May 23, 2008
A summary of daily
news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public
Service.
- Graduate-Level Scholarships Aim at 'Mission-Critical' Jobs
- F.A.A. Tests Ways to Detect Runway Junk
- Lawmakers Push for More Diversity at Homeland Security
- Georgetown University and Accenture to Host Panel and Open
Discussion on E-Government
- Celebrate Public Service at a Washington Nationals Game!
Graduate-Level Scholarships Aim at 'Mission-Critical' Jobs
The Washington Post
By Stephen Barr
To help the government attract scientists, doctors, economists and
other highly skilled professionals, two House members yesterday
introduced a bill that would create graduate-level scholarships for
students who commit to public service.
Recipients of the awards would be called Roosevelt Scholars, named for Theodore Roosevelt, the president widely considered to be the father of the
modern civil service.
Reps. David E. Price (D-N.C.) and Christopher Shays
(R-Conn.) teamed up to introduce the legislation, aimed at making the
government more competitive in hiring for what the bill calls
"mission-critical positions."
About a third of the government's
seasoned professional and technical employees will likely retire in the
next five years, according to projections by the Office of Personnel Management.
The baby-boom retirements come as Labor Department forecasts show the
nation's workforce growing at a slower pace, setting off keen
competition for talent in the public, private and nonprofit sectors.
"In
the face of a dwindling professional workforce, we must act now to
recruit the scientists, engineers and other high-level experts who make
our government work," Price said. "Our initiative would mobilize the
country's colleges and universities to address this very acute
challenge."
Shays, noting that the cost of college continues to
rise, said the government needs to "provide resources, like tuition
assistance, in order for these jobs to compete with the salaries
available to top-notch employees in the private sector."
The
Roosevelt Scholars program would provide tuition, room and board, and a
stipend for graduate study, up to $60,000 for an academic year. In
exchange, scholarship recipients would be required to serve an
internship in a federal agency and, upon graduation, serve at least
three years in the government.
The bill would provide $10 million
in initial funding to establish a nonprofit foundation to manage the
scholarships. The foundation would be expected to build an endowment
and become self-sustaining over time.
One of the leading
supporters of the scholarship has been the Partnership for Public
Service, a District-based nonprofit group that sponsors research on the
civil service and promotes efforts to improve the government's
recruitment strategies.
Max Stier, the partnership's
president, said that the military has attracted talented young
Americans through officer training programs on college campuses and
that the Roosevelt scholarship program "is, in essence, a ROTC program for civilians."
The scholarships also would lend prestige to the civil service, Stier said.
"The intent here is to create a brand as attractive and as powerful as the most elite out there," he said.
Shays also is a co-sponsor of legislation that would create a U.S. Public Service Academy, modeled after the U.S. military
academies. It would offer free education to undergraduates in exchange
for their pledge to work for five years in local, state or federal
government jobs.
F.A.A. Tests Ways to Detect Runway Junk
The New York Times
By Matthew Wald
At the edge of Logan International Airport's Runway 15-right, a
technician watched a yellow sensor slowly scan back and forth across
the pavement. He waited until it was pointed away from him and, like a
man dodging a lawn sprinkler, he rushed to the middle of the
150-foot-wide runway, tossed a plastic pen onto the surface, and dashed
back.
The sensor is being tested by the Federal Aviation Administration to
detect "foreign object debris," known as F.O.D., that can damage
airplane engines on takeoff or even lead to plane crashes.
On this occasion, it worked. In less than a minute, a computer in
the control tower half a mile away sounded an alarm in a mechanical
voice: "F.O.D. Alert, F.O.D. Alert."
The camera at the edge of the runway automatically zoomed in on the
pen nearly 75 feet away, and in the image on the computer screen in the
control tower, the computer drew a red box around it to highlight its
location. A co-worker in the tower announced over a radio, "I see a
pen."
Then the two repeated the drill with an 18-inch strip of metal like the one that fell off a Continental Airlines DC-10 at Charles de Gaulle Airport
on July 25, 2000. On that day an Air France
Concorde, departing about four minutes later, ran over the strip and
shredded a tire. Rubber pieces flew against the underside of the wing
so forcefully that the fuel tanks ruptured, and a fire ignited. The
plane crashed into a nearby hotel, killing all 109 people aboard and
four people on the ground.
The Logan test is one of four run by the Federal Aviation
Administration around the country. If the systems turn out to be better
than the human eye, usually watching from behind the windshield of a
car, the F.A.A. intends to publish standards for such systems. Then airports could apply for federal money to buy them.
The exact cost is not clear yet, and the airlines are not eager to
see an airport spend money on anything that could increase landing
fees. But others see obvious benefits.
"Anytime we can keep an engine as near pristine as we can, it adds
to the safety factor," said Thomas J. Kinton Jr., chief executive of
the Massachusetts Port Authority, which operates Logan.
Jet engines are extremely reliable, one of the reasons that air
travel is so safe. But they are vulnerable to foreign objects, and
F.O.D. sucked into engines can cause failure or expensive damage. And
even in cases with little safety risk, the cost of the repairs and of
lost time for the aircraft runs into the billions of dollars a year,
according to estimates by Boeing and the F.A.A..
Part of the problem is birds, but a major cause is debris that could be cleaned off a runway if it were located promptly.
Jim Patterson Jr., an airport safety specialist with the F.A.A., is
running a program to determine how reliably a mechanical system can
detect small objects. The Concorde crash added urgency to the effort
but F.O.D. has been a problem for years, he said.
Experts say the Concorde was more vulnerable than most airliners,
but so are military planes, many of which have only one engine, only
one tire on each landing gear, and engines that are very close to the
ground.
One of the four systems being tested by the F.A.A., built by Xsight
Systems, of Rosh Haayin, Israel, uses both a camera and a radar, and is
installed adjacent to runway edge lights, one every 200 feet.
F.A.A. rules prohibit anything tall next to the runway, and the
runway is crowned like a road, to help water drain, so the Xsight
system being tested at Logan needs one on either side.
In the current test, there are seven monitors, covering about 1,000
feet at the northwest end of the runway. Both the camera and the radar
compare their data to an image of a clean runway, and look for changes.
Software developed by Oded Hanson, the co-worker in the tower during
the system test, helps the computer ignore things that are supposed to
be there, like airplanes.
A few miles away, in Providence, R.I., the F.A.A. is testing a
competing system built by QinetiQ, of Farnborough, England, which uses
radar alone, on pylons near the runway. It has been used at Vancouver
International Airport in Canada for two years.
On March 12 the Vancouver system found a 30-foot long steel
grounding cable, the type used to dissipate static electricity in
fueling operations. The system has previously found everything from
paper bags to feathers, but the cable was "potentially very hazardous,"
said Brett Patterson, director of aviation operations there. Damage
that it could have caused might have exceeded for the cost the system,
he said.
Mr. Patterson said he could not give an exact figure, but the system sold for $2 million to $3 million a runway.
And in March, at Midway in Chicago, the agency began testing a
system built by the Trex Enterprises Corporation of San Diego that is
mounted on top of a truck and can be driven down the runway, and also
over taxiways and into ramp areas in front of the gates. . It uses a
radar and an infrared camera.
At O'Hare in Chicago, the F.A.A. is testing a fourth system, by
Stratech Systems Ltd. of Singapore that uses a high-resolution camera
mounted at a central location.
For all the systems, the F.A.A. uses a set of test objects that
includes fuel tank caps, chunks of concrete and pieces of airport
signs. At Logan, testers have painted dots on the runways where they
drop the test objects, so they can run the evaluation the same way on
successive days, to see how it works in direct sun with shadows, in
rain and snow, and shimmering heat.
They also put objects at various angles, to see how that affects the
ability of each system to see them. More testing may be needed for
objects peculiar to particular airports; at Logan, for example, sea
gulls drop clams on the runway; other airports have problems like
tumbleweed.
One question is whether the probability of detecting an object
mechanically is higher than with the human eye. Current practice is for
airport personnel to drive down the runway every two hours or so. But
an automated system has another advantage over the human eyeball,
because sending a truck out to look raises the risk of runway
collision.
An inspection every two hours is not nearly frequent enough to head
off a chain of events like the one in the Concorde crash. A system that
detects debris within seconds gives the airport a chance to warn the
airline that one of its planes has shed parts, said Alon Nitzan,
president and chief executive of Xsight.
It would also help establish liability. In the Concorde case, that
could turn out to be criminal; a judge in Paris is expected to decide
this summer whether to proceed with involuntary homicide charges
against two employees of Continental, one official of the company that
built the Concorde and one French air safety regulator. The legal issue
is whether the four men did everything they should have to assure
safety.
Xsight hopes to mass-produce an inexpensive system by using radar
already in production for cars and trucks, and used in advanced cruise
control. In that application it slows the car down if it senses traffic
ahead.
When it spots debris, it uses a laser pointer to guide an airport
worker to its location. In contrast, pilots often report runway debris
to the tower, but their description of the location is less reliable,
because it is often given as they speed down the runway at over 100
miles an hour.
F.O.D. is a hazard all over the airfield but damage can be larger at
the beginning of the runway, which is where the Boston system is being
tested, said Brad Bachtel, manager of airport technology at Boeing.
That is where pilots open jets to full throttle, so they can suck in
as much air as possible and thus are "at maximum Hoover factor," he
said.
Lawmakers Push for More Diversity at Homeland Security
Government Executive
By Alyssa Rosenberg
Lawmakers called on the Homeland
Security Department to do more to increase workforce diversity during a
House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Wednesday. Democrats said
a number of racial incidents suggested that despite an array of
programs to recruit diverse applicant pools, DHS was a long way from
fully accepting diversity as core value.
"I can say that there is
a lack of diversity. I can say that these incidents happened. I can say
that with only one exception, those who carried out these actions were
not disciplined," said Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie
Thompson, D-Miss. "My concern is that this lack of diversity coupled
with low morale will hamper this department's mission effectiveness.
And that is too high a price to pay."
The incidents Thompson and
others referred to include racist e-mails circulated by 20 Secret
Service supervisors, a noose placed in the workspace of an
African-American Coast Guard cadet, and an Immigration and Customs
Enforcement Halloween party in which an employee came dressed as an
African-American prisoner. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said she
was particularly disturbed by the Secret Service e-mails, one of which
joked about the potential assassination of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and
said she hoped the committee would further investigate racial bias in
the Secret Service.
Despite those incidents, Elaine Duke,
undersecretary for management at DHS, said the department recognizes
both the moral imperative and the business case for diversity.
"Expanding
diversity such as gender, geographic, economic, ethnic and veteran
representation of this workforce will increase the variety of available
skills and knowledge that can be employed in pursuit of the
department's success, thereby bringing greater benefit to the American
public," Duke said.
George Staculp, director of strategic issues
at the Government Accountability Office, said DHS' efforts to increase
diversity, which include outreach to historically black colleges,
regional internship programs, career training, partnerships with
minority senior executive associations, and expanded mentoring and
coaching initiatives are "consistent with several leading diversity
management practices." Duke said performance reviews under the new
evaluation system implemented in October will rate managers on their
efforts to promote diversity.
GAO's workforce analysis
suggests that DHS is more diverse in some areas than the rest of
government. Hispanic representation is more than 10 percent higher than
the governmentwide average. DHS' workforce is 14.6 percent Hispanic men
and 4.9 percent Hispanic women, compared with 3.6 percent and 3.1
percent, respectively, for the rest of government. African-American men
comprise 7.1 percent of DHS employees, compared with 6.9 percent
governmentwide. But the department still lags behind the rest of
government in employing African-American and white women.
Rep.
Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said he was disappointed that legal restrictions,
limitations on hiring authorities and the requirement that applicants
go through USAJobs.gov to apply for most positions prevented DHS from pursuing minority
applicants more aggressively.
DHS'
overall record on race is "absolutely unacceptable," complained Rep.
Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J. "We should have the secretary here, because
he does a lot of talking about how wonderfully everything is shaping
up....Let's call it the way it is."
Georgetown University and Accenture to Host Panel and Open Discussion on E-Government
www.gppidialogue.com
Join Georgetown University and Accenture on June 5th for their third session in a series for public managers and policy makers to discuss the
managerial, technical, and leadership challenges of implementing large-scale policy and management change. The discussion will focus on the future of
e-government and how government can better serve the public. Panelists include Cary Conglianese, University of Pennsylvania; Karen Evans, Office of
Management and Budget; Patrice McDermott, OpenTheGovernment.org; John Moses, Environmental Protection Agency; and moderator John Koskinen, Former
Deputy Director, Office of Management and Budget. Click here to RSVP.
The session will take place at 5:30 p.m. in the Faculty Dining Room of the Eric E. Hotung International Law Building at The Georgetown Law Center.
Please visit www.gppidialogue.com for more details.
Celebrate Public Service at a Washington Nationals Game!
The Partnership for Public Service
Join the Washington Nationals and the Partnership for Public Service as we celebrate public service this summer -- come cheer the Nationals on to
victory! Get discounted tickets for three summer games -- click here to purchase
through the Partnership for Public Service. You do not need to be a federal employee
to receive this discount.
Discounted tickets are available for games on:
- Saturday, May 24 vs. Milwaukee Brewers
- Saturday, July 12 vs. Houston Astros
- Saturday, September 20 vs. San Diego Padres
Discounted ticket prices are:
- RF Mezzanine: $33 (Normally $38)
- Scoreboard Pavilion: $24 (Normally $29)
- Upper Infield Gallery: $15 (Normally $20)
