May 14, 2008

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

1. New President May Face Chain of Meltdowns
2. Federal Diary: Executives Less Satisfied With Pay and Puzzled by Ratings
3. Army Test is First Step Toward Automated Clearances
4. Celebrate Public Service at a Washington Nationals Game!

New President May Face Chain of Meltdowns

Politico
By Paul C. Light
 
Except for the occasional swipe at business as usual in Washington, the 2008 campaign has been devoid of the slightest attention to the recent meltdowns in government — the tainted meat, toxic toys, aircraft groundings, contract fraud, counterfeit Heparin or formaldehyde-soaked trailers.

Who knows why? Barack Obama's children are young enough to play with lead-painted toys, John McCain is a former Navy pilot who has personal experience with airplane crashes, and Hillary Rodham Clinton has eaten more hamburgers on the road than Popeye’s friend, Wimpy.

The problem is that the federal government is perilously close to the breaking point. Unless the next president takes the lead in fixing government, he or she will preside over a string of meltdowns that will make the federal response to Hurricane Katrina look like a minor mistake.

Just imagine for a moment the worst possible circumstances for running a high-performing government.

First, the federal government would be given missions that stretch well beyond its resources. Asked to do more with less, federal employees would eventually be forced to do everything with almost nothing. Old missions would never fade away, even as new missions would suck up scarce resources.

Second, the federal government would be governed by a chain of command that defies logic. Built upon the belief that more leaders would create better leadership, the federal hierarchy would be stocked with needless layers of management and ample opportunities for political interference. There would be so many deputy associate assistant deputy secretaries, assistant associate undersecretaries and assistant assistant secretaries (repetition intended) that no one could be held accountable for what goes right or wrong in government.

Third, the federal government would be led by presidential appointees selected through a process that guarantees delays, vacancies and embarrassment. It would ask nominees to fill out 60 pages of forms listing every detail of their personal lives, including short trips to Canada and Mexico, the names and birthplaces of long dead relatives and in-laws, and any traffic fine over $150. And pity the paranoid nominees who are now asked whether anyone, fairly or unfairly, overtly or covertly, will oppose their nominations.

Fourth, many federal employees would be motivated more by pay and compensation than the chance to make a difference. The civil service system would be slow and confusing in its hiring, permissive in giving promotions, reluctant to penalize poor performance, and penurious in giving the federal service the technology, information, employees, and training to do its job well. Federal employees would estimate that roughly a quarter of their co-workers are not doing their jobs well and would rate their leaders as mediocre at best. "Heck of a job, Brownie" would be long gone from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but his spirit would live on in the DNA of appointees selected solely for their loyalty.

Finally, federal employees would share accountability with a hidden work force of contractors and grantees that disguises the true size of government and diffuses accountability for what goes right and wrong. This shadow work force would grow by more than almost half to nearly 10 million during the war on terror, but it would be nearly impossible to hold it accountable for even egregious failures on the launch pad or in the streets of Baghdad. Under constant harassment from the president’s henchmen, government’s oversight agencies such as the office of inspector general would be unable to keep up with the number of huge contracts awarded without the slightest competition.

Unfortunately, this is not just the worst case for creating a government well executed. It is the reality of the federal government today: The federal government can no longer guarantee the faithful execution of all the laws. As Alexander Hamilton warned, "a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be in practice a bad government."

The place to start building a government well executed is to talk about it. Instead of frittering away their time on gasoline tax holidays or complaining about congressional earmarks, the three candidates should put their government reform ideas on the table.

The media should also start asking about the recent meltdowns and why none of the candidates has said word one about the shortages of food and airplane inspectors, tax collectors, passenger screeners, and Social Security claims representatives. For every $1 billion that the next president might save by trimming earmarks, he or she could recapture roughly $25 billion in unpaid taxes. But that would require more tax collectors. Any candidates ready to make that pledge?

Finally, Americans should stop pretending that the federal government can succeed without an immediate infusion of the resources to do its job. Either that, or start a betting pool on the next government meltdown. It is coming soon to front pages everywhere.

Executives Less Satisfied With Pay and Puzzled by Ratings

The Washington Post
By Stephen Barr

Federal executives are less satisfied with their pay than they were two years ago, and many don't understand how their raises and bonuses are linked to job performance ratings.

Those were two of the key findings of a survey of the Senior Executive Service, the government's senior leaders who oversee the day-to-day operations of the government, released yesterday by the Office of Personnel Management.

Congress and the Bush administration placed the SES in a pay-for-performance system four years ago to emphasize the importance of job performance and to provide higher salaries for executives. Under the system, executives are not guaranteed annual raises and are not entitled to the locality pay adjustments that go to most other white-collar federal employees.

The system got off to a shaky start, in part because it was poorly explained or poorly implemented in a number of agencies. Members of Congress, including Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), have urged the administration to do a better job of administering the system to instill confidence that performance-based pay can work in the government.

Yesterday, two OPM officials who oversaw the survey, Nancy H. Kichak and Nancy E. Randa, said they were disappointed by the responses on how well agencies had briefed and trained executives on their pay system.

Sixty-one percent of the survey respondents said they had not been given a summary of how their agency had rated executives and how bonuses and pay raises were distributed among executives. More than a third said they had not received a briefing or training on their agency's performance management system.

"We believe communication should be quick," Kichak said. "People like to have feedback on how things went very shortly after the ratings cycle."

Carol A. Bonosaro, president of the Senior Executives Association, said: "This is not rocket science, to give all these people a copy of the agency's executive compensation plan, their SES performance management plan and the summary data with regard to ratings, bonus awards and pay adjustments. Why some agencies are doing a reasonably good job and others are not is a really interesting question."

In the survey, 61 percent of the respondents said they were satisfied with their pay, down from 73 percent in 2006.

The survey does not explain the drop off, but Kichak said that some executives have hit the maximum they may receive under the law and that some agencies impose other limits on executive pay. Recent increases in SES pay have lagged behind those for other white-collar federal employees, another possible cause of dissatisfaction.

More than a quarter of the executives said they did not understand how their most recent raise or bonus was determined at their agency.

There are about 7,000 federal executives in the government; the majority are career employees, but the SES ranks include political appointees and experts brought in on term appointments. The survey drew responses from 4,386 executives, and the survey's margin of error was less than 1 percent, the OPM said.

On Board and In Sync

A nonprofit group has started briefing departments and agencies on the importance of properly "onboarding" new employees, after releasing a report showing that the government and new employees could benefit from well-run orientations.

The Partnership for Public Service report found that orientation programs typically concentrate on administrative matters such as filling out paperwork. What's needed, it said, is a more comprehensive approach that involves teaching new employees about the agency's mission and culture, including how employees relate to each other and to outside groups, how collaborative the workplace is and how performance is rewarded.

Studies of private-sector employers, plus anecdotal evidence from agencies, show that good onboarding programs improve retention and get new workers up to full performance levels sooner, said Max Stier, president of the partnership. "There's some set of folks that are leaving because it was not a good fit, but you can also infer that there are some who are leaving because they were not effectively engaged by their employer."

The report, produced in conjunction with the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm, recommends that new employees be assigned a sponsor who can help integrate them into the organization, and that senior leadership, managers and supervisors become personally involved in the transition and not leave the task to the human resources office.

Army Test is First Step Toward Automated Clearances

Federal Times
By Courtney Mabeus

The Bush administration will launch a pilot program this summer as a first step toward automating the government’s process of approving security clearances.

The program will process and evaluate applications for Army clearances by combining the functions of the Office of Personnel Management’s e-QIP system, which allows applicants to electronically submit security clearance documents, and the Defense Department’s Automated Continuing Evaluation System (ACES), which can automatically query government and commercial databases to assess a person’s criminal, financial and other records.

The pilot will enable program officials to develop performance metrics and better understand the challenges for a governmentwide automated clearance approval system, said Beth McGrath, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for business transformation and co-leader of the Joint Security and Sustainability Reform Team that is overseeing the project.

The pilot, which McGrath expects to complete by the end of September, is part of a massive overhaul of the 50-year-old, paper-based system to process security clearance approvals in a more timely fashion.

The Office of Management and Budget announced plans to pursue an automated system May 1.

Procurement of an IT system for the project could begin by the end of the year, said Clay Johnson, OMB’s deputy director for management. The cost is not yet known.

In the meantime, the biggest challenges will be redeveloping current security clearance policies — determining which agencies will be responsible for which parts of the process and determining how it will work — and rewriting the Standard Form 86 questionnaire used to apply for a national security clearance.

"This is all technologically possible," Johnson said. "Certainly the will is there, the need is there, the willingness by all agencies to play nice together and implement this thing is there."

Automating the system to perform checks of basic records, including address and financial history, could clear roughly one-quarter of the secret-level security clearances without requiring a second look by investigators, Johnson said. The plan also would allow for continual automated evaluation of cleared individuals, rather than the current practice of re-examining each case every few years according to the level of security clearance held.

The plan to automate the clearance process followed several tests that ran existing federal procedures through private companies’ automated systems to compare results, said John Fitzpatrick, director of the ODNI Special Security Center. Fitzpatrick is also a co-leader of the automation project team.

"The general rule was, it had to be at least as good as what we do today," Fitzpatrick said.

The plan pleases industry leaders, who have clamored for an automated reform of the system for years.

"What we like is, they’ve decided on a way forward," Trey Hodgkins, vice president for federal government programs at the Information Technology Association of America, said last week. "We've got an outline of a plan. We have to start filling in that plan."

Brendan Peter, senior director for industry affairs at LexisNexis, said his company is eyeing opportunities for involvement. LexisNexis compiles public and other records into a searchable database and offers automated background checks to business customers. Some agencies use LexisNexis for eligibility checks for such services as Medicare, he said, but the company has not been involved in security checks.

"That's the type of case that we've been making for the better part of 10 years and that's why we're so gratified that this is being put out there," Peter said.

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)