By: Sean Reilly

Federal Times

Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania plans to lay off more than 400 contract employees by the end of next month due to declining workload and sequester budget cuts.

Last week, Tobyhanna officials announced that all of the depot’s roughly 3,600 Army civilian employees will be furloughed for 22 days between next month and the end of September.soldiers firing line

The three-stage contractor layoffs will affect up to 418 employees of Oklahoma-based URS Federal Support Services who aid in the depot’s mission of making and maintaining radars, satellite terminals and hundreds of other electronic systems. The first stage will take place this Friday and cost 95 URS workers their jobs, followed by 216 layoffs on April 15 and another 107 on April 30, the release said. The URS workers account for more than half of Tobyhanna’s approximately 700 contract staff.

The Army depot had beefed up its contractor workforce in recent years to handle the growing workload stemming from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that workload is already in decline due to the end of operations in Iraq. It will shrink further because of sequester-related cuts, which will ax all maintenance between April through September, the depot said in a news release on Monday. Tobyhanna had already resorted to a buyout and early retirement offer to trim its government workforce by 150 on March 1.

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