applications.
- Applications development and maintenance, to include the MCC MIS and SharePoint systems development. To harness data to improve agency results and to use high-quality evaluation to address important policy and program issues, MCC requires the extensive data available from compact evaluations, compact finances and MCC financial, contracting and grant data to analyze and answer questions about MCC program activities housed in these systems.
- MCC program management and project management that will ensure high-quality, low-cost evaluations and rapid iterative experimentation. This funding includes support for enterprise architecture and capital investment, another agency-specific need that will significantly improve MCC’s capacity to use or build evidence to achieve better results or increase cost-effectiveness in high priority programs. In addition, MCC expects to complete activities initiated in FY 2014 and continuing into FY 2015, including transition of services to the cloud, such as file storage and collaboration tools (e.g., SharePoint).
- Increased effort on Open Data. So much of MCC’s work is rooted in the use of data and evidence to underpin MCC’s investments. The data itself have significant value when provided in an open machine-readable format where third party developers can enhance the work of MCC through transparency, public participation and collaboration. MCC’s open data efforts have put the agency in the forefront of this movement. MCC is also modernizing its public website. This funding will support efforts to make all of MCC’s data open through a data.mcc.gov portal, building on the transparency MCC provides through its current website and foreignassistance.gov. The modernization includes the continued delivery of scorecards and harnessing data to improve agency results for multiple purposes. MCC expects that its approaches to providing data will help with knowledge-sharing within and outside of the agency and will make the data more readily consumable for related research from a variety of communities in the international development field and with a variety of devices.
Rent: As a result of a thorough space needs analysis and a competitive bidding process, MCC will lower its headquarters rent cost by $30 million over the course of its new ten-year lease, which was signed in February 2014, and will begin in May 2015. As noted in the overview, the rent displayed in the new lease justification materials previously submitted to Congress differs from this section’s table due to the timing of the payments for each year. The actual cost of rent is $8.3 million for FY 2013, $8.4 million for FY 2014, and $6.2 million for FY 2015, which only covers part of the year due to MCC’s leases expiring. In order to pay rent for FY 2013, $5.5 million was paid before the start of FY 2013 and $2.8 million was paid during FY 2013. The remainder of payments in FY 2013, $6.9 million, paid for rent for FY 2014. During FY 2014, MCC will pay the balance due for FY 2014, $1.5 million, and will pay $5.1 million toward rent for FY 2015. During FY 2015, MCC will pay the $1.1 million outstanding for the remainder of its current leases. Under the new lease, the rent for FY 2015, as well as other costs associated with the move, will be paid from prior year administrative expense balances.