I attended a roundtable this morning, hosted by the American Public Health Association and Booz Allen Hamilton on using social media and risk communication during times of crisis. Agencies really have made tremendous strides in the last few years improving communication and dissemination of emergency preparedness information both during and in advance of disasters.

Officials from CDC, FEMA and HHS highlighted some of the things they’re doing with web tools, and the numbers alone were impressive. CDC sends weekly hurricane and winter weather tips by e-mail and text to more than 60,000 people. HHS’ recall widget has garnered 9.6 million page views. The speakers were very insightful about the benefits and challenges for agencies in taking advantage of social media, but a couple of points stuck out to me:

 Nathan Huebner, CDC emergency risk communication specialist, made the very important point that agencies must take advantage of “unaffected persons” who access information about disasters and emergency preparedness despite not being directly affected by any one event. These people tend to be extremely engaged with the information and can be used as “evangelists” to help people prepare for future crises. This kind of thinking is very “web 2.0”. It goes beyond the common government fear that they can’t police the information and puts faith in citizens to spread what’s important.

 Both Andrew Wilson, web content manager for HHS, and John Shea, FEMA public information officer for new media, stressed the importance of leveraging existing media properties and communication channels during a crisis. It seems to me that agencies are constantly creating new Twitter feeds and Facebook groups for specific topics, instead of taking advantage of the audiences they already have, and Wilson and Shea acknowledged that. The number of people who track agency information online is staggering, and they shouldn’t jump ship to a new platform for each new topic or event.

 These smart “Gov 2.0-ers” understand that social media is not a gimmick. It shouldn’t be used just because it’s available. As one panelist said, “we want to make sure we’re putting out valuable information, not just fluff to keep people pacified.”

The more I focus on social media use by agencies the more impressed I am by how much is going on despite the constantly cited cultural resistance. While this kind of cross-platform engagement is something citizens are clearly starting to expect from their government, I’d be curious to hear how engaged feds are with learning about and using these tools.

An arbitrator has ruled against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, saying that the anti-discrimination agency broke wage laws but pressuring employees to work for extra comp time instead of offering them additional pay. The agency's leaders have pledged to make changes, but it's too bad that this news comes just as the EEOC thought they might get funding for more staff to relieve a huge case backload and take the pressure off current employees.

The Post's Joe Davidson did a Q&A with House Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Darrell Issa, who said the following:

I have issues with our current pay-cap structure [for high-level civil servants], because I don't believe in pay caps. I take issue with having an employee's salary capped for the purposes of calculating your salary but not for retirement. This doesn't make sense -- if anything, these employees should be paid a full salary and have the theoretical cap apply to retirement. You should make what you earn.

Davidson didn't follow this up, but I'd be curious to see how Issa thinks pay should be assessed in the federal sector and where federal pay should be in relation to private-sector pay. Thus far, all the significant pay and benefits bills have originated from the Democratic side of the aisle in the House, or from a bipartisan cooperation between Daniel Akaka and George Voinovich in the Senate. I think it would be a good thing for debate if the Republicans were presenting more bills and proposals for how to move forward with workforce reforms.

Three teams from the Commission on Wartime Contracting have touched down in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a 10-day investigative trip to the two war zones.

Investigators with experience ranging from auditing to military and diplomatic to management have begun their work inspecting job sites, reviewing documents, conducting interviews and participating in briefings. The commission said the team members have detailed agendas for topics, sites and programs to look into.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting, created by the fiscal 2008 Defense authorization act, is charged with investigating reconstruction, support and security contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan and reporting back to Congress. The commission will deliver an interim report this spring and a final report in the summer of 2010. The group will issue recommendations on the reliance of contractors in wartime settings, contractor performance and accountability, management practices, contractor use of force and potential violations of law.

“We can do a lot of work with stateside interviews and computerized research, but there's no substitute for first-hand investigation," said Commission Co-Chair Michael Thibault. “There are about 200,000 contract employees working in Iraq and Afghanistan, outnumbering U.S. troops in the area. The unprecedented reliance on contractors in support of our foreign-policy and military objectives has been accompanied by many problems."

Sorry for the slow start today, ya'll. I'm moving offices (yet again) so I'm a little late in getting access to my computer and everything. But I wanted to put a reminder out there that if you've got an innovative idea for making government better, the deadline for entries to the FedPitch competition are coming up on April 4. See details on the contest and how to submit here.

Okay, that's a little dramatic headline-wise. But Sens. Daniel Akaka and George Voinovich, who have long been concerned about the glacial pace of the federal hiring process, have introduced a reform bill to change it. I'll have a fuller story on this tomorrow, but this puts a lot of pressure on the Office of Personnel Management and the agencies to come up with serious reform efforts of their own, or be forced to accept a new set of mandates.

It's a sunny day here at the GovExec offices, and I think everyone has a little bit of spring fever. So when I discovered this picture of Obama's Navy Secretary nominee Ray Mabus, a big debate started over whether the Navy allows beards like this:

It turns out the Navy's facial hair regulations are as follows:

The face shall be clean shaven unless a shaving waiver is authorized by the Commanding Officer per. Mustaches are authorized but shall be kept neatly and closely trimmed. No portion of the mustache shall extend below the lip line of the upper lip. It shall not go beyond a horizontal line extending across the corners of the mouth and no more than 1/4 inch beyond a vertical line drawn from the corner of the mouth. The length of an individual mustache hair fully extended shall not exceed approximately ½ inch. <Figure 2-2-1> refers. Handlebar mustaches, goatees, beards or eccentricities are not permitted. If a shaving waiver is authorized, no facial/neck hair shall be shaved, manicured, styled or outlined nor exceed 1/4 inch in length. Supervisors of individuals with shaving waivers shall actively monitor and ensure treatment regimen is followed. The following personnel are not authorized to wear any facial hair except for valid medical reasons:

a. Brig prisoners.

b. Brig awardees.

c. Personnel in a disciplinary hold status (i.e., who are serving restriction or hard labor without confinement or extra duties as a result of a court‑martial or NJP).

d. Personnel assigned to a transient personnel unit who are awaiting separation:

(1) By reason of a court‑martial sentence.

(2) To benefit the service

The American Federation of Government Employees and a number of other AFL-CIO unions kicked off a campaign today to with collective bargaining rights for registered nurses and a number of other categories of employees at the Veterans' Affairs Department. Sen. Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Bob Filner have introduced complimentary legislation in the Senate and House to do just that, although I don't know what the prospects are for the bill at this point. The coalition supporting the bills, RNs Working Together, makes an interconnected argument for expanding collective bargaining rights:

Limiting employees' ability to fully exercise their congressionally mandated rights jeopardizes the VA's ability to maintain excellence in care and honor a sacred trust with our nation's veterans. The lack of a meaningful voice at the workplace limits the ability of the VA to recruit and retain a strong healthcare workforce resulting in dangerous staff shortages. As the nation confronts a growing nurse shortage, the VA must establish itself as an employer of choice to ensure safe, quality care.

Making an efficacy argument strikes me as smart politics. The biggest--and most misleading--argument about allowing federal-sector workers unionize has always been "what if they go on strike? won't the air traffic control system/veterans' care/national security be in peril?" That argument ignores the fact that federal-sector strikes are illegal, and in the post-PATCO era extremely unlikely. The risk just isn't worth it. But by arguing that collective bargaining is a means to get better care and better information on patient treatment, RNs Working Together is trying to head off the argument behind it, that unionization somehow means a less effective workforce.

If your Monday's off to a slow start, just a head's up that I'll be on Federal News Radio (1500 AM for those of you in the Washington area, or streaming live from their website) between 11 and 12 on Thursday at noon. Taping now.

Al Kamen provides a little context on the pace of Obama's nominations and confirmations, which clarifies where the holdups are. Apparently the first Reagan administration has the gold standard for both nominations and confirmations by April 1.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told Government Executive last week that he wants to bring more rigorous performance management to his department:

"Tying what we do to specific articulated results is a very important function of what the management side of this agency has to do," Vilsack said. "To do that not only requires a commitment by leadership to make that happen, the president has been very clear in his expectation in that respect."

While he didn't discuss pay-for-performance specifically, I'd be curious to see how Vilsack is going to handle the pay-for-performance demonstration project he's inherited at the Food Safety Inspection Service. If the Secretary intends to establish strong performance management measures before diving into pay for performance systems, he'll have to keep an eye on FSIS where he'll have no choice but to move both together in tandem.

This is a guest post by Amelia Gruber, one of my editors:

Is anyone else wondering if the writers of the NBC comedy “The Office” have taken a page from the Obama administration? Those of you who watched last night’s episode might have noticed that toward the end, when new boss Charles Minor is restoring order after Michael’s departure, he assigns Stanley to be Dunder Mifflin’s “productivity czar.” Maybe we have been too immersed in federal management issues, but this seems reminiscent of Obama’s new “performance czar” position. We hope, though, that Obama finds somebody who won’t be doing a crossword puzzle when the nomination is announced.

Dipnote, for "U.S., Mexico Share Continent, Future." It's not quite as good as "Headless Corpse Found in Topless Bar," but in the government reform world, you take what you can get.

Yesterday was BUSY, everybody, and I just wanted two things. The Senate Budget Committee also moved to add pay parity to its version of the budget (the House did it on Tuesday). And Sens. Daniel Akaka and George Voinovich introduced their version of the telework bill. So pretty much everything workforce related is rolling along in concert in the House and Senate. I think this could be the session of Congress that some workforce bills actually pass in both houses and are signed by the president. A lot of bills got introduced last year, and there where a lot of hearings. While at the time, the stalling of those bills in committee or on a docket calendar seemed frustrating, my guess is they'll prove to be useful groundwork.

John Berry's confirmation hearing has barely gotten under way, but Sens. Daniel Akaka and George Voinovich, the only Senators in attendance at the hearing (other than Ben Cardin, who testified in support of Berry), have had to run off to take a couple of votes. Thus far, the hearing has a fairly relaxed, jocular tone. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer showed up and joked that he was wondering if everyone in the packed hearing room was here to testify against Berry, to huge laughs. Akaka accidentally called Hoyer "Mr. Maryland." Berry introduced his partner, Curtis Yee, who is from Honolulu, which Akaka seems to enjoy as a nod to his home state. There's been so much laughter that Akaka actually noted the mood in his opening statement, saying "It is obvious this is a joyous moment for all of you today."

Two key paragraphs from Berry's statement, which he is scheduled to give shortly. Sen. Ben Cardin and Rep. Steny Hoyer have just wrapped up their remarks:

The Civil Service of today carries forward that proud American tradition. Whether it is defending our homeland against attack, restoring confidence in our financial systems and administering an historic economic stimulus effort, ensuring adequate health care and administering an historic economic stimulus effort, ensuring adequate health care for our veterans and fellow citizens or searching for cures to the diseases which plague us--we are fortunate to have our best and our brightest to rely upon. It is our people who are our most important tool in facing any challenge, and we forget that at our peril. I believe people are not merely part of the equation, like capital or technology. They are the equation.

....

OUr workforce and human resource management system does not operate in a vacuum. It is connected and intertwined with every one of the President's priorities for economic recovery, energy, transportation, education, and health care. The pressues and demands on OPM are great, nearly as serious as those its predecessor--the Civil Service Commission--successfully met in the 1930s and 1940s. I believe OPM and its talented employees are ready to rise to these new challenges once again.

Nate Silver, the very smart statistician who runs FiveThirtyEight, has a novel idea for how we should handle regulation of the financial industry. We should make government salaries higher, so the smartest people will have more incentives to move into regulation, rather than on to Wall Street! Nate writes:

This is a very real problem. Some of the work that I did in my first job after college at KPMG involved valuing intellectual property in conjunction with international tax disputes. We had our economists, and the IRS had theirs. The thing was, however, that our economists were better than the IRS's, because if someone at the IRS was any good, we'd hire them away and treble their salary. Part of a good regulatory reform plan, then, would be to increase the salaries paid to employees at institutions like the Fed, the Treasury, the IRS, and the FDIC.

I also happen to think that's an awesome idea, but, sadly, it is not remotely as easy as it sounds. To jack up salaries significantly in those agencies would require big adjustments to those budgets. And once it's done, it raises the question of why we aren't making National Institutes of Health salaries competitive with top hospitals? What about CIA agents and corporate espionage? I think it would be great if that Pandora's Box got opened, and we had a serious conversation about government compensation, the pay gap, and societal values. I would love it. But to say, let's raise salaries for some smart people who we need right now totally ignores the realities of federal pay, and how compensation is out of whack up and down the pay scale.

Don't travel with home-built technology, or stuff you've modded. The Transportation Security Administration will blow it up.

Lily Whiteman has an interesting piece in the Post this morning about how to get a federal job. And while she has some good suggestions--don't assume the government doesn't hire people who do what you do, sometimes working for a contractor first may be a quick way in--but she doesn't take on what I think should be the primary subject of a column aimed at private-sector employees trying to get inside the federal door. And that's the nature of the applications process, which will almost invariably seem very different from anything they've experienced at companies or non-profits. The technical language is tough, the requirements for KSAs aren't immediately evident.

Looking for a job is difficult, especially if you feel under pressure to find one immediately. I know that when I was looking for jobs out of college about three years ago, the market for journalists was bad, though not remotely as miserable as it is now. I applied for at least fifty jobs in journalism and publishing, and because most of the time I wasn't getting much in the way of responses, I tended to fill out more easier applications, the ones that wanted just a resume, cover letter, and maybe some clips. It was depressing to do huge, complicated applications that I thought no one would read. And I worry that that's what job seekers will feel when they look at USAJobs. At least if they're prepared for what they're getting into, they might be less intimidated.

This post, a guest entry by Howard Risher, a consultant and author on performance-based pay who's been of frequent help to me in understanding compensation issues, addresses some of the issues I raised on Tuesday.

The outrage over the AIG bonuses would seem to have important implications for the federal pay program. Every critic, including President Obama it seems, is in favor of using financial rewards linked to performance. Their criticism has focused on two issues: (1) the idea that any organization would award bonuses in a year when the organization’s performance was unacceptable and (2) the lack of evidence that the individuals performed well.

The critics and voters across the country have also reacted to the amounts. The payouts were staggeringly large. But the more shocking issue is the apparent recognition by the critics that the awards were not out of line with common Wall Street practices. It’s a different world.

Continue reading "How A.I.G. Relates to Federal Agencies" »

Apparently, Danielle Gray, the staffer who filled out a questionnaire for President Obama in which he expressed strong support for whistleblower protections, is now an associate counsel to Obama. It's not clear that she'll be working specifically on whistleblower issues in her new position, but it might affect how people read Obama's signing statement on whistleblower issues in the omnibus spending bill.

If you haven't read Katherine Peters' story about the trouble the Energy Department is having managing the money it's received in the stimulus package, you should. Katherine's reporting makes the critical point that the stimulus money is straining already limited oversight resources. It's not the first time that folks have suggested that Inspectors General are overloaded, or that financial management needs to be reformed. But Katherine's story makes the additional point that the stimulus is also a way the Obama administration is redirecting agencies and departments' priorities:

The guidance from the White House Office of Management and Budget on administering the funds poses daunting challenges for even the most well-run federal program offices, Friedman wrote. For Energy and other agencies with histories of contract and financial management problems, the stimulus funds present potentially overwhelming difficulties.

...

"This is complicated by the fact that, in many respects, the Recovery Act requirements represent a fundamental transformation of the department's mission. If these challenges are to be met successfully, all levels of the department's structure and its many constituents, including the existing contractor community; the national laboratory system; state and local governments; community action groups and literally thousands of other contract, grant, loan and cooperative agreement recipients throughout the nation will have to strengthen existing or design new controls to safeguard Recovery Act funds," he wrote.

I think most program managers would agree that additional funding is a good thing. But that doesn't mean that keeping track of it is easy. And it's especially not easy when you're trying to realign your programs at the same time, get staff buy-in for that realignment, and meet a raft of new reporting requirements that your staff may still be struggling to understand. I don't have as solution for this. But it does mean that stimulus spending done properly is going to take time.

Ed O'Keefe has a good point about last night's press conference today. Obama may not love the way the procurement process now, but what's he going to cut? And how is he going to reexamine existing contracts without disrupting important programs?

I'm at the markup of the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act, and it's been interesting to watch as both Democrats and Republicans on the committee make the argument that the federal government should be a model employer.

Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), the long-term sponsor of the bill, is using that argument from a liberal perspective, saying that if the federal government moves, other employers will follow: ". This bill would only affect the 1.8 million federal employees, but it is often the federal government that leads the country. It is a model project for the country...As a country that constantly talks about family values, it’s a way of putting the reality into the rhetoric. The federal government is the largest employer in our nation, but it lags behind the private sector on this vital work-life issue."

And Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) is making the case from a conservative, federalist perspective: "There are thousands of state and local governments that could be doing this…I see this as setting an example. These are our employees…One of the things the federal government ought to do more is lead through example, rather than dictate. As the largest employer, we can set an example so millions of businesses out there will follow our example, take a look at the bottom line, and see they can have their employees working with their families, not just with their businesses. I much prefer to lead by example and this bill follows that edict."

But they're all on the same page. Bilbray's alone among Republicans in making that argument, but it's the first time I've heard a Republican make the case for the federal government as model employer. It makes a lot of sense, from a traditionally conservative and federalist perspective.

Andrew Cuomo, the New York state Attorney General, says he's persuaded a number of A.I.G. executives to return bonuses that were paid to them out of funds the government used to bail out the insurance giant. I asked one of my friends who works at a consulting firm in New York to explain to me why A.I.G. went ahead and paid out the bonuses, and why the people who received them felt justified in accepting them. Basically what he explained is that the compensation system is such that employees' contracts include a base salary and bonuses that are an expected part of what they make each year. In other words, bonuses aren't really bonuses. They aren't really paid out according to performance--it seems like you have to seriously screw up not to get your "bonus."

This is the same problem with the so-called retention bonuses paid to some high-ranking federal employees a couple of years ago. It wasn't ever clear that those employees had offers to leave, or if they had offers, intended to take them. The retention bonuses weren't really aimed at retention, just as the Wall Street bonus system isn't actually based on extraordinary performance.

The solution--for Wall Street, and for the federal government--isn't really to claw back bonuses. It's to determine what compensation schemes actually provide incentives for extraordinary service, and what levels of service ought to be rewarded by extraordinary compensation. The A.I.G. fiasco ought to, and is, provoking conversations about what kind of executive compensation is appropriate in the private sector. But it ought to be sparking conversations about what kinds of compensation are effective in the federal government as well.

Paul Light has a typically smart op-ed in today's New York Times on the impact of not making presidential appointments quickly, and not getting them confirmed. The Washington Post has an application running to track the appointments the Obama administration has made so far and how far those appointments have gotten through the confirmations process. The Obama team isn't actually moving through the appointments process more slowly than other administrations, but as Light writes, these are extraordinary times, when the appointment process needs to move faster:

At the Treasury Department, for example, the Senate has confirmed only one appointee, but Secretary Timothy Geithner is hardly alone. He has an at-will chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, press officer, three special counselors and 50 at-will appointees working in his executive suite. Mr. Geithner has no choice but to bulk up on at-will functionaries if he wants to keep Treasury running, but these appointees will still be making decisions long after the Senate confirms the deputy secretary and various undersecretaries, inspectors general and assistant secretaries who will make up his formal subcabinet. Once the de facto subcabinet is in place, it is nearly impossible to dismantle.

Mr. Byrd should not underestimate the impact of this de facto subcabinet on the federal government’s performance. Under President George W. Bush, at-will appointees were responsible for the politicization of the Justice Department’s civil service hiring process, the suppression of scientific evidence at the Environmental Protection Agency and the woeful response to Hurricane Katrina by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

This is also an argument for simply cutting the number of political appointees. But that's a long-term reform, and given that Obama has to make these appointments, the Senate should be moving quickly on the president's choices and making decisions on the merits. If we're genuinely worried about the impact of de-facto appointees, and if we care about the major government programs being developed, in particular at Treasury, getting the right people in place, the right way, matters.

The Washington Post has a great monthly feature going, where they ask a panel of technology experts to grade WhiteHouse.gov on the basis of some of the same goals, including transparency and interactivity, that the Obama team set out for its administration during the campaign. But what's most interesting for me is not the particular letter grades the judges are giving to the White House website, but how they're talking about the technological cusp that we're on, and how the president can build buy-in, or miss an opportunity to push new, responsive forms of communication:

"In the same way FDR was able to use radio 'Fireside Chats' to talk to the American public to understand his decisions and his vision leaving them inspired to subscribe to it and adjust their expectations accordingly, this President has the same opportunity with an exponentially more powerful medium to not only lead us to achieve his vision, but to invite us to help get us all there faster," said Rasiej, who served as an adviser to the Obama transition's technology, innovation and government reform group. In a way, Obama's innovative use of the Internet during his campaign set a high bar for what he would do once he occupied the Oval Office. As Miller explained, "When it comes to transparency and citizen engagement, it still has a long way to go to meet the expectations that the President himself set during the campaign."

The details of Vivek Kundra's theft bust have finally been made public. He got caught stealing four shirts worth $134 from J.C. Penney. What a stupid thing to steal. I'm sympathetic, in principle, to the idea that someone might steal, say, bread for their starving family out of total desperation, in a situation without our social service programs. I am not sympathetic to some dude stealing a couple of shirts. There are respectable thrift stores with decent shirts anywhere. There are charities that give away clothes. And if you're stealing clothes as a prank, you are endangering someone's job. And at J.C. Penney, that person is probably a low-wage worker who really needs the job. Not cool.

Tania Shand is going to be running the Office of Personnel Management's Office of Congressional Relations. This strikes me as a very good thing. I worked with Tania some when she was staff director of the House Oversight and Government Reform Federal Workforce Subcommittee. She struck me then as knowledgeable, extremely responsive, and as someone who had a real sense of the big picture of government management. I don't know if this means OPM is considering some of the diversity reforms that Rep. Danny Davis pushed when he was chairman of the subcommittee, but I'll be curious to find out.

So, we just got our 4,000th comment, and this is the 3,000th post on FedBlog. Big numbers indeed. I want to thank Tom for letting me have this space to share with all of you, and to thank all of you for your keen insights and senses of humor. It's a pleasure writing for ya'll. I'd hoped this post would be the kickoff to a great day of blogging, but I'm afraid posting might be somewhat sporadic today as I have the Cold of Death. So talk amongst yourselves, let me know what's on your minds in comments, and I'll do my best to come back in full force.

Okay, confession time. I was a high school policy debater. I spent the better part of four years arguing at very high speed over absurdly convoluted scenarios, including what it would be like if we had weapons in space. So it's simultaneously kind of cool and kind of creepy to read Bob Brewin's piece on the debate over satellite-disabling weapons. This stuff was never supposed to become TRUE!

The Senate confirmed Elena Kagan today, making her the first female Solicitor General. I know we're beyond the point in society when every "first" needs to be noted, but I thought this was one significant, given who preceded her as the last Harvard Law School dean to take up the position. I recounted the following story from a book I was reviewing about a month ago, Fred Strebeigh's Equal:

Kagan is is not the first dean of Harvard Law School to become solicitor general, the last was Erwin Griswold, who took the job in 1967. As dean, Griswold invited women law students, including future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to an annual reception where he asked them what they thought they were doing occupying seats that could be filled by men. Ginsburg recalls that she told Griswold she hoped law school would help her understand her husband, then a year ahead of her. Another student, ribbing the dean, asked "What better place to catch a man?"

A lot changes in 42 years, doesn't it?

The FAA's broken out its stimulus spending on airports by project in a pie chart. It's clear and understandable, even if you're not an aviation expert. All the departments should release something like this; it could be a great public confidence tool to help people understand where their money is going.

The Washington Post has a sad story about a soon-to-be former CIA agent who took prospective agents to strip clubs to recruit them and has been accused of sexually assaulting several women. And it goes on to ask a question that, in different form, I think has important implications for agencies everywhere:

The CIA says that these problems involve a tiny fraction of its workforce, and that those found to have breached rules are punished or fired. But former officers say the cases underscore a perennial challenge: guarding against scandal in a workforce -- the size of which is classified but is generally estimated to be 20,000 -- that prides itself on secrecy and deception.

"You have an organization of professional liars," said Tyler Drumheller, who oversaw hundreds of officers as chief of the agency's European division. Experienced field managers are needed, he said, because inevitably "some people will try to take advantage of the system . . . and it's a system that can be taken advantage of."

To be clear, I think this is probably an overly harsh assessment of CIA agents as a whole. Just because your job involves deception doesn't make you a morally bankrupt human being. Taking on a cover doesn't mean you're suddenly free from moral constraints, and most people seem to understand this just fine. But the question of how to inculcate an ethical culture is still really relevant for all agencies across government. I was shocked about a year ago when I wrote a story about a report that showed high levels of ethical violations in the government. But I've come to see that perceptions of unfairness and mistrust are more prevalent than I initially assumed. So how do we get beyond that? How do we encourage people to do right by each other, and inculcate them with a sense that that behavior should be instinctive? I don't have the answer. But it's an important question to be asking.

Apparently, the National Endowment for the Arts' literature director is really, really devoted to his job. He's trying to get all the residents of a 128-person town to read To Kill a Mockingbird, and if they don't, he'll eat a copy of the book. Maybe it makes me a bad person, but having already read the book a couple of times, I'd be tempted to hold out just to watch him do it. Hey, he offered...

Some of the big news yesterday was that the Obama administration is going to send a lot more civilian federal employees to Afghanistan. I tended to think of that from a workforce perspective, but fortunately Spencer Ackerman is around to put this move in the context of diplomacy and counter-insurgency tactics. He writes of the leaders of the civilian surge:

These are two serious heavy hitters. Galbraith -- who basically uncovered the Kurdish genocide of 1987-8 (read about it in now-White House aide Samantha Power's first book) -- is one of the leading lights of the global human-rights movement. Ricciardone, a former ambassador to Egypt who's a foreign-service rock star, helped establish the post-Coalition Provisional Authority composition of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Iraq. What's more, they're going to be joined by Tim Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan and another diplomatic eminence with Iraq experience. These are people you go to when you want to send a message about the importance of diplomacy.

According to DeYoung's piece, this isn't just a diplomatic plus-up, it's a plus-out. (Ugh sorry I sound like Tom Friedman.) That is, these diplomats (and agronomists and legal experts and others) aren't going to be clustered in Kabul. They'll be sent around the country, including down south in Taliban and insurgent strongholds. The idea, evidently, is to roll back the insurgency's ability to outgovern the Kabul government in those areas. That's a big cultural shift toward a more deployable, activist State Department.

I think the State Department is going to see huge changes in the next several years: there will be more staffing, but there will also be a lot more asked of the Foreign Service. I just hope that the administration will take action with workforce planning in mind.

Remember that plan to change health care payment order for wounded veterans I've been writing about? My college friend Phil Rucker is reporting that it's dead.

From Rob Brodsky:

Hard to believe but it took the U.S. Congress until last year to prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from awarding a Federal Protective Service contract for guard services to a business concern that is “owned, controlled, or operated by an individual who has been convicted of a serious felony.”

DHS has now issued a proposed rule detailing which felonies may prohibit a contractor from being awarded a contract and to require companies to provide information regarding those crimes to government officials.

And if you’re curious what qualifies as a serious felony, the rule spells out some examples including: fraud arising out of a contract with the federal, state or local government; bribery; threatening physical harm to a government official; counterfeiting; forgery or willful failure to collect or pay federal taxes.

Brian Friel, a reporter from our sister publication National Journal, is covering a House Budget Committee hearing where Robert Hale, DoD comptroller is testifying. Friel says that House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt asked Hale why DoD’s costs have gone up so much higher than the rate of inflation over the past decade. Hale said one of the reasons is that jobs that have been outsourced to contractors have been more expensive than in-house personnel were. To get costs under control, Hale said the Pentagon will look at converting contractors back to government personnel. We “need to look carefully at how many contractors we’re using,” Hale said.

This is a pretty cut and dry statement from the comptroller. Unions have long claimed that outsourcing costs the government more, while contractor associations have disputed this. It's increasingly looking like there will be more than a suspension of Circular A-76, there may very well be a significant reversal.

President Obama wrote the following in a signing statement he attached to the omnibus spending bill, referring to a section that protects officials who disclose information about their jobs:

“I do not interpret this provision to detract from my authority to direct the heads of executive departments to supervise, control and correct employees’ communications with the Congress in cases where such communications would be unlawful or would reveal information that is properly privileged or otherwise confidential.”

The New York Times that Chuck Grassley thinks the signing statement could be interpreted to abridge whistleblower rights. Grassley takes whistleblower rights really, really seriously. But that doesn't mean he's wrong. If the Obama team supports whistleblower rights, clarifying what the signing statement means and issuing a strong statement of support for employees' rights shouldn't be a problem, right?

I wrote last week that the Obama administration was considering changes to how Veterans Affairs bills for veterans' health care. At the time, the details of the proposed changes weren't clear. As it's been explained to me, this is how it would work: right now, for veterans who have health insurance in addition to the TRICARE insurance they pay for, the VA bills the other insurance before they bill TRICARE. The idea would be to switch wounded veterans to the same payment order. I'm still not sure why the Obama administration is considering this. But that appears to be what the change is.

Gautham Nagesh has confirmation from the White House that Kundra's back at work, but Anne Laurent, my former boss, doubts he can survive.

Gautham Nagesh pointed this out to me: http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/breaking-news-cio-vivek-kundra-back-job

According to commenter Sister in State, Obama is part Irish. And there's a song about it:

I surrender to the cheesiness. :)

Drumroll please, Elaine Kaplan, currently senior deputy general counsel at the National Treasury Employees Union, and formerly head of of the Office of Special Counsel under President Clinton. I have a weird feeling that the government's lawsuit defending the Federal Career Intern Program might disappear. According to court papers, Kaplan argued NTEU's amicus curiae brief in Gingery v. Department of Defense, making the case against FCIP. I'll have a story on this later in the afternoon.

Vivek Kundra, Obama's currently-suspended-chief-information-officer, got busted on a petty theft charge in 1997. I don't think one misstep should ruin anyone's career, particularly not if that indiscretion comes at a fairly young age. But, as Valleywag writes:

There are two equally disturbing possibilities here: Either the army of White House lawyers vetting candidates just didn't bother to check Kundra's criminal records. Or they agreed that Kundra's probation-before-judgment maneuver meant the crime he admitted committing in court was nothing to worry about.

I wrote yesterday that I thought a combination of naivete and arrogance were responsible for the failures of the Obama vetting process. But I honestly don't have an explanation for Kundra, and the way revelations about him have continued to leak out. At minimum, the vetting seems poorly done. And the public relations handling of this is an embarrassment to public relations people everywhere. It doesn't matter if Kundra gets to keep his job or not at this point. He's already created a huge mess.

I have nothing against St. Patrick's Day. I'm a quarter Irish, and I am sitting at my desk in a green cardigan with plans to bake a stout cake later in the day to celebrate. But I think it's really cheesy that President Obama chose today to nominate an ambassador to Ireland.

You aren't any more. Story coming, but DoD has suspended NSPS conversions while they and OPM do a review of the system.

The National Treasury Employees Union case against the Office of Personnel Management seeking to eliminate the Federal Career Intern Program is still pending. But OPM, under Acting Director Kathie Ann Whipple, issued a memo last week telling agencies that, for now, if they decide to pass over service-disabled veterans for jobs they're filling with federal career interns, they have to follow pass-over procedures and send a request to do so to OPM. And the memo notes that, with regard to the Gingery decision, "OPM is still analyzing the decision and considering options." I don't know that it's a clear signal either way that the Obama administration has made up its mind either way whether to end the program. But it seems like a sign that they're thinking about it.

Amy Harder has a good post up at FedBlog's sister blog, Lost In Transition, on some of the controversy surrounding Obama's issue czars. Harder writes:

n the Washington Post this week, Yale law and political science professor Bruce Ackerman went a step further, arguing that czars should in fact undergo Senate confirmation. Ackerman noted that if Tom Daschle had been appointed only to the health czar post and not as Health and Human Services secretary, his tax problems might never have surfaced and he would be well on his way to leading the charge for health care reform.

And that reminded me that I've been wanting to delve into the contradictions and failures of Obama's vetting process so far. It's been fascinating to me that a team that's so publicly committed to ethics, and that dealt with lapses in ethics or decorum during the campaign (see Samantha Power's "Monster" slip, Jim Johnson's resignation from the vice presidential search team, etc.) has become so publicly bogged down of finding qualified candidates without ethics problems to serve in the administration. Some commenters here have ascribed those problems to a deliberate and willful disregard for ethics concerns. But I don't really think that's the case. Obama himself comes across as fairly personally conservative. No one's ever been able to really pin a true ethical violation on him. I don't think ethics are irrelevant to him.

But I think demanding the same from everyone you appoint to serve in your administration creates a real problem for an administration. First, as of 2005, there were 1,640 Schedule C political appointees in the federal government. That's a lot of people to have to find to serve in your administration. The chances that you can find 1,640 people who have never made a mistake on their taxes (for the record, when I was examining my 2007 tax filings this year, I found an error. I take back everything I ever said about how easy it is to do your taxes. At least I overpaid the government by a couple of dollars, rather than underpaying by tens of thousands!), who have avoided conflicts of interest to the absolute highest standard their entire lives, and whose families and friends have avoided all the same problems, are extremely small. In fact, it's probably fairly naive to assume that there are that many extremely qualified people who are completely ethically unscathed, or self-righteous to assume that everyone's been trying to live up to those same standards in anticipation of the day their ship comes in and the president comes calling.

I don't think that excuses folks who don't pay their taxes correctly, or who take work from contractors without paying them promptly, or whatever. Pay the government the money you owe. Think carefully about conflicts of interest. Do the right thing. Tax complexity aside, it's not that hard.

But the Obama administration set the rules for judging nominees, and then picked this slate of people. And either they knew about their tax, and contractor, and other kinds of problems, and they went ahead with them anyway, or they didn't know. If the first case, they badly miscalculated how the nominations and accompanying reveals would play. And if the second, their vetting process was a disaster--these are basic things that should have shown up. Either way, the Obama team set the rules that are now forcing nominees to drop out, and have produced a souped-up process that's leading other potential nominees to back out because the process is too exhausting or they can't face the media scrutiny. The Obama team isn't in trouble because it doesn't care enough about ethics. The administration's in trouble because it cares a lot about ethics, but it hasn't found a way to transform that concern into a viable enforcement regime that weeds out genuine wrong-doers, and finds a way to move forward with folks who are guilty of nothing more than mistakes.

I got an email on Saturday announcing that Daniel Hirsch, who co-founded Concerned Foreign Service Officers, a group that's focused on the security clearance process at the State Department, is going to run for Vice President of the American Foreign Service Association. AFSA's spent a lot of time lobbying Congress to increase appropriations for staffing at State, and their leadership has found allies in Sen. George Voinovich and the American Academy of Diplomacy. I don't particularly know if Hirsch has a shot in his campaign, but it's interesting to see the groups' competing agendas play out in an election. If anyone's seen campaign literature or emails, send 'em my way.

Sorry blogging's been light today, folks. Lots of phone calls to make, legalistic stories to write. But I wanted to call attention to this post of Ross Douthat's, since he's about to leave Atlantic Media for the New York Times editorial page and I felt like I should link to him before he goes.

The piece is a lot more philosophical than I usually get here on the blog. But one section of it caught my eye. Ross writes:

I don't want to dismiss the arguments about the practical costs and benefits associated with different styles of welfare states, mind you. I like those arguments, and they matter a great deal. I would just deny that they can come close to settling, in any meaningful sense, the debate over how big the American welfare state should be overall, and whether we should copy Western Europe or disdain it. That's because both the American and the European models of government are successful in purely practical terms, to the extent that purely practical terms exist - which is to say, both models have provided, over an extended period of time, levels of prosperity and stability unparalleled in human history.

One way to go about deciding how big government should be is to decide what you value in society, as Ross writes later in the post. But another way to decide how big government should be is to develop quality measures that tell you how good it is at certain things. And then you can decide that there are some things government should or shouldn't do because of how good it is at doing those things.

Apparently, Obama's Urban Policy czar, Adolfo Carrión, has thus far neglected to pay an architect who did some work on his home while also working on a major housing project Carrión was reviewing. The experience of a certain former Connecticut Governor and a certain former Alaska Senator really should be enough to convince politicians that no one even remotely politically connected should do work on your house, and perhaps that all home improvements would be best saved until after leaving office. I think we've reached a critical mass in this administration where it's clear that everyone is flawed. But the constant trickle of this stuff is a mess.

Two California judges ruled that the domestic partners of gay and lesbian federal employees who work for them are entitled to health care benefits under FEHBP. This sets up a confrontation with the Office of Personnel Management, which as of a Feb. 20 letter, said that the office couldn't provide federal employees' partners with benefits because of the Defense of Marriage Act. More to come in a story later today, but this is big.

Vivek Kundra, Obama's new Chief Information Officer, is on leave while the FBI sorts out the bribery case of one of his former employees and a contractor who worked in his office. Kundra isn't implicated, supposedly, but again, the optics are terrible.

The Obama administration has created a real problem for itself. Clearly, some of its early vetting, especially on tax issues was sloppy. Now, the vetting has gotten so tough that some candidates are withdrawing before they're done with the process. Those who do are facing such heightened scrutiny that any wrongdoing in the vicinity sticks with them. They're trying to do the right thing, but they've put themselves in a terrible bind.

Many of you who read this blog have, I'm sure, read the work of my colleague and beat partner, Brittany Ballenstedt. She's been a leader in coverage of the National Security Personnel System, personnel reform in the intelligence community (keep an eye out for her upcoming feature on the topic), the unionization campaign at the Government Accountability Office, and the generational shift in the workforce, among many other topics.

And tomorrow's her last day as a full-time employee at Government Executive. Brittany and her husband are moving to California, a move that I'm sure will be wonderful for them, but leaves me and her other colleagues here feeling rather bereft. As any of you who have met Brittany know, she is not only a terrific reporter and writer, but a kind, funny, intelligent, perceptive person.

Fortunately for all of you, she'll be back with us later in the spring with a new blog over at our sister technology site, NextGov. I'll keep you posted on that blog's development, and I hope you'll read Brittany often, and join me in wishing her the best of luck.

I swear I read blogs other than Matt Yglesias's. But his post on a new Center for American Progress poll on American's views on government is really valuable. Matt writes:

And on specifics, there’s a strong desire for high levels of government spending with 79 percent agreeing that “Government investments in education, infrastructure, and science are necessary to ensure America’s long-term economic growth” and 69 percent agreeing that “Government has a responsibility to provide financial support for the poor, the sick, and the elderly.” This fairly overwhelming support for spending is tempered by more conservative views on some other issue area, and also by concern that government does work well in practice. 61 percent agree that “Government spending is almost always wasteful and inefficient.” CAP also coded as “progressive” the 65 percent who agreed that “Government policies too often serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy” but at least some of that might be skepticism about the idea that an activist federal government will actually side with average people, rather than a belief that we need to reverse the small-government policies of the past 30 years.

Matt's writing about the survey in the context of what it says about how progressive or conservative Americans are. But I think this also represents a very important opportunity for the federal government. Americans want the government to do a bunch of very specific things right now, and feel urgently that it's important the government does them well. It's a rare chance to catch the public's attention and build a reserve trust in government capacity. That reserve of trust is a huge source of momentum for reform in things like the hiring system. If agencies fail to deliver, it won't be just President Obama, or liberals who suffer the consequences. It'll be government as a whole.

So, apparently, one of the employees of Vivek Kundra, the new Chief Information Officer, just got busted in a big federal bribery sting. I doubt it has anything to do with Kundra, but man, does the Obama administration have bad luck with perception right now. NextGov's Gautham Nagesh is tweeting from scene, which is currently locked down by the FBI.

Laura Rozen (who I fact-checked back in the day when she was doing some freelancing for National Journal and I was a baby journalist) has a good post up about how Chas Freeman's nomination to to chair the National Intelligence Council blew up. It's an interesting look at the confluence of lobbying, political and media skils, and vetting. This paragraph stood out at me:

A former colleague of Blair's, who asked to speak on background, said the former Pacific commander and former Rhodes Scholar is "intellectually brilliant" but "not a Leon Panetta." The CIA director and former Clinton chief of staff, he said, "is a creature of the Washington establishment -- a former member of Congress who understands the political nuances of the Beltway."

But, of course, Panetta's not just a Washingotn insider; he knows how to handle a bureaucracy.

Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have made a couple of points about my argument that there are too many political appointees in government right now, that I think raise an interesting question about how people perceive the federal government and what they see of it. I want to explore their points, because I think they hit on some issues that may seem obvious to those of us who work in and cover the workings of government, but may be invisible to those outside it. Ezra says, postulating a pro-appointee argument:

The counterargument here is that administrations enter office with radically different agendas -- agendas that often have to be imposed on bureaucracies that have spent the last few years doing the opposite thing, and may have liked doing that thing. That's a lot of inertia for one appointee to overcome. So you fan them throughout the bureaucracy to make sure the various departments align with the administration's agenda.

But that sort of strategic appointing is not always necessary. It's hard to imagine the Treasury Department hid a lot of functionaries bitterly opposed to crafting a bank rescue plan.

I think this argument somewhat overstates the extent to which White House-set policy impacts the day-to-day operations of government, and that Ezra's right to say there aren't huge pockets of agenda-driven federal employees. It's one thing to set policy regarding what scientists can say to the press and Congress, for example. A policy decision like that might be something that a new administration wants to reverse, but it doesn't actually stop the scientists from doing research, or change the grants process at the National Science Foundation, much less change how the person who runs telework programs at the National Science Foundation does their job. The Bush administration may have changed how Medicare interacts with prescription drug coverage, but that doesn't change the fact that there are people who need to need to process Medicare applications.

More importantly, I think that what's most important to federal employees is efficacy, rather than ideology. If they work at the National Institutes of Health, they're going to support policies that do the most to support excellent research. If they work for the Army, they want to find effective ways to support the armed forces. When I was researching and reporting a series about faith in the federal workplace more than a year ago, one thing I found was that the very devout employees I talked to, even ones with clearly articulated conservative politics, were directing that energy not towards advancing a political agenda, but towards, for example, challenging themselves and their co-workers to do record amounts of pro-bono work helping low-income people with their tax filings, or creating work environments that helped them deal with the stress brought on by working in public health. The goal was efficacy, not a specific policy spin.

Continue reading "R.E.S.P.E.C.T. (Or, Why Civil Servants Deserve More Of It, and Appointees Should Get Less Ink and Fewer Chairs)" »

Obama issues a signing statement for the Omnibus bill that appears to give agencies a fair amount of latitude on how they spend the money that's coming to them. Most importantly, they're allowed to treat the opinions of Congressional committees as advisory when they spend or reallocate the funds. Relevant portion of the signing statement is here:

Legislative Aggrandizements (committee-approval requirements). Numerous provisions of the legislation purport to condition the authority of officers to spend or reallocate funds on the approval of congressional committees. These are impermissible forms of legislative aggrandizement in the execution of the laws other than by enactment of statutes. Therefore, although my Administration will notify the relevant committees before taking the specified actions, and will accord the recommendations of such committees all appropriate and serious consideration, spending decisions shall not be treated as dependent on the approval of congressional committees. Likewise, one other provision gives congressional committees the power to establish guidelines for funding costs associated with implementing security improvements to buildings. Executive officials shall treat such guidelines as advisory. Yet another provision requires the Secretary of the Treasury to accede to all requests of a Board of Trustees that contains congressional representatives. The Secretary shall treat such requests as nonbinding.

As Federal Times reports, no one manages the I fund in particular. No fraud has been committed. The fund is not bankrupt. We can all return to our regularly scheduled freaking out about the state of our retirement funds now.

CNN is reporting that "Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance."

Senators like Patty Murray have already said there's no way the proposal would win approval in Congress. But I'm hard-pressed to understand why the administration is considering this. It's a fairly basic tenet that if people get themselves hurt protecting our country, it's on the government to take care of that hurt. The CNN story gives very few details on why the administration is considering this, other than Shinseki's confirmation that it's under discussion. Perhaps this is part and parcel of a larger health care reorganization? Perhaps there will be a reorganization of how TRICARE is set up and paid for? None of this is clear.

But it's bad optics. Veterans' benefits are--and probably should be--a political third rail. But at absolute minimum, it would seem that if Shinseki's going to confirm this is under discussion, a good explanation of the change and the rationale behind it should be part and parcel of that confirmation.

Everybody wants to get new federal employees automatically enrolled in the Thrift Savings Plan. First, it was new Federal Workforce Subcommittee Chair Stephen Lynch. Now, Henry Waxman's reintroduced his tobacco bill with a package of TSP reforms including automatic enrollment, attached. A similar piece of legislation passed the House last year.

This go-round, so similar to the endless debates over pay, illustrates the strengths and the weakness of Congressional control over much of the TSP. The legislative process means that change can't happen precipitously or recklessly--if the TSP decided it wanted to go big on credit default swaps, for example, the market as a whole would have moved on to something else by the time the TSP got authorized to buy into risky investments. But it also means that it takes forever to advance an idea, even when there's consensus on it. The Employee Thrift Advisory Council and the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board are signed up as saying automatic enrollment's a good thing. Leading lawmakers support it. And yet, we're still waiting for automatic enrollment because it's really hard to get lawmakers to pay attention to federal employee issues long enough to pass bills that affect them.

Fedline asks, where's Cass Sunstein, supposedly Obama's pick to run the Office of Management and Budget Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs?

The New York Times "The Moment" blog (a must for anyone who likes looking at, if not buying, silly, pretty things) has a neat examination of the Obama administration's new logos for Recovery.gov and the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery. Steven Heller writes:

Obama’s branding during and after the campaign has been vigorous and intelligent. But does Juras believe there is a distinctly “Obama” graphic design ethos? “It’s not really about ‘Obama’ branding anymore,” he replied. “It’s more about branding the administration, and it’s best to let the administration speak to its own overarching ethos. That having been said, the direction — ‘don’t make it look too governmental’ — that we were given certainly stakes out an interesting position.”

What’s also interesting about this logo is that its goal is to become obsolete. Just as the W.P.A. was retired when the Depression was over (and World War II began), the ARRA logo is tied to the fate of the economy. “Hopefully, the recovery effort will work so well and so quickly that we’re no longer in recovery but back at full strength and don’t need it,” Juras said. “The sooner it becomes a historical artifact, the better.”

The designs are sharp and crisp, particularly for TIGER. But I think the idea that they'll make a substantial difference in how Americans feel about recovery programs is probably wrong. Print and graphic media are a smaller part of Americans' overall media consumption than they were during the Great Depression, so it's less likely that either of these logos will become as iconic as Roosevelt's Blue Eagle. At the same time, if this is part of a larger rebranding of the government, I'm fine with it. I guess it's easier to choose a graphic designer than a Chief Performance Officer, even if the latter has the potential to be a great deal more important.

Update: Apparently I am in trouble with my amazing art director for denigrating the graphic arts. Graphic design is much more important in Government Executive than it is anywhere else. I swear! In all seriousness, though, our magazine looks amazing because of Kelly and Jennifer's work, and if you're not a subscriber, you really should check it out. It's free if you qualify!

Apparently, ABC is wrapping up the run of Homeland Security USA early. Ed O'Keefe writes that the network isn't sure when it will air the remaining episodes of the show, which debuted to decidedly mixed reviews and low ratings. I've got mixed feelings. It's too bad to lose representations of federal employees on television, but yet another law enforcement show doesn't exactly add to the diversity of those depictions. And a show that isn't compelling doesn't do federal employees any favors.

I get emails from readers all the time asking for the bill numbers of certain pieces of legislation or wondering where they can find out a status of a particular piece of legislation. Sometimes I can tell them. Sometimes, I don't know because the bill hasn't been formally introduced, processed, and recorded yet (if a bill number doesn't appear in the story, it's not because I don't want to give it to you. It's because I don't have it.). But I always point them to an online search engine run by the Library of Congress called Thomas. You can search by bill name, bill number, by legislator, and by Congress. It's got the full text of bills, as well as their complete status. It's not quite a Google for government. But for complicated, arcane information, it's pretty good. I'm sure some of you are familiar with Thomas, but for those of you who aren't, enjoy!

Brittany Ballenstedt had a good piece yesterday exploring what the Office of Personnel Management is doing to help agencies staff up as they begin spending stimulus funding. A lot of the details are important, but this excerpt towards the end strikes me as the key takeaway:

Bailey also expressed concern that providing blanket fast-track hiring authorities would limit federal agencies' recruiting and hiring strategies. "What happens is that everyone fixates on direct-hire authority or dual compensation waivers, but that does a disservice because you throw out everything else that might possibly assist [agencies] better," she said.For example, Bailey said, providing such authority could prevent agencies from tackling the true problem in federal hiring -- the lengthy application process and a lack of communication with applicants.

The argument, essentially, is if OPM gives agencies the tools to skate through this crisis, that they'll lose the impetus for reform. I can understand why OPM would want to show agencies where the current process gets them when push really comes to shove, and I can understand why OPM would want to build momentum behind its efforts to streamline the hiring process. And I can understand why this need for momentum would be true of a whole range of workforce reforms.

I do wonder what it means for the stimulus, however. Will tailor-made solutions be enough to get agencies and departments the staffing they need to spend the money promptly, effectively, and with a minimum of waste, fraud, and abuse? Could there be a middle ground? Maybe agencies and departments could be required to sign on to hiring reform efforts in exchange for limited-time access to direct hire authority? Seems like it might be a reasonable incentive.

So, Tim Geithner doesn't have a lot of people helping him out at the Treasury, and he's overstreteched. This is obviously a bad thing. A lot of the debate over Geithner's overstretch has focused on how the Obama administration got spooked by some early confirmation scares, and as a result, has moved far too slowly to fill some positions at arguably the most important department in government at the moment.

It's hard to argue that it's in any way a good thing that Obama hasn't filled a lot of key posts at Treasury. But that kind of misses the point. Obama shouldn't have to appoint that many people in the first place. There are far too many positions that the president has to fill personally that could be easily and competently done by career employees. Of course the president needs people who can implement his agenda and set policy. That's what department heads and a layer of political appointees immediately below him or her are for. But agencies and departments would be vastly better served by having high-ranking career employees bringing their institutional memory and experience to high-level positions in departments and ensuring that they can continue to function no matter how far along the president is in his vetting and appointments process.

I appear to have hit a nerve with last week's post criticizing NCIS. To be clear, I do enjoy the show quite a bit--I just think there are some that are better. But having seen Watchmen this weekend, I'd be really curious to hear what all of you think about how the government--and in particular, the two characters who are employed by the federal government after the Keene Act is passed, the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan--come across in the movie.

So, we've got ourselves a nominee for Office of Personnel Management director. But John Berry's people say he isn't giving interviews until after he's confirmed. And Deej Lundgren, the communications director for the Senior Executives Association told me on Thursday that Berry's told representatives of stakeholder groups that he won't be meeting with any of them until after he's confirmed either. If you've heard different, of course, tell me.

This strikes me as a little odd. A lot of Obama's nominees have been front and center fairly quickly after their nominations. All the employee groups I've talked to have seemed very enthusiastic about Berry, so it's unlikely that he'd have a tough time with any of them. Berry has support from key lawmakers in the House and Senate based on long-standing relationships, so it seems unlikely that he'd say anything in an interview that would derail his long-anticipated nomination. And his job depends on getting a lot of stakeholder input and buy-in. I can see why, with the Obama team's notoriously tight media policy, John Berry wouldn't be talking to me. But it seems strange that he wouldn't be talking to the folks he's going to have to get on board for his agenda.

I kind of want to tip my hat to George Packer for taking time out on his blog to salute a civil servant who's done great work on behalf of Iraqi refugees. But I'm sort of too annoyed by his tone about the federal bureaucracy to cheer this on as an example of the mainstream press taking notice of talented federal employees. Packer writes:

Her name is Lori Scialabba, and she is the—we’re dealing with the federal bureaucracy here—associate director of the Refugee, Asylum, and Operations Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as serving as the department’s senior adviser on Iraqi refugees. In other words, she’s the person appointed to cut through the red tape that was keeping all but a trickle of Iraqi refugees from reaching these shores.

Hilarious. Federal titles are really funny. It's rare that a civil servant would answer emails in a timely fashion. Shucks.

I understand that Packer and others are hugely frustrated by the government's failure to protect Iraqi refugees, especially Iraqis who have helped American forces in the country by acting as translators. But to act like that's because civil servants are inherently not responsive, or that it's incredibly surprising that someone who works for the government would work hard or go above and beyond to help people who are vulnerable, is just condescending.

Following up on my post about feds on TV, Sandy posted a whole bunch of ideas for contracting and acquisitions-centric TV shows:

Contract or No Contract?
Acquisition Idol
Dancing with the DFARS
Survivor: Risk Management
Who Wants To Be A Contract Specialist?
Law and Order of Precedence
Fear Evaluation Factors
Diagnosis: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
C-SPAN: Special GAO Unit
Unsolved Audit Mysteries
8 Simple Rules for Dating Under 52.207-2 Notice of Streamlined Competition

I think "Dancing with the DFARS" is my favorite....

I'm talking about CBS hit show, not the Naval Criminal Investigative Service itself. What? It's Friday. I can write about pop culture if I want to. And I have a serious point to make, I promise.

I watch a lot of NCIS. It's syndicated on USA before House re-runs (and I watch a LOT of House). It's easy on the brain. And I'm pretty much in favor of anything that keeps Mark Harmon working. And a lot of Americans watch with me: on a good night, the new episodes can get 19 million viewers.

But while I think NCIS is a pleasant diversion, I don't think it's a particularly good show. And it exemplifies some of the more annoying things about how I think federal employees are depicted on television.

First, it's a procedural based in a law-enforcement agency. Almost all federal employees or federal employee characters on television work for agencies like the FBI, or the Department of Homeland Security, even when they're part of a larger constellation of characters on a show like The Wire. That's not necessarily a bad thing. People like to see cops solve crimes--it's why the Law & Order franchise has such enormous staying power. And it means that the vast majority of federal employees on television look like heroes, the occasional rogue agent aside. But it's an extremely limited view of the wide range of work that federal employees perform. And by focusing on law enforcement, the federal government looks punitive, rather than service-oriented.

And NCIS, like JAG (which it's a spin-off from) is fairly ensconced in the Naval community. The show's characters only interact with civilians who are related or otherwise directly connected to the members of the military who are the victims or criminals in the cases they tackle. It's a hermetic look at the federal world. That's also not to say that the IRS, which touches the life of every adult American, would make a fascinating show (though it's the subject of David Foster Wallace's new novel). USA's In Plain Sight, about U.S. Marshals, does a better job of placing its characters in broader communities, and showing how government can make people's lives better and safer.

But for my money, the best show about federal employees on the air right now is Fox's Bones. Yes, it's a procedural, and it's got an FBI agent. But it's set in a federal scientific lab, among a group of employees with a wide range of skills. Solving murders is what the show focuses on, but it's not the only thing the characters do. They interact with a broad array of members of the public. And the show makes frequent references to coordinating with other agencies. The show isn't a documentary, of course--I don't think a lot of federal labs include vaults set up by serial killers, and David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel, who play the two main characters "deviate from the norm" in terms of physical appearance, as Deschanel's character would say. But despite those necessary elements of fantasy, the show has a feeling of interconnectivity, and shows the characters doing a whole bunch of things other than brandishing guns and kicking in doors. With NCIS as the counter-example, that feels like progress.

Not all government blogging is a good thing. It's great to be transparent, and it's great to push information out to the public, but having a blog doesn't mean that you're doing those things. If you write an agency blog in legalese, you aren't doing the average reader a major favor.

But I thought this latest post from TSA's Evolution of Security blog, which walks the reader through a day in the life of a transportation security inspector, was useful. Airport security is annoying. I travel a fair amount, so I'm used to it, but taking off my ballet flats to get scanned gets a little old after a while. So explaining what TSA employees do and why they do it makes it feel that there's some rhyme and reason to the inconvenience, and also is a good reminder that those employees get frustrated by regulations and requirements too.

Over the past week and a half, you all have been engaged in a fairly intense debate both here, and in comments on some stories about the pay raise, and how big, or small, or non-existent it ought to be. As far as I can tell, your positions break down into a couple of categories:

Position 1: The economy is terrible. Our private-sector counterparts are in huge trouble. We should be thankful for our job stability, and shouldn't expect raises at all. If we get them, we should be grateful.

Position 2: While we are doing a lot of hard work, especially given the government's increased role in managing the economic crisis, our colleagues in the military are in danger. We deserve our cost-of-living raises, but pushing for pay parity at this time makes light of their sacrifices.

Position 3: We have this debate every year. I thought Obama was committed to doing things different. Pay parity should be part of that change.

Position 4: We deserve a larger raise considering how fast our health care premiums rise.

Position 5: Yes, there's a recession. Yes, our private-sector counterparts are getting hit extremely hard. But that doesn't eliminate the pay gap between comparable occupations in the public and private sector, and it doesn't eliminate the government's mandate to try to close the gap. This is an opportunity for us to become more competitive.

There are variations on all of these arguments, of course. And I'm not going to side with any one of them, but I did want to put some kudos out there for the breadth of discussion, and encourage all of you to continue debating. Colleen Kelley joked at the NTEU legislative conference earlier this week that the pay debate is kind of a year-round cycle; the president puts out a potential pay raise in February, and it gets codified in late December. Maybe we'll still be discussing this at Christmastime, but hopefully things will get settled before then.

Back in January, when Sanjay Gupta's name was floated for Surgeon General, I explained why I thought we needed a different kind of candidate for the job. Now, ABC is reporting, he's no longer in the running.

The Onion jokes that Obama will be forced to wear a motion-capture body suit for his entire presidency so it can be animated for the record:

"Imagine being able to see what it might have looked like had Obama been wearing a bow tie when he delivered his first State of the Union address," American historian Joseph Ellis said. "Or if he'd been sporting a luxurious mustache while sitting down with the prime minister of Japan. The possibilities for customization are endless."

John Gage just said at a hearing that 25 percent of Transportation Security Officers are American Federation of Government Employees members. That's the first hard number I've heard about any organizing campaign at TSA. I'm assuming TSA employees will get collective bargaining rights in this administration, so I'll be curious to see how many of them join AFGE and the National Treasury Employees Union when they can bargain.

"That’s a very fluid situation, but it’s fluid in the right direction," Lynch just said. "They had the military at 2.9 and they had us at 2.0. What I understand is there’s a scrambling going on. When I raised a concern, they said don’t beat us up yet, that’s not a final number. I think there’s some fluidity there, and I think we might be happy with the end result. We’re pushing on our end for parity, but we want even the military number to move up."

Rep. Stephen Lynch just said at the National Treasury Employees Union legislative conference lunch that he has 17, count 'em, 17 family members who work for the Postal Service and the federal government. He joked that he's surprised Ed Towns gave him the Federal Workforce Subcommittee chairmanship, given their influence.

"There’s a decided shared view that we have," he said. "Having so many federal employees in my family, they are not shy about letting me know what’s wrong with what they see in the workplace."

Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, has some advice for John Berry in the Washington Post today. He's got a laundry list of suggestions, including a Federal Applicant's Bill of Rights, but the most important idea he has is a philosophical one: OPM, Stier argues, should be more a source of innovative ideas, and less bogged down in regulations.

Obviously, the Office of Personnel Management's regulatory and oversight functions aren't just going to disappear oversight. And they may actually increase if Rep. Danny Davis pursues and passes his legislation to centralize data collection on Senior Executive Service diversity in OPM. But it's true that the centers of idea generation on federal management are fairly diffuse. Those ideas are coming from non-profits and good government groups, from the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, from innovators and agitators within individual agencies and departments.

I don't know if it makes sense for OPM to try to centralize that thought process. But the idea that it could be more of a clearinghouse has currency in a lot of areas, from Stier's column to the GAO. There's not a consensus on what that clearinghouse might look like. But a series of authoritative reports on pay for performance systems, on bonus payments, on the efficacy of other practices, stamped with the OPM imprimatur, might do a lot to establishing consensus on what works and what doesn't.

The stimulus has a new logo! Pres. Obama said at the Dept. of Transportation yesterday that the administration will begin stamping an emblem on stimulus projects to clearly denote that they are being funded by the recovery program.

"We’re also making it easier for Americans to see what projects are being funded with their money as part of our recovery. So in the weeks to come, the signs denoting these projects are going to bear the new emblem of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” Obama said. “These emblems are symbols of our commitment to you, the American people -- a commitment to investing your tax dollars wisely, to put Americans to work doing the work that needs to be done. So when you see them on projects that your tax dollars made possible, let it be a reminder that our government -- your government -- is doing its part to put the economy back on the road of recovery.”

Now I'm not entirely sure how you can put an emblem on a project -- does it go on a sign outside the construction site? on the contract itself? just on the websites? -- but it's clear someone put a lot of time and thought into the emblem's imagery. What do you think of it? A good transparency measure? Gimmicky? A little of both?

(Hat tip: ABC News, The Cato Institute)

Click here to see the procurement memo Pres. Obama issued today. We'll post a follow-up story in a couple of hours.

Blogging's going to be light today, guys. In between John Berry's appointment to head OPM, Obama's contracting reform speech and memo, legislation is getting introduced left and right and I'll be running off to attend the second day of the National Treasury Employees Union conference in a little bit. So talk amongst yourselves: and to get the conversation started, what do you think John Berry's priorities should be as Office of Personnel Management director?

Full announcement below the jump. See my stories on Berry as an advocate for gay rights here and on his management background here.

Continue reading "John Berry Nominated to Head OPM" »

The New Yorker writer is reading and blogging the entire stimulus package. Coll says "I don’t intend to censor my skepticism about the federal bureaucracy," but he says he might need some help interpreting the programs that are getting funding. Email him, if you're up for lending a hand.

According to the pool report from President Obama and Vice-President Biden's visit to the Transportation Department this morning (and the pooler notes the audio was poor, so it's possible hemissed something), the entire focus was on highway construction. I understand Obama's promoting the stimulus package, and that highway construction and other infrastructure investments are a part of that. But his budget also contains a serious chunk of change for revamping the air traffic control system, including in ways that could make it greener. Surely that's worth some attention, isn't it? Especially given the attention Obama's paid to workforce issues at the FAA...

Ezra Klein linked to this 2001 Governing profile of former Kansas Gov. and soon-to-be-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. It's well worth reading. Much of the profile is about how Sebelius balanced her reputation as a consumer advocate with the demands and needs of the insurance industry in Kansans. But these two paragraphs give a sense of Sebelius the administrator:

She has revamped her department’s technological capabilities, making it far more efficient. She has slashed regulations that were duplicative, irrelevant or particularly quirky. And she has worked with the legislature to deregulate commercial insurance lines and to boost tax credits for businesses that buy health insurance for their employees.

At the same time, Sebelius has raised the department’s profile as a source of reliable consumer information on companies and their products, and promoted a raft of consumer-oriented bills in the legislature: a patients’ bill of rights; mandated maternity coverage; a requirement that companies pay their bills promptly; an initiative to protect consumers’ privacy. She has created “market conduct” and anti-fraud units aimed at monitoring companies’ and agents’ behavior.

This devotion to common-sense needs, both for employees and consumers, strikes me as promising. If HHS needs new technology, Sebelius will be in a good position to fight for it. She'll know how to deal with a legislature to get what her department needs--she'll have done it before with what I'd guess will be a less receptive audience than the one she'll find on Capitol Hill.

As an aside, I really wish more outlets would publish stories like this one. I'd wager that the majority of the discussion of Sebelius's future until recently hinged on her less-than-stellar State of the Union response a while back, and maybe her telling former President Bush that she'd like her National Guard troops back from Iraq so they could do natural disaster response. But this kind of experience is far more telling about how Sebelius would lead an organization or a government than any political spin.

One of the best things about blogging is that if you toss a question or complaint out into the blogosphere, answers come back real fast.

A subcommittee spokesman for the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wanted me to let y'all know that Rep. Stephen Lynch will be holding his first hearing on March 25, on “Restoring the Financial Stability of the U.S. Postal Service: What Needs to be Done?” I tend to treat Postal Service and federal workforce business separately, but Lynch will also be holding a business meeting on the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act the same day. So business is under way.

That spokesman also noted that the committee isn't all the way staffed up yet, and won't be by the time that hearings start. But they're getting started anyway.

I know I pushed a little hard yesterday. But, like I said in my post on Tom's 40th anniversary column, I've come to believe this stuff is important. Working on leave law isn't as sexy as ending the war in Iraq, but federal employee issues are key foundational issues. It's good to see that the folks who work on those issues are treating them like priorities.

It's kind of hard to believe that Government Executive is 40 years old, but Tom has a really nice column in this month's issue looking back at a bit of our history. This part of it really got to me:

Government Executive was founded on the notion that the people who serve in high-ranking positions in the executive branch are worthy of being treated with the same respect and deserve the same high-quality journalism as America's corporate elite. It has been, and remains, our privilege to serve an audience whose work is so critical to the nation's future.

I will freely admit that before I came to work at GovExec I did not know a ton about how government worked, and I was more interested in the process of politics than of government. Now, I've become a total good-government bore. I'm pretty sure my friends, family, and the editors I freelance for at other publications are sick of me talking about how government management is Secretly the Most Urgent Challenge Our Nation Faces, but I'm glad for the transformation.

There's not much good coming out of the current economic crisis, and at first read, the news that Swiss bank UBS is raising its salaries sounds like more bad news. But USB is raising its salaries because it's lowering the bonus system, frequently blamed for encouraging financial industries to take risks and seek profit by creating increasingly complicated instruments to trade. They're trying to find out another way to put a number on what their employees are actually worth.

I think this could be a potentially positive outcome of the recession, or depression, or whatever this turns out to be. I don't think it's controversial to say that certain kinds of compensation have become wildly divorced from the actual value people bring to their employers, and those kinds of compensation are clearly no longer viable in a major downturn. Companies will be forced to reassess what they're paying, and as salaries come down, it seems possible that the gap between public and private sector pay will shrink. That may no be a permanent change, and it's hardly the best way to achieve pay parity. But the federal government's conversation about pay is long-running, deep, and serious. It's great that other sectors of the economy are following suit; it's just too bad these are the circumstances under which that conversation could happen.

Al Kamen's speculating that Cassandra Butts, Obama's deputy White House Counsel, could be the next chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and goes on to say that she could be a shot of life for the Commission. I'm not particularly qualified to speculate on Butts' shot of life potential, but this is a situation where I don't think it's just a matter of getting new leadership in the agency. If Obama wants a crusader to run the agency, he could easily make Christine Griffin, the current acting vice-chair, the permanent chair. You won't find a candidate more outspoken and committed to her vision of equal opportunity than Griffin.

But the EEOC needs money to hire more staff. Once it gets those staff on board, it'll need to make sure they have whatever resources they need to reduce the backlog of cases. A new head of the EEOC can advocate for those resources. But she can't produce them out of thin air. If Obama decides to make the EEOC a priority, it will be. If not, the most determined entreaties probably won't be able to change much.

Just curious: when do folks think Stephen Lynch will hold his first hearing as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Federal Workforce Subcommittee? I was used to a regular schedule of events and press releases from Danny Davis. So far from Lynch, despite the fact that he's got a new administration to deal with? Nothing workforce-related.

President Obama's famously joked that people in DC don't know from snow, which is true. So why, then is Michelle Obama's literacy event at the Library of Congress today cancelled? This is nothing, right? Just delay a couple of hours. (I kid. Mostly.)

Federal agencies in the DC area are open, but employees have an extra two hours to get into work, unless they're teleworking, or they're emergency employees. If you can't get in, you can use unscheduled leave.