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The Roosevelt Scholars Act is back, reintroduced by Democratic Rep. David Price and Republican Rep. Michael Castle. The bill would create a non-profit foundation to give scholarships to graduate students in fields relevant to federal agencies, and would have to spend between three and five years in the civil service in return for the financial aid. It's a much more targeted program than the loan-forgiveness law that went into effect this summer, which defined public service broadly, and was championed by John Sarbanes. But that targeted effort could make it more directly useful for federal agencies in need of talented personnel in specific fields.

It appears that the season of departmental reviews is upon us. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced earlier this month that her department would conduct its first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which she said would help align performance goals within State, and help make the case for increased resources to people outside the department. Now, Janet Napolitano is taking the Homeland Security Department's own review collaborative, soliciting comments on DHS's website. And OPM's strategic plan has gone live online as well.

These reviews will proceed in different ways, of course, and they're addressing a very different set of needs at each agency. The State Department has management challenges in terms of the need for more staffing and more resources, but I don't think anyone's arguing in favor of a major reorganization of the department. The Homeland Security Department, on the other hand, has never particularly gelled as a coherent institution, and a review is a chance to pull the component agencies together on a common project. And the Office of Personnel Management could probably use more resources, and talk of reorganization has been in the air since late June, when OPM Director John Berry said it was a possibility--and some Congressmen have long wanted to undo parts of the 2003 reorganization of the agency that eliminated the office dedicated to the Senior Executive Service.

But they'll all face common challenges. How do you sort the totally frivolous responses from the serious ones? Within the serious responses, how do you categorize and process them? For the departments that are conducting public, collaborative reviews, how do you control those conversations without censoring them? How do you decide, at the end of the day, what's actionable and what's not? How do you avoid missing great, innovative suggestions that don't appear en masse because they're innovative? If the reviews can answer those questions, they'll be useful for government as a whole, beyond the recommendations they generate for specific reforms. Not all reviews will be collaborative in the future, but some will be. And the large number of conversations happening right now are a valuable test case for technologies and techniques in moderation, content-sorting, and study.

By Robert Brodsky

President Obama on Thursday filled out some of his remaining administration management positions, nominating Daniel Werfel as controller of the Office of Federal Financial Management at the Office of Management and Budget and Frank Kendall III as deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition and technology.

Susan Tsui Grundmann was also nominated as chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Anne M. Wagner was slotted as the board's vice chair. The board is an independent, quasi-judicial agency that serves as the guardian of federal merit systems.

Werfel has served as deputy controller since March 2006 and as acting controller during the administration transition. As controller, Werfel will manage the day-to-day operations of the Chief Financial Officers' Council, run the government's financial management improvement plan and coordinate OMB policy on areas such as financial reporting, audits, internal controls, fraud and error reduction, and grants management

"His leadership in implementing the Recovery Act is just one example of his stellar work over many years - work that led the administration to recognize what those who have worked with him have known for years: Danny's an extraordinarily able public servant," OMB Director Peter Orszag said in a blog post Thursday evening.

Kendall, meanwhile, has 35 years of government, private sector and military experience in engineering, management, defense acquisition and national security affairs. Currently a managing partner at Renaissance Strategic Advisors, an Arlington, Va. aerospace and defense consulting firm, Kendall will serve as deputy to Ashton Carter in helping set DoD's acquisition strategy.

Grundmann recently served as general counsel to the National Federation of Federal Employees, a labor union which represents 100,000 federal workers nationwide. Wagner is currently the general counsel of the Personnel Appeals Board of the Government Accountability Office.

The dates to switch between plans in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program are out: November 9 to December 14, pending, of course, anything that requires a last-minute extension. Let's all cross our fingers.

By Robert Brodsky

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, wants to provide Alaska Native Corporations with another chance to plead their case for maintaining their contracting preferences - this time with a possibly more receptive audience.

In a letter today to Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-ND, and John Barrasso, R-WY, the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Murkowski called for a hearing this fall on the Native American 8(a) program.

Earlier this month, the Homeland Security and Government Affairs' Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight held a hearing on the rapid growth of ANC contracting.

"The subcommittee on contracting oversight hearing was a hostile environment for the Native Corporations and I believe the Indian Affairs panel would provide a fair and impartial environment for Indian tribes, Native corporations and Native Hawaiians to tell their story," Murkowski said.

Murkowski suggested that any review of the 8(a) program should first be examined by the congressional panels with jurisdiction over the issue, including the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee and the Indian Affairs Committee.

Just got word that the House Oversight and Government Reform Federal Workforce Subcommittee passed the bill, which would provide access to a range of benefits for the domestic partners of gay and lesbian federal employees, this morning, moving it on to the full committee for consideration. More details to come.

I know that "the process of getting [official presidential and vice presidential portraits] produced, framed and hung" does take time, but it is almost August. So I'm curious as to what the real reason for the holdup on distributing Vice President Biden's portrait to federal agencies is. Maybe they just can't get the guy to sit still for a serious picture? He does tend to go in for the big grins.

Can people please, PLEASE stop making lists of websites you can visit to understand the mysterious species known as young people? I realize all of this stuff is good-intentioned, but I am genuinely convinced that the effort to create types that will explain the generations is, in and of itself, unhelpful. One of the things I like best about working for Government Executive is that there is really strong intergenerational communication and cooperation here. And we have that, because people from different generations talk to each other in the office, not because any of the editors have gone out and signed up for Twitter accounts in an effort to understand the younger writers better, not because any of us writers went out and read a bunch of books on generational types and decided to curb our tendencies towards independence and innovation in deference to our elders. Don't go surf a bunch of social networking sites if you want to understand your younger employees. Go talk to them. Seriously.

By Alex Parker

It's been a long-simmering issue that appears to be winding down, but the National Employees Treasury Union is one step closer to ensuring that its employees can wear masks to protect themselves from infectious diseases such as the swine flu, without having to ask for permission.

According to a memorandum of agreement between the CBP and the National Treasury Employees Union Workers at Customs and Border Protection can now wear agency-provided masks, or N95 respirators, without having to seek approval from their supervisors. NTEU President Colleen Kelly announced the agreement during testimony Wednesday before the House Committee on Homeland Security.

NTEU had earlier claimed that some supervisors were preventing employees from wearing masks in the Department of Homeland Security. In June, the House added an amendment guaranteeing that workers with the Transportation Security Administration can don masks.

But despite the agreement, NTEU still claims that more needs to be done to protect federal workers during a virus scare. In her testimony to the committee, Kelly said the government needed to issue
clear guidelines about priorities for federal workers when it comes to vaccinations, clarify federal leave policies for pandemics, and to make sure that telework policies are up and running to ensure that government can operate during a crisis.

Ouch. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and George Voinovich, R-Ohio, are going after Rafael Borras, President Obama's nominee to be Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Management for mistakes made two years in a row on his tax filing. Collins said:

What concerns me is a pattern of carelessness here. You have been nominated for a job that is enormously complex, and is going to require great managerial experience and great attention to detail. We could spend hours to you talking about the management challenges. If there was just one incident or one form overlooked, I could understand. Anyone can make a mistake. But I'm concerned about a record of significant lapses with regard to your taxes. If there are extenuating circumstances the cmte should be aware of, for example, we had a nominee who was deployed in Iraq at the time he owed some taxes....If there are extenuating circumstances or some justification for this pattern, I need to know it.

Borras responded:

I've filed taxes for over 30 years and had no pattern of making those kinds of mistake. In my 27 years of professional work, there has never been any issue related to attention to detail, anything about my performance that has indicated any level of concern. I have managed successfully very difficult financial situations, I believe with distinction. I have been commended for that. I have never had an investigation that questioned or challenged my financial management....I regret the errors I made in 2006 and 2007.

No matter what you think of Collins' charges or Borras' response, the awkwardness of the whole exchange made me understand more clearly why folks who made even minor errors on their taxes would withdraw from consideration rather than go through this kind of grilling.

Alex Parker has the details on the the way some Senators are moving to defend home-state tourism revenues by seeking equal protection for all localities that want their share of the federal conference business. Like I've said before, that seems like a good idea to me. Federal travel should be determined by practicality and reasonable cost, and practicality and reasonable cost alone.

Over at Wired Workplace, Brittany notes that folks are already starting to analyze the generation beyond mine, dubbing them Generation Z (enough with the letters already, I think). This makes me feel ancient. But I do think there's going to be one key difference between Millenials and the workers who come next: I'm an older Millenial, I guess, but I do remember what it was like to get the internet at home. I remember the pokey, blue-screen DOS-operated computers we had at school. I remember the pokiness of America Online, the primitive chatrooms, and venturing beyond them into the web. Those memories make me feel like someone's grandma next to my younger brother, who had a fantasy baseball team online at a younger age than I even had an email address. And I think that growing up with the internet in a fairly mature form is going to mean that the generation behind me is going to have much less tolerance for outdated technology, antiquated computers, and slow-moving information. Whether that will affect their styles in other areas, I'm not sure. But it means as agencies update their technology and their means of communication, they need to think two generations down the road, not just one.

I'm at the Office of Personnel Management right now, where director John Berry has just announced an innovation: OPM is going to become the first government agency to put its proposed strategic plan online for public and employee comment, and will make discussions among commenters easy for the public to read. I'm not sure how many comments the agency will get from the truly general public, but it is an attempt by Berry to make what OPM does more transparent to observers. And judging from the reporters at his event at a food bank this morning who didn't seem sure what OPM was, or even exactly what the agency's name was, the bar for existing public knowledge is pretty low.

By Robert Brodsky

The U.S. Postal Service, or at least some of its programs, was added to the Government Accountability Office's High Risk List, the GAO confirmed late this morning, and the Washington Post reported. We know that the Postal Service has been bleeding funds for the past few years and this certainly won't help the confidence level at the agency. We'll have more on this story later today.

Via Tyler Cowen:

At a recent town-hall meeting in suburban Simpsonville, a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to "keep your government hands off my Medicare."

By Robert Brodsky

It looks like Congress is ready to settle a growing dispute between the Obama administration and the Government Accountability Office.

On Friday, the Senate approved an amendment to the fiscal 2010 National Defense Authorization Act which would place three small business programs -- HUBZone, 8(a) and service-disabled veterans - on an equal footing when competing for contracts. The amendments were sponsored by Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, the chairwoman and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

"With the passage of this amendment small businesses will be given a more equal chance to compete," Landrieu said. "This is a victory for small firms competing for a government contract because it levels the playing field within these important programs."

In a July 10 memorandum to agency heads, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag called into question recent GAO protest decisions and accompanying recommendations, which stated that the Federal Acquisition Regulation require agencies to award contracts to a historically underutilized business zone company if the contracting officer has a reasonable expectation that two qualified HUBZone businesses will submit offers at a fair market price.

The GAO decisions -- issued in favor of two HUBZone companies, Mission Critical Solutions and International Program Group Inc. -- cite the FAR in stating that agencies must contract with HUBZone companies when certain criteria are met, essentially creating a preference for contracting with HUBZone companies rather than other groups, such as firms owned by socially or economically disadvantaged individuals, or service-disabled veterans.

Everyone's known that NASA would burn off some of its workforce as it retires the shuttle and moves towards a new program. Brittany Ballenstedt has the goods on when the actual numbers of workers losing their jobs might be known.

Matt Yglesias is entirely correct to point out that Julia Child was a pretty awesome spy before she brought French cooking to America, and that the ads for Julie & Julia, the new movie based on Child's memoir, My Life in France, and Julie Powell's memoir of cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, totally elide that fact, suggesting that Julia Child was lost and looking for a calling when she headed off to cooking school in Paris. I agree that I would watch a movie about Julia Child's spy years in a heartbeat, and I think it would be a good thing if folks knew that she was able to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking in part because federal employment brought her and her husband overseas, and provided a salary Paul and Julia could live on. But I also think that Child didn't view spying as her calling. Cooking was what it turned out to be, and it's okay to portray her life as a search for that.

The folks at TSA's Evolution of Security blog are looking for five questions to answer about the rationales behind the way they do their work. If you've always wondered why something works (or doesn't) the way it does at TSA, this seems like a good opportunity to ask. And a useful exercise, if I might say. It's easy for this kind of Q&A to get swamped with questions like "Can you change x procedure?" to which the answer is a short, and not terribly informative "No." Things at TSA and at any other agency, are usually the way they are for a reason. Illuminating those reasons is far more useful than assuming they're irrational. Deadline for submissions is 5pm today.

Gallup has a new set of data out on what sort of job Americans think a range of federal agencies are doing. The Centers for Disease Control came in near the top with 61 percent of respondents saying the agency is doing a good or excellent job, while the Federal Reserve Board lagged being, with only 30 percent saying that the agency was doing well.

I think it's always worth taking these ratings with a grain of salt, as an indicator of how the public thinks government is performing generally on a broad swath of issues, rather than as an indicator of informed opinion on government performance. For example, I doubt 61 percent of Americans even have contact with the CDC in a single year. But a whole lot of people heard about swine flu, got worried about it, and then were relieved they didn't get it. And so they think the federal government is doing a decent job at disease control, and when they hear the name of an agency that does that in a survey, they say they think said agency is doing a pretty good job. Ditto with the Federal Reserve, which touches all Americans, but in ways that are less directly traceable to affirmative contact with federal agencies. Folks don't feel great about the economy, they know the Federal Reserve has something to do with it, and so they say the Federal Reserve isn't doing great, entirely irrespective of anyone's efforts. It's also a fairly random sample. Why ask about the Central Intelligence Agency, but not the Defense Department, for example? In other words, this is sort of generally useful information to have, but I don't think the folks at the Federal Reserve should be despondent today.

The conversation about pay parity is always a difficult one, because there is an actual difference between the work done and the risk accepted by soldiers who are serving overseas and folks who work in office buildings in the United States. But I don't think it's useful to treat federal employment as two polar opposite points, and rather as a continuum. Border Patrol Agent Robert Rosas died in the line of duty, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced today, and as Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry pointed out on Monday, between 1995 and 2007, 2,085 civilian federal employees have died on the job.

As Alex Parker reported late last night, Sen. Tom Coburn filibustered Sens. Daniel Akaka and Susan Collins' amendment containing a package of federal workforce reforms out of the Defense Authorization bill. Apparently for Coburn, dealing with federal employee benefits is "intolerable" during a recession. But Ed O'Keefe noted that the Senate added a provision, sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer, to the Defense bill that would make it easier for members of the military and civil servants stationed overseas to vote. At least there's some bipartisan agreement, somewhere, that voting rights are a good thing to protect....

This was something that came up in comments, so I thought I'd like to Doug Elmendorf's explanation of the Congressional Budget Office's independence from the White House. I really don't think visiting the White House in a professional capacity should be interpreted as some sign of fealty to the President of the United States, though I can understand the symbolism of turning down a social invitation as a form of political protest. The White House is, after all, a working office. People go there for meetings, even folks who don't particularly like or agree with the President.

President Obama is set to award one to Staff Sergeant Jared C. Monti who died in Afghanistan defending one of his comrades. My friend and colleage at National Journal Sydney Freedberg, Jr. wrote an astonishing story in 2007 about the process by which medals are awarded and the ways in which they had become stratified by rank and service. At the time Sydney wrote the piece, only two soldiers had earned the Medal of Honor for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Check it out.

Greg Sargent notices that independents in particular are feeling skittish about the Obama administration's agenda as it relates to government:

It suggests a possible souring on one of the hallmarks of this presidency: An unabashed embrace of ambitious government. A solid majority of 59% say Obama's proposals call for too much government spending; 52% say they call for too much government expansion.

What's problematic is that these numbers are largely fueled by independents. Two-thirds of indys, 66%, say Obama's proposals call for too much spending, and 60% say they call for too much government expansion.

Dan Munz is a relatively modest guy, so I thought I'd pull his presentation from the Open Government & Innovations Conference from his Twitter feed to the blog and get it the attention that it deserves. Dan says something that I've been hearing from other folks who do social media work lately, that you need to focus less on the specific tool, and more on the action you want to make folks take:

Whenever people do public engagement, I think there's a lot of focus on "what will our website look like"? That's important but I'd encourage you to think this way: Build a process, not just a website....The best public collaboration starts not with a website, but with a clear theory of: How will this action enable people to hold me accountable? Maybe it's giving them data and seeing how they use it Maybe it's ensuring that you're looping back and completing that value exchange."

The folks at FEMA's social media office are doing pretty much exactly that, trying to be platform-agnostic, while focusing on the message first, and then finding the best tool to deliver it. I think that level of fluidity can only come when people are extremely comfortable with social media and collaborative tools, and with their swift evolution. Getting on board for the idea of a website, or a Twitter feed, or whatever, is a first step. The second is being able to step away from what you've built if it's not the right tool for the job.

President Obama took a wide range of questions about health care reform at his press conference last night. And once again, he provided a reminder that the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program is still seen, rightly or not as I explore in my column this week, as the gold standard for coverage:

Q: One, can you guarantee that this legislation will lock in and say the government will never deny any services; that that's going to be decided by the doctor and the patient, and the government will not deny any coverage? And secondarily, can you, as a symbolic gesture, say that you and the Congress will abide by the same benefits in that public option?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, number one, not only the public option but the insurance regulation that we want to put in place will largely match up with what members of Congress are getting through the federal employee plan. That's a good example of what we're trying to build for the American people -- the same thing that Congress enjoys, which is they go -- there is a marketplace of different plans that they can access, depending on what's best for their families.

Now, I can understand that it's not very good for the federal government's image for federal employees at conferences to go all Katy Perry on agency time. Conferences are a chance to learn things, share ideas, work on joint projects, etc., and not necessarily to gamble, drink, get facial peels, and kick Penn and Teller out of their hotel suite. And none of those things should happen on the government dime, obviously.

But the news that the Obama administration is trying to deter agencies from holding conferences in "resort" locations or places where gambling is a big local industry strikes me as a tad silly. As long as a)the conference is set in a place that is economical and convenient, and b) participants make full and effective use of their experience there, I don't think there's anything wrong with holding a conference in Las Vegas, or Orlando, or whatever. If there's a specific part of the conference that involves bonding activities, spending 24/7 with other participants, etc., then it seems reasonable to require that everybody to show up to every mandatory event and to hold the event in a setting conducive to that kind of experience. I can also understand choosing venues that are sensible to folks who suffer from gambling addictions. But if Vegas is the cheapest and most convenient place to hold a large conference, it's silly not to hold it there out of squeamishness.

And, as we know at Government Executive, location is not exactly a barrier to a federal employee, or to anyone, acting like a fool or a lunatic while out of the office.

No, Congress isn't all the way there yet. Differences remain between the House and Senate versions of the legislation on issues like passenger facility charges. But the House passed a reauthorization bill in May, and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee passed its own legislation yesterday. Which means that, reauthorization legislation might actually get enacted this year, two years after the last authorizing legislation expires, and six years since the last authorization passed.

So, Douglas Elmendorf, Director of the Congressional Budget Office, got invited to the White House to discuss cost estimates for health care legislation, and being at CBO, blogged about it. And noted "People have asked whether it was exciting to meet the President and be in the Oval Office: Yes, and my kids will be jealous when they get back from summer camp and hear about it." It's an odd reminder that even the folks who head important offices and agencies get only so much time with the President. And the distance between the President and the deputies of those agency heads is almost unimaginably huge. The pinnacle of power in Washington, D.C. is a pretty crowded place. If the distances were smaller, maybe it would be easier to prioritize concerns like HR and IT. But then the president would be unimaginably overwhelmed.

FedSmith, following up on Emily Long's article on the reasons not to abolish KSA statements--and some of the barriers to doing so--has an interesting meditation on KSAs. I thought this was a particularly good point:

Several readers touched on an issue that I failed to address, observing that another value of KSAs is that they enhance applicants' understanding of what the job is about. I agree that the requirement to respond to KSAs does, as these folks opined, force applicants to really think about their qualifications for the position. I have had preliminary interest in vacancy announcements, only to be brought back to reality by reviewing the KSAs for the position.

I am certainly thankful that I've never had to fill out a KSA, though for my first job, I had to take a strenuous and time-consuming edit test to see if I was qualified to be a fact-checker. The test served a couple of useful functions: it weeded out candidates who weren't qualified, and gave me a fairly good sense of the work that I'd be doing, and how I'd have to do that. That was a useful exercise. It might make sense to administer limited KSAs to weed down serious candidates part of the way through the job search process, or to design more relevant and specialized tests for certain positions.

Berry just gave an extended speech on his vision for the civil service, to one of the largest audiences he's faced since taking office. Full text here and after the jump:

A New Day for the Civil Service

Thank you. It's an honor to be here today to talk about the State of the Civil Service and the way forward.

I've been on the job as the Chief People Person for the Federal Government for a few months now, and I've worked on Civil Service issues for many years before this. And I have to tell you, I've never been more excited and optimistic about the opportunity for genuine, wholesale, systemic reform in the way we recruit and motivate the Federal workforce.

Continue reading "John Berry's Speech at Excellence In Government" »

I wrote on Friday that House Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Republican Darrell Issa was using the specter of changes to the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program to try to get the House Democrats' health care reform bill in front of the committee. I wrote at the time "To me, this sounds like a question that could be answered through a simple informational request to the bill's drafters and to OPM itself." And today, Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns said as much in a letter today responding to Issa's request. His staff have been reviewing H.R. 3200 for its impact on FEHBP, and this is what they found. Towns wrote:

I should note initially that the legislation establishes a 5-year grace period for employment-based health plans, which explicitly includes FEHBP. During this period, no substantial changes to the FEHBP would be required. This 5-year period would begin in 2013, providing the Office of Personnel Management and this Committee until 2018--nearly a decade--to make any necessary changes to the FEHBP. During this period, all other group and employment-based health plans will be conducting similar reviews to determine necessary changes.

As for changes to FEHBP, I understand that some administrative and a small number of benefits-related adjustments would be necessary in 2018 in order for all of the individual plans offered under FEHBP to satisfy the applicable requirements of a 'qualified health benefits plan.' However, there will not be a need for a significant overhal of FEHBP, and there likely will not be a need to amend title 5 of the United States Code to either alter the structure of FEHBP or to provide OPM with additional authority.

In other words, don't look for the Oversight and Government Reform committee to be holding health care hearings, but don't worry that major FEHBP changes are on the way, either.

Sadly, I think the bureaucratese in which this solicitation for a comedian is couched will produce more humor than any comedian the Treasury Department manages to hire to work with the Bureau of Public Debt. I understand the need to be specific, but I think the likelihood of finding someone who can a) do sketch cartoons, b) is familiar enough with the Bureau of Public Debt to do sketch cartoons and humor specific to the agency, and c) can do so in an entirely professional manner, without swearing while d) also being funny is HIGHLY unlikely.

A group of Federal Bureau of Investigation intellgence analysts announced the creation this weekend of the FBI Intelligence Analysts Association. Employees of the Bureau aren't allowed the join unions, but they can form groups to represent their interests--in this case, enhancing the agency's focus on intelligence-gathering and analysis. As the new group said in its press release announcing its formation:

We recognize the significant progress the FBI has made in becoming an intelligence-led organization that views Intelligence Analysts as a core part of its mission. However, we believe there is still a clear need to elevate the importance of intelligence in the FBI, enhance the role of the agency's 2,500 Intelligence Analysts, and provide additional career and professional development opportunities for FBI intelligence professionals.

FBIIAA also is posing itself as an alternative to the 29-year-old FBI Agents Association, saying that it will be a "independent, strong voice" for agency employees.

Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wants Chairman Edolphus Towns to assert some jurisdiction over the health care reform legislation introduced by House Democrats, H.R. 3200. The grounds? Issa writes in a letter to Towns:

H.R. 3200 requires all individuals to have a government-determined minimum level of health insurance. To be in compliance, every individual must obtain coverage through enrollment in a "qualified health benefits plan or other acceptable coverage," or, if not enrolled in a "qualified health benefits plan or other acceptable coverage," through the Health Insurance Exchange. However, it is not clear from the legislation if FEHBP is a "qualified health benefits plan," or if federal employees and their dependants who are enrolled in FEHBP would be in compliance...any changes to the program or its operation by the Office of Personnel Management could have serious costs and consequences for the federal government and federal employees. This legislation should not move forward until we know its effect on our federal employees. The Oversight and Government Reform Committee is uniquely positioned to examine this legislation to get a broad view of how it will affect federal employees.

To me, this sounds like a question that could be answered through a simple informational request to the bill's drafters and to OPM itself. But by asking the committee to hold hearings, Issa's trying to get the bill in front of a committee that has a number of aggressive Republicans, Issa most definitely included. It's a smart bit of politics, framing the letter as a request for Towns not to give up jurisdiction on an issue the committee doesn't have primary jurisdiction over in the first place.

The White House has a new director for its personnel office, Nancy Hogan, who had been chief of staff of the office. It's a tough job, especially with lots of vacancies in the core management positions.

By Emily Long*

Yesterday, Christine Griffin had her nomination hearing for Office of Personnel Management Deputy Director, but this post pulls out a few of the important points from the many pages of her disclosure form.

Griffin is a self-described vocal advocate for diversity in government jobs and personnel support ("I've become known as someone that cares about federal employees," she says), and she's got 3.5 years of experience at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to back up those priorities. Also, as a Vietnam-era Army vet and Massachusetts Maritime Academy graduate, she's been actively invested in providing greater federal employment opportunities for veterans and wounded warriors.

In her disclosure, Griffin highlighted her hopes for OPM to collaborate on EEOC programs, including the Leadership for Employment of Americans with Disabilities Initiative, which trains agencies to use hiring waivers and increase opportunities for persons with disabilities. Her experience in implementing these kinds of programs and developing an EEOC conflict resolution service will inform her abilities to put these practices into wider management policies and to provide consistent messages to federal agencies on equal employment issues.

The form also revealed Griffin's party-line Democratic financial contributions to the Obama campaign, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, and numerous Massachusetts state senators and representatives, most of whom are deeply involved in the Boston political scene.

Continue reading "Reading the Documents" »

The Senior Executives Association is launching a survey in commemoration of their 30th anniversary. The twist? They're looking for input from GS-14s and GS-15s. And they're calling in backup from HR contractor Avue, and will have support from the Office of Personnel Management as well. So if you're a 14 or a 15, and have stuff to get off your chest, you can go to www.seniorexecs.org and register for the survey there. It will be available until August 14.

It seems fitting on the day that the EEOC moves towards losing one member as Christine Griffin had her confirmation hearing for her nomination to become deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management, that President Obama should appoint another, Jacqueline A. Berrien, to become permanent chair of the committee. Berrien's full bio is below the jump.

Continue reading "New EEOC Chair" »

By Robert Brodsky

The Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight's long-awaited hearing on Alaska Native Corporations will get underway soon and it should be a doozy. But, to whet your appetite, the panel has released an early copy of its analysis of the contracting documents requested by the subcommittee several months back.

By the way, the hearing room is packed solid and a line has spread around the corner. Who knew such interest in small business procurement issues?

The preliminary recommendations are out, and according to Randy Erwin, the legislative director for the National Federation of Federal Employees, the review panel called for the Defense Business Board to "reconstruct" NSPS. It's not yet clear what that means, but Alex Parker, my beat partner, will have more details later this afternoon.

William Finnegan has, in his usual style, a cutting, perceptive profile (registration required for full text) of Maricopa County, Az. sheriff Joe Arpaio in this week's New Yorker. But in an interesting twist, the piece may pull some unwanted attention to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who forged a cross-party alliance with Arpaio as governor (she is a Democrat, he a Republican), and who is now overseeing a review of the 287(g) program that gives Arpaio's department a lot of training that it applies in paramilitary style raids aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants. Arpaio is hugely popular, both for his tough tactics as sheriff, and for his adoption--he has not always taken this stance--of a strongly anti-illegal immigrant stance. But some law enforcement officers in Arizona say his approach has made it harder for their agencies to work to prevent crime in immigrant communities because it's difficult for them to get immigrants to trust the police, undermining their ultimate goal of law and order.

Alec Baldwin's character on 30 Rock once said, deadpan, that "Jack Welch is the greatest leader since the pharaohs." That assessment, of course, all depends on how one feels about the pharaohs, but it cannot be denied that Welch is an influential figure in business circles, and his declaration that "There's no such thing as work-life balance....There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences," is getting some attention as a result. The Atlantic Business Channel's Daniel Indiviglio says that Welch just means that time is finite, but that Welch may be proven wrong as technology makes work far more efficient, and working from home becomes substantially easier.

Well, yeah. As someone who's been covering telework for years at this point, this is a conclusion that governments have been reaching for ages. Look, it's true that some people who want to achieve extraordinary things will undertake those pursuits to the exclusion of almost everything else. President Obama would have had a much harder time running for the White House if his wife's mother hadn't been able to step up and provide a lot of childcare. A small subset of top corporate and government jobs eat up a huge amount of that finite time.

But if industries made a collective decision that employees with better work-life balances, whatever that is for an individual, were more productive, or less likely to burn out, or to leave, or whatever, the standards for success could shift. That appears to be something Michelle Obama and John Berry are trying to promote in the federal workforce, and it could be something corporate leaders could consider as well. Folks like Jack Welch have sacrificed all semblance of a work-life balance for success because that's how the system they operate in works. It doesn't mean that having a personal life is actually an impossibility.

Gawker reported yesterday, and the folks behind Twitter vehemently denied, that Twitter was giving backdoor access to a federal intelligence agency who wanted to monitor tweets and their origins. Lots of federal agencies have Twitter feeds, so I imagine the service is reasonable about working with agencies, dealing with user agreements, etc. But I have a hard time imagining that a lot of actionable intelligence is going to get gathered from a service that's specifically about broadcasting. It makes a lot of sense that an organization like the State Department would want to take a look at trends out of a place like Iran as a sample of what the population is up to. But it's hard to believe that anyone's going to advertise a covert plot that would require them being tracked down on a service that seems increasingly like a practice ground for stand-up comedy punchlines.

I looked at White House salaries in comparison to the Senior Executive Service a couple of weeks back. Yesterday, Ariel Boone crunched the numbers and came up with a gender gap. Turns out women have half the jobs, but many of them are lower-paying positions.

David Bradley, owner of Atlantic Media, of which Government Executive is a part, has been appointed to the Homeland Security review team considering the color-coded threat rating system. I didn't know that when I wrote this morning's post on the system. Mr. Bradley and I have not discussed the system, so like Marc Ambinder, I don't know what his position on the system is. My thoughts on the subject are my own, and will remain so.

It seems an entirely reasonable proposition to change the Homeland Security Department's color coding system for threat alerts. It's always struck me as proof of ineffectiveness that the colors have always had to be translated into words to communicate the actual level of the threat. Yellow or orange doesn't actually mean anything to us. It doesn't stop people getting on planes, because we don't know what the threat is, or where it's concentrated. It's not a useful tool.

And I tend to think that color-coding in general isn't particularly helpful. It's possible to get obsessively fine-grained, but a three-color system, as in agency performance ratings, doesn't actually communicate meaningful difference in performance ratings either. I think the same is true with the Homeland Security ratings, which are so useless they've become background noise.

USAJobs has a list of the jobs that have the most openings in federal agencies right now. A couple of notable positions on the rankings: Human Resources Specialist shows up 7th on the list, a somewhat worrying gap as the hiring boom starts, and Human Resources Assistant is close behind at 12. Nurses are the 8th-most in-demand position, a frequent vacancy Office of Personnel Management Director mentioned at a Congressional hearing last week. And in a nod to the acquisitions workforce crisis, Contract Specialist grabs the 5-spot.

(Hat tip: GovExec Twitter)

Back in January, I wrote a long post arguing that while the Surgeon General has a major role to play in raising public awareness about health issues, the person who holds that position has to be a strong administrator as well. It looks like President Obama's second pick for the position, Dr. Regina Benjamin (CNN doc Sanjay Gupta bowed out), has the administrative side of her job down pat. She's the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, but she's most famous for rebuilding the rural medical clinic she runs in Alabama after it was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and then after it burned down. If that doesn't take administrative skills, I don't know what does. And given disparities in available care between rural and urban areas, her experience should be an interesting factor in her term as Surgeon General.

But there isn't going to be a federal employee union bloc supporting Greg Junemann's run for AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer: the American Federation of Government Employees is endorsing Richard Trumka for federation president, Liz Shuler for secretary-treasurer, and Arlene Holt Baker as executive vice president.

Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry has announced some of the details for the review of recruitment, retention, and relocation bonuses that he said he'd kick off back in May. Currently, agencies only have to report back on their use of retention bonuses, which have been the subject of some scrutiny over whether they've been used appropriately. Berry's asking for three things to happen: first agencies need to conduct internal reviews of their use of those bonuses, and report back on their plans for that use and any changes they intend to make it in that use, 45 days from today. Second, Berry wants the Chief Human Capital Officers Council to create a work group to examine and report back a cost-benefit analysis of recruitment, retention, and relocation bonuses within 90 days. And finally, his own agency will report back on the results of those reviews.

"As part of this cost-benefit analysis, I ask the [CHCO] work group to evaluate what the impact would be on recruitment and retention efforts if agencies were to scale back their funding of the 3Rs," Berry wrote in his memo announcing these actions. "The purpose of this evaluation is to improve our understanding of the return on investment we obtain when we use these discretionary authorities."

By Robert Brodsky

Alaska Native Corporations are not going out without a fight.

On Thursday, the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, led by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., will hold a hearing examining the government's contracting policies toward Alaska Native Corporations. Leaders in the ANC community, as well as officials from the Defense Department and Small Business Administration are expected to testify at the hearing, which could eventually lead to significant changes in the contracting preferences afforded to the corporations.

But on Monday, ANCs launched a forceful defense of their programs and landed a pre-emptive strike against the objectivity of the hearings. A group of Native American tribes, organizations and businesses have formed Native8aWorks, a coalition to "educate Congress on the successful Native participation in the in the Small Business Administration's 8(a) Business Development Program." The group's new Web site also professes to "set the record straight and be a reminder of the trust relationship between the United States and its indigenous peoples."

Native8aWorks also does not hold back on its feelings toward the upcoming hearing.

"The current McCaskill inquiry is a blatant attempt to discredit a federal economic development policy that actually works! Enough is enough," the site says. "This 21st century witch hunt is misguided and will cause a roadblock to job creation for Americans during dire economic times."

These are strong words indeed. This hearing should be a doozy . We'll have a preview later this week.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has finally scheduled a confirmation hearing for Christine Griffin's nomination to be deputy director for the Office of Personnel Management. It'll be this Thursday, three months almost to the day after her nomination was announced. Griffin is the last member of senior leadership at OPM to get in place. John Berry's mentioned her, and the things he has for her to do, repeatedly. Griffin, as I've mentioned, is extremely outspoken and hardworking, which should make both for an interesting hearing on Thursday, and an interesting tenure at the increasingly outgoing agency.

"It appears that government reform is a sexy topic these days," Sarah Rosen Wartell, an executive vice president at the Center for American Progress just joked at a panel I'm attending at the liberal think tank's headquarters in Washington. Her point was that government management and efficiency issues are at the heart of the issues we face today, and for progressive advocacy groups, the public's lack of faith in government presents a significant challenge in their efforts to build support for government's work. For those of us who cover--or work in--the federal management community, that's an obvious point. But it's significant that one of the progressive think tanks is taking this on as a major research area. I'll be curious to see their approach, how they define the problems, and what kinds of partners they seek out. I think it's interesting, for example, that Anna Burger, the chair of the labor federation Change to Win is here, along with Nancy Killefer, Obama's first choice to be his Chief Performance Officer. I wouldn't think of Burger as an obvious expert on the subject--but getting her, and other major political players like her, on board for a focus on management, is a significant step.

POGO's won the Society of Professional Journalists "Sunshine Award" for its work on open government. I've always found POGO's reports to be comprehensive and illuminating, and their experts are wonderful resources. In a fast-paced news environment, I know my fellow reporters and I are grateful for the concentration they bring to bear on a lot of issues we--and you--care about.

But if you do, be glad you weren't the Justice Department employee who sent out a press release with the line: "FEDERAL GRAND JURY RETURNS INDICTMENT ON INTERNET BOMB THREATS -- good luck, this one sucked."

While fostering intergenerational communication in the workplace is a good thing, some so-called "generational consultants" are just plain absurd.

Obviously, it's hard to stop fraud when someone on the inside of an institution is helping to perpetrate it. But if agencies need to do more thorough reviews of medical records, or need to get an extremely high number of security clearances done faster, or to research the relationship status of employees who are trying to get benefits for their spouses, or whatever verification that includes the possibility of fraud, there need to be a) more people to do the work so fraud won't be a temptation as a way of getting things done faster and b) consequences for not following internal controls.

It hasn't started yet, because the House Oversight and Government Reform Federal Workforce Subcommittee members and half of the first panel are voting off voting on legislation. So I'll give you a summary of the important bits in the three panels-worth of testimony that have been submitted:

-The Office of Personnel Management is supporting the bill: This is no surprise, but it is a reversal from the previous administration, when the deputy OPM director said that concerns about fraud and constitutional issues meant that the administration couldn't possibly support the legislation. Current OPM Director John Berry suggests in his written testimony that the bill be amended to find a way for agency-level HR offices to handle benefits elections and verification of employees' relationships, rather than have OPM act as a central clearinghouse; that provisions be made for annuitants with same-sex partners to include them as beneficiaries, etc.; and to find a way to recognize former domestic partners as beneficiaries.

-The definition of "domestic partner" is still facing some technical issues: The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers wants the bill clarified so that gay and lesbian federal employees who are married in states where such marriages are legal, but where domestic partnerships do not exist, are covered. Testimony from the California Public Employees Retirement System suggests it might be viable to cover domestic partners who are heterosexual if they're over a certain age but don't want to marry for tax reasons. The Southern Baptists are calling the exclusion of heterosexual couples discriminatory. Those latter two objections seem unlikely to go anywhere, but they raise the problems of definitions.

-Dr. Frank Page, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention 2006, is the only witness in opposition to the bill: Page's objections center on religious-conservative lines about the sanctity of the family, but he says aloud the sentiment that I think motivates most opposition to this bill on social grounds: that it makes the Defense of Marriage Amendment look hypocritical and untenable, and if passed, could be a step towards the repeal of that legislation.

I get emails from a lot of you about how to find the status of a particular piece of legislation. Now you don't need to email me anymore, because Alex Parker, my awesome and enterprising beat partner, has put together a guide to all the pay and benefits legislation awaiting Congressional action right now. If he's missed anything, let us know, but this is a pretty comprehensive run-down.

Politico has a good piece up this morning explaining how the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to beef up management have run afoul of House appropriators. Apparently, the situation's gotten so bad that former DHS chief Michael Chertoff is speaking out to get successor Janet Napolitano's back. There are a couple of issues here: first, appropriators are cutting the very funds that DHS needs to increase staff in critical management areas like procurement. And second, lawmakers are insisting on earmarking significant parts of the department's budget for disaster management projects in their own districts, an effort that simultaneously smacks of pork-barrel politics and distrust of the ability of DHS components to make good evaluative judgments about where that money should go.

To a certain extent, I can understand lawmakers' frustration. The creation of DHS was politicized from the beginning, especially on collective bargaining and human capital issues. The performance of component agencies like FEMA have dismayed lawmakers. But DHS was given an almost impossible brief when it was created, to protect Americans under an extremely tense atmosphere, with absolutely no lead time or margin for error. Of course there were going to be problems. But cutting funding dedicated to management staff doesn't seem to be the proper response to those problems.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's announced a new head of its federal sector programs, and the Obama administration is pushing along some management nominations, sending Rafael Borras' name to the Senate for consideration as undersecretary for management at the Department of Homeland Security and George Cohen to head the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. I'm glad to see the administration is getting down to filling some of these positions, and I'll be even gladder when they start getting confirmed. Right now, Christine Griffin's nomination to be deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management has become something of a bellwether for me: when she gets confirmed, I'll be convinced things are moving along.

I cannot even begin to describe the awesomeness that is the YouTube video the Government Accountability Office is using to promote the agency's new channel on the video-sharing site, so I'll urge you to watch it yourself.

Where to begin? The pulsing music? The multi-minute shot of a revolving box with cable news references to GAO and Joe Lieberman referring to the agency as a modern-day Paul Revere? I think I've got to go with the use of Matrix-style green streams of numbers as the backdrop. Tom Shoop said he really wants a shot of Acting Comptroller Gene Dodaro leaning back in slow-motion to dodge a hail of bullets, or audits, or something. It might not be the strategic approach to social media that FEMA, for example, is using. But it would be AMAZING.

Soon-to-be-former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is drawing some mockery today for declaring in an interview with ABC's Kate Snow that the "department of law at the White House" would have her back if she became the target of unfair allegations in a subsequent campaign. It's sort of funny, but it's sort of not. I don't really think this is a case of mis-speaking in the heat of an interview: the Justice Department isn't at the White House. It just seems like basic ignorance, and it's depressing to see that ignorance about government on very public display.

Canadian academic Jeet Heer, an occasional correspondent of mine, has a really fantastic analysis of Robert McNamara's career as an example of a romance with management philosophy. McNamara, Heer writes, once said that management is "the most creative of all arts, for its medium is human talent itself." McNamara was a scientific manager, using statistical methods to plan firebombing campaigns in Japan during World War II and to dramatically reshape Ford after the war. But Jeet says there were limitations to the effectiveness of these techniques:

McNamara didn't understand his own soldiers any better than he understood the Vietnamese. Ordinary troops, many of them conscripted from the ghettos and barrios of America, hated being the foot soldiers of an ill-conceived imperialist adventure. The morale of the American army collapsed as drug use and fragging (the killing of officers) became common. McNamara's computers couldn't measure such intangibles as esprit de corps.

The top-down management style of modern business doesn't really lend itself to developing cultural empathy. McNamara would have better off if he had listened to some historians, psychologists, and anthropologists rather than relying a horde of computer programmers.

To an extent, this sounds less like a failure of management as something to emphasize, and more like a failure of McNamara as a manager. A manager who can't tell that his employees hate him or his policies is not a good manager. They may be right or wrong to hate him, but being able to suss out that hatred and why is a pretty basic thing for leaders to figure out. There are reasons so many agencies, including the Defense Department, do employee satisfaction surveys. What they do with that data is an entirely different matter.

And there's no question that McNamara may have relied on the wrong kind of managers during the Vietnam war, but that doesn't mean that relying on the knowledge of experts is wrong. You just need someone who knows how to manage a counterinsurgency, rather than someone who knows how to target aerial strikes.

Kal Penn, the Harold & Kumar and House star is apparently mid-way through his first day in the White House Office of Public Engagement.

The New York Times reports that White House appointees are having a hard time maintaining their work-life balance, despite the fact that they've been assigned laptops so they can work from home, and that the Obama administration is trying to be considerate, doing things like hosting screenings of family-oriented movies so parents can bring their children to work. It's good to see that the administration is practicing for its appointees, the employees it has the most direct control over, what Michelle Obama's been preaching for federal employees. But the problems appointees are facing makes clear how hard it can be to make sure everyone has a balance between their work and personal lives.

If you're worried about IRS auditors getting overwhelmed during tax season, or about a spike in investigations requested of the Government Accountability Office, you can hire more people to do those things. Sure, there's a cost to that, but it may pay off in increased productivity, decreased turnover, folks taking fewer sick days, etc. You can't necessarily hire another person to run the Sonia Sotomayor nomination. Some jobs require one person at the top who can keep track of everything and run the big picture strategy. There's no simple viable way to take the pressure off of those people.

In the kerfuffle over the dinners to which the Washington Post had planned to invite administration officials and lobbyists, who would pay a seriously hefty entry fee, the Obama administration has issued a reminder to appointees about its ethics rules governing gifts and events, and notified folks about its electronic request forms for dealing with both.

My sense of the debacle is that it was poorly handled in a way that made the whole series of events look much worse than the initial conception. And given the ethics rules, I wonder who and how many folks from the Obama administration had actually committed to attend--if any had. I have a sneaking suspicion that the whole series may not have come off the way the Post planned, which makes for a lot of smoke and very little actual heat.

Marc Ambinder has a really nice post up on the significance of Robert McNamara, the Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary who died today. He writes:

John Ralston Saul, in Volatire's Bastards, makes McNamara a central character in his tale of Western governments came to rely on a cult of credentialed, jargon-y experts to make decisions that were better left to politicians. This is not a conservative critique of the elite, per se: it's merely a meditation on the limits of what humans can do, and know, and why it is dangerous to leave major decisions in the hands of people who think they can know. We've see a version of this fallacy play out among the central actors in our economic crisis: CEOs and experts, quants and traders, who created an orderly world from something fundamentally, almost irreducibly complex.

Marc's point, and what McNamara seems to have spent the end of his life grappling with, is the tension between expert decision-making and the democratic decision-making process, which may be (agonizingly) slow and sometimes irrational, but can provide an important check on folks who think they have all the answers.

The blog is off for the weekend, everybody. Have a wonderful, safe July 4, and I'll see you on Monday!

Apparently, the State Department is working on building the infrastructure to help scientists in North and South America communicate with each other. The Department's providing space for conversations on the Western Hemisphere Affairs bureau's website, hosting webchats, and looking at setting up a social network. This strikes me as smart and potentially valuable. It provides a resource for universities and research institutions without explicitly setting an agenda. Providing pipelines for communication is useful, it's not always something universities have the resources to set up and maintain themselves, it provides a venue other than conferences for scientists to talk to each other, and it provides a somewhat low-stakes forum for the State Department to test out its ability to build this kind of network.

From science-fiction blog io9 comes a delightful reminder of the crazy things countries can get themselves into when they go in big for self-improvement: apparently, Russian engineers spent about 40 years trying to build a flying-car system in Moscow. Washington, D.C., of course is modeled on on layout and architecture of the past, and federal buildings are inspired (or not) by a whole range of styles. So it's entertaining to see plans for what a capital city might have looked like with an extremely futuristic vision. And sort of scary to contemplate the effort that went into this project, in particular.

The Post has an interesting story today, suggesting that even growing federal employment in the greater Washington, D.C. area isn't enough to offset job losses in other industries. Combined with the report of higher-than-expected job losses across the country today, it's a reminder for folks who grouse about the size of government that while federal agencies are big, they're still not THAT big.

It's worth noting that Brown spoke highly of Berry as recently as last week, saying he and other NFFE officials had positive meetings with Berry and were willing to work with him on issues like pay reform. Brown was definitely tough on the issues he cared about, like repealing the National Security Personnel System. But I know the folks who worked with him at NFFE really cared about him, and my sense was that he had a good sense of humor to go with his conviction.

Statement by U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry

President Richard N. Brown

"I am greatly saddened by the unexpected death of Richard Brown. He worked tirelessly on behalf of Federal employees.

"Rick lived a life of service and leadership, and this is a tragic loss. I only knew Rick for a short time, but his dedication shone through in our work together on issues that matter deeply to Federal employees and working people everywhere.

"He will be forever remembered as a smart, tough, and passionate employee advocate. His family, friends, and colleagues are in my thoughts and prayers."

Neil Armstrong was a GS-13 when he walked on the moon.

To the family of Richard Brown, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, and to his co-workers at the union. Brown passed away unexpectedly yesterday at 47. I've reproduced NFFE's announcement below the jump.

Continue reading "Condolences" »

The folks at the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board weren't kidding when they said provisions of the tobacco legislation that made changes to the Thrift Savings Plan could be implemented as early as July. The Board published the regulation starting automatic agency contributions equivalent 1 percent of income to employees' TSP accounts in the federal register today, saying that provision is effective immediately.