§7014 Office of the Secretary of the Army

Summary

Create an Office of the Secretary of the Army to help the Secretary do his duties. The Office includes the Under Secretary, the Assistant Secretaries, the Administrative Assistant, the General Counsel, the Inspector General, the Chief of Legislative Liaison, the Army Reserve Forces Policy Committee, and any other offices set up by law or chosen by the Secretary. The Office alone is responsible inside the Office and the Army Staff for several key jobs: acquisition, auditing, comptroller and financial management, information management, inspector general work, legislative affairs, and public affairs. For each of those jobs the Secretary must pick one office inside the Office of the Secretary to run it. The Army Staff may advise or help, but it may not be put in charge of those jobs. The person who leads auditing must have at least five years of accounting or auditing experience and the job must be a career reserved position under 5 U.S.C. 3132(a)(8). The Office also handles research and development, though the Secretary may give parts tied to military needs and testing to the Army Staff, and must pick one office to run R&D and set how it works with the Chief of Staff. The Secretary must keep the Office and the Army Staff from doing the same specific jobs twice. The Office of the Secretary and the Army Staff together may have no more than 3,250 people, no more than 1,900 active-duty officers, and no more than 67 general officers on permanent duty. Those limits do not apply in wartime. In a national emergency each of the first two limits may be increased by 15 percent.