GovernmentExecutive.com

In case any of you are checking in between turkey, football, and time with family, have a happy and restful Thanksgiving day!

The representation of women and minorities in the Senior Executive Service is increasing, but not across the board, GAO concludes in a new a report today. The report's key finding:

The representation of women and minorities in the SES and the SES developmental pool increased governmentwide from October 2000 through September 2007, but increases did not occur in all agencies. Over these 7 years, increases occurred in more than half of the 24 major executive branch agencies, but in both 2000 and 2007 the representation of women and minorities continued to vary significantly at those agencies. In 2003, we projected that increases would occur in the representation of women and minorities in the SES and SES developmental pool by 2007. These increases generally did occur.

GAO also looked at when executives are appointed to and retire from the SES. Its analysts found that SESers were 50, on average, when they entered the executive corps and 60 when they retired. Those averages didn't vary much by race, ethnicity, or gender. But women do tend to stay in the SES longer than men: 11.4 years vs. 8.8 years.

NYU professor Paul Light has a good column up today about how the recession is impacting the non-profit sector, and how Obama can adjust his national service plans to give non-profits, especially those stepping in to help families in need, a boost. But it seems to me that one thing Obama should also do is include federal service in his broader call to serve. It doesn't mean that Obama has to include federal agencies in his expansion of AmeriCorps, or in his national service fellows program. There are a lot of programs that can get young people into government already, ranging from the Presidential Management Fellows to the Federal Career Intern Program. But he should at least be talking about federal service, both to build confidence in the agencies that will be carrying out his agenda, and to set the table for more effective recruiting by departments and agencies. It may be more self-sacrificing to earn no money and work in a soup kitchen than it is to take stable wages and benefits to work in a government agency, but it's not necessarily more virtuous or more effective. Both jobs are service jobs, and if Obama plans to offer broad incentives for service, young federal employees should definitely be included.

This is official TSA policy, apparently: yes, you can take your pie with you on the plane, though they recommend it as a carry-on, rather than as checked luggage.

Sorry for the light posting yesterday, folks. A snafu on my end mis-dated a post I meant to have go up while I was on the road for pre-Thanksgiving travel. More today, I promise.

I wrote in that post that now was likely to be a semi-quiet time for management news, since the first several weeks of the transition have given us a look at Obama's management style, but that he's unlikely to get to appointing an OPM director or Chief Human Capital Officers for a while. In that vein, I thought some of you might be interested in the cover story Brittany Ballenstedt and I wrote for the December issue of the magazine, on the factors that have made this transition what it is.

For me, at least, this story was an interesting experience in reporting. I went into the story convinced that no matter who was elected president, the transition would be a disaster. The challenges, I was sure, were just too big. But as Brittany and I talked to a range of government leaders, non-profit heads, and academics, it became clear that folks in every sector of the good government community had risen to the challenge, and we're seeing a lot of that play out now. Transitions are a rough time, obviously, as knowledge goes out the door, and less experienced people come in. It's a period when information and experience can fall through the cracks. But what we're seeing in this instance, in large part because of people like Clay Johnson on the administration, is a transition shaped by a lot of institutional memory, and an intense awareness of major issues.

And that's a very good thing. There's no such thing as a perfect transition. Missteps will be made, names will be leaked, people will withdraw their names from contention. But in this very short period of time, knowing what the issues are and addressing them head-on is a key outlook for the president-elect.

My colleague Mike Memoli, who's filling in for Marc Ambinder over at his Atlantic blog, raises a fascinating question: Is Hillary Clinton actually prevented by the Constitution from taking an appointment as secretary of State?

At issue is the "emoluments clause" in Article One, Section Six of the Constitution. It states that no member of Congress can take a federal office for which the "emoluments" (read: salary) have increased during his or her term in office. And the pay for the secretary of State, like other Cabinet members, went up last year.

The situation has come up before, the Washington Post's Al Kamen noted last week. For example, in 1973, after President Nixon nominated Sen. William Saxbe, R-Ohio, to be attorney general, Congress backed his request to lower the attorney general's salary to the level it was at before it was raised in 1969, during Saxbe's term.

Does this mean that Clinton will have to settle for a lower pay rate than her Cabinet colleagues?

Several years ago, I held a little contest on Fedblog to list people whose names fit their jobs perfectly. I got some great responses, ranging from Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Peter Seaman to former National Credit Union Administration Chairman Dennis Dollar.

I was reminded of that endeavor this morning when the Congressional Budget Office announced its new acting director, replacing Peter Orszag, who President-elect Obama just named to head OMB.

So who's the new guy who's job it is to bring the federal budget to light for lawmakers? Robert Sunshine.

Slate columnist Daniel Gross has an interesting column today on why he thinks Timothy Geithner, who currently leads the New York Federal Reserve, will do well as Secretary of the Treasury. Among his arguments?

Geithner has been an extremely effective meritocratic bureaucrat for 20 years—a sort of community organizer for the financial world.

...

While Obama abandoned community organizing for politics early on, Geither has stuck with it. Of course, the community Geithner has been trying to organize—with limited success—is the international and domestic financial community.

Geithner worked his way up the ladder in the Treasury Department. As a junior member of the Committee To Save the World in the 1990s, he worked long nights alongside Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Summers to douse the economic forest fires that arose in Mexico, Asia, and Russia. After a brief sojourn at the International Monetary Fund, in 2003 he was an unexpected choice for president of the New York Federal Reserve.

The community organizing metaphor is an interesting one, both because the term became an (unjustly) hot-potato during the presidential campaign season, and because one of the things organizers try to do is build new institutions. Whether they're short-term institutions, like a group of people on a block who want to drive out a drug-dealer, or long-term institutions, like city-wide coalitions of churches and unions who push for larger social change. They also want to build leaders. A great community organizer may, at some point, make himself obselete.

While Geither certainly doesn't want to organize himself out of business, one of his most important tasks will be to really build a new institution to oversee the bailout, once that actually takes shape. That process hasn't really gotten underway because Treasury has kept switching to new modesl for the bailout, and as a result, the department hasn't really started hiring new civilian staff. That will have to be one of the first thing Geithner deals with, and it'll require getting Treasury's hiring and onboarding processes in gear. In other words, he'll have to spend a lot of time on people issues, much like organizers do.

Let me start with an aside. Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich hasn't been at every hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Federal Workforce subcommitee that I've attended, but when he's there, I've been impressed by how prepared he is and how determined he can be when he's pushing an argument. Voinovich isn't a big points-scorer in hearings, he doesn't show up to enhance his stature, but rather to get more information out of the people who are testifying or to tell them in no uncertain terms what he wants (something he's done especially emphatically on the subject of increasing the size of the State Department staff.) So I think it's particularly appropriate that he commissioned this monster report from the Government Accountability Office on key questions to ask political nominees in each department and a number of key agencies.

The goal of most of the questions seems to be two-fold: first, to test the nominees' knowledge of the specific issues they're going to be dealing with. And I mean specific:

The 2008 Farm Bill gives the department responsibility for grading examination and inspection of catfish processed for human consumption. The new inspection responsibility also includes the conditions under which the catfish were raised and transported. The catfish industries may be quite different from the traditional meat and poultry industries that the department inspects and there may be other differences from developing catfish inspection procedures to the trade agreements that the new procedures may impact. Can you describe any prior work of yours relevant to leading and directing new and expanding roles and responsibilities, and how you managed expectations within the organization? How could your experience help in effectively managing the department’s expanding food safety role?

But the questions also try to get to how the nominees think about management, beyond what kind of policy decisions they would make in their positions. For example::

OPM’s retirement modernization initiative has faced many project management challenges related to deploying new technology to improve the timeliness and accuracy of retirement application processing. In your prior work have you been involved in deploying new technology organizationwide? If so, what do you think are key variables a manager can and should track to ensure timely deployment?

If you're not looking at the transition from an agency-management perspective, this report (which I've just begun to delve into) is a must-read briefing book on the key issues facing the federal government. If you are a management professional, hope many of these questions actually do get asked in nomination hearings, and keep an eye out for the answers.

First, an apology; our servers were down earlier in the day, hence the lack of blogging. But we should be back to our regularly scheduled updates now.

Second, last week, I wrote in our Pay & Benefits column that TSP participants had the funds’ conservative allocation and market-tracking approach to thank for the fact that their losses were smaller than those of their counterparts in some major public employee pension funds that have seen their allocations actually get riskier during this period of market turmoil. But I was sitting in a meeting of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board this morning, and I learned something new. It turns out, the allocations in the TSP Lifecycle 2010 fund, designed for investors who will retire in the next several years, is actually also more conservative than the allocation in some other comparable funds. As Tracey Ray, the TSP’s chief investment officer, put it:

Our income fund is 85 percent income and 15 percent equities. But that’s not a rule. That’s determined by the individual organization. Other organizations, maybe for marketing purposes, make their allocations more aggressive. We had a bull market for a long time. Other funds raise their equity allocations so they can compete with them.

Check back for more updates from the meeting later in the day.

The Obama transition is well under way at this point, and while the trickle of names of appointees to prominent positions is widening into a creek, in a way it feels like the first phase of the transition is over. In that first period, observers from every perspective and kind of media outlet, be they left, right, journalists, analysts, or voters, were waiting to see whether Obama would pull it off. How well had he prepared? What kind of people would he pick to serve in his administration? What kind of manager would he prove himself to be in his first acts as the executive of something other than a campaign?

But while a lot of my friends and colleagues in the blogosphere are debating the merits of Susan Rice at the United Nations or the choice of domestic policy coordinator, now that some initial questions have been answered about Obama's management style, I feel like those of us in the good government community need to settle in for a wait. Obama isn't likely to appoint an Office of Personnel Management in the first wave of major nominations. It's not clear how much information about the agency and policy review teams' conclusions will be made public. There are signs that Obama has ideas about management, although not perhaps a comprehensive management agenda, and it's not clear if someone will be tasked with a Reinventing Government-style effort.

We'll be running a story later today about a new Partnership for Public Service-Gallup poll that suggests public trust in government is at an all-time low, and Partnership president Max Stier argues that without that trust, it's extremely difficult for a president to gain a mandate. With that in mind, I want to argue again that the Obama administration would do well to incorporate discussions of management and a strong management philosophy into the discussions about its transition and its appointments. In some cases, it seems clear that management concerns have played a role in determining appointments: Larry Summers' troubles managing the faculty at Harvard (which, yes, went considerably beyond his remarks about women in science, just so we can avoid that debate) may have been the reason he's not running the Treasury department, for example. But making the link between policy-making and policy-implementation explicit every step of the way would go a long way to make the case for Obama's decisions every step of the way, and earn him political capital. With his ambitions, it's hard to imagine that he could ever have too much capital at this stage in the game.

But there's a lot going on, and there's a Turkey to pardon, and other nominations to make. So we'll all have to wait for a while.

Not only is Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown co-chairing the Obama transition team at the Veterans Affairs Department, he is a leading candidate to serve as VA secretary.

A source close to the Obama transition effort confirms that Brown is being given "serious consideration" for the VA slot, and is currently undergoing the vetting process.

A member of the Army Reserves since 1984, Brown, who holds the rank of colonel, commands the 153rd Legal Support Organization in Pennsylvania. He is the highest-ranking elected official in the country who has served a tour of duty in Iraq, having spent 10 months in the country in 2004.

According to his official biography, the handful of issues Brown has been asked by Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley to focus on in his current position includes the military base realignment and closure process, veterans affairs and health care.

There is no question that Barack Obama is going to change a lot of things, starting in January. There will be executive orders to assign, new agency heads to get in place, tweaks to programs, programs that get scrapped, programs to be built up out of nowhere. But one thing that I think no one writes about is what Obama will be stuck with. And also, what shouldn't he change? I know I'm throwing a lot of pieces at you guys today, but people really should read this piece from the November issue of the magazine. In it, Rob Brodsky observes that the Bush administration has made sure that some parts of its management agenda will stay in place unless they're specifically repealed:

The next president will have little choice in adopting the Bush administration's human capital plan for improving the federal workforce and boosting recruitment and retention. In April, the Office of Personnel Management quietly posted a notice in the Federal Register cementing the administration's entire human capital plan, including key metrics for knowledge management and workforce planning, in federal regulations.

"Regardless of the administration, we think that what is in regulation is just good business sense," says Kevin Mahoney, OPM's associate director of human capital leadership. "And it makes sense to follow the framework and use the framework to keep the progress that we have made over the past six or seven years going." The notice does not tie the next administration's hands, he says, and the metrics can be changed as needed.

And he also raises some good questions about whether there are elements of the management agenda that should--and will--stay in place. It's not really clear whether the agency policy review teams will release their reports publicly when or after they report to the transition team. But I would be very curious to see what conclusions they draw about management. Obama has already signaled that he'll reverse some decisions and policies related to the workforce. But what will the teams tell him to keep, if anything? What will he decide to keep in place?

I'm not going to comment on Ted Stevens' defeat or conviction, nor on the Senate sendoff to him yesterday. But I do have to say, the Senate will be poorer for not having a member who knows karate.

I don't know that many people thought Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano was a likely candidate for Homeland Security Secretary; more people seemed to be thinking Attorney General. But now that she's emerged as the DHS front-runner, and even John McCain has gotten on board for her nomination, it's well worthwhile for DHS employees--and everyone else--to read Dana Goldstein's profile of Napolitano, which ran in the American Prospect a while back. It's not really focused on Napolitano as an administrator, but the piece provides a good look at how Napolitano makes decisions, and how she sees herself:

But for every compromise, there are times when Napolitano put her foot down hard and fast. On the environment, she enrolled Arizona in a Western Climate Initiative that seeks to impose a regional cap-and-trade system on carbon emissions. She has also exercised her veto power more often than any governor in Arizona's history; state Republicans have bestowed upon her the moniker "Governor No." She nixed legislation that would have made it a crime for day laborers to look for work on public streets, and in May she pulled $1.6 million that Maricopa County police were using to conduct immigration raids in the Latino community. Being the savvy operator and former attorney general that she is, Napolitano immediately announced she was reinvesting the funds in a program to track down at-large fugitives. And although she signed one of the most restrictive anti-immigration bills in the country, an employer sanctions law that enforces stiff penalties for hiring undocumented workers, she did so in large part to prevent Republicans from placing an even more punishing measure on the state's November ballot.

and

When asked what she'd like to work on at the national level, Napolitano won't name a specific position, but she makes a hard sell for her law-enforcement experience. "I think at this stage, what I bring is that I've been an attorney general," she says. As U.S. attorney, Napolitano brags, her work on border-related crime forced her to make "big decisions that require judgment and attention." Like Hillary Clinton, Napolitano constantly emphasizes her experience, tenacity, and policy chops, often in a list-like deluge of information.

On this date 40 years ago, Richard Nixon was basking in the glow of his election as president. Yale University had just announced it would admit women. "Hey Jude" by the Beatles and “Harper Valley P.T.A.” by Jeannie C. Riley were burning up the pop charts. And in Scranton, Pa., a group of intrepid executives were gathered at a printing plant as the "pilot issue" of a brand new magazine they had invented rolled off the presses.

That magazine was Government Executive.

The first official edition of the magazine wouldn't come out until March 1969. So we'll be commemorating our 40th anniversary throughout next year. In the meantime, here's a look back at that inaugural edition:

(Sorry for the stains and scribbles on the cover. It's the only copy I have in my office -- and by the way, no, I haven't been around for the full 40 years, just a few more than I care to admit to right now.)

I think Ezra Klein's point that the policy review teams Obama announced yesterday indicate that he’s picked a few priorities for policy review is well taken. But I take issue with the suggestion that the fact that there’s a “Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform” team indicates that management is a priority to the new administration. This team appears to be a technology policy review team, not a government reform team.

First, let's look at the team members' resumes. Unlike the agency review teams that deal with government, where the participants bring a real diversity of relevant experience, the resumes of Blair Levin, Sonal Shah and Julius Genachowski are heavily weighted toward technology. Both Levin and Genachowski worked at the Federal Communications Commission, and for both, that is their only experience working in a government agency. Shah worked at Treasury -- but on policy rather than administration issues -- and at the National Security Council.

There's no question that Levin, Shah and Genachowski have sterling technology reform resumes, and obviously that's an important policy issue to pursue. And it's clear that Obama sees a connection between technology and government reform. Whether it's his Google for Government proposals or having the first transition blog, technology is Obama's vehicle of choice for transparency.

But it's not enough. This would have been a great place to get a serious management person on board, someone with deep, deep experience with the civilian and political workforces. It didn't happen, and that's a lost opportunity. Maybe these folks have really innovative government reform ideas. Maybe they're ethics experts. Maybe they have some cutting-edge private sector models they think would work in government that we're all going to think is a game-changer. I hope so. But least in Obama’s choice of people to run this team, government reform is just a tacked-on phrase.

CongressDaily, as always, puts it concisely and on the money:

The vote weakens the seniority system and signals the rise of California liberals who backed Waxman. It also strengthens House Speaker Pelosi, who stayed neutral but whose allies supported Waxman's bid. The result gives Waxman, an environmentalist, a key role in shaping legislation on climate change, energy, healthcare and other priorities of President-elect Obama. Dingell will stay on as chairman emeritus.

It's official: Henry Waxman has just won a tight vote, 137-122, to oust John Dingell as chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee, likely a key post if President-elect Obama advances major climate change and health care legislation (not to mention the fading prospect of a bailout of Detroit automakers). As we wrote yesterday, this is yet another major shakeup to the leadership and tone at the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Stay tuned for more...

My colleage Rob Brodsky sends in this classic story from Jim Williams, acting GSA administrator, told at the Government Contract Management Conference:

"As GSA administrator, Williams is tasked with officially naming the winner of the presidential election so that GSA can turn over the keys to the transition headquarters to the president elect and so that GSA can release funds for the transition. So, late in the evening on election night, Williams heads over to the transition headquarters in NW Washington. They set him up at a table with an official pen and get ready to take a photo of the historic moment. At first they bring him the official letter to sign naming Obama as the apparent winner but it did not have the proper letterhead. So, GSA aides rushed around to find a computer and printer to print out a new letter with the proper letterhead. By the time that the letter arrives, Obama is already giving his acceptance speech in Grant Park. So, when it finally arrives, Williams looks down to sign the historic form, officially naming the first African American president in history, and the letter says that the winner is …. Sen. John McCain.

Woops."

Daniel Friedman, my colleage at CongressDaily, reports that Henry Waxman has narrowly defeated John Dingell in a House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee vote over who should chair Energy and Commerce. The full Caucus vote is tomorrow, but this has to give Waxman some momentum.

In any case, this is a step closer to the reshaping of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, too. If Darrell Issa is the new ranking member, the Republicans are virtually guaranteed to be much more aggressive than they were previously. But if Waxman's gone, Issa may not clash as much with a new Democratic chairman. Lots to watch, clearly.

I've written quite a bit about a push by State Department employees, diplomacy non-profits, and some legislators to increase the size of the Foreign Service, and especially to ramp up staffing of public diplomacy officers, the people who are tasked with getting out there in other countries and actually talking to folks there about who the U.S. is. And so I was pleased to see today via the always classy-looking State Department blog DipNote, that Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Colleen Graffy, is Twittering a public diplomacy mission to Bucharest.

This is neat for a couple of reasons. First, it's transparency. We get a sense of who Graffy is meeting with, how long she spends with them, etc., as she tweets where she's going, when she's going. Second, it's a good way to communicate what a diplomatic trip overseas looks like. I think most Americans have very little sense of what happens when a diplomat goes abroad. It's true that Graffy isn't actually stationed overseas full time, so her schedule isn't exactly representative of a full-time public diplomacy officer. But it does open up the process a bit, and that's important in both directions.

So follow Colleen, and while you're at it, check us out on Twitter, too.

Almost as soon as the election results were in, Barack Obama's team moved in to a suite of transition offices in the Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago. So how was the General Services Administration, which has the responsibility of making office arrangements for transition teams, able to move so quickly to free up the space? I'm told that GSA employees themselves made the sacrifice. Renovations recently were completed on a part of the building slated to be occupied by a GSA unit. But when Obama won, employees of that unit were told they wouldn't be moving in to their new digs until after Inauguration Day.

I mentioned this yesterday and forgot to link it, but Rob's story on the agency review teams has good details on how the review teams are going to do their work, and when they'll report back to the new administration. Check it out.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner Christine Griffin doesn't mince words. Ever. She's the kind of person who isn't afraid to tell a room full of disability hiring coordinators that "we're doing a terrible job," making the government a more open and accessible employer. So as I was picking through the agency review teams and decided to ask her about Kareem Dale and Marilyn Golden, who are reviewing the National Council on Disability/Access Board, I knew I'd get an honest answer.

"They are good choices," Griffin wrote in an email to me. "Kareem has been the Obama campaign liasion to the disability community since Obama became the [Democratic] nominee. I met him once but know lots of folks that he impressed. He is a person with a disability - he is blind. Marilyn is a long time advocate on all issues. A woman with a physical disability - uses a wheelchair for mobility - she is arguably a national expert on accessibility of transportation issues. Both good people."

John Kamensky of the IBM Center for the Business of Government has a great blog post up about Obama's "line by line" budget review pledge (which I've commented on before).

Kamensky knows whereof he speaks. He is a veteran of the last effort by a Democratic president to comb through the budget in search of savings. Here's his assessment:

President-elect Barack Obama will soon find out that most of the federal government’s biggest spending isn’t actually in the budget. Going through it line-by-line won’t help much. That’s what I and others found when we were tasked by President Bill Clinton to conduct his National Performance Review 15 years ago. He said “we’ll conduct an intensive national review of every single Government agency and service.” Well, we did that. And we conducted a huge savings review that went beyond agencies and services. We had identified $700 billion in potential savings (in the days when $700 billion was a big number) but only acted upon a fraction of that. What we found was politically too scary to do anything with.

Michael Iskoff at Newsweek is reporting that Obama has asked Washington lawyer and Clinton-era Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to be his AG, and the real debate is over who will be his deputy:

One top candidate, favored by Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and other former Clinton White House officials, is Elena Kagan, dean of the Harvard Law School and a former lawyer in the White House counsel’s office under Clinton. Another top candidate, favored by other Obama advisors, is David Ogden, a former chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno, who is currently heading Obama’s Justice Department transition team. Kagan brings legal policy credentials; Ogden has more experience in the Justice Department trenches.

And always-saavy Alexis Simendinger is reporting at Lost In Translation that Peter Orszag will head up the Office of Management and Budget. Thoughts? Send 'em or post in comments.

The Agency Review Working Groups that Obama announced last week are important for a couple of reasons. 1) Especially for more under-the-radar agencies, the appointments provide a good preview of potential appointees to key positions. 2) The appointments provide some sense of how Obama sees the agencies, and what he knows, or doesn't know, about them. 3) They provide some sense of who Obama thinks he owes, and who he values.

Take the Department of Transportation Review Leads, Mort Downey, Jane Garvey, and Michael Huerta. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, which for a small union is relatively tight with Obama (one of his first acts as a Senator was to introduce the "FAA Fair Labor Management Dispute Resolution Act of 2006," which would have restored the controllers' right to binding arbitration in contract disputes), is super-happy about that list. When Garvey was FAA administrator, she negotiated a contract the controllers consider the gold standard. And they're happy about Downey, too:

"There’s all sorts of people who are in there who we know and who know us. Mort Downey, beyond being a high-ranking official, was a former judge for our top controller of the year award," NATCA spokesman Doug Church told me yesterday. "He knows a thing or two about what we do for a living."

Continue reading "Some Thoughts On the Agency Review Teams" »

Marc Ambinder has a post up on the interaction between the Obama team's "No Drama" mantra and the message control that will become less and less possible as the team expands dramatically. I think he's on the money that stuff will leak, but it probably won't leak in damaging, discontented ways: people won't grumble, but stuff will get out.

I also think that the agency policy review teams were a brilliant political move. Whether they turn up major ideas for agency-level innovation remains to be seen, of course. But throwing out the long list of names of folks who are overseeing the teams threw a lot of chum into the water. Those names are great fodder for reporters who want to speculate endlessly on who will end up with presidential appointments. They allow for all sorts of conjectures about who Obama is trying to reward, and what policy changes he is trying to signal. In other words, they provide the press corps with something to focus on while Obama and Biden hold private meetings with a whole range of other potential nominees and discuss other policies. The policy review teams may prove substantive and substantial; I'm certainly not ruling that out. But right now, they're mostly a very effective smoke screen.

Barack Obama has the good fortune to have not one, but two, official presidential transition offices: One in Washington, and the other on the 38th floor of the Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago. The fact that he's taken up temporary residence at the latter location makes me wonder: Who's filling his staplers?

When Obama and McCain announced they were going to meet today, and said that "t's well known that they share an important belief that Americans want and deserve a more effective and efficient government, and will discuss ways to work together to make that a reality," some of us joked around the office about what kind of position in the new administration that statement might be signaling for McCain. We concluded that it seems possible that Obama will ask McCain to lead up government reform efforts of some kind. But I suggested that the efficiency bit didn't really seem like McCain's bag; he seems a lot more interested in issues of waste (earmarks!) and corruption than in converting federal agencies to the Church of Six Sigma.

And true to form, the joint statement from Obama's meeting with McCain doesn't really give details:

At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform where we take on government waste and bitter partisanship in Washington in order to restore trust in government, and bring back prosperity and opportunity for every hardworking American family. We hope to work together in the days and months ahead on critical challenges like solving our financial crisis, creating a new energy economy, and protecting our nation’s security.

The "government waste" line looks like a nod to McCain's anti-pork inclinations. But otherwise, not a hint. And certainly no mention of the implementation issues that divided the former candidates on the things they jointly identified as national priorities today.

Slate's John Dickerson has a nice piece today that connects two trends that have shaped coverage of the transition: Obama's committment to bring a lot more, and a lot more sophisticated, technology to government, and questions about how open to the press his legendarily discipled operation will be. Some of the points are pretty simplistic: releasing a YouTube video of his weekly address may get that address out to more people, but it doesn't give more people the opportunity to ask questions or reveal any more than Obama and his team want to. But the overall point is an important one:

Obama will show he is transparent not by delivering his message in some new way but by conveying actual information. He's got to tell the truth, yes, but he's also got to have something to say. His most powerful statements during the campaign were not conveyed through an Ethernet cable but from a stage, alone, with a microphone, the way it has been done for 100 years. If the promise of transparency and candor never arrives but the hype continues, his campaign will have produced the political equivalent of vaporware.

Language guru (and former speechwriter) William Safire did his New York Times Magazine column on transition language this weekend, and gave some love to the Plum Book and the Council for Execellence in Government's Prune Book, noting that:

Plums are the delicious fruit of the political tree. In 1885, the Pennsylvania boss Matthew Quay is said to have coined the phrase “shaking the plum tree,” updating the previous “persimmon tree.” When a generation later William Allen White, editor of The Emporia Gazette, asked the presidential candidate William Howard Taft how he got started in politics, Taft replied, “I always had my plate the right side up when offices were falling.” It was natural to call the book of political plums “the plum book” informally, and in 2000 a creative designer introduced a plum-colored cover.

It's a good column, but it's a reminder that every so often, commentators beyond our own good-government circles get startled awake and remember that the government is operating along out there, beyond the Sturm und Drang of the political season. And when they do, they feel compelled to translate the workings of government for their readers as if they're describing something very exotic, rather than the services our tax dollars pay for. Clark Hoyt, the Times' public editor, has written that many readers are sick of coverage of political races, and would prefer coverage of the actual issues at stake in the elections. Perhaps now that the election is over and the new administration is beginning, the Times will give their readers some good stories to go with their etymologies.

The Obama transition team has released the full list of people who are soon to be dispatched to agencies to review their operations. Here's the complete list for one key group: "Government Operations Team Leads":

Sally Katzen
Martha Johnson
Jane Woodfin
Bruce McConnell
Gloria Parker
Amy Comstock Rick
Elaine Kaplan
Linh Nguyen
Sylvia Bolivar
Stephen Crawford

Sorry for the light blogging today, folks. Your loyal correspondent had a bunch of deadlines, but I'm back, I promise. And I had almost as much fun reading a press release from Customs and Border Protection as the person who wrote it must have had thinking it up. Apparently, a Korean Air flight passenger had tucked 59 hypodermic needles and 10 oz of collagen, a popular facial filler like Botox, in her suitcase. As CBP's release put it:

Some Washington, D.C., area residents will have to find another source to remove those unwanted wrinkles and to gain a fuller smile after Customs and Border Protection officers seized a shipment of collagen from an international traveler at Dulles International Airport on Thursday.

...

“CBP officers and agriculture specialists at Dulles have seized some rather interesting items over the years, but I think this collagen is a first for many of us,” said Christopher Hess, CBP Port Director for the Port of Washington. “The importance of this seizure is that it reinforces CBP’s commitment to protect American’s against products that may be unsafe, and that are not approved for use in the U.S.”

Of course the seizure is relevant, and important. But most importantly, it's pretty entertaining.

So, once upon a time, back in May, the Council for Excellence in Government released a poll they'd commissioned Gallup to do about young people's attitudes towards public service. One thing that struck me as entertaining at the time was that the survey respondents said their favorite public servant on TV was the Simpsons' Mayor Quimby, followed closely by Detective Olivia Benson from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Jack Bauer from 24. I've been thinking about that lately, because I am completely obsessesed with Fox's federal procedural, "Bones," and because I think it's a shame that the only federal employee on the list is Jack Bauer; ;it's a great time for feds on TV.

The FBI in particular comes across quite well. Special Agents Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) on "Bones" and Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) on "Numb3rs" are complex, compelling characters who see their work at the Bureau as a mission, and make great sacrifices, like getting shot in karaoke bars and living in the shadow of their brothers, to get their work done right. And these FBI-oriented shows do a good job of showing another side of federal employment by showcasing the work of the non-law enforcement feds their main characters work with. On "Bones," the Jeffersonian Institution, a federal research lab, comes across as a top-of-the-line scientific facilty populated by extremely smart, often extremely nerdy, extremely attractive people. Charlie Eppes, the mathemetician on "Numb3rs," often finds his federal consulting work more interesting than his academic committments.

All in all, these shows make the federal government look like a fantastic place to work: it's got good resources, cool colleagues, and a sense of mission. "24" may have become part of the national conversation about interrogation tactics. But "Bones" and "Numb3rs" couldn't be a better advertisement for federal employment if the Partnership for Public Service or the Council had ordered them up.

Alexis Simendinger over at National Journal's Lost in Transition blog has some good stuff: the documents that govern the relationship between the Bush and Obama transition teams. A lot of it is the usual concerns--how communication and agency-level office space will be designated, for example.

But the largest part of the memorandum is taken up with chains of communication and information control. The Bush administration and the Transition team have to designate specific contacts who will channel coordination and communication between the two teams. The transition teams will use an informal dispute resolution mechanism to deal with people who leak information determined to be "non-public." The Bush administration pledges to keep confidences communicated to them by Obama's transition team.

Some of this is about national security. Some of it is about leak and message control. Some of it is about establishing trust. It'll be interesting to see what does end up leaking (it's a big organization, some stuff is going to get out) and how leaks--and leakers--are ultimately dealt with.

If there's one thing good government experts said over, and over, and over again during the election season, it was that the new administration would have to move quickly to get its nominees prepped, cleared, confirmed and in place. The unstated implication behind that, however, is that speed can't trade off with quality, something Obama himself said in his first press conference. And from the questionnaire for presidential appointees the New York Times obtained today, it's clear that Obama wants to make sure no nannies of questionable legality emerge at the last minute, that no drunken and disheveled Facebook photos will appear to grace the Drudge Report's landing page, that nobody's sordid past comes back to bite them, and especially not the new administration.

The question, however, is whether this thoroughness will conflict with the need to move quickly. Some of the questions, like those about professional licenses and real estate holdings are carry-overs from previous administrations. Others, like questions about online handles, pages on newer websites like MySpace or Facebook, or about potentially embarassing comments or blog posts, are simply reactions to new technology that has proliferated since the last presidential transition.

But some of the things the administration wants seem extremely hard to fulfill. They want every resume you've sent out over the past ten years, for example. In an era when most of us endlessly revise and update the same Word document, is that something that most of us are even capable of producing? And what happens if the Obama administration runs into a question that many or most applicants are unable to answer; will they be willing to say that the question maybe didn't work, or will they wait on folks to find a way to answer it?

I don't know what you're doing on your lunch hour, but if you've got a free moment at noon, tune in to Federal News Radio (1500 AM) to hear my colleague Rob Brodsky wax poetic on Obama (and check out his profile of the President-elect as manager from our October issue).

And in print media, the New York Times is citing Government Executive to explain the management philosophy of Joshua Gotbaum, one of the two Clinton-era administrators who Obama has tapped to oversee the transition at the Treasury Department. The Times writes:

In a May 2001 essay for Government Executive magazine, Mr. Gotbaum reflected on the successes and limitations of bringing private-sector financial management to government programs. “There is a debate on the standards for social insurance, national parks and other ‘stewardship assets,’ ” he wrote. “Here it is not at all clear that private sector standards make sense: Rather than auditing acres at Yosemite and exhibits at the Smithsonian, wouldn’t resources be better used to audit cash at the Housing and Urban Development Department?”

Just remember, even if you read it in the Times, you read it here first.

More analysis once I've had time to read and digest it, but here's the full press release:

Obama-Biden Transition Team Announces Agency Review Team Leads for Departments of Treasury, State and Defense

WASHINGTON – The Obama-Biden Transition Team today announced the Agency Review Team leads for the Deperatment of Treasury, Department of State, and Department of Defense. The Obama-Biden
Transition Team also announced the Agency Review Team co-chairs, who will oversee the entire review process, as well as the Agency Review Working Group, which will manage and review the Teams' work and coordinate with other transition teams, including those handling personnel, policy and the budget.

The Agency Review Teams will complete a thorough review of key departments, agencies and commissions of the United States government, as well as the White House, to provide the President-elect, Vice President-elect, and key advisors with information needed to make strategic policy, budgetary, and personnel decisions prior to the inauguration. The Teams will begin their efforts by the end of the week, and will ensure that senior appointees have the information necessary to complete the confirmation process, lead their departments, and begin implementing signature policy initiatives immediately after they are sworn in.

Continue reading "Obama's Agency Review Teams" »

As a general rule, this blogger does not approve of wild speculation over Cabinet appointments. There are more entertaining ways to waste time. But the New York Times new "If You Were President" tool is highly entertaining, if only because of the look it provides at how readers view the Cabient. More participants, so far, would like to see Oprah Winfrey or Ralph Nader be Secretary of State than would like to see Madeline Albright reprise her role. More Times readers see Dennis Kucinich as Attorney general than picked David Iglesias, a former U.S. Attorney. And Mad Money host Jim Cramer is beating out Bill Clinton in voting for Secretary of the Treasury. Take that, Big Dog!

Brittany Ballenstedt and I have a feature coming out in the December issue in which we note that the good government community is coordinating better than ever on their approach to the presidential transition, and I'll have an update on Friday on what those groups are doing to try to influence President-elect Obama's emerging management agenda. But one thing I will say is that I really wouldn't want to play cards with some of the key leaders of good government groups right now. Just like everyone else within a country mile of the Obama transition team, these folks have suddenly developed incredibly intense message discipline. My sense at the moment is that the government reform groups that focus on policy, like the Center for American Progress, are involved with the transition team at a higher level (see: Podesta, John), but that the management reformers are there and are pushing hard to get their message across.

House Republicans Dan Burton of Indiana and John Mica of Florida have formally signed on to Darrell Issa's bid to become ranking member of the House Oversight and Governmental Affairs Committee in the wake of Tom Davis's retirement and Christopher Shays's defeat. And their endorsement letter gives a sense of what they hope Issa will do in the position:

At the full committee level, he has never shied away from issues nor from standing up for the positions and ideals of our Conference, which have come under attack by Henry Waxman and the Democratic leadership...We believe he is the best person to further the positions of the Conference while acting as a counter to the Democratic Committee Chairman. This Committee can be an effective tool for helping Republicans retake the majority, and Darrell Issa is the most able to represent our Conference.

It's clear that Henry Waxman, who enjoyed tearing into the Bush administration, thinks that chairing the Oversight Committee will be less interesting with the White House occupied by a fellow Democrat, which is why he's engaged in a battle royale with John Dingell over the chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee. If he succeeds, it'll be interesting to see which Democrats want to chair the committee--it could be a real prize for one of the Democrats interested in management reform. Edolphus Towns of New York is second in seniority to Waxman, but he hasn't come out publicly to say he wants the chairmanship, which probably makes sense until the dust settles.

But while Democrats may regard this, and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in the Senate, as second-tier committees without Republican red meat to chew on, they're a great opportunity for Republicans who want to make names for themselves. In the Senate, Susan Collins, the ranking member on HSGAC, presumably isn't going to go anywhere, but she's not going to go out of her way to score points against Obama. So it makes sense that members of the Republican Conference would look for an attack dog in the House. Issa fits that bill.

My co-worker Gautham over at Tech Insider notes some flim-flammery up at Change.gov.

Transitions are pricey. John Podesta said today that Obama's would cost $12 million, about $7 million of which would have to be raised, and that lobbyists aren't allowed to throw money into this particular little sandbox. Lots of folks have been adding "as is customary" to the number that Congress has appropriated for the transition: $5.2 million, but haven't exactly explained that the figure isn't just customary, it's required by statute.

Congress didn't even have a mechanism for funding the transition until 1963, when it passed the Presidential Transition Act and allocated $900,000 for the transition. In 1976, that number went up to $3 million total, $2 million for the president-elect's team, and $1 million for the outgoing president's.

In 1988, the Presidential Transitions Effectiveness Act bumped the total number up to $5 million, an amount that the Government Accountability Office said at the time "provides adequate public money to eliminate the need for private funding for presidential transition." Twenty years later, that's no longer the case, obviously. $1 million is allocated for training appointees (thanks to John Kamensky for setting me right), and is provided through the Presidential Transition Act of 2000, sponsored by old favorites Fred Thompson and Joe Lieberman.

These numbers are flat. They're not adjusted for inflation. And thus, the Obama fundraising machine has to ride one more time. In this election cycle, anyway.

(H/T: About.com's Transition Guide)

John Podesta announced that the Obama team will have policy review teams in place by November 18. So if folks start showing up in your office, remember FedBlog's citizen journalist policy: if you see something, say something. It's not clear that this initial review will produce cuts in any programs, as Obama discussed in his debates with McCain (Obama said one needed to use a scalpel on the federal budget, while McCain said a hatchet had to come first).

I think the sense is more that these are genuine policy reviews, and that, just as Obama is looking at Bush's executive orders to see which ones he wants to overturns, he's looking for agency policies to reverse or modify as well.

(H/T: Marc Ambinder)

I realize this isn't the best-quality image of all time, but I think it gets the point across. Metro Center, the key subway juncture in Washington, D.C., is covered with Blue Cross Blue Shield ads for their federal health plan for Open Season. GEHA is advertising their dental plan on subway cars. This stuff is everywhere
. Advertising on the Washington metro is always pretty entertaining, whether it's Northrop Grumman trying to sell helicopters, anti-PETA groups trying to convince commuters of the organization's awfulness, or lobbyists fighting over the reason for air travel delays. But this is pretty epic. Know your powers as consumers, feds. This advertising budget is a pretty clear sign.

I think Ezra Klein makes a good point about the importance of non-Cabinet-level appointees in this post on the importance of John Podesta, the president of the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, who is co-chairing Obama's transition team:

So much as we all focus on the cabinet-level positions, the stock of under-secretaries and deputy under-secretaries and assistants-to-the-deputy-undersecretary are actually crucially important (the federal government, in some ways to its credit, has almost comical title deflation). Not only do they fundamentally run the government for the next few years, but they're also the talent pool that moves up in year three of the Obama administration. In government, like in any institution, personnel is destiny, and Podesta is the guy running the hiring process.

But I wish he'd taken the point a litte further. Bob Tobias, the former National Treasury Employees Union President who is now at American University, frequently talks about the difference between public policy creation, and public policy implementation. Cabinet-level secretaries are the go-to guys on public policy creation; you want people in there with good ideas, the ability to think big within the constraints of their institutions, who are comfortable looking at big budgets and making good decisions about how to allocate giant pools of resources. But if you want to get stuff done, implemented all the way down to the roots, you really need fantastic assistant secretaries, fantastic CXOs, etc. In fact, you need to make sure you have fantastic career talent, too, and that those lower-level political appointees can work effectively with the career folks who have been around for much longer than the politicals have.

This is a consistently under-discussed issue at the national level. Both liberals and conservatives have learned how to do great organization building when it comes to elections. Both sides understand how to build leaders, engage with communities, boost turnout and voter enthusiasm. Turnout and election machines get discussed endlessly during the political season. But when it comes to governing, to organizational management, not nearly enough attention gets paid by commentators and mainstream journalists to the organizational issues at hand, and how presidents and agency heads can--and need to--build leaders and motivate workers within their agencies, even though it's a major topic of discussion within government itself.

Before I say what it is, can I say that I think it's really fantastic that folks in government work on and study such a wide array of topics. The federal government has an incredible range of opportunities, and does important work that might not be performed or funded elsewhere. That said, seeing the title "Bureau of Land Management: Effective Long-Term Options Needed to Manage Unadoptable Wild Horses," in my inbox under the day's GAO report, kind of made my day.

Remember those White House gigs I was talking about earlier this morning? Well, it turns out, if you want a job in the Obama administration, you're probably better off talking to Patrick Gaspard, who is running personnel for Obama, than firing your resume off into the ether. Gaspard's only running the political side of things, so don't go running in his direction if USAJobs lets you down. But at least we know who the gatekeeper is, now.

(H/T: New York)

It doesn't happen often, but two extremely hot sectors of government are hiring at the same time right now: the White House, and the Treasury Department office tasked with overseeing the bailout of the finanancial system. It's a rare moment when lots of Americans who might never have considered federal service before may be considering it for the first time. And yet, rather than having transparent applications systems, both Treasury and Obama's transition team are using email addresses and web forms to solicit applications, a surefire way for applications to get sent off into the ether and never heard from again.

Sure, these systems make it easier for folks to send off an application without having to surmount some of the major hurdles of the federal hiring system. But it also makes it easier for serious applications to get lost under a flood of resumes that get sent in because, why not? With new tools available to make it easier for agencies to track applications and make sure they are responsive to applicants, the use of these black holes to accept resumes seems like a decided step backwards. It's great if the Obama administration wants to be more open and accessible to people who want to serve in government, but they'll get a lot further by seriously reforming the hiring process than by throwing up a form on a website.

Wow, it's been quite a sprint this week, hasn't it? And we're not even close to the finish line on the transition. For those of us who feel a bit like we've been thrown in a blender, John Kamensky confirms our impression over at the IBM Center for the Business of Government's Transition blog. I hope everyone has a good weekend, and a chance to take a deep breath. Keep transition news coming, and we'll be back on Monday!

In his first post-election press conference, President-elect Obama previewed how he'll go about making his high-level appointments:

"When we have an announcement about Cabinet appointments, we will make them. There is no doubt that people want to know who's going to make up our team, and I want to move with all deliberate haste, but I want to emphasize deliberate as well as haste. I'm proud of the decision I made for Vice President because we did it right. I'm proud of the decision I made for chief of staff because we thought it through."

Is there any point at which career federal employees get more love than during a presidential transition? During this period of frenzied limbo, as political appointees move in and out, they're all eager to praise the folks who will hold the fort together.

"The next Secretary will also benefit from the support of an exceptional staff of hard-working career employees at Treasury who are critical to the important work before the Department," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in his statement on the transition.

And Jim Rispoli, Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management at the Energy Department, wrote in his resignation letter that " am particularly proud of the accomplishments made by our DOE team of career civil servants and contractors to enable EM to attain performance results in our projects, and in safety for our work force and our communities. This dedication and enthusiasm have been major catalysts for me as we executed our cleanup mission."

It's interesting to me that, if political appointees are sincere in their appreciation of career employees, that more of them don't advocate for workforce reforms, like better pay and performance management systems. Even politicals who don't work in workforce and management agencies like OMB and OPM should see the importance of workforce issues. It might be an interesting project for the next Treasury Secretary to take on; perhaps the bailout office, and the rapid hiring the department is doing will provide a catalyst for talking about what works, and what doesn't, in hiring, pay, and benefits.

Energy security is high on the watch list as the Department of Energy prepares for its transition. The department announced today that the transition will be led by Ingrid Kolb, currently the director of the Office of Management and a 30-year federal veteran who has done stints at the Department of Homeland Security, the Education Department, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. During an earlier rotation at Energy, Kolb was Chief of Staff for the Office of Management, Budget and Evaluation/Chief Financial Officer, where one of her main responsiblities was overseeing implementation of the President's Management Agenda, a sign that there will be some continuity into the next administration. Jay Hoffman, Director of Program Analysis & Evaluation at DOE, will help Kolb with preparing materials like briefing books.

Here's a reminder that the social scientists who the Army has hired to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of its Human Terrain program are serving in conditions of very real danger. Danger Room's Noah Shachtman reports today that one Human Terrain team member in Afghanistan, Paula Lloyd, has been flown to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas after being set on fire in an apparent Taliban attack.

This is just the latest in a string of attacks on Human Terrain personnel, who have been hired to lend cultural expertise to Army units fighting overseas.

There will obviously be a lot of revolving-door news trickling in these days: who's staying, who's going, lots of announcements about how transition plans will be handled, etc. Keep tips coming. And every day I'll try to have a roundup of the transition appointments and plans we've heard about. Today's haul:

-Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Julie Myers will be gone by next Saturday. John Torres, currently Myers' deputy and a career official, will step in for the interim. Myers' next move isn't immediately clear, and she had something of a rough tenure at ICE.

-The Small Business Administration announced today that career officials are both leading the agency's transition efforts and have stepped up to serve in place of outgoing political appointees. Acting Administrator Sandy Baurah has delivered an agency-wide message about transition expectations and met with political appointees to clarify their roles. And there's a big focus on continuity of operations, particularly important given that SBA plays a big role in disaster response.

President Bush met with employees of the Executive Office of the President today to discuss transition plans. Here's some of what he told them:

For more than a year now, departments and agencies throughout the federal government have been preparing for a smooth transition. We've provided intelligence briefings to the President-Elect, and the Department of Justice has approved security clearances for members of his transition staff. In the coming weeks, we will ask administration officials to brief the Obama team on ongoing policy issues, ranging from the financial markets to the war in Iraq. I look forward to discussing those issues with the President-Elect early next week.

Offices within the White House are at work preparing extensive transition materials. We're preparing career employees throughout the administration to take on added responsibilities to help prevent any disruption to the essential functions of the federal government.