campaigns : Campaign Archive

April 25, 2008

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

Bush Plan To Contract Federal Jobs Falls Short
Texas Coverup Is Latest FAA Black Eye
Only 3 Percent of Feds, Contractors Have Received New ID Cards
Agencies Not Complying with Record Preservation Policies

Bush Plan To Contract Federal Jobs Falls Short

Joseph Wassmann thought he had a secure position producing videos for the U.S. Military Academy, but not long ago he found his job on the line because of a Bush administration plan to inject more efficiency into the federal bureaucracy.

Wassmann, 40, was among a group of information management employees at West Point who had to prove that they could do their jobs better and more cheaply than a private contractor. If they could not, they were told, the work would be outsourced. It was all part of President Bush's government-wide plan to reduce costs by inviting contractors to bid on about 425,000 federal jobs that could be considered "commercial" in nature.

The West Point competition dragged on for more than two years. In the end, Wassmann and most of his co-workers won, but only by agreeing to downsize from 119 employees to 88. And the mood has never been worse, he said.

"Tensions are at an all-time high," he said. "We have to cut ourselves to the bone to win these bids. . . . And morale is just destroyed afterward."

The public-private face-off at West Point illustrates just what Bush envisioned when he proposed the "competitive sourcing" initiative in 2001 as part of his management agenda. It turned on a simple idea: Force federal employees to compete for their jobs against private contractors and costs will decrease, even if the work ultimately stays in-house.

But as Bush's presidency winds down, the program's critics say it has had disappointing results and shaken morale among the federal government's 1.8 million civil servants.

Private contractors have grown increasingly reluctant to participate in the competitions, which federal employees have won 83 percent of the time.

The program fell short of the president's goals in scope and in cost savings. Between 2003 and 2006, agencies completed competitions for fewer than 50,000 jobs, a fraction of what Bush envisioned.

Moreover, the Government Accountability Office found that the administration has overstated the savings from some competitions by undercounting the costs of running them. Collectively, they cost $225 million, or about $4,800 per job, according to White House figures.

"The competitive sourcing initiative did little to improve management, produced a ton of worthless paper, demoralized thousands of workers and cost a bundle, all to prove that federal employees are pretty good after all," said Paul C. Light, a professor of government at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

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Texas Coverup Is Latest FAA Black Eye

The Washington Post
By Del Quentin Wilber

Federal Aviation Administration managers covered up mistakes by air traffic controllers at a Texas facility, making it more difficult for authorities to detect safety hazards in some of the nation's busiest airspace, FAA officials disclosed yesterday.

In revealing the results of a government watchdog investigation, the FAA was also forced to admit that it failed to adequately address similar allegations raised publicly several years ago.

The disclosures come as the FAA has been battered in recent weeks for lax oversight of airline maintenance programs and their compliance with safety mandates. Embarrassed by those revelations, the FAA launched a crackdown on air carriers, resulting in massive groundings of planes and flight cancellations as maintenance workers scrambled to look for potential flaws.

The Texas investigation centered on how supervisors misreported errors at a control center that handles thousands of airplanes arriving and departing daily from airports in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The Transportation Department's inspector general found that managers at the facility were reclassifying errors by controllers as mistakes made by pilots, according to FAA officials. While disclosing the results of the probe, the FAA declined to release the report itself. The inspector general also declined to release the documents.

"The report is disturbing," FAA Acting Administrator Robert Sturgell said in a hasty statement before leaving a news conference without taking any questions. "A higher standard is expected of us."

The errors included instances in which controllers allowed aircraft to get too close to each other and others in which they gave pilots improper or late instructions, FAA officials said. None resulted in crashes, and no further details were provided about the incidents.

FAA officials said the inspector general found that managers misclassified 62 incidents as pilot errors or "non-events" during a 20-month period ending in July 2007. About 25 percent of errors at the facility were found to have been misclassified, FAA officials said.

As laid out by FAA officials, the inspector general's probe confirms the general thrust of allegations made by another government investigator, U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch, in a July report. Bloch, who investigates complaints by federal whistleblowers, said at the time that FAA managers reclassified errors to avoid criticism from their bosses and to enhance their chances of receiving monetary performance bonuses, which are based partly on error rates.

FAA officials yesterday did not discuss potential motives for the misreporting but said they were re-evaluating their bonus system. They also said the report revealed serious problems because such data manipulation could make it difficult to discover trends that could be addressed to prevent accidents.

"If you are going to chase risk in the system, you have to chase it accurately," said Hank Krakowski, chief operating officer of the FAA's air traffic management organization.

Krakowski and other FAA officials said they do not believe similar reporting problems exist at other facilities. The inspector general found that only 3 percent of reports were misclassified in a national sample of such data, FAA officials said.

Still, Krakowski could not guarantee that managers at other air traffic control centers were not playing similar statistical games. "I am not sure I am confident that it can't happen elsewhere," he said in announcing a series of steps designed to thwart such efforts.

Krakowski said that the FAA had removed the manager and assistant manager of the Dallas-Fort Worth facility and placed them in administrative jobs. The FAA has also stepped up audits at that center, he added.

To reduce the chance of managers altering statistics for their own benefit, they will no longer have the authority to assess and assign the causes of errors, FAA officials said. Instead, they said, officials outside a facility's chain of command will be given that responsibility.

Meanwhile, the FAA has launched a "complete review" of how it operates and holds controllers and managers accountable in its air traffic division, Krakowski said, adding that the agency was also deploying computer software that will automatically detect errors by controllers.

However, lawmakers and Bloch said those measures might not be enough to change the FAA's culture. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who had tough questions for FAA officials during an April 10 hearing on oversight of maintenance practices, said that "there isn't anything in this incident that should reassure people that we are managing this agency competently."

Bloch said he worried that the misreporting of errors and recent lapses in FAA oversight of airline maintenance are "part and parcel of a culture of complacency and coverup."

The special counsel also questioned the FAA's commitment to fixing its reporting issues, noting that nearly identical allegations were raised by the same whistleblower at the same facility in 2004.

In the earlier instance, the whistleblower -- a controller -- alleged that managers were improperly investigating and underreporting operational errors. By 2005, the Department of Transportation's inspector general had determined that the allegations were true and that the facility's managers had been underreporting mistakes for seven years.

The FAA pledged to take steps to address the problems. It removed one manager, placed others on "performance improvement plans," retrained controllers and launched a nationwide audit to ensure such problems are not widespread, according to the inspector general.

But it appears some of those actions were not completed or fell far short of their goals.

"We failed as an organization," Krakowski said. "We were supposed to go down there and monitor and audit and do quality assurance on what was going on down there. It is clear to us that that was not taken seriously by some of those people who were charged with that."

The air traffic controller who exposed the 2004 situation and the most recent incidents said that she remains frustrated by the pace of change at the FAA. She also said she was skeptical that anything will change.

"They have to regenerate faith in me and a lot of people," the controller, Anne Whiteman, said in an interview. "I may be the most vocal, but people have lost faith in the system and the FAA."

Only 3 Percent of Feds, Contractors Have Received New ID Cards

Government Executive

By Jill R. Aitoro

Federal agencies still have a long way to go to meet the Bush administration's 2008 deadline for issuing new credentials.

The Office of Management and Budget released a report on Thursday indicating that 97 percent of employees and contractors have yet to receive their new identification badges, placing the federal government far behind the ability to meet a deadline to have the new high-tech ID cards in the hands of all employees by October, the Bush administration reported.

President Bush called for the new cards when he issued Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 in 2004, requiring a common identification standard for federal employees and contractors. Employees will use the cards, which include biometrics and other high-tech features, to access federal buildings and to log on to government computers.

OMB set a deadline of Oct. 27, 2007, for agencies to have completed background checks of employees and contractors who had worked for less than 15 years for the federal government, but most missed that deadline. They are now working hard to meet the Oct. 27, 2008, deadline to replace the flash badges for all employees and contractors.

Agencies had blamed technical challenges to issuing the cards. For example, agencies had to develop solutions for integrating the IDs with support systems that maintain the data and provide an interface with enrollment and issuance functions. But OMB said that agencies no longer can say technical challenges are preventing them from issuing the new cards. "Agencies can't use those excuses anymore," said Karen Evans, administrator of the Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology at OMB, the top IT position in the administration.

In total, agencies must conduct background checks and issue new IDs to 4.3 million employees and 1.2 million contractors. So far, 59 percent of employees and 42 percent of contractors have completed the background checks, OMB reported, and 143,260 employees and 36,102 contractors have been issued cards.

These numbers are in sharp contrast to those reported in October 2007, when OMB reported that a total of 1.9 million federal employees and 591,358 contractors required credentials, and 97 percent of federal employees and 79 percent of contractors had completed the required background checks.

OMB attributed the increase to poor data on the number of government workers. "From my understanding, we originally had more issues with data quality," an OMB spokeswoman said. "We have better and more complete data now than we had previously."

In a report released in February 2008, the Government Accountability Office faulted OMB for moving too slowly in following the HSPD-12 directive. OMB had emphasized issuing cards, rather than focusing on implementing the full capabilities of the cards, and had not provided guidance to agencies on how to manage the substantial investment needed for implementation, GAO concluded.

"We're highlighting [to agencies] that here are the milestones, [and] here's what you said you are going to accomplish. You're not quite going to make it there at your current rate," Evans said. "We're working through that on a case-by-case basis. [Before] we knew we had technical shortcomings. . . . But those issues have all been addressed, so they can't use those excuses anymore."

Agencies Not Complying with Record Preservation Policies

NextGov

By Jill R. Aitoro

Agencies are not preserving e-mail records properly because of depleted staffs, an overwhelming volume of messages, and a reliance on an archaic print-and-file storing process, industry and government representatives told a congressional panel on Wednesday.

"Records management in general is afforded low priority across government," Linda Koontz, director of information management issues at the Government Accountability Office, told a hearing of the House Information Policy, Census and National Archives Subcommittee. "Without a mandate we won't get too far."

At the hearing, Koontz released preliminary results from an ongoing GAO study of how four agencies managed e-mail and electronic records. GAO is studying the electronic storage practices at the Homeland Security and Housing and Urban Development departments as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Trade Commission. Koontz said the agencies print and then file e-mails, but about half of senior officials were not following these procedures, and the e-mails for these officials were maintained in e-mail systems that lacked record-keeping capabilities, such as the ability to group the e-mails using a classification system.

"Unless they have record-keeping features, e-mail systems may not permit easy and timely retrieval of both groupings of related records as well as individual records," Koontz said.

EPA is implementing an electronic application to preserve e-mails, and DHS and HUD are considering introducing one as well. FTC is not considering any change to its current process, Koontz said.

To provide agencies with more guidance on preserving electronic records, the House is considering the Electronic Communications Preservation Act, which Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.; William Lacy Clay, D-Mo.' and Paul W. Hodes, D-N.H. introduced on April 15. The bill would strengthen policies for preservation of government records by requiring the National Archivist to establish and regulate standards for the capture, management and preservation of White House e-mails and other electronic communications. The bill also would require agencies to preserve electronic communications in electronic format.

The legislation's potential cost to agencies could be "astronomical," said Gary Stern, general counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration, especially when other electronic records brought about by Web 2.0 technologies are included, such as instant messaging, wikis, blogs and other types of records. National Archives spends $450,000 annually to support the deployment of a records management application for e-mail and other electronic records for about 60 employees.

"Extrapolating our costs -- and our anecdotal understanding of [records management applications] costs in other agencies -- across the federal government results in potential astronomical outlays by federal agencies if they were to be required to create and provide ongoing support for such [records management applications]," Stern said in testimony.

He also noted the bill's requirement that the National Archives would maintain authority over the White House's electronic records might be unconstitutional. "Up until now, under the Presidential Records Act, we've worked closely with presidential administrations on issues, but we've had no formal responsibility," Stern said. "This bill would insert NARA [for] overseeing records management in the White House over the president. It's not clear whether that would be permissible under the Constitution."

Without the bill, officials with open government advocacy groups are concerned that the White House won't be held responsible in preserving electronic records. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a suit under the Federal Records Act against the White House Office of Administration concerning missing White House e-mails, because the group cannot sue under the Presidential Records Act, said Patrice McDermott, director of OpentheGovernment.org, which counts CREW among its coalition members.

"I understand the constitutional issues, and I don't have a good answer for that," she said. "But one of the concerns is that there is no way to enforce accountability [of] records management in the White House. We understand it's a difficult dance [for NARA]. They're there at the invitation of the White House in many cases, but there needs to be some way for the outside community to hold the White House accountable."