April 18, 2008

A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.

1. Federal Diary:  Morale at Homeland Security Still Shaky After Five Years
2. Army Contracting Command to Hire Midcareer Employees, Interns
3. Dozens of Federal Health Plans Require High Payments for Specialty Drugs
4. Virtual Networks: An Opportunity for Government

Morale at Homeland Security Still Shaky After Five Years

The Washington Post
By Stephen Barr

Most employees at the Department of Homeland Security like their work, believe it is important and cooperate with others to get the job done. That, no doubt, is a great comfort to the department's senior leaders.

But the leadership can take no pleasure in findings that show roughly half of employees are troubled by the department's pay and promotion practices.

These attitudes were captured in a new employee survey at Homeland Security, the results of which will be released to the department's workforce. In the survey, nearly 55 percent of respondents said they did not agree that pay raises depend on job performance, 45 percent did not think promotions are based on merit, and 42 percent did not believe creativity and innovation are rewarded.

To a large degree, these workforce views have not changed from five years ago, when the department began operating. That is especially troubling to officials in the department's big law enforcement agencies, which are essential to improving the nation's border security and thwarting terrorist attacks.

For example, when asked whether "pay raises depend on how well employees do their jobs," nearly 60 percent of those surveyed at Customs and Border Protection responded with what the report labeled "negative" views. The question also drew negative responses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (54.6 percent), the Secret Service (52.5 percent) and the Transportation Security Administration (54.9 percent).

Employees at these law enforcement agencies were slightly less negative about their chances for winning a promotion and getting recognized for their creativity. A substantial number appeared to be uncertain how they felt or had no opinion. On the pay, promotion and creativity questions, about one in four employees opted to check "neutral" as a response.

For the 2007 survey, the department received completed forms from 65,753 of 141,160 eligible employees, a response rate of 47 percent.

The survey suggested that the department may be losing ground in some areas even as it improves in others.

For example, 49 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with their salaries, compared with 55 percent in 2006. Only 32 percent said they were satisfied by their level of involvement in decisions that affect their work, down seven percentage points from 2006.

But 62 percent agreed that their workload is reasonable, up from 55 percent. And 29 percent said differences in performance were recognized by their bosses "in a meaningful way," up from 22 percent in 2006.

The survey report offered no detailed analysis of what the findings mean. But it noted that employees rated twice as many survey items as problem areas than as strengths. "Not surprisingly, supervisors were more positive than nonsupervisors," the report said.

The report, prepared by a consultant, includes recommendations for follow-up action, such as using town hall meetings and focus groups to identify where improvements are needed. "It is extremely important," the report said, that any efforts to address employee issues include rank-and-file workers.

Army Contracting Command to Hire Midcareer Employees, Interns

Federal Times
By Elise Castelli

The Army plans to hire about 1,300 civilian employees over the next three years to award, execute and oversee more than $80 billion in contracts.

The Army Contracting Command's human capital plan calls for hiring 700 federal employees to fill gaps in the midcareer acquisition work force. Another 200 interns will be hired in each of the next three years. The goal is to maintain the current strength of the acquisition work force as more than 40 percent of the Army's acquisition work force becomes eligible to retire in the next five years, said Jeffrey Parsons, executive director of the Army Contracting Command, told Federal Times in an April 17 interview.

The new command, which was provisionally set up Feb. 29 under the control of Army Materiel Command, implements a recommendation made last year by a Pentagon commission, led by former Defense acquisition chief Jacques Gansler. The commission found the Army needs more contract support to battle fraud and abuse in contracts for the Iraq war.

Under the hiring plan, the Army will target retired military personnel with contracting experience and contracting employees from other federal agencies and industry, Parsons said. The Army will also partner with business schools to create co-op programs and incorporate Defense Department contract training into business degree curricula. Parsons said this will help ensure there is a ready-to-hire cadre of young acquisition personnel who already have their first level of certifications.

The Army has also requested direct hire authority and relocation incentives to make career opportunities in the command more competitive with the private sector and other agencies, he said.

Approximately 4,400 current Army Contracting Agency and Army Material Command employees, both military and civilian, fall under the new contracting command. Once the work force is brought up to strength through the hiring program, the Army Contracting Command will include 5,800 people, Parsons said. About 1,000 will be military.

Parsons plans to create 400 new military billets split among enlisted, warrant officers and commissioned officers. Most of the Army's current military contracting personnel are commissioned officers who had more than seven years in the service before they began contract training. Not only will the new human capital plan diversify the ranks, it will also start contracting training sooner, after five years in the service, Parsons said.

"Over the next four to five years we really want to develop a group of military people who can deploy and support the war fighter and fill the shortcomings identified by the Gansler Commission," Parsons said.

Most of the military contracting personnel, and some civilians, will make up expeditionary contracting teams that will deploy alongside troops to meet contract support needs, Parsons said. When not deployed, the expeditionary teams will perform contracting duties at military installations and major acquisition offices alongside civilian personnel, he said.

Both military and civilian acquisition personnel will receive special expeditionary contracting training. In addition, duties will be tracked to ensure all contracting command employees are exposed to and able to handle a variety of contract types, Parsons said.

The Army is also creating training for combat commanders so they can better plan for the use of battlefield contract support and so they know whom to turn to in order to manage contractors and execute contracts, he said.

The hiring plan still requires final approval from the Army, which Parsons expects to have by the end of May.

Dozens of Federal Health Plans Require High Payments for Specialty Drugs

Government Executive
By Alyssa Rosenberg

More than 87,000 federal employees have health insurance that requires them to pay higher prices for certain specialized drugs than they would under standard co-payment systems, Government Executive has learned. And more insurers may turn to such pricing plans.

"This is going to be an ongoing problem," said Lorraine Dettman, assistant director for insurance services programs at the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. "The cost of these specialty drugs can be enormous. The question becomes what is the industry going to do about those costs? It's very expensive for individuals to bear [them], but it's also very expensive for group programs, even as a shared cost."

Government Executive's research was prompted by an April 14 New York Times report on insurance companies that now require customers to pay a percentage of the full price of some drugs that treat diseases -- including anemia, hepatitis C, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and certain kinds of cancers -- rather than charging set co-payments that are unrelated to the drug's actual cost. The insurance companies determine which drugs fall into different pricing tiers.

Until recently, one of those companies was Kaiser Permanente. The company announced on April 11 that it was suspending such a pricing system that it had introduced this year in its Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic States, which covers more than 63,000 federal employees in Washington, Maryland and Virginia. That system required members to pay 25 percent of the cost of drugs that fell into Kaiser's highest pricing tier -- up to a maximum of $325 per prescription at pharmacies run by the company -- and 30 percent of the price up to $375 per prescription at pharmacies affiliated with the company.

Kaiser's plan was not the only one to employ a percentage pricing system for these drugs. A review by Government Executive of all the plans offered through FEHBP found that in 2008, 49 plans covering employees in 20 states, Puerto Rico and the Foreign Service, require enrollees to pay a percentage of the price of so-called Tier 4 or Tier 5 drugs. Last year, 87,242 federal employees and their families were enrolled in those plans. (Click here for a full list of the plans.)

Some of those plans cap the total cost of a single refill, while others set ceilings for total out-of-pocket expenses on prescriptions. Kaiser's cap per refill was higher than the ceiling set by other plans.

To read the entire article, click here.

Virtual Networks: An Opportunity for Government

The Public Manager
By Frank DiGiammarino and Lena Trudeau

Today's government relies on a broad network that extends beyond other public-sector entities to include the private sector, nonprofit organizations, community groups, and individual citizens. Government entities need to work effectively across boundaries that impede the collaboration and information sharing required to innovate and change.

"Virtualizing" these networks gives government the opportunity to extend outside its institutions and employ the resources of nongovernmental organizations and the citizenry at large. It also provides government leaders with new ways to reach deeper into their own organizations to leverage the wealth of information and ideas that reside there, stifled by the natural hierarchy of government and the "operating silos" that hierarchy has created.

The key to understanding this new model lies in the increasing power of computing and the way this enables a new generation of Web based applications--known as Web 2.0, or the interactive Web--to harness collective intelligence. The virtual network is replete with a new lexicon of tools like social bookmarking, wikis, blogs, really simple syndication (RSS) feeds, and the ability to "tag" keywords throughout a document. Yet the power of this phenomenon does not reside in the technology itself, but in its potential as a tool for leaders grappling with industrial-era hierarchies and looking to increase agility, extend reach, and maximize efficiency.

To read the entire article, click here.

The Public Manager offers readers practical solutions for emerging public administration and policy issues from experienced professionals. A forum for developing and disseminating best practices, it encourages continuing excellence in government and nonprofit organizations.  The journal's Web site, http://www.thepublicmanager.org/, features a searchable archive with 35 years of articles, as well as new opportunities to engage fellow managers through electronic forums and blogs.  The spring issue announces the inaugural flagship conference -- Transforming Bureaucratic Cultures: Challenges and Solutions for Public Management Practitioners -- July 28–29 at Baltimore's Renaissance Harborplace Hotel. This conference, held in partnership with the American Society for Public Administration, features a number of practical take-always, including best practices from case illustrations presented in more than 30 panel sessions and sponsored workshops as well as solutions to management challenges such as reaping the strategic benefits of performance-based acquisition, managing virtually in a technology-smart organization, and inter-organizational collaboration in the face of catastrophic disasters.