Title: 1) Principal Assistant Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (Retired); 2) Lobbyist (Retired); 3) Lawyer (Retired)
Company: 1) Department of the Army; 2) American Federation of Government Employees; 3) Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue
Location: Herndon, Virginia, United States
John Charles Anderson, PhD, Retired Principal Assistant Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army at Department of the Army, Retired Lobbyist at American Federation of Government Employees, and Retired Lawyer at Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue has been recognized by Top Military, Members of Congress and their staffs, and other lobbyists for dedication, achievements, and leadership in law and military service.
Dr. Anderson’s legacy is rooted in nearly five decades of military service, defense management, legal practice, public service and legislative advocacy. His expertise clarifies that the “supply side” of Human Capital Planning (hiring) must be analyzed holistically with Total Force Management defining “demand side” of Human Capital Planning, particularly by optimizing the mix of military, civilian and contractor personnel to enhance readiness and operational effectiveness.
A native of Saginaw and Ironwood, Michigan, Dr. Anderson developed an early interest in public service, analytical reasoning and leadership. As a champion debater at Arthur Hill High School, he developed skills that would later inform his work in law, defense policy and legislative advocacy. He also advanced to become an Eagle Scout and member of the Order of the Arrow, experiences that reinforced his commitment to service, teamwork and personal responsibility.
Dr. Anderson subsequently pursued a formal education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1976 after completing four years under an Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship. That same year, he began active-duty service in the U.S. Army, beginning a military and defense career that would span nearly five decades. From 1976 to 1981, he served on active duty in the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of captain & subsequently in the Reserves as well as an operations research systems analyst. Notably, Dr. Anderson was presented with an Army Commendation Medal during his active military service.
From 1978 to 1980, Dr. Anderson worked as headquarters detachment commander and battalion S-1 with the 8th Maintenance General Support Battalion in Hanau, Germany. In that position, he implemented accountability measures that reduced vehicle downtime and addressed skills misalignments/unfilled positions adversely affecting readiness, as noted by the Inspector General. The experience provided an early foundation for his later work on force structure, workforce utilization and borrowed military manpower.
After his military service, Dr. Anderson shifted his attention toward a career in law and philosophy. He graduated with a Doctor of Jurisprudence from Catholic University Law School in 1990, where he published legal scholarship on securities law (37 Catholic Univ. Law Review 791-827 (Spring, 1988). From 1990 to 1994, he practiced law as an associate at Jones Day Reavis & Pogue in Washington, D.C., handling appellate litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court on regulatory takings, securities litigation, mergers and acquisitions, antitrust matters, thrift litigation, tax planning and administrative law.
While practicing law, Dr. Anderson continued his academic studies at The Catholic University of America, obtaining a Master of Arts in philosophy in 1993, completing a thesis examining Kant’s aesthetics in moral philosophy, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1995 (with five-year full tuition honorary scholarship). His doctoral dissertation, “An Enquiry on the Origins of Injustice in Legal Systems,” was later turned into a book: “Why Lawyers Derail Justice, Probing the Roots of Legal Injustices,” published by Penn State University Press (1998), still in print.
Soon thereafter, Dr. Anderson moved into senior defense management and federal public service. He found success for 15 years as Principal Assistant Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for (Force Management, Manpower and Resources) (PADASA(FMMR) in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs (OASA M&RA) at the Pentagon. His primary work centered on determining the appropriate balance among military personnel, civilian employees and contractors to improve readiness, operational effectiveness and the cost efficiency of the total force. (He was in the Pentagon during 9-11.)
During this period, Dr. Anderson became deeply involved in Army-wide efforts to identify the most effective use of military, civilian and contractor personnel. Under ASA (M&RA) Patrick Henry, in 1998, he identified military positions that could potentially be converted to civilian or contractor performance, and civilian functions that could appropriately be privatized. He also co-chaired a council overseeing the Army’s Total Army Analysis process and drafted/coordinated ASA(M&RA) responses to 126 challenges and Under Secretary of Army responses to 34 appeals from unions and industry under the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998 concerning whether particular functions were “inherently governmental.” He co-chaired a Council of Colonels Total Army Analysis process application of these decisions to Army commands.
Dr. Anderson’s work became especially consequential during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Senior Army leadership designated him as the Army lead for an initiative to realign approximately 15,000 military positions from support functions to the operational force. The effort increased the number and size of Army brigade combat teams to improve operational capacity, readiness, lethality (exemplified in 2026 by lessons learned in Ukraine from the use of emerging technologies such as drones), reduced stress on the force reflected in reduced suicide rates and improved unit and individual deployment ratios, generating efficiencies in fully burdened workforce costs and reduced the need for additional military end strength and the use of more costly and high risk contractors on the battlefield.
Dr. Anderson also became a key contributor to defense policy concerning contractor use and acquisition. He was recruited to a working group formed by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. that developed recommendations concerning lessons learned from contractor use in Iraq and Afghanistan. His recommendations provided to the War Time Commission on Contracting contributed to Congressional oversight and subsequent legislation restricting the use of private security contractors, the recognition of “critical functions” for logistical support contracts, from a command, control, communications, intelligence and security perspective, the recognition of the risks of “closely associated with inherently governmental functions,” restricting the use of contractors performing interrogation functions, and making contractors in theater subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He also used the Gansler Commission Recommendations to advocate successfully for legislation not capping civilian pay when deployed to theatre, renewed with each successive NDAA.
Dr. Anderson’s defense management work extended into the development of statutory authorities governing the federal workforce. He helped advance legislative proposals concerning insourcing, contractor inventories, service-contract planning, programming, budgeting & compliance with total force management statutes using a standardized checklist integral to contractor inventory reviews, civilian workforce management and total-force analysis. He collaborated with senior defense officials, the Joint Staff and other Military Departments, overcoming opposition to insourcing & contractor inventories collecting labor hours and costs from contractors from the Office of Management and Budget, which was influenced by industry lobbying, with a SecDef letter to Congress and meeting with OMB and industry leaders, & obtaining statutory authority from Congress. Insourcing based on the savings & eliminating contracts perform inherently governmental functions, as well as reducing reliance on high risk contracts performing closely associated with inherently governmental functions and critical functions or not in compliance with the OMB Circular A-76 moratorium, etc., derived from using the Army contractor inventory processes, subsequently became a major Army business-transformation initiative and was incorporated into the Department of Defense Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution System (PPBES) with the use of the Army contractor inventory (ECRA) to generate savings during the first two years of the Obama Administration.
The March 29, 2012 hearing held by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC), specifically under the Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight chaired by Democratic Senator (Mo.) Claire McCaskill, and Republican Ranking Member Senator (OH) Rob Portman was titled: “Contractors: How Much Are They Costing the Government?” The Washington Post article, titled “Senate panel examines contractor spending,” was written by journalist Joe Davidson and published on March 29, 2012, quoted Subcommittee Chair Senator Claire McCaskill’s opening statement noting that service contract spending had jumped 44 percent over 10 years (from $181 billion to $324 billion), compared to a 34 percent increase in federal employee spending ($170 billion to $229 billion). Both the Chair and Ranking Member supported government-wide application of ECMRA which was the focus of the Hearing.
During the sequestration period (when Republicans took control of Congress in Obama’s mid-term), Dr. Anderson was detailed to Rich Robbins (Former Director, OUSD(P&R)) in the Office of Frederick Vollrath, LTG (ret) (former Army G-1) and DUSD (Total Force Manpower, Personnel & Readiness) (TFMPR) (OUSD) (P&R), where Dr. Anderson wrote the DoD position that was incorporated into section 341 of the FY2013 NDAA, called the McCain civilian reductions. (Sen. McCain opposed the sequestration being pushed by House Republicans and the Obama Administration’s concurrent effort to cut military end strength.) Sequestration was implemented through furloughs of the civilian workforce, mainly in the Operation & Maintenance Accounts, replacing their work with military, who were exempted from sequestration by Congress or contractors (mostly funded through the off-budget Overseas Contingency accounts), thereby increasing overall fully-burdened costs of the total force (military, civilian and contract) and adversely affecting readiness (deferred depot maintenance), lethality, deployments of military, hollowing operational force structure by not manning their positions, as military took on civilian jobs, and high risk unaccountable contractors replaced military in combat zones. See GAO-14-177R & GAO-15-470. This discredited sequestration as producing any savings, but actually adding to deficit, except for a minority of House Republicans (later MAGA). The language on “unjustified transfers” was the genesis of the core concept later incorporated by Dr. Anderson into section 129a of title 10, prohibiting the SecDef from arbitrarily reducing the civilian workforce without first doing an appropriate analysis of the impacts on the fully-burdened costs of the total force (military, civilian and contract), readiness, etc. During Pres. Trump’s first term, Pres. Trump imposed a civilian hiring freeze and reductions, tried to legislatively reduce civilian pay, including retirement and medical benefits in his first two years. Dr. Anderson helped de-rail the cuts of civilian pay, retirement, health benefits on jurisdictional grounds when Pres. Trump tried to make these cuts by amending the National Defense Authorization Act, one of the few “must pass” bills. At that point, the existing section 129a was a generic shell with loopholes and other related statutes such as section 129 (weakened through amendment) and the contractor inventory and budgeting statutes that later became section 4505 and 4506 of title 10 were undermined when OSD worked with OMB to kill the Army contractor inventory, Enterprise Contractor Manpower Reporting Application (ECMRA), that captured both direct and indirect fully burdened costs of all contract services, as well as containing a process linking its data to program elements and object classes used in the program and budget process, that had been transferred to OSD by replacing it with the System for Awards Management (SAM), run by GSA which excluded fixed price contracts, did not identify the requiring activity, had no process for linking data to the DoD PPBES process, and did not capture indirect labor overhead costs (I.e. the fully burdened costs of contractors). During this period Section 341 of the FY2013 NDAA (containing the unjustified transfers language) was repealed in 2017. Through planting questions on borrowed military manpower in HASC readiness hearings, Dr. Anderson established a record of the adverse readiness effects of Trump’s downsizing of civilians. Dr. Anderson, over the course of Trump’s 1st term and into the Biden administration, established the foundation for finally perfecting section 129a of title 10 and the related statutes in sections 129, 2463, 4505, and 4506 in their mature form in 2023. The record that incrementally established the foundation for this includes the following GAO audits on the contractor inventory and contractor PPBES statutes (4505 and 4506), (see GAO-16-119 (18 Feb. 2016) “DoD Service Acquisition: Improved Use of Available Data Needed to Better Manage and Forecast Service Contract Requirements,” Timothy J. DiNapoli (GAO reviewed ECMRA in Army and found forecasting in the program & budget could be done using the Army’s ECMRA process while other MilDeps, wanting to do the same, were floundering due to lack of OSD CAPE & Comptroller support); and (GAO-21-267-R; 22 Feb. 2021) “DoD Service Acquisitions : DoD’s Report to Congress Identifies Steps Taken To Improve Management, But Does Not Address Some Key Planning Issues, “ Timothy J. DiNapoli); (Dr. Anderson lobbied Congress to ask for this GAO report which describes ECMRA capabilities lost when OSD took over ECMRA and then replaced it with SAMS); and the Record also included the following Total Force Management related studies (lobbied for by Dr. Anderson) undertaken by RAND, IDA, and CNA for sections 129 and 129a; (“How Should the Army Use Contractors on the Battlefield? Assessing Comparative Risk in Sourcing Decisions,” Frank Camm, Victoria A. Greenfield (RAND, 2005), “Balancing the Total Force: An Ongoing Issue,” Nancy M. Huff, David F. Eisler, Stanley A. Horowitz (Institute for Defense Analysis; August 2020), “Identifying Contributions of Civilian Workforce to Readiness,” Steven Belcher, Nicholas Diebel and Kletus Lawler (Center for Naval Analysis; September 2021)); and two Defense Business Board Studies: “Building a Civilian Talent Pipeline”(Mar. 2023) (where Dr. Anderson procured a seat for an AFGE VP) and “Fully-Burdened and Life Cycle Costs of the Workforce” (FY18-01) (containing a great chart on the total force with ECMRA data). These concepts became a foundation for provisions which require consideration of the effects of proposed civilian workforce reductions on workload, force structure, readiness, operational effectiveness and burdened costs. Section 129a was recently mentioned by former SecDef Panetta and covered by CNN as a limitation on arbitrary reductions by DOGE. “Defense officials fear impending Pentagon firings could break law and hurt military readiness’ by Natasha Bertrand and Haley Britzky, Wed., Feb. 19, 2025, CNN: Title 10 section 129a of the U.S. Code states: “The Secretary may not reduce the civilian workforce programmed full-time equivalent levels … unless the Secretary conducts an appropriate analysis of the impacts of such reductions on workload, military force structure, lethality, readiness, operational effectiveness, stress on the military force, and fully burdened costs”
Dr. Anderson’s federal career included significant recognition for his contributions to Army manpower and force management. He received a Secretary of the Army Manpower and Force Management Distinguished Service Award in 1998 and two Meritorious Civilian Service Awards from the U.S. Army in 2001 and 2015. He was also honored with multiple Army commendation Awards and maintained top 1 percent performance ratings throughout his federal career.
His efforts strengthened key provisions in Title 10 of the United States Code, in addition to Section 129a. They also strengthened Section 129, which prohibits arbitrary caps on civilians (requiring managing to budget and workload); Section 482(b)(10), which mandates that readiness reports include borrowed military manpower; Section 4211, which requires total force planning analysis for major weapon system acquisitions; Section 2463 on insourcing; Section 4505 on contractor inventory; Section 4506 on contract services planning (programming, budgeting; and execution); and Section 2022 on cyber scholarships. Dr. Anderson’s advocacy was recognized in Congressional hearings and cited by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as foundational to modeling contract labor costs within the Department of Defense budget (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61018). See also testimony by CBO to SASC Personnel Subcommittee on July 26, 2023, on ways the DoD could achieve budgetary efficiencies.
Dr. Anderson, while advocating for pay equity, at least managed to obtain pay parity with military pay. Pay equity and parity are directly linked to effective total force management because suppressing civilian pay generates massive incentives to retain military in infrastructure rather than build up operational units. The years Dr. Anderson achieved pay parity directly resulted from his efforts to encourage AFGE to work with the Association of the United States Army (AUSA), which also became an advocate for pay parity. He successfully managed to conform the probationary period and RIF policies of the DoD to the rest of the federal government by asking Congress to request a RAND study of discriminatory practices and inefficiencies in human capital planning with more extended probationary periods and subjective RIF rules.
Dr. Anderson ensured that the Cyber Workforce scholarship program for the civilian workforce was similar to the military R.O.T.C. scholarship program to improve accessions and retention of civilian employees in this area, where there were massive skills gaps in DoD (section 2022 of Title 10). By increasing the use of civilian employees in this area rather than defaulting to more expensive military, this optimized the fully burdened costs for the total force, as required by section 129a of Title 10. (A current loophole is SASC authorizers supporting this statute have not obtained SAC-D funding at the line item level for this program.)
Dr. Anderson’s efforts as an AFGE lobbyist to try to enforce section 129a of title 10 in the Defense Appropriations process was successful under Biden Adm. until mid-terms where Rep. Calvert (41st C.D.; CA), a longstanding proponent for arbitrarily cutting the civilian workforce, became Chair of House Appropriations Committee-Defense (HAC-D). An AFGE letter prepared by Dr. Anderson requested the HAC-D and Senate Appropriations Committee-Defense (SAC-D) carry forward the current section 8012 from the Pub. L. 117-328, ‘‘Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023’’ Division C (Dec. 29, 2022) containing language in sections 129; and 129a of title 10; and add a new provision enforcing 4506 of title 10.
The HAC-D, due to its Chairman Calvert rejected this. The GAO could enforce an Anti-Deficiency Act violation of the impoundment statute with language in an Appropriations bill; and when budget hearings occurred, tough questions could be asked of the Department. But without a meaningful budget exhibit, there was no way to enforce compliance with the strongest stick Congress has, the appropriations process.
On the bright side, the SAC-D, chaired by Republican (Sen.ME) Susan Collins and Republican SAC-D member (Sen., Alaska) Lisa Murkowski supported retaining the language, but in Conference negotiations they compromised and instead included directive report language. And OSD (Comptroller) is fine with that outcome because producing a meaningful budget on services contracts at the same level of detail as done for civilian employees (see, GAO—16-119) that complies with section 129a section 4505 and section 4506 of title 10 is not possible with SAMS data (although the CBO has demonstrated how they could use 2016 ECMRA data, with inflation factors to do so), and this would be more work for USD (Comptroller). Additionally, the Department of War (DOW) of the 2nd Trump term, purporting to embrace insourcing, have instead ignored the insourcing statutory requirements of section 129a, 2463, 4505 (ECMRA) & 4506 (standardized total force management checklists used in ECMRA reviews of service contracts) by replacing contractors with military (in infrastructure civilian jobs based on hiring difficulties), just as they have mis-characterized lethality (a “tooth to tale” force structure/force modernization concept) into an anti-woke campaign circumventing promotion panel recommendations of women and minorities and firing respected senior rank officers. On other hand, Dr. Anderson strongly supported converting contractor logistics support that deployed with operational Stryker Brigades in 2005 ; see GAO-06-928R Published: Sep 05, 2006.
Across his career, Dr. Anderson’s professional accomplishments have been accompanied by a continuing interest in law, philosophy, literature and the arts. His poetry has appeared in North American Mentor magazine, and their collection of award-winning poems, “One-Score-and Two Years of Uncommon Fanfare,” that included Dr Anderson’s “Sapphics on the Violet.” Additionally, Libra Press published a collection of his poems in a book: “Cosmic Omelet.”
In 2023, Dr. Anderson was celebrated with the Distinguished Service Award from the American Logistics Association, who he worked with to preserve Commissaries & Exchanges, adding to a career of professional recognition spanning military service, federal employment and defense policy. He is a retired member of the New York Bar, District of Columbia Bar and D.C. federal courts.
Dr. Anderson has also maintained longstanding interests in genealogy and Anglo-American legal history. He is a member of the National Society Magna Charta Dames and Barons, the Plantagenet Society and the Sovereign Colonial Society Americans of Royal Descent. His interest in these organizations reflects both his family heritage and his broader interest in the legal traditions that shaped the United States and the United Kingdom. During his historic address to a joint meeting of Congress on April 28, 2026, King Charles III cited the Magna Carta to emphasize that executive power must be subject to checks and balances to bi-partisan applause, citing 160 Supreme Court references to the Magna Carta.
In terms of his own family, Dr. Anderson feels that the lessons passed down from his family were foundational to everything else. He treasures the time he spent with his mother, June Elizabeth Lepisto; his father, Charles James Anderson; his sister, Mary Ashley and brother in law Bill Ashley and their two sons, Robert and Michael and their families; his sister, Joan (changed to Kaija); his brother, Paul; his maternal grandfather, Victor Elias Lepisto; his maternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Keskey; his paternal grandmother, Gladys Kellogg; his Aunt Louise Anderson; his aunt Alice Anderson and his uncle by marriage, Walter Cochrane. Dr. Anderson’s personal life is enriched by his marriage in 1984 to Marcia Foster Anderson, with degrees from the University of Rochester (B.A., Psychology; French; 1972); Rutgers University (M.S.W.; 1976) and the Catholic University of America (M.A.; Theatre; 1990). She raised funds & increased audience attendance for community theatre as Development Director, acted in community theater productions, and retired after teaching English as a second language in the Fairfax Public Schools in 2016. Dr. Anderson also had a close relationship with his father-in-law, Albert Foster and his mother-in-law, Ida Braiman. Dr. Anderson’s children are Albert Foster Anderson: SUNY Purchase College (BFA, Acting, 2016); currently recognized as chess teacher of the year in Fairfax County, Virginia (2026); and Ian Foster Anderson: Virginia Commonwealth University’s sculpture program (2018).
Dr. Anderson is a direct descendant of Miles Standish from the Mayflower, William Bradford, who was first Governor of Plymouth Colony, Hugo Grotius, “the father of international law,” Lamoral von Egmont, Sir Thomas More, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Geoffrey Chaucer, William of Orange, the Tudors, Plantagenets, Stewart, Oldenburg, Wittelsbach, Hapsburg, Visconti 16th century royal families. He additionally descends from the Knickerbocker family in New York. His seventh-great-uncle is President Martin van Buren. He is a direct descendant of every baron listed as a Magna Carta Surety. A statue of his sixth great-grandfather, Captain Thomas Abbe, a Lexington and Concord patriot, is in the town square of Enfield, Connecticut, and his cousin relations include Henry David Thoreau, who is a fourth cousin, Emily Dickinson, a sixth cousin, Theodore and Eleanor Roosevelt, sixth cousins, FDR, a seventh cousin, and Winston Churchill, a sixth cousin.
Outside his professional responsibilities, Dr. Anderson enjoys playing piano, listening to classical, Broadway and rock music, reading literature, history and science, conducting genealogical research and maintaining an extensive personal library. He has also remained engaged with civic causes supporting democratic principles. He has gone through multiple surgeries, radiation treatments and now immunotherapy for oral cancer affecting his speech from 2015 and is hopeful that his current treatment will improve his current speaking ability so he can return to lobbying and contributing more to public life and applying the principles of integrity, teamwork, intellectual rigor and lifelong learning that have characterized his career.
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