Reading the Documents

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.

Griffin's responses reflected enthusiasm for the challenges she'll face in this position, but they weren't without the occasional criticism of how things have traditionally been done. Her personal investment in workplace diversity and the need for greater collaboration between EEOC and OPM were common themes, but she also identified several broader areas for which current efforts and policies are insufficient. For example, in the midst of wide debate and Obama administration initiatives to reform hiring policies, she criticized the unnecessary questions and slow processes that deter applicants and frustrate agencies, as well as inconsistent standards and carve-out exceptions that make candidates eligible for employment in one agency and ineligible in another. Other potential areas for improvement, she said, are in training supervisors to be more effective leaders, addressing pay system reform, and reversing the fragmentation that prevents OPM from holding agencies responsible for compliance with hiring regulations.

Griffin professed support for many of the issues John Berry, OPM's director, has already begun addressing, but she added that certain priorities have dominated their discussions thus far. These reflect her own experiences, including examining diversity in federal recruitment, hiring, advancement, and retention and highlighting the importance of veteran preference rules in the process. Finally, she echoed Berry's goal of making the federal government the "employer of choice," saying that it is not yet the "model employer" it should be.

*(Note from Alyssa: Emily is going to be spending six months with us at GovExec, and I hope she'll be writing here often!)