Marc Ambinder, over at sister publication The Atlantic, has an excellent post up about the difficulties for the Central Intelligence Agency of mourning 8 CIA officers reported to have been killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, war dead the administration is not acknowledging; who may have participated in a Predator drone program that killed many civilians; and that the American public may not particularly understand:

The death of eight CIA officers would be the agency's worst toll since the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, when at least six officers were killed. Robert Baer, the now ubiquitous former CIA officer who spend years hunting down the Beirut bombers, has written that the agency never recovered from the loss of life that day. In an environment where the CIA is under extreme pressure from all corners, the Afghanistan massacre begins history as a tragedy that even under ordinary conditions the agency would find it hard to bear. Leon Panetta, the CIA director, must now add, to the mountain of pressing concerns, the grief counseling for thousands of employees.

I'm not going to opine on the Predator program, or whether the CIA should be publicly understood as combatants. I think Marc is right to focus on the fact that these deaths will have an enormous ripple effect through an agency that's already under tremendous strain. If the administration wants the CIA to function effectively, they should at least acknowledge that internally.

Once again, the Office of Personnel Management has announced that federal agencies in the DC area will operate under an unscheduled leave policy. Employees who can't make it into the office must let their supervisors know they're using leave, and emergency employees are expected to report for duty. There's some chance of rain or snow later in the day, and it is New Year's eve, but skies are clear, if dark, now.

The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association has just sent out a press release saying pretty much exactly what I said this morning about the delay in confirming a Transportation Security Administration chief. From J. Adler, the group's national president:

"We do not have the luxury of simply listening to so-called terrorist experts discuss the Detroit incident ad nauseam. Life and air travel vulnerabilities have not taken pause; we need Chief Southers confirmed immediately so we can end the blogging and begin the real work of strengthening air travel protocols."

It is inexcusable to continue jeopardizing the safety of Americans while engaging in a misguided debate over collective bargaining rights for Transportation Security Officers. While FLEOA supports collective bargaining rights for TSO'S, this issue should not be used as a partisan stall tactic to delay vote on Chief Souther's confirmation.

Is that it's not simply a matter of tightening up internal American processes and regulations. It's also a matter of working with international partners in flight security screening to make sure standards for who can fly, carrying what, and going through what security, are uniform and acceptable to everyone involved. When I was coming back from Cambodia, I had a stopover in Seoul, involving going through a security checkpoint. And when we were boarding the plane, Korean Air explained, somewhat apologetically, that the U.S. had asked them to perform additional screenings as we boarded, essentially involving a visual inspection of our bags, a metal detector screening, and in some cases, a pat search.

In the past, the U.S. has flagged certain countries for not meeting even basic security standards. But it seems to me that we're reaching a point where what our country wants is not minimum international standards, but the adoption internationally of what the U.S. considers best practices. I think we've got to keep in mind that that may be difficult to achieve, and that it's not something TSA can accomplish on its own.

Brittany Ballenstedt points out over on Wired Workplace that the Office of Personnel Management has set January 23 as the launch date for a new iteration of USAJobs, the government's famously impenetrable job-listings website. Among the functionalities the new site is expected to feature is the ability to share individual job listings through social media sites. I think this is a particularly smart step forward.

On a fairly regular basis, I get asked to give federal career advice to recent college graduates or friends switching jobs or looking for internships before graduate school. And it's really difficult to tell them where they start. Most of them have little idea of the breadth of agencies, much less offices within agencies out there, making it difficult for them to pin down where they'd like to work, much less what they'd like to do when they get there. Allowing folks to push out individual listings will give folks a much better idea of what kinds of jobs are available in the federal government. For folks who are curious about public service but confused about where to dive in, it's an important place to start. Now we just have to hope that folks take advantage of these tools to spread the word and information.

It's with a combination of relief and exasperation that I've been reading all the stories about how yet another attempt to attack a U.S.-bound airplane have made lawmakers remember that the Transportation Security Administration really ought to get confirmed administrator at some point. I'm relieved because of course TSA needs an administrator, and it's not only because some dude tried--and failed--to set off an explosive device he had hidden in his pants. The Department of Homeland Security has largely punted on the question of whether TSA workers should be extended collective bargaining rights, leaving that for a future TSA administrator to determine; big questions about workforce attrition, scheduling, and performance management remain; and the agency is trying to move forward with technological upgrades that are sparking civil liberties debate. In other words, even if Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had never headed for Detroit, there would still be critical questions of TSA's operations for a new agency head to grapple with.

And the reason that I'm frustrated is that it seems astonishingly easy for lawmakers responsible for confirming these folks to forget that those critical operational issues exist--not just in TSA but in many agencies--until something (that may or may not be linked to those operational issues) goes wrong. It makes vastly more sense to get these people in as soon as possible, so they can start work on these issues, then to delay forever, and face an enormous hullaballoo because they aren't in place to address something that went wrong.

Look, I've been to my fair share of confirmation hearings at this point. And the truth is, they don't take a huge amount of time. The nominees submit a huge amount of information in writing in advance, that committee staff and Senators can review. For most positions (other than Cabinet Secretaries, for example), only a couple of Senators show up, giving them each plenty of time and space to grill the nominees in, at most, a couple of hours. There's really no conflict between all deliberate speed and due diligence on these nominees. And there's no reason that a year into the Obama administration, an agency as vital as politicians have suddenly decided TSA is shouldn't have an administrator.

FedBlog will be off the rest of this week, and return as there's news next week. I've had a wonderful time reading your comments and emails this year, so thank you for checking in, and giving me the occasional hard time. I hope all of you who are taking some time off for the holidays enjoy the rest, and that those of you who are traveling to see family and friends have safe and wonderful trips.

I hear the federal government will be returning to fully normal operating status in Washington, DC tomorrow. Emergency workers or not, federal employees will have to be back at their desks, and the unscheduled leave policy in place today will be lifted.

I think most Americans don't spend much time contemplating Canada, and when we do consider our neighbor to the North, it's mostly to talk about health care, the cold, or if you're a foodie, poutine. But a survey out of Canada has some valuable lessons for federal hiring managers and anyone concerned with human capital. According to the 2009 Top Campus Employer Brand Rankings, a survey of more than 16,000 Canadian college students, the federal Government of Canada has the best employer brand in the country. And that's not the end of it--the provincial governments come it at number two, followed by Health Canada, the nation's public health care system. That means three governmental entities beat employers like Google and Apple, which have sterling brands in the United States. I don't think that Google and Apple are less-respected in Canada, rather, that government's brand is just much, much better.

I can think of a couple of reasons for this. First, because of Health Canada, Canadians have much more direct contact with their national government than most Americans do with theirs. As a result, as long as that contact is positive, they're likely to be more familiar and comfortable with the government. Second, as far as I know, Canadian politics hasn't been dominated by pernicious scapegoating of the government. But I'd be very curious to know more about how to Canadian governments, both national and local, sell themselves as employers, and whether there are lessons the American federal government could learn from them.

The weather's been clear for two days in Washington, DC, but snow is still on the ground, and the Office of Personnel Management isn't taking any chances with federal employees' safety. Tomorrow, federal offices in the area will be open, but operating under an unscheduled leave policy. That means, if federal workers can't get into the office, they can take leave without having requested it in advance, though they must inform their supervisors of their plans. Any workers designated as emergency employees must report for work in time.

This kind of cautious approach to employees' safety is consistent with the position OPM Director John Berry outlined early in December, and that led the agency to close down federal agencies in the Washington, DC area today. Berry is responsible for making the call about the government's operating status unless he is traveling, in which case he delegates responsibility to an official who will be in the region to consult with emergency management officials and assess the impact of the weather. Full closures cost about $100 million daily in lost productivity. But an Unscheduled Leave policy day should cost less, since some if not most workers will make it into the office.

I meant to link to this Wall Street Journal article about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's efforts to retain its jurisdiction in the face of massive proposed overhauls of the financial regulatory system. I single it out because I think the piece is a leading indicator of something I've seen coming for a while: that 2010 could be a major year for agency reorganizations. In the case of the FDIC:

Ms. Bair's struggle is part of a broader battle over the future shape of the apparatus that regulates the U.S. financial system. In the wake of the crisis, virtually every agency involved stands accused of being asleep at the switch, and officials who led the response are under fire. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who by the end of next month faces a Senate vote on his re-appointment to a second four-year term, is trying to fight off an assault on the central bank's powers. Mr. Geithner is frequently blasted by the left for being too close to Wall Street.

And no matter whether the Office of Personnel Management ends up with health care jurisdiction or not, federal agencies are going to have to build capacity to take on a supervisory role for reform. The Department of Homeland Security represented a major reshuffling of federal agencies, but not necessarily an expansion of capacity. But I think next year could be different. All of which means big questions about fiscal management, personnel, and oversight.

On the floor of the Senate Friday evening, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., compared the proposed Office of Personnel Management health care reform plan plan with his own 2004 campaign promise that all Americans have access to the health insurance of federal employees. True, the deal wouldn't open up the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program to the uninsured -- but it could create a parallel, mirror program with similar benefits, Kerry argued.

"Ask any American, do you think you should have access to the same health care that we members of Congress give ourselves, and they'd say yes," Kerry said. "We have the possibility of that. We don't do that precisely, because we don't say it has to be that plan, but there is the possibility that in the plan they put together, there could be that kind of option for people."

Kerry said this before the details of the plan were revealed on Saturday morning. Now that the details are public, we know that OPM will be mandated to negotiate plans as close to FEHBP as possible, and will have the power to deny contracts to insurers that aren't able to make the standard. (These plans will be national, but people would buy them through state-based exchanges which will include other health care plans.)

But despite the similarities, it's a mistake to look at these new national plans as a mirror FEHB program for uninsured Americans.

These programs will be serving different populations, will have different payment structures, and could end up looking pretty different from the options currently available to federal employees. For one thing, FEHBP currently has about 250 health care plans. Under this proposal, OPM will likely offer far fewer options for uninsured Americans. OPM was chosen because it has experience negotiating national health care plans with private insurers. But even if the process is similar, the resulting product could be different.

Which isn't to say it's a bad idea. But if you want to understand why so many federal employee organizations are either against this proposal or are anxious about it, this is one of the big reasons.

If Congress enters into this idea with the mentality that it's giving uninsured Americans the same options members of Congress and federal employees have, then there may be political repercussions if the result is two drastically different programs. How long will it take for an enterprising lawmaker to say, "Hey, it's time we combined them!" That's not a realistic proposal today, but federal employee advocates are worried that this bill could make it a little bit more realistic. Perhaps it's a baseless fear -- Medicare and Medicaid have worked side-by-side at the same agency for years, without similar problems -- but that's the concern.

Federal agencies and offices are closed in the Washington, DC area today, and most federal blogs have gone dark as well. Douglas Elmendorf, the Congressional Budget Office's director, to his credit, posted a correction to an earlier assessment yesterday morning. And GovGab has a cautionary tale about bed bugs. But most agency blogs seem to be taking a snow day.

For federal employees in the Washington, DC area, offices will be closed tomorrow. OPM has the details, and offers the following caveats:

-Federal agencies in the Washington, DC, area are closed. Nonemergency employees (including employees on pre-approved leave) will be granted excused absence for the number of hours they were scheduled to work. This does not apply to employees on leave without pay, leave without pay for military duty, workers' compensation, suspension, or in another nonpay status.
-Telework employees may be expected to work from their telework sites, as specified in their telework agreements.
-Emergency employees are expected to report for work on time.
-Employees on alternative work schedules are not entitled to another AWS day off in lieu of the workday on which the agency is closed.

Legislation to involve the Office of Personnel Management in a national health care plan -- finally revealed today after two weeks of closed-door negotiations -- includes language to protect the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

Word leaked about two weeks ago that the Democrats were considering a compromise option which would replace the government-run public option for health care with national plans, to be regulated by OPM but offered through private carriers. Some federal workforce employee groups and advocates have been anxious that the plan could eventually dillute FEHBP by shifting OPM's focus. Whether or not they're satisfied with the newly revealed details of the plan, we'll have to see. But clearly, Reid and his colleagues took their concerns into account.

The details were revealed Saturday through a "Manager's Amendment," offered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. The amendment specifies that OPM cannot reduce the staffing or funding which currently goes toward administering FEHBP in order to meet this new responsibility. It requires OPM to maintain seperate risk pools for FEHBP and the "multi-state plans," as they're called--which means that the legislation wouldn't affect benefits or premiums for FEHBP enrollees. And, unlike some early rumors, the legislation wouldn't put any additional requirements on insurance plans currently in FEHBP.

Of course, critics might still argue that the bill would is a first step on the long road of opening FEHBP to the general population--which many health care experts say would drastically raise premium rates. They might also argue that the bill can't protect OPM from a political shift in focus away from the needs of federal employees. But already, Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, has sent out a statement saying she is "pleased" with the new requirements in the bill.

Other thoughts:

The bill requires the OPM director to negotiate with insurers to ensure that the plans' premium rates, profit margins, and other terms and conditions are "similar" to those offered in FEHBP. OPM would then have the authority--and this is crucial--to turn down plans that don't meet those standards. That's at least some teeth for OPM to use when it negotiates the plans.

The Congressional Budget Office's report on the compromise is decidedly ho-hum about the OPM plan. It estimates that the plan will have little effect on national health insurance premiums, or on federal government spending. That's mainly because, as CBO puts it, creating national plans (especially non-profit national plans) might be harder for insurers than offering plans through the state-based exchanges, which already existed in the bill. So the end result could be the same number of health care plans.

For feds from DC to New England, it looks like it's going to be a snowy weekend. Washington, D.C.'s public transit system has already put up a limited-service map in case the area gets hit hard. The storm should be over before work begins on Monday, so I'm doubtful there will be a delayed opening or even office closure in the Washington, DC area. But all you feds out there, stay safe, and stay warm.

Josh Rogin at the Cable, reading through an analysis of the financial units of the State Department, makes a good--if sobering--catch:

The 100-plus page document, the annual Agency Financial Report, is meant to give a snapshot of how all financial aspects of the State Department are faring, but includes an interesting aside. Only 63 percent of employees' performance ratings in fiscal 2009 were deemed to be "on or above target" and 38 percent were judged "below target or improved but not yet met." Ouch.

That's down from a 69 percent positive performance rating in fiscal 2008 and 86 percent in fiscal 2007.

But wait. The numbers don't tell the whole story. Apparently, the measures for grading performance changed somewhat for 2009, meaning that the numbers don't represent a genuine apples-to-apples comparison.

"Marked by increasing rigor and intensive engagement at multiple levels of the organization, the process for developing and selecting performance indicators changed significantly in FY 2009," the report states. (Is the implication here that the previous administration wasn't "rigorous" in measuring performance?)

I think it's entirely possible that State is implying "that the previous administration wasn't 'rigorous' in measuring performance." Indeed, it seems to me that a significant tenet of the Obama administration's human capital policy is going to be the argument that they can recognize and reward performance more effectively than the Bush administration did because they hold federal employees in higher regard in the first place. If they can firmly establish that attitude, they might have a better shot selling pay reform and performance management to federal employee unions--ultimately, beating the Bush administration at a game it started.

I was showing Tom Shoop (who really is the best boss ever) this trailer for Iron Man 2:

And complained that none of the hearings we ever cover ever begin with one of the witnesses answering a Congressman's request for attention with "yes, dear." Clearly, Tony Stark need to get cracking so Robert Brodsky and Elizabeth Newell can have more fun on the contracting beat.

DipNote provides a reminder of the World Digital Library, a joint project of UNESCO and the Library of Congress, which provides access to content from libraries in more than twenty countries, much of it primary source material. Projects like this are important from an archival standpoint, because they provide digital copies of materials that may be decaying or in danger. But they're also important as a symbol of academic freedom and cultural exchange. And this is the kind of project that is perfect for governments and multinational organizations to take on. It's extremely hard for academic institutions, which may have limited resources, to host this kind of project, much less coordinate it with rival academic programs. Governments and NGOs can smooth rivalries and provide neutral access to material.

Sometimes, it takes going away for a while to see things clearly. I feel a bit like that was one of the effects of my trip to Cambodia: covering the federal government day-to-day sometimes means I'm so down in the weeds that it's hard to pull back and look at the American government clearly. But in Cambodia, I was staying with a group of young reporters, and the ways they interact with government officials and some of the stories they're covering gave me a new perspective on how the American government works.

First, their relationships with government officials and major politicians is infinitely more direct than it is here in the United States. These reporters have the cell phone numbers not of these officials' media representatives, but of the officials themselves. The leader of the major opposition party in Cambodia spends a lot of time on Gchat. That level of accessibility is unfathomable to me: here, if I want to talk to an agency head, I go through their representative, or catch them at a hearing, or a dinner, or an event. I think that having officials that accessible has benefits and problems--it certainly makes for colorful quotations for the reporters in Cambodia, but I also think it means they get less vetted and checked information sometimes. Dealing with intermediaries sometimes means it's easier to get reports or work that the heads of agencies aren't necessarily intimately familiar with, but that are important none the less.

And the Cambodian government itself is, well, a lot more ad-hoc than the American government. One of the big news stories developing when I was there had to do with the Cambodian air traffic control system. In the U.S. such a story might have to do with working conditions for air traffic controllers. In Cambodia, it turns out that the air traffic control system is run by a Thai company. Thailand and Cambodia have a deeply acrimonious relationship. And it turned out that a Thai employee of the air traffic control system was turning over Cambodian officials' flight details to the Thai government. This is the kind of thing that it's hard to imagine happening in the United States, if only because a) we've got a highly professional, competent, government-employed air traffic control workforce, b) we've got decent counterespionage and security systems in place. In other words, the whole event is a reminder that even though the American federal government has its problems, as a whole it's functioning and competent. And that's more than some countries can say.

President Barack Obama today signed into law the omnibus appropriations bill which includes a 1.5 percent base pay increase for federal civilian employees and a 0.5 percent locality pay increase.

The Government Accountability Office released an analysis of how well the Defense Department has done in complying with the recommendations GAO made between fiscal years 2001 and 2008, and the results are fairly interesting, at least in the human capital arena. In that time period, GAO made 3,099 recommendations overall. The Department implemented 60.6 percent of those recommendations, made a decision not to implement 12 percent of them, and has yet to act on 27 percent of them. The rates of implementation on personnel issues were lower: 56 percent of the 273 recommendations that dealt with personnel were implemented, 14.7 percent were not implemented, and 29 percent of them are still open.

And I thought that some of the areas where there are high rates of non-action by the Defense Department were interesting. Among the reports where many issues remain open: "Military Personnel: Federal Management of Servicemember Employment Rights Can Be Further Improved," "Military Personnel: Progress Made in Implementing Recommendations to Reduce Domestic Violence, but Further Management Action Needed ," "Military Personnel: DOD's and the Coast Guard's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Programs Face Implementation and Oversight Challenges," and "Military Personnel: Top Management Attention Is Needed to Address Long-standing Problems with Determining Medical and Physical Fitness of the Reserve Force."

All of these reports tap into difficult cultural issues, whether it's the questions of how standards have been stretched to meet difficult recruiting goals, or the fact that more than most employers, the Defense Department needs to be involved in the domestic lives' of certain classes of its employees, or some historical problems of sexual violence. But just because these issues are substantially challenging doesn't mean that the recommendations surrounding them should be allowed to linger.

For those following the health care debate -- and its impact on the Office of Personnel Management -- Kaiser Health News has an interesting forum of ten health care policy experts and their thoughts on the proposal to have OPM take over the so-called "public option" of health care reform. Their verdict? Anything from "it makes a lot of sense" to "it's a joke."

Robert Moffit, a Reagan-era OPM official currently with the Heritage Foundation, has an interesting point:

"[OPM's] philosophical approach is going to reflect the policy of the White House. These [legislators] don't realize it's kind of a two-edged sword. They have the Obama administration, but you may also have the Palin administration."

That gets to an issue that has been on my mind lately--what effect would this reform have on the politics and culture of OPM? Perhaps OPM is more political than Health and Human Services or the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but it's also an agency generally geared towards wonky human resource-related challenges. It spends most of its time tending to federal employee needs, as well as drawing up personnel policies which normally hit bureaucratic walls. (When he first came to office, OPM Director John Berry jokingly referred to it as the "Office of Personnel Recommendations.") Is it ready to handle this type of intense political pressure?

In terms of administrative burden, it's hard to say -- OPM already handles about 250 health care plans with 8 million enrollees. Estimates vary, but it's unlikely this OPM-run public option replacement would have as many enrollees, or anywhere close to as many plans. There have been a lot of legitimate questions about whether or not OPM can handle the administrative burden of a new health care plan, with new rules and responsibilities. But when you look at the numbers, it's not outrageously larger than OPM's current mandate -- assuming that Congress includes some staffing and funding increases along with this new responsibility.

But what about the politics?

But when Berry comes down to Capital Hill these days, he's normally quizzed by lawmakers on personnel reforms, labor-management relations, the security clearance process, and occasionally hot-button issues like domestic partnership benefits. But if this proposal became law, it's hard to imagine that he would be asked about anything but health care. What chance would Berry have of following through with the ambitious goals -- re-thinking the General Schedule, cleaning up the convoluted hiring process, ushering in a new era of public service -- that he laid out when he first came into office?

The IRS today reported that federal employees owe more than $3 billion in taxes they failed to pay in 2008. More than 275,000 feds and retirees account for the $3 billion shortfall. The IRS tracks this number annually and, for the first time in several years, it has decreased. In 2007, feds failed to $3.58 billion in taxes.

The Treasury Department, which houses the IRS, has the best tax compliance record, and the Postal Service takes the sour cake with the highest rate of failure to pay. As if postal workers didn't have enough to deal with! USPS did demonstrate significant improvement, though. In 2007, more than 54,000 Postal Service employees failed to pay over $407 million. Last year, 28,913 USPS workers owe $297 million.

Here is a link to the complete spreadsheet of data, courtesy of the Washington radio station WTOP.

OMB today announced the winner of the first ever Securing Americans Value and Efficiency (SAVE) Awards. Nancy Fichtner, a fiscal program support clerk at the Veterans Affairs Department nabbed the honor. She will meet with Pres. Obama at the White House on Dec. 21 to discuss her idea, which will be included in the fiscal 2011 budget.

Fichtner's idea is for veterans leaving VA hospitals to be able to take the medication they have been using home with them, rather than have it be thrown away upon their discharge.

"The SAVE Award is about allowing federal employees on the frontlines to contribute their ideas on how we can make government more efficient and more effective," OMB Director Peter Orszag said. "I want to commend the three runners-up for their efforts and for their inspiring dedication to public service."

More than 38,000 federal employees submitted ideas for making the government more efficient and effective and OMB officials say hundreds of the "most promising" ideas were passed back to agencies to be included in the next budget. The general public picked a winner among a designated "final four."

This USA Today study regarding six-figure federal salaries seems to be getting a lot of interest and is sparking the usual debates. The study shows that the number of federal employees making $100,000 or more climbed from 14 percent to 19 percent of the total civil service from Dec. 2007 to June 2009.

Among the reasons that USA Today cites are pay raises from Congress, the National Security Personnel System, and increases in the salaries of agency heads (which normally set the salary caps for the entire agency).

I would imagine another reason is that the civil service is becoming considerably older, and with a pay scale geared heavily towards seniority, that's going to mean more salaries on the high end. In addition to that, a lot of retirement-age workers are putting their retirements off until the economy gets better. That tilts the scales a bit.

The article also gets into the public/private salary split, which we've already spent too many pixels on. Here are our previous posts and articles on the subject.

A few minutes ago, the House of Representatives approved an omnibus appropriations bill which includes a 2 percent raise for civilian federal employees, with 1.5 percent going to base pay and 0.5 percent going towards locality pay. It now only needs a Senate vote to go to President Obama's desk for a signature.

More information about the compromise here.

The Partnership for Public Service is collecting nominations for the "Service to America Medals"--i.e., the Sammies, or the "Oscars of Washington"--and will be until January 29, 2010. The awards go to civil servants who have shown exceptional commitment and devotion to public service.

More information about how to nominate a hard-working co-worker here.

Here's our coverage of their awards ceremony earlier this year.

By Robert Brodsky

The $450 billion Omnibus legislation approved by House and Senate negotiators Tuesday night once again extends the moratorium on new public-private competitions for federal work and denies any funding for government use of private tax debt collectors.

In addition to the one-year ban A-76 job competitions--which was also included in the 2009 Omnibus bill--the fiscal 2010 spending package also requires federal agencies to create an annual inventory of their service contracts to determine whether work now being done by private contractors should be insourced to federal employees.

"I am particularly pleased to see continuing congressional attention to the issue of who does the work of the federal government," said Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union. "As I have said repeatedly, when provided with adequate resources and appropriate training, no one can perform the work of the federal government as well as dedicated and accountable federal employees."

President Barack Obama signed an executive order today creating a "Labor-Management Forum"--a national partnership including both management and labor representatives to discuss labor issues and try to resolve differences, to advise the president on labor-related issues, and also to set up similar entities at the agency level.

Unlike an earlier version of the order, it will not require agencies to collectively bargain over the so-called "permissive issues," such as employee grading, technology, method of work, and other issues which are exempted from collective bargaining by Title V of the federal code. However, it will require the forum to create "pilot programs" with a small number of agencies to test such bargaining on an individual agency level.

The order also requires that the forum serve as a "venue" for labor or management if the agency-level forums fail to resolve differences--which union leaders had suggested as a way to ensure that the order is enforced.

President Bill Clinton created a similar partnership, but the practice was discontinued under President George W. Bush.

More on this to come shortly.

As noted yesterday, the White House has now released the Open Government Directive, providing guidance to agencies and departments about the steps they will have to take to implement the President's transparency, participation, and collaboration agenda.

Going forward, one key element in this agenda is sure to be Data.gov. The portal, launched in May 2009, provides a consolidated portal for downloading federal datasets in machine-readable formats. The Open Government Directive gives Data.gov a starring role in agencies' open government plans, requiring them to:

identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets and register those data sets via Data.gov. These must be data sets not previously available online or in a downloadable format.

The Directive goes on to provide some guidance on what "high-value" really means, but as we all know, the value of data is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, happily, the beholder is you. Recognizing that Data.gov is still in the beginning of what is sure to be a continuous evolution, the Federal CIO Council, which oversees the site, is inviting all interested parties to weigh in on the question: What would you like Data.gov to look like by July 2010?

The site, hosted on the IdeaScale platform, is a classic "online dialogue" model: You can suggest ideas, discuss others' ideas, categorize them, and vote the best ones to the top. The site also provides an opportunity to read the draft Data.gov CONOPS (link to pdf), a pretty interesting document that sheds some light on how Data.gov is being thought about inside OMB and the CIO Council.

This is a neat opportunity to shape a service that, fundamentally, should be guided by the desires and requirements of citizens.

From Robert Brodsky:

Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert is not a big fan of Recovery.gov, the administration's Web site to track the $787 billion stimulus. Last Tuesday, the late-night comedian went after the administration's implementation of the stimulus, the brouhaha about fake congressional districts and the cost of the Web site. He also had a little fun at the expense of the White House's Recovery Act Coordinator G. Edward DeSeve, pronouncing his last name as "Deceive."

At a Government Executive breakfast last Thursday at the National Press Club, DeSeve shot back:

"Just two days ago, I'm told -- because I don't have cable TV and I don't stay up late - I'm told that I was called out by Stefan Colburt [sic] -- I was called out as being a malefactor in oversight and execution of stimulus. Not only did he call me out, but he perverted the pronunciation of my name."

Well last night, Colbert picked up on those quotes, going after DeSeve again saying he will now be known only through his initials: G.E.D. Ouch. He also threatened to "fight DeSeve anywhere in America, let's say Rhode Island's 65th district. I'll meet you at the corner of Sesame Street and Electric Avenue at 13 o'clock on February 30th.

But, while the late night funnyman may have a bone to pick with DeSeve, we at Government Executive are steamed at Colbert. How dare he not cite us as the host of the Press Club event? Sounds like just another case of "Who's not honoring us now?"

Well in the interest of the peace, love and the holiday season, we would like to offer an olive branch to Colbert. We know how much he likes having pieces of the federal government, such as a NASA treadmill , named in his honor. So, we at Government Executive would like to humbly suggest renaming the public option plan in the House and Senate health care bills after Colbert. Let's admit it. The public option--or the Colbert Option as it will now be known--could certainly use the Colbert bump.

BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING MUST CREDIT FEDBLOG!!!1!

Okay, not really. Via the Sunlight Foundation (and about a jillion Gov 2.0 tweets), we learned late last night that the Obama Administration is finally ready to release the Open Government Directive. The guidance is expected to fill out and operationalize the Open Government Memorandum that, issued on the President's first full day in office, directed agencies and departments to find ways to become more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. Accompanying the release, the White House is doing a live webcast featuring U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra -- and You, since the forum will also take live questions from viewers. (First TIME Person of the Year, now this! Pretty impressive.) You can watch the action unfold at 11:00 a.m. ET at http://www.whitehouse.gov/live.

Why is this so significant? Part of it is simply cultural. The initial Memo instantly strengthened the hand of those throughout government who had been insisting for a while that a more open and participatory government was both essential and inevitable; this Directive should only strengthen momentum and the sense of Presidential leadership on these issues. It's also worth noting that the original due date for the Directive -- May 21st, 2009 -- is, uh, a really long time ago. But to me, that's a good thing, because it means that lots of different voices were consulted in putting this together. Openness and transparency aren't their own separate mission or box on the org chart; they potentially affect everything that federal government does, and reflect a shared responsibility for senior managers, program folks, human capital, acquisition, legal, CIO, financial and performance managers, and, well, everyone. So it's good and essential that this not just be a project of the White House's resident tech enthusiasts. An Open Government Directive that's had consultation by Jeff Zients and Cass Sunstein, for example, is one that's going to be a lot more effective at laying out performance management criteria and addressing regulatory issues than one that hasn't. So kudos to the White House for blowing past the deadline and giving this guidance the time it really needed.

Finally, no matter what gets said at this morning's webcast, a lot of attention will inevitably be put on the additional requirements, both procedural and in terms of resources, that the Directive places on agencies. And that's an absolutely valid concern. Making data free takes more resources than not making it free. Enabling the public to shape policies that affect their lives is harder than just making the decisions by yourself in a closed room. A recent thread on GovLoop asked folks whether their agencies were ready to implement the Open Government Directive; the general answer seemed to be, "Probably not, but who knows?"

But ultimately, I hope federal managers realize that the ability to inform and collaborate with other agencies, front-line employees, stakeholders, and citizens represents an unprecedented opportunity to do the work of government in a more informed, meaningful, and responsive way. It will be the responsibility of those who advocate for this path (and I include myself here) to demonstrate how that return on investment is captured, which is one reason that I'm really looking forward to the Directive's guidance on performance measurement. In the meantime, though, it's incredibly heartening to see the President's vision -- and that of thousands of folks across federal government and millions of folks outside it -- being fleshed out in an important and unmistakable way.

At least one person begs to differ with John Berry's characterization of the Office of Personnel Management's decision-making regarding weather delays or closures---his predecessor, Linda Springer.

During a news conference on Thursday, Berry said that he would make all weather-related decisions by 4 a.m., and implied that OPM had erred in the past by waiting too long to make an announcement.

Here's Springer's response, which was e-mailed to Government Executive:

Over the course of three winter seasons from 2005-2008 during my tenure as OPM director, I always made the closing decision in time for a 4:00 a.m. announcement. The OPM team rapidly executed the announcement release to all recipients as evidenced by the almost instantaneous television news coverage.

It's disappointing to see Director Berry follow the unfortunate practice of criticizing prior administrations, but if he is going to do so, he should be more explicit and not leave open the possibility that the "past" includes my tenure and many of the dedicated career professionals who serve him now.

During the news conference, Berry said he didn't know the specifics of OPM's previous policy.

This morning brings news that the President's SAVE Award -- which, cleverly, stands for "Securing Americans Value and Efficiency" -- is up for final public voting.

For the unfamiliar, the SAVE Award is an award for the idea, submitted by a government employee, that will most effectively cut red tape, reduce government bureaucracy, and generally make government more efficient and un-waste-y. The Obama Administration has opened voting on the top suggestions to the general public, and the winning idea will be submitted in the President's FY2011 budget. The winner will also get to meet the President, which is nifty. I've just gone through the top four ideas, and they're not bad:

• An employee at a national forest in West Virginia wants to radically simplify how the government processes fees that are collected from the public.
• A HUD employee from Alaska notes that information on subsidized housing is often collected in multiple, redundant formats and instances.
• A VA employee in Colorado wants veterans who are discharged from VA hospitals to be able to take their remaining medication with them, rather than having it thrown away.
• An SSA employee in Alabama wants to enable appointment scheduling online.

These all reflect a good deal of common sense, and I think do a real service in showing the public that government employees aren't just cogs in a massive federal system; they, like the rest of us, are constantly surveying their environments, looking for new efficiencies or ways to just do a better job. And the White House is to be applauded for putting these to a public vote. The value here isn't just "transparency" for the public, but the ability for the White House to align spending decisions with actual public priorities.

That being said, the way this is being done raises some interesting questions. It's not clear how much money would be saved or bureaucracy avoided by any of these suggestions. A quick CBO score or something like it would have been a good way to help make the decision. Most of us have to make a business case when we want to alter the way something like this works, and citizens voting should have the benefit of knowing the predicted ROI before voting. That, again, is not just for the sake of "transparency" -- if an implemented idea lives up to its promised result, that's an incredibly strong case for sustaining and expanding this kind of public participation in the budgeting process. There are also some pure process questions, such as why only four out of the 38,000 ideas (or approximately 0.01%) are being presented here for voting. It's possible that only that many met OMB's evaluation criteria, which is its own valuable intelligence about how hard it is even for federal employees to take a global view of government's operating expenses.

THAT being said, these are all questions that should be answered in the next iteration of this, not reasons not to do it. It will be exciting to track how ideas make it from suggestion, to vetting, to voting, to implementation. The last of these stages is always the most difficult part of online citizen consultation, and if the White House really is able to successfully align the process owners (the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) with the substantive owners (OMB and Congress), that in itself will be a striking achievement for transparency as a gateway to real accountability.

As part of a general renewed focus in Washington on developing skilled acquisition professionals in the federal government, American University and MCR of McLean announced today the "Senior Manager Certification Program."

The weekend courses are designed for acquisition executives who are on track for a Senior Executive Service or other leadership positions, and will be offered through AU's School of Public Affairs, as part of its Key Executive Leadership Program.

Bob Tobias, the former president of the National Treasury Employees Union and current director of public sector executive education at AU, was a key developer of the program, which the university said aimed to help workforce development goals set by the Office of Management and Budget in October.

The program consists of six, four-day courses, with tuition totaling $9,000 including course materials.

More information on the program is available here.

Obviously, we write a lot about civil servants and military personnel on this blog--but what about those most most criticized of government employees, the politicians? Believe it or not, they're taking a beating in the health care debate currently underway in the Senate.

As it stands now, the Senate health care bill would require all members of Congress--and their staffers--to use either the public option, or to buy insurance off of the state-based exchanges. (This grew out of a previous attempt to completely eliminate the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, and enroll all federal employees into the exchanges.)

A slew of amendments submitted on the Senate floor this week would further restrict the health care options available to elected officials. One amendment, submitted by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., would require all members of Congress to enroll in the public option--the government-run health care plan which would be created by the bill--and it would also require the federal government to specifically use the premiums that would have been paid for them under FEHBP to help fund the option.

Yet another amendment, filed by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, would enroll members of Congress in Medicaid, the health care option currently available for low-income Americans. One more amendment from Sen. David Vitter, R-La., would ensure that members of Congress do not receive care in a military hospital. So far, these amendments only affect the elected officials themselves--not their employees, and certainly not employees under the executive branch.

What to make of all of this? For the most part, it's about making a point, that Congress shouldn't create any new program it wouldn't be willing to take part of, itself. In terms of actual policy, I bet that the most far-reaching part of this would do with Congressional staffers, who sometimes hop from the executive to legislative branches, but might be more reluctant to if it would mean losing their health care plans. And who knows, if representatives and senators are forced into health care plans they don't like, maybe it would open the door for lobbyists to supply them with cushy plans as a way to gain influence.

But so far, none of these amendments have been voted on, and there's no guarantee that they will ever see a vote. So we'll just have to wait and see.

Via the Washington Post, it looks like the D.C. metro--long the lifeblood of the federal government, to say nothing of its role in giving people a place to read Government Executive on their way home--is considering fare hikes to make up a massive budget shortfall.

Still no word on the amount of the hikes, but apparently metro managers want to make up at least $92 million with fare increases, and 5 cent increases on average raise $20 million in revenue, so, you do the math. Board members disapproved of the plan, but they're going to have to make up a $175 million shortfall somehow.

When I moved to D.C. at the beginning of the year, I was surprised when I added up how much a daily commute on the metro (or bus) cost. How much would fare hikes impact your budget?

The non-profit group OMB Watch today released a beta version of a new FedSpending.org database on the Recovery Act. The database aims to improve public access to and the searchability of stimulus data. It will allow users to search more than 160,000 recipient reports on almost $159 billion in Recovery Act contracts, grants and loans awarded between Feb. 17 and Sept. 30.

All the data now available on FedSpending.org was obtained through Recovery.gov, the government's stimulus data site, but OMB Watch says its search functions are more user friendly, allowing the public to search for prime recipients, sub-recipients, Zip codes, congressional districts, awarding agency, award amounts, etc. Search results can also be downloaded from the site.

"We created the Recovery Act data tab to expand the options people have for searching, sorting, and analyzing Recovery Act data," said OMB Watch Executive Director Gary D. Bass. "The mapping features on Recovery.gov are great, but there are lots of other ways to interact with this data. We hope our website serves as a springboard for further changes at Recovery.gov."

OMB Watch is warning that, despite their best efforts, this version of may contain some technical errors, as it was created in just a month at relatively low cost.

Welcome Fedblog readers, and thanks to Alyssa for having me back. As she mentioned, I work at the National Academy of Public Administration, a half-consultancy-half-think-tank-half-Academy (yep, that's three halves!) that tries to solve government's most complex management challenges. My particular beat is the new and exciting area known as "government 2.0" -- the use of collaborative and social media technologies in public governance -- but I'm also a government generalist (read: "huge nerd") and it's my honor to populate this space in Alyssa's absence.

I wanted to kick things off by calling your attention to a kind of bizarre story with a kind of important lesson. Apparently, some enterprising J.P. Morgan analyst went and put together a report comparing the aggregate private sector experience of the Obama cabinet to that of cabinets past. The resulting finding was -- drum roll -- that they have way less private sector experience than past cabinets. There's even a startling graph. Look at that tiny little Obama bar!

To me, the obvious conclusion to draw from this graph is that level of private sector experience of cabinet-level officials is not really correlated with successful presidential administrations. As you may have guessed, however, the graph just isn't true. Politifact's helpful takedown of the study includes an amusing fact I had not known before:

And Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in addition to serving as Colorado attorney general and a U.S. senator, has been a partner in his family's farm for decades and, with his wife, owned and operated a Dairy Queen and radio stations in his home state of Colorado.

The really interesting part of this, though, is the attitude it reveals about the nature of federal service. Think about your own workplace. If your chief human capital officer walked up to you one day and said, "Hey, I think we need to start hiring a bunch of people who have never done this kind of work before," that would probably call into question that person's understanding of what their job is supposed to be. So it's a little baffling to see experience in federal government, which is a pretty unique environment, held up by implication as a negative or disqualifying factor. Particularly in a time when the competent administration of government is pretty important, the idea that what government really needs is people with less experience in government is a really odd way to think about what skill sets you want in your public servants.

I'm headed out on vacation for 12 days on Thursday. But never fear, three trusty guest-bloggers will keep you supplied with content while I'm away. Frequent FedBlog contributors and my fellow Government Executive staff correspondents Alex Parker, who handles the workforce beat with me, and Elizabeth Newell, who is half the management and oversight beat, will be on hand. And Dan Munz, the manager of the Collaboration Project at the National Academy of Public Administration, who has filled in for me before, is back. They'll take good care of you until I get back.

The IBM Center has a good post up on GoverningPeople.com riffing on some of my thoughts about health care implementation, and taking them a bit further. Among their suggestions:

There are a number of implementation issues that do not depend on policy options (such as whether there is a public option, or state exchanges, etc). For example, it is not too soon to be thinking about things such as (a) identifying a small cadre of successful career civil servants who have the experience of leading large efforts, (b) creating expedited hiring authorities for new functions being created in legislation, or (c) developing new approaches to speed up regulatory development and implementation for statutory provisions to be "implemented immediately." As Rosenberg notes, there probably are lessons to be learned from the stand-up of TSA and the implementation of the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit.

They'll be blogging there about the National Academy for Public Administration's meeting on health care reform as a management challenge over the next couple of days. Those posts should be well worth checking out.

If you want to know not only how many troops President Obama's sending to Afghanistan, but where he's sending them, where NATO troops will be, and what he hopes to accomplish there, read this piece by The Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman. I won't excerpt it because you really should read it in its entirety. But I will say that much with federal policy, what lawmakers, Cabinet Secretaries, and even Presidents announce generally doesn't explain actually how things will happen. Spencer's piece does.

As you may have read on our homepage, President Obama, if his pay plan is implemented and not overridden by Congress, will become the first president since the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act went into effect to freeze locality pay. I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons.

1. It implies a fairly close reading of federal pay law. I spend a lot of time digging through Title V, and hadn't known that the President could freeze locality pay, though of course it's logical that he could.

2. The ability to do this hasn't actually lasted very long. 2003 was the first year that the President had the authority to freeze locality pay. There wasn't necessarily justification for doing it, since the economy was strong in comparison to what we're experiencing now, but the authority was there for the last six years of the Bush presidency, and it wasn't used. I don't think that this particularly implies anything about Bush and Obama's relative attitudes towards the civil service, which of course played out in multiple other policy arenas.

3. This all highlights how absurd the process for setting federal pay each year is. There is not a corporation in the world that would let any one of a number of committees take up compensation at its leisure, and if they didn't get to it, the chief operating order would just set pay in a two-page letter. It really does seem to me like the federal pay raise needs a more stable method of determination each year, whether it's permanently attached to an appropriations bill and a specific committee, or whether the President's Pay Agent simply gets to set it. But this is really bizarrely haphazard.

By Robert Brodsky

Just when you thought it was safe to move on past the Recovery Act job reporting numbers story.

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office released a report which found that between 600,000 and 1.6 million jobs were saved or created by the stimulus. The report, which buttresses earlier findings by the administration about stimulus job numbers, provoked a new round of sniping between Obama officials and Recovery Act critics, including one news media outlets.

"From independent economists to Congress's own nonpartisan research body, the experts have spoken and the debate is no longer whether the Recovery Act is creating and saving jobs, but how we provide even more opportunities to drive growth and support American workers," said Vice President Joe Biden.

The White House's Recovery Act coordinator Ed DeSeve used the release of the CBO report as an opportunity to respond to a recent request for information by House Minority Leader John Boehner, a frequent critic of the Recovery Act.

"Having heard the Congressional Budget Office cited frequently in your speeches and statements, it seems their report should be a particularly reliable and independent answer to any questions you may have about Recovery Act job impact."

Republicans, however, were not conceding their position.

"The CBO report provides very little comfort to the 15.7 million Americans currently unemployed," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. "We know that the economy has lost more than four million jobs since passage of the stimulus. The CBO report does not account for how many of those jobs were lost as a result of $787 billion in deficit spending that takes money out of the private sector. What we have is a stimulus that is paying for government jobs with private sector jobs and has failed to lower unemployment."

However, the most entertaining volley in this seemingly never-ending back-and-forth was served by Jared Bernstein, Biden's chief economist, who in a White House blog post noted the discrepancies between the news and editorial reporting of the Wall Street Journal on the Recovery Act jobs numbers.

"If you read the editorial page, you'll be in the dark," Bernstein writes. "If you read the front page in today's WSJ, you'll learn the facts about the CBO report noted above in the context of an article that documents the importance of stimulus projects to construction workers."

Government Executive will host a at the National Press Club Thursday morning with DeSeve, Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney and J. Christopher Mihm, managing director for strategic Issues at the Government Accountability Office. Expect the debate to continue.

Excuse the cross-pollination for a second, but Megan McArdle over at our sister site, The Atlantic, has an interesting post about the obstacles facing the creation of a New Deal-style jobs program like the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Works Progress Administration. Some pundits -- especially the New York Times' Paul Krugman -- think that such direct employment programs are the best way to lift us out of double-digit unemployment. McArdle argues that with current bureaucratic rules, civil service protections, and politically connected public sector unions, they're simply not realistic, regardless of whether or not they'd be good policy.

It's a pretty good point. The federal government is a very different animal today than it was in the 1930's and 1940's. Here's McArdle:

Even if you could surmount union opposition, the federal government has an ever-increasing thicket of red tape that makes such a thing impractical. It takes months to get hired for a new job with the federal government. It takes months to ramp up a new program. By the time you'd gotten your NWPA through Congress over strenuous union objections, appointed someone to head it, set up the funding and hiring procedures, and actually hired people, it would be 2011. Maybe 2012. Perhaps you could waive all the civil service and associated procedures surrounding federal hiring, but I don't see how.

In fact, Congress did just that--on a much smaller scale. Many of the same issues arose with the Part-Time Reemployment of Annuitants Act, which made it easier for the government to re-hire former government workers on a part-time basis, without going through the civil service procedure. Ultimately, that act became law, once strong restrictions were placed on how long these part-time workers could work, and how many could be hired. Some unions still opposed it, but because it included that compromise--and because it was wrapped into other legislation which the unions desperately wanted--the overall opposition was relatively mild.

It's not the first loophole in the federal hiring process--as Alyssa has noted before, it's literally filled with them. But could you do the same thing for a larger project to hire thousands, maybe millions, or unemployed Americans? And would it be a good idea? Well, that's where it gets more complicated.

As I wrote in a reported story yesterday, as absurd as the White House state dinner crashing incident seems, with its reality-television implications, there are serious personnel and coordination issues at stake. For the Secret Service, the incident raises questions about staffing levels and the organization of the Uniformed Services division. And while it might seem like Republicans asking Desiree Rogers to testify about the incident at a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Thursday are just aiming for an Obama administration scalp, there's a legitimate organizational issue there too if Rogers' office eliminated a role in clearing invitees as they went through security. It's an odd issue, intersection with the supremely goofy and the dead serious. But it's worth treating like the legitimate security issue that it is. The Salahis may not have been able to hurt the President because of other protective countermeasures in place. But they shouldn't have been able to get in proximity to him at all.