GovernmentExecutive.com

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."

That's not to say that Downey, Garvey, and Huerta don't know a ton about transportation, period, and don't represent a diverse set of expertise. Downey knows transportation from both the legislative and executive perspectives. He was Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Transportation Budget Analyst for the House of Representatives Budget Committee, and he worked at Port Authority in New York. Garvey knows both flight and road: she was at the Federal Highway Administration before she was at FAA. And Huerta's a security expert: he's held executive positions at the Ports of San Francisco and New York, and served all over DOT. But those folks are also experienced and make a key DOT constituency happy. In other words: Obama and his team have a good sense of what some of their Transportation priorities are, and who it's important to be in good with.

The Office of Personnel Management tells a somewhat different story. There, Obama has appointed a consultant, Linh Nguyen, and a labor person, Sylvia Bolivar, which produces a nice balance, at least theoretically. Nguyen runs Morningside Consulting LLC, a small consulting company that includes a bunch of federal agencies in its client list. Before that, he was at Accenture, running the section of the firm's practice that dealt with government "organizational strategy and development, change management, HR transformation, and workforce transformation solutions," pretty much all the hot HR buzzwords of today. (He was also an anthropology major, which I think could lead to some fascinating observations about the federal workforce, and the culture at OPM, but we'll have to wait for the report for that. Bolivar is the right hand woman for Bruce Raynor, the general president of UNITE HERE, the garment, laundry, and hotel workers' union. She also worked in the Clinton White House Office of Presidential Personnel, where she focused on diversity efforts.

The priorities that Obama is signaling here are a lot less clear. He's clearly absorbed the need for HR change in the government, which good-government non-profits have been arguing for non-stop. But he didn't pick any of those good-government leaders to lead the review. He also didn't choose any federal employee union leaders. And he didn't appoint someone like Bob Tobias at American University or Paul Light at New York University whose resume includes service in government and academia. In other words, he didn't pick folks who are directly connected to federal employees from the labor side (both Nguyen and Bolivar have clearly engaged with federal employee issus from the management side), or to the key constituencies in any given agency or the non-profit community. What does this say Obama thinks about their ideas? I'm honestly not really sure.

Bolivar's appointment could signal a couple of things. It's entirely possible that Obama, though he isn't a co-sponsor of the Senate version of legislation that would try to increase the diversity of the Senior Executive Service and to improve the overall diversity of the federal workforce. Her appointment could also signal a renewed committment by Obama to improving labor relations best practices and training at OPM, or a thaw in labor-management relations. But the labor world she comes from is really, REALLY different than federal-sector labor relations, and I'll be curious to watch (and here) how that experience will translate. But again, this is a case where, if Obama wants to reward an ally (UNITE HERE's Nevada local, the Culinary Workers, endorsed Obama right before the primary, and put serious muscle behind him) he chose someone who has solid experience in the federal sector as well.

Rob Brodsky will have more on the Agency Review Teams this afternoon. But I think they're well worth watching: these teams, their recommendations, and what Obama decides to do with those recommendations and the people who made them, may signal a lot about how he'll run the organization he's now CEO of.