Management

I'm not qualified to say whether government managers are, on average, better or worse than those in private industry. I've spent my entire career in one agency in the Federal Government. However, I can say that management in that agency has not, on average, been good. I read a recent article that blames the Bush Administration's failure to recruit enough competent top-level executives on the pay disparity with private industry; I don't think that's the problem. For those political appointees, there is no shortage of smart, dedicated, and willing people who are itching to implement the agenda of the President. It's just that this President doesn't seem to be able to pick the ones that will do a good job. I attribute this to bad priorities: this White House prizes personal loyalty first, party loyalty second, and ideological purity third. Competence is way down the list.

In any hierarchical organization, the tone is set at the top. A friend who had a high-level job at FEMA recounted how Joe Allbaugh (G W Bush's first FEMA Director) wasted no time alienating the staff with his arrogance and ignorance of the job. He then proceeded to make decisions based primarily on politics. Michael Brown (forever to be remembered as "Brownie") continued in the same vein. These are not stupid people; they are just incompetent at running organizations, and were never focused on the agency's mission. The Homeland Security reorg sealed the fate of anyone who was relying on FEMA to ameliorate the effects of the next big natural disaster. At Interior, another friend reported that Bush's appointees were uniformly sharp, but concentrated on implementing an agenda set not by Congress but the Western States' Legal Foundation. Not only have the nation's parks and natural resources suffered, but there has been a political backlash from ordinary Westerners who have just started to wake up to the true meaning of all that Fed-bashing financed by the timber and mineral extraction interests.

Ideally, the President would choose good administrators who understand and are dedicated to the mission of the agency they'd head. It's pretty simple. Such people exist, too, although when the President opposes the [i]raison d'etre[/i] of an agency, it's unlikely that such a fit will be discovered and maintained. (Christine Whitman did fairly well at the EPA but had to leave when it became clear that Bush did not support the agency's mission.) Politics leads to some spectacularly bad choices, like Bush's first Education secretary. And of course this President's penchant for allowing the White House staff to make all the policy has made cabinet posts less enticing to excellent people. Put it all together and you have a paucity of inspirational leadership at the top levels of government.

Below the political appointees is the Senior Executive Service (SES). They are usually highly responsive to the desires of the political appointees, which can be bad or good depending on those appointees. That's because they don't have the full Civil Service protections, being executives. Unfortunately (and I imagine it's the same in the private sector), these tend to be the people who consider their careers to be their number one priority. They are generally masters at office politics but have little devotion to the mission. That has to be impressed upon them from above, and we already covered why that isn't happening. Left to their own devices, SESers will reorganize themselves into better jobs, throwing their agencies into turmoil, at the first excuse. They will think up flashy projects to make their marks and reputations, and will leave their jobs before they have to deliver. They will try to impress potential future employers in the private sector by throwing them large contracts. They're not dumb or crooked or evil; they're just personally ambitious.

Middle management consists of a mixture of SESers-in-waiting, burnouts, and good competent managers. They too will usually respond to SES direction. Unfortunately, that direction often takes the form of telling them to implement the SESer's self-aggrandizing ideas. Line managers are all too often good technicians promoted into a job they dislike and aren't good at so they can make more money, but there are a lot of good managers here, and some with ambitions to be in middle management or higher. Line managers are not as responsive to direction, on average, due to their proximity to the employees in the hierarchy whom they have to get to do the actual work. It's not easy to be a line manager anywhere. In the government, they are faced with our personnel system, which makes it extremely difficult to hire, fire, or move employees. Most take the easy way out and give everyone great evaluations, and assign the work to those who will do it while allowing the slackers to coast without penalty.

Like I say, it has to come from the top. I'm skeptical that personnel "reforms" will do much good as long as the entire bureaucracy is seen by its boss ( the President) as a necessary evil which may as well be staffed by loyalists with questionable credentials. But there is no doubt that it is just too hard to discipline employees for nonperformance, and too cumbersome to hire people. By the time we get around to selecting someone from outside, they've already found another job in the private sector. So my prescription boils down to: electing a President who takes government very seriously and who will prize competence and dedication to the agency's mission above personal loyalty; get busy on hiring a raft of good young people who will be the backbone of the Federal bureaucracy in the coming decades; and instilling a dedication to the agency's mission to the entire hierarchy. Basic stuff, but it isn't common today.

Curses--Scooped by the Post

This is what procrastination gets you--the loss of the chance to say "you heard it hear first". I've been intending to write about the coming wave of Federal retirements (referred to more picturesquely below as a "tsunami") and what it means for the country. But something else was always more important. Well, this morning's Post makes it clear that I was not the only one concerned about this, and someone in authority is even making a stab at trying to do something about it--or at least look as though something's being done.

OK, how big a deal can it be, you might ask? It's just a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats, after all. There are more where they came from, right?

Well, yeah, there are more. But the govt isn't looking for them (see below) and doesn't make it easy to join. There has also been a twenty year push for contracting out governmental functions, which I am convinced has inhibited hiring initiatives. Consequently, when I walk the halls here in the IRS offices in New Carrollton (which I sometimes refer to as "Castle Greyskull"), most of the people I see are over 50. The number one social activity is retirement parties, and the number one topic of conversation is how long we have to work before we can go out on full retirement. (Nine and a half months, though I almost certainly won't leave as soon as I'm eligible--thanks for asking.) The managers are the same age and have the same preoccupation.

A little background on Federal retirement regs is in order; I'll keep it short. Until the mid-80s, all Federal workers were in the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). It's a sweet deal. We don't pay Social Security taxes (we won't get it either, unless we earned it somewhere else), and have 7% deducted from our pay. If one has 30 years in at age 55, one can retire at about 60% of the average of one's last three years pay. Work longer, and that percentage goes up 2% a year. There are complications, but that's basically it. In 1987, all new employees were enrolled in FERS (Federal Employees Retirement System), and the existing employees were given a chance to switch--only a few did. FERS is still quite generous. SS is deducted, and retirees get it. There is an additional pension. And there is a matching contribution of up to 5% of salary to the Thrift Savings Plan, our 401k. The major drawback is that full retirement comes at age 65.

So, you see where I'm headed. The Federal workforce has been downsizing for decades, meaning that we don't have a lot of younger people. The people that make up the bulk of the civil service are the last of the CSRS employees and have been thoroughly disgusted with the poor quality of management and Presidential leadership. Every President from Carter on has run against Washington and has made it a priority to downsize the civil service, farming out our jobs to private contractors that we know damned well don't do it as well (because we end up cleaning up their messes). We eagerly anticipate leaving, and many come back as contractors for a few years at a pay increase (plus we get the pension--many easily double their income).

Why is this bad? Look at FEMA. One of their big problems was the loss of experienced CSRSers who could not stand the arrogant incompetence of Allbaugh and Brown. It didn't have the depth of experience to cope with the next big emergency. In my own agency, I see a dropoff in quality and quantity of work. The executives have for many years been awful, and many had one eye on their future with contractors after they went through the revolving door. But now we're losing people right and left, and in their last years the commitment level drops too as they anticipate their exits. I find it easier all the time to go half speed, and I work on the stuff that interests me first. (Fortunately, there is a good bit of such work.) And I've become one of those guys who thinks daily of how great it would be to retire at the ripe old age of 55, when I can still ride my bike (it's beautiful out today) and am healthy. Money is fine, but time is what life is made of and spending it here seems more and more like wasting it.

But enough about me. The only way out of this is to recruit, and to show that the nation values its workforce. We're paid enough, and the benefits are great. What we need most is decent management (next post) and leadership. John Kennedy made people in government feel as though what they did mattered. Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush made us feel as though we were part of the problem (though Reagan and the second Bush were by far the worst offenders, they all acted as though they were ambivalent about being our boss). The President needs to stick up for us against meddling Congressmen and greedy contractors, and in return demand commitment and quality. Most Feds would cheer if a few thousand of the worst slackers were fired--we have to do their work in addition to our own.

Well, here's the article that scooped me.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100631.html

Civil Service Steps Up Recruitment
Ads
Set to Appear as Survey Finds Students Have Little Knowledge of Federal
Jobs
By Zachary A. Goldfarb and Christopher LeeWashington
Post Staff WritersTuesday, May 2, 2006; Page A19

Civil service leaders announced a media campaign yesterday to lure talented applicants to the federal workforce at the same time that a new study says the government needs to do a
more effective job of recruiting college students for federal jobs.
Linda M. Springer, director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the agency will
begin airing four 30-second television ads featuring federal employees touting
the work they do and encouraging viewers to explore job opportunities at http://www.usajobs.gov/ . The ads come as the federal government faces an unprecedented wave of retirements among the baby-boom generation, with about 60 percent of the government's 1.8 million workers eligible to retire over the next 10 years.

"We often call it the retirement tsunami," Springer said. "We've got to get ready for
it."However, the new study by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, scheduled for release today, shows that federal officials have often failed to reach out to a group of people
who might be expected to fill the jobs of departing civil servants: university students.
The partnership, whose mission is to entice talented people to consider federal careers, found that university students -- as measured by the responses of juniors, seniors and engineering
graduate students at six universities -- say they lack the knowledge of federal jobs and
internships necessary to map out career decisions.
Specifically, 54 percent of students said they did not feel knowledgeable about federal
opportunities, compared with 13 percent who said they were very or extremely
knowledgeable. Forty-two percent of students said they were very interested in
federal jobs, slightly less than the percentage who said they were interested in
private-sector spots.

Students said their biggest concern about taking a job in government was too much bureaucracy.
The OPM ads and the report come as the difficulty of maintaining a skilled federal workforce is building. The problem is especially critical at the uppermost levels of career bureaucrats,
with 90 percent of Senior Executive Service members eligible to retire in the next decade.
Max Stier, president of the partnership, said the next generation of federal workers will think differently about their career paths than the generation that is about to retire. "The generation that's leaving" believed in a system in which "they came into government for lifetime
employment," Stier said. "The model no longer works today. This is a problem
the government has never had to address before."
Springer acknowledged the new demands yesterday, saying the government must offer more flexible work arrangements. "We can't just bank on employees today in the 21st century that
want to come work in a bricks-and-mortar building and stay there for 20, 30
or 40 years," she said. "It's not going to happen."
The partnership's report urges the government to create substantive relationships with colleges and universities, pool resources of agencies to recruit for certain careers, stress
the public-service component of government work and tailor recruitment with as
much face-to-face effort as possible. Springer also said OPM and other
agencies must redouble their efforts to simplify the red-tape-laden federal
hiring process, which is notorious for leaving job applicants in the dark for
months. And OPM is encouraging workers who could retire over the next few years
to stick around longer, perhaps through new part-time arrangements.
An area of acute concern is workers with technical skills. The Defense Department
needs to hire 6,000 engineers annually, while various agencies need 2,000
information technology experts, according to the partnership. About 12,500 new
air traffic controllers will be needed over the next 10 years. At the same time,
scientific proficiency in U.S. schools is not keeping pace with that in foreign
schools.
"The numbers are dramatic," said Doris Hausser, an OPM senior policy
adviser. "The university systems of foreign competitors are generating engineers
and scientists at a much higher rate than we are. That's not to say we don't
have good engineering schools, but what needs to happen is for federal agencies
to establish good working relationships with the departments at some of these
schools."
The partnership's report said engineering students tend to be less interested in federal jobs than others, with only a quarter having actually sought information about them.
The report reflects the views of 3,200 students who responded to a survey sent to about 31,000 students at Clark Atlanta University, George Washington University, Louisiana State, Ohio State,
Stanford and the University of New Mexico. At Ohio State, only language and
engineering students were surveyed...

I Must Be Doing Something Right

Well, we started our configuration control board. The big boss is refusing to attend, and by the charter she is the only one who can make decisions. This is a huge handicap, of course, but she's appointed my division director to act as chair for her, although of course not to make the actual decisions. Our CIO has commanded all of his direct reports to chair their own CCBs, so my big boss is basically telling him to go screw himself. I don't think he has it figured out. I'm the CCB's "secretariat", which is not a racehorse but the person who takes minutes, sends out the agenda, and makes sure the right people get to the meetings prepared to discuss the right things.

So how do I know I'm doing something right? Easy. I got cursed out by one of the big boss's little butt-boys yesterday. I had the effrontery to contest his non-negotiable demand to exempt a purchase he was working on from the CCB. He got increasingly testy in emails, and ignored my phone calls for a couple hours. Then he called and asked me into his office. He started by trying to snow me, then gradualted to attempting to intimidate me. This is only the second time he's spoken to me, so he did not know how unlikely either tactic was to work with me. After a half hour of his expletive-laced haranguing, he started accusing me of "sniping" and lapsed into repeating the word 'shit' every fourth word. He was barely coherent; indeed much of the previous ten minutes was almost as bad. Anyhow, I stood up, said "This conversation is over," and walked out. It turns out that the big boss pulled the plug on his little scheme that morning, and I suspect it had something to do with the fact that they couldn't really avoid the CCB.

You see, up until now the big boss has had a small coterie of contracts and budget people make decisions on purchases. They have a pet contracting officer who does whatever they ask, whether it's legal or not. They never compete anything, and everything starts as an unsolicited proposal from a vendor who is just dying to save us money. I can't figure out whether they're just really stupid, or have some sort of other motivation; but in almost every case, we end up paying more after the new contract than we did before for the same thing. And after every one of these rotten deals, they loudly proclaim the big lie that they've saved money.

Meanwhile, our maintenance and service contracts are expiring left and right without replacements, because they were spending all their time figuring out ways to shovel money into new purchases with the vendors they are so chummy with. (They play our people like violins--it's pretty disgusting.) It is an almost unbelievable mess--it's as though they were trying to screw the government.

Well, the contracts people were just transferred to my boss a couple weeks ago. They used to work directly for the big boss, and the excrement was about to hit the fan, so she wanted a little distance, I guess. Now we're trying to rein in the worst actors and get them to do their jobs right. Really, there's just one who's done the big damage. The others are salvageable, with decent management, but this guy is going to persist in his ways until we force him out, I fear. He can retire any time, and every time he whines to me (which he does every time I see him) I tell him he should think of his health and get out. We'd be so much better off if he left.

It's not an ideal situation. It's actually a pretty bad situation. But there is some chance that it will get better now, a good chance. I'm going to keep plugging away. Yesterday we saved a half-million a year just by shining a flashlight at the baseboards. Things are looking up.