I'm over at the White House complex right now for a forum on workplace flexibility, lead by First Lady Michelle Obama. Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry and the President are scheduled to wrap things up in a couple of hours. But it's been very interesting to hear Mrs. Obama, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer talk about workplace flexibility as specifically a women's issue. The First Lady recalled about a job interview she got shortly after having one of her daughters:

I packed up that little infant, and I put her in the stroller, and I brought her with me, and I prayed her presence wouldn't be an automatic disqualifier. I was fortunate, she slept through the entire interview, and I was still breastfeeding...and I got the job....I know that most folks are nowhere near as lucky as I was, particularly right now with the job market the way it is. Many folks don't have access to any kinds of flexible leave policies whatsoever.

And Secretary Solis said that the rising number of women in the workforce due to the recession spotlighted the need to have flexible workplaces so Americans can care both for their children and increasingly for their aging parents. The event is streaming here if you want to tune in: www.WhiteHouse.gov/live It promises to be an interesting afternoon.

The Obama administration released a draft definition of "inherently governmental" today, a hotly awaited regulation by unions and contractors alike. But as Elizabeth Newell and Rob Brodsky explained yesterday, this is really just the starting point of a debate over the final rule:

Daniel Gordon, administrator of OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said the guidance will address three categories of work: inherently governmental, closely associated with inherently governmental and critical functions. He said comments on the draft will be seriously considered.

"Agencies need detailed guidance from us," he said. "But this is not cast in stone in terms of being final. This will be a draft for public comment. We expect a lot of public comment, and we will give substantial weight obviously to every comment. But then we need to move promptly. Agencies are anxious to get guidance from OFPP and OMB."

The very first story I reported for Government Executive, on air traffic controller staffing at the Federal Aviation Administration, was colored by this debate, as have been many others. It lies at the heart of both the personnel and the contracting beats here. You can bet the suggestions will come thick and furious. And it'll be interesting to see whose advice the Obama administration takes.

This is a really nice, smart idea. Office of Personnel Management Director has said that employees at the agency's headquarters can have an hour off to walk down to the tidal basin from April 1 to April 4 to see the city's famous cherry trees in full blossom. Obviously, they've got to get supervisor approval, and being able to go depends on their workflow. But tying fitness to a popular and pretty event is a good incentive, and also, frankly a fun, considerate thing to do.

No matter how often I think I'm fully aware of the extent to which the federal government just plain lags on updating its processes and procedures, I always manage to get surprised sometimes by a story about an agency that's stuck. In this case its the Veterans Affairs Department's struggle to computerize college benefits for vets:

House Veterans' Affairs Chairman Bob Filner, D-Calif., described the existing system as an "insult to veterans" and said swift, effective computerization is the only solution. "It looks like we are going backwards rather than forward," Filner said to the summit panel. "No matter how much we raise the budget, no matter how many people we hire, the backlog seems to get bigger."

Of course Filner's right. The fact that most benefits programs, most bill-pay programs, etc., now operate mainly if not exclusively via computer processing means that expectations for turn-around are, quite reasonably, higher than they were when most folks were operating on paper. But federal agencies can't just decide to upgrade to meet market standards for these things. They've got to get approval and resources and support, first. And sometimes the urgency for that only builds when an agency has already fallen far behind.

You'll never guess who is the latest public figure to stand up for federal employees....

Ben Stein, the conservative speechwriter, lawyer, actor, and funnyman took to the CBS Morning News show to defend federal employees. (Text here, although it doesn't feel quite the same.)

Here's a quote:

"I have been a bureaucrat in my youth, and I never worked so hard for so little in my entire life, and my fellow employees were in the same galley slave boat," Stein said, apparently referring to his days as an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission.

"Let's take our conservative noses out of the air and stop sneering at the people who serve us in the civil service. We would be awfully sad if they were gone, even the ones in the Department of Motor Vehicles."

Thanks to the AFGE for the link.

Ezra Klein has an interesting long piece in Newsweek about the fact that Congress is broken (which should come as a surprise to no one) and that it's pushing off a great deal of its work onto the agencies and other bodies:

The architects of the health-care-reform bill, for instance, couldn't bring themselves to propose the difficult reforms necessary to assure Medicare--and the government's--solvency. So they created an independent panel of experts who will have to propose truly difficult reforms to enable the Medicare system to survive. These recommendations would take the fast track through Congress, protected from not just the filibuster but even from revision. In fact, if Congress didn't vote on them, they'd still become law. "I believe this commission is the largest yielding of sovereignty from the Congress since the creation of the Federal Reserve," says Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, and he meant it as a compliment.

Cap-and-trade, meanwhile, is floundering in the Senate. In the event that it dies, the Environmental Protection Agency has been preparing to regulate carbon on its own. Some senators would like to block the EPA from doing so, and may yet succeed. But those in Congress who want to avert catastrophic climate change, but who don't believe they can pass legislation to help do so, are counting on the EPA to act in their stead.

One thing I would be interested to know, however, is whether Ezra sees discernibly different outcomes when these issues are given over to the agencies. In other words, do bureaucrats make different decisions than lawmakers would if they were pursuing this work? And are those decisions demonstrably worse? No matter the answer, it's obviously still a problem that Congress isn't particularly functional, but I would be curious to see the results.

First, a note: your blogger is working from home and under the influence of a nasty sore throat, so if I'm a little slow to get to an item, a question, or to post a comment. That's why. Many apologies.

But man, what a crash and burn for Obama's second choice to head the Transportation Security Administration, Maj. Gen. Robert Harding, who withdrew his name from consideration over the weekend. Five pending Inspector General reports into his contracting work? Using sleep apnea to claim he was a "service disabled veteran" (not that I dispute the severity of sleep apnea, it just seems like a fairly brazen claim to meet the definition)?

I would be very, very curious about how deep the vetting was on Harding, and if, in fact, the Obama administration knew about all of these issues with his company, how they decided those issues weighed against the strengths he'd bring to TSA as an administrator. It's been hard for me to believe the Obama administration is paying close and careful attention to TSA, given what's gone down with their two picks to run the agency.

Specifically, my March cover profile of Office of Personnel Management, which he mentioned at length at the beginning of a Wednesday hearing on the agency's budget. You should check it out too, if you haven't already. FedBlog will be on a mental health break tomorrow. So have a good weekend, everybody.

Over at AOL News, Sharon Weinberger has an interesting find: the Transportation Security Administration has brought in the American Institutes for Research to study whether or not the Behavior Detection Officer program works. Behavior Detection Officers work sort of like detectives: they're TSA officers trained to look for travelers who are behaving in ways that indicate they might be threats. While the program gets criticized, it's also a major effort to turn TSA's workforce into a highly professionalized law enforcement corps. That said, it's very smart for TSA to open up the program to an outside research group.

It might seem unrelated, but one of the major criticisms of--and challenges to reestablishing--the labor management partnership councils that existed during the Clinton administration, was that there weren't multiple studies clearly demonstrating their benefits, or lack thereof. Advocates for rebuilding the councils had to rely on one study about cost savings at Customs and Border Protection, and anecdotal evidence. That failure is a useful model for any program that agencies want to be able to expand or defend. You have to muster evidence that your programs work, and make sure that evidence is credible, objective, and directly responsive to policymakers' concerns. And you can't muster that after a program has shut down: you've got to start studying programs as soon as you stand them up.

Josh Rogin has the scoop on an investigation into mismanagement at the National Defense University's Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies which would comical if it wasn't so inept on every level as to be tragic. Apparently retired Lt. Gen. David Barno and his staff discouraged the use of Arabic at the center, held a major conference in Prague, a location totally unrelated to the subject matter, and exercised favoritism in faculty appointments. Rogin writes:

"I've never seen a situation in which such a small agency is mismanaged so badly," said one NESA employee with decades of government experience, who lamented that no official action has yet been taken. "It is to me incredible that you can have, on one hand, such mismanagement and that no one is prepared, evidently, to do anything about it."

Institutes like this are key examples of the extraordinary work people can do in government. It's not so much that mismanagement at organizations like this is more tragic than at, say, the Social Security Administration. But it is unfortunate that organizations like this can be so easily damaged by putting someone in place who is not up to the requirements of keeping them extraordinary.

One of the biggest challenges for people trying to find their way into federal employment has often been, I think, finding a face-to-face point of contact, a real, live person who can help them negotiate the hiring process. Sending your stuff off via USAJobs can feel like throwing a sheet of paper into a vast blizzard of documents: how will you be distinguishable amidst the masses? But for veterans, that process of finding a point of contact just got a lot easier. The Office of Personnel Management has just posted the names, email addresses and phone numbers for the heads of the Veteran Employment Program Offices in the departments and major agencies. If any of you try to contact these folks, let me know if they're responsive. Getting the information out there is a major step. Making sure they're responding quickly and helpfully is even more important.

By Robert Brodsky

It's hard to get more ironic than this.

A Senate hearing on federal financial management and transparency in government was shut down early yesterday because of an obscure Senate rule which says the chamber cannot conduct hearings after 2 p.m. without unanimous consent. Republicans refused to consent to continuing the hearings.

Republicans blocked two other hearings--an Energy & Natural Resources Committee hearing on the environment and a Commerce Committee hearing national broadband plan--after Democrats won a motion to proceed to debate on the health care reconciliation bill.

Democrats were livid with the decision. "Ironically, as they make false claims about transparency regarding health reform, they're shutting down a committee hearing today on transparency in government," said Jim Manley, spokesman Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "The bottom line is that as millions of Americans are learning about the immediate benefits of health reform, Republicans are throwing a temper tantrum and grinding important Senate business to a halt."

The unexpected cancellation came only moments into the testimony of Ellen Miller, executive director of the non-profit Sunlight Foundation, before the Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security. Miller was interrupted by Subcommittee Chairman Tom Carper, D-Del., just as she was planning to discuss how the government can be more open in its operations - maybe they should have stuck around and listened to her recommendations.

The Sunlight Foundation has posted video of the strange incident.

Meanwhile, the obstructionism is continuing today as the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight was forced to cancel its hearing on the management, oversight, and funding of police training contracts in Afghanistan. The hearing was scheduled to begin at 2:30 p.m.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Subcommittee Chairwoman Claire McCaskill offered an impassioned plea for Republicans to let the hearings proceed.

I've written some in this space before about how the military has taken a creeping level of responsibility for diplomatic tasks, particularly in our engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over at the Cable, Josh Rogin reports that a number of retired military leaders think it's time to give some of that responsibility back to the State Department, and to send appropriate amounts of resources and support back with it:

"While our military power can provide the logistics and organizational support to help those in need in times of humanitarian crisis, as demonstrated by our current efforts in Haiti, it can only help create the conditions necessary to allow the other tools of statecraft - our diplomatic, development and humanitarian programs - to effectively address these issues," reads a letter to Congress organized by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, a network of more than 400 businesses and non-governmental organizations....

Hagee said the letter is remarkable because it represents the opinions of "50 retired three-and-four-star good-old boys," who have seen first-hand the military's encroachment upon traditional development issues, which was unavoidable but now needs to be addressed.

The combination of this and the State Department policy review in April should make for an interesting, and powerful, discussion about State's role and capacities.

Reihan Salam, blogging over at National Review, says it's possible no one will ever end up paying it. The delay in implementation gives groups opposed to the tax plenty of time to try to kill or weaken it even further legislatively. I'd add that the potential for a threshold hike means that plans might avoid it, too. I think it's worth remembering that implementation of this, and other provisions, in the health care bill is going to take a long time, and that the impact is going to come clear bit by bit. No use panicking about anything--or going overboard on the celebration, either, until we know exactly how things are going to happen.

Already, the health care bill which President Obama signed into law today would kick members of Congress out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, and onto the state-based exchanges which the law will establish.

But Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, doesn't think that's enough. Grassley is promising to offer an amendment to the law, which would require senior administration officials, including cabinet members, and the president himself to enter into the exchanges. He'll offer his amendment as the Senate considers a package of amendments to the law this week.

"It's pretty unbelievable that the President and his closest advisors remain untouched by the reforms they pushed for the rest of the country," Grassley sad in a released statement.

Because of how the process works, Senate Democrats are going to try to avoid making many extensive changes to the reconciliation package, so cabinet members shouldn't worry about ditching FEHBP just yet.

As for whether Obama himself would participate in the exchanges -- in a July 22 health care conference a reporter asked him a similar question, whether he'd be willing to enroll in the public option, the government-run health care program then under consideration. Obama said he'd be "happy" to, but then implied it might be a bit impractical for the leader of the free world.

"I'm the president of the United States, so I've got a doctor following me every minute," Obama told reporters.

Grassley's amendment would also address what has become a growing brouhaha here in D.C.-land -- the fact that only some Congressional staffers might be covered by this new prohibition.

As the Hotline On Call blog notes, the precise wording of the language might only apply to those who work directly for senators and representatives -- not leadership staff or those who work on committees. (In Congress, the difference between staffer for a lawmaker and a staffer for a committee can sometimes be fuzzy.)

An anonymous Democratic aide on the blog blames the loophole on the original amendment, offered by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Tom Coburn, R-Okla. I'll just note that their initial amendment, offered during the Senate Finance Committee markup, included a much broader definition of staffer: "an employee whose pay is disbursed by the Secretary of the Senate or the Clerk of the House of Representatives."

But the version signed into law today only would apply to members of Congress and "full-time and part-time employees employed by the official office of a Member of Congress, whether in Washington, DC or outside of Washington, DC."

Agencies can legally discriminate against employees on the basis of their sexual orientationcan't legally discriminate against federal employees on the basis of their sexual orientation, but if they're discriminated against and sue under Title II, they will probably lose in court:

According to DHS, the plaintiff tried to "place his own interpretive spin" on his alleged "harassment and classify it as harassment based on sex or gender rather than as harassment based on sexual orientation." The Court agreed, finding that plaintiff's allegations consist of instances of harassment based on his sexual orientation. The Court explained that the SAC used the term "flamboyant" to indicate behavior associated with a gay man, not a woman, and that, therefore, the acting SAC did not make the alleged comments "because of sex."

I have to say, technology is important, but policies like this are also important things young workers look at when determining if a workplace is somewhere they want to be.

One of the most interesting parts of today's hearing on Maj. Gen. Robert Harding's nomination to become Transportation Security Administration chief, was his emphasis on training. In particular he said he'd like to see TSA move towards an Israeli model, which emphasizes behavior detection, includes interrogation ability, in other words, an enhanced, professionalized, career model for aviation security. So it's heartening to hear about things like a TSA program that got agency staff familiar with prosthetics for wounded veterans. Having a truly professionalized TSA workforce isn't just a matter of having good checkpoint procedures and having everyone follow them. It's having a career workforce with specialized, subject matter knowledge: the language skills to overhear a threatening conversation in a language other than English, the physiology knowledge to see that a prosthetic has been modified, the psychological skills to detect evasion or calm down a frightened person. All of those skills require serious, sustained investment in the people who are going to deploy them.

The health care reform bill passed by the House over the weekend is certainly not the most radical change to the American health care system that could have passed. But it's a very big bill, with very big implications. And the federal employee groups I've talked to are still studying it carefully. The consensus so far has settled around the excise tax. Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees, speaks for most of the employee groups I've spoken with when she says "While we oppose any excise tax, the provisions of H.R. 4872 are much better than H.R. 3590 and we will urge the Senate to pass them." Those provisions she's referring to would raise the threshold plans' prices would have to meet to be subject to the tax.

That calculation is important and impactful for feds, at least it will be in 2018, when the tax goes into effect. Short term, the story I'm most interested in though, is what happens to the Office of Personnel Management now, as it prepares to take up its new responsibilities.

A CBS columnist says they did. The White House says that it didn't email anyone who wasn't signed up to receive updates from the administration. There are a number of ways folks could have ended up on that list, whether they signed up to receive information from the Obama campaign, or the White House directly. Either way, this seems like a lesson to me that unless you're signed up for an email list because you're monitoring it for work reasons, it's probably best to keep political subscriptions on a personal email account rather than a work one.

To follow up a bit from Alyssa's story on the new health care bill, especially the uncertainty surrounding the excise tax and feds:

It's possible that the excise tax -- which is the benefits tax to be levied on insurance plans deemed too generous -- in the soon-to-be-voted on health care bill has been watered down to the point that it wouldn't have much affect on the majority of Americans, whether they're feds or non-feds.

But feds could particularly benefit from a new provision which grants relief for plans with a high percentage of elderly enrollees. The proposed changes to the excise tax would raise the thresholds -- how expensive premiums have to be before the 40 percent tax kicks in -- if the employer offering the insurance has more elderly people than the national workforce. The formula used for this is a bit baffling, but it does appear that might apply for the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. FEHBP is one of the relatively few insurance programs which fully covers retirees -- even after they reach Medicare eligibility.

And it could be substantial. According to Walt Francis' book, Putting Medicare Consumers In Charge: Lessons from the FEHBP, about one third of FEHBP enrollees are age 65 or older -- and those retirees are responsible for about half of FEHBP's spending.

That's not the only way that the excise tax has been changed. According to the House Rules Committee's chapter-by-chapter explanation of the new bill, the reconciliation bill would reduce the amount of revenue in the excise tax by 80 percent. Much of that difference is caused by delaying the tax's start date to 2018. Even after it starts, it would take a few more years before the tax would have a direct or indirect effect on a large number of plans -- so it could be well into 2020 before you feel any affect.

It's worth noting that after 2020, the excise tax would be indexed to inflation, rather than "inflation plus one"--which means the thresholds will actually rise slower than they would have in the original bill. That's one way that the new changes actually toughen the excise tax. But it will be a while before that will have much of an effect.

By Robert Brodsky

It turns out the stimulus funded more jobs last quarter than originally expected.

Recipients of Recovery Act funds have spent the past several weeks updating their January 2010 spending reports. Final data for the quarter now shows that the bill funded 608,203 jobs from Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, 2009, according to data on Recovery.gov . The original reports showed recipients had reported funding 599,108 jobs.

Recipients of stimulus contracts, grants and loans are required to report quarterly on the status of their stimulus-funded projects and the amount of money spent. Under a new policy, recipients are allowed to correct mistakes in their award reports for several weeks after the reports are filed. Nearly 15 percent of all reports filed for the quarter were subsequently amended, most often to correct jobs totals.

The next reporting cycle begins April 1, 2010.

Postmaster General John Potter is asking for more flexibility to make cuts and changes at his troubled agency on the grounds that businesses have often had to retool dramatically to right themselves in troubling economic circumstances. I understand that the Post Office is very much like a business, more so than like a government agency in many way these days. But I wonder if he'd get further by citing other hybrid government-business organizations. I don't have any examples immediately to hand, and I'd be curious to see if folks have strong business cases. But it seems to me like as long as the Post Office is subject to Congressional oversight and large pension obligations, it's going to be constrained in certain major ways, even if it gets more businesslike flexibilities.

By Robert Brodsky

It appears ACORN may have more lives than a creature from some bad horror movie.

Nearly six months after Congress passed a series of provisions banning the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now from receiving federal contracts or grants, the Office of Management and Budget has alerted agencies that it can begin funding the controversial group again.

In a March 16 memo, OMB Director Peter Orszag told agencies that the legislative provisions were declared unconstitutional by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York and were thereby voided. Agencies were told that ACORN can legally secure government funding for its non-profit operations.

If you remember, ACORN got into some trouble last year after company officials were filmed by a pair of conservative activists--dressed as a pimp and prostitute--offering guidance on how to hide their income.

The Department of Justice is filing an appeal of the District Court decision and is seeking a stay pending appeal.

The New York Times reports that reports of sexual assault reports in the military were up 11 percent overall in fiscal year 2009 and 16 percent in combat zones, to 3,230 total reported attacks. 53 percent of those reported assaults were committed by one servicemember against another. The military's attributing that rise to policies that encourage victims to come forward and report assaults, rather than on an actual increase in the number of attacks occurring, but it's hard to know whether that's true or not. The story notes:

Of all the assaults, Ms. Whitley said, a vast majority, 87 percent, were male on female, while 7 percent were male on male. The typical case, she said, was an assault by an 18- to 25-year-old junior enlisted male service member on a woman, with alcohol involved.

While of course the vast majority of servicemembers comport themselves in a way that does credit to the military and the government as a whole, the fact that the military can come up with this profile suggests a cultural problem that's probably worth targeting. Teaching people to drink responsibly and to behave responsibly when they drink is a worthwhile project in any context.

Details about the health care reconciliation bill likely to be taken up by the House this weekend are leaking out in advance of the official release this afternoon. Among the most interesting things is in an early summary of the bill is this language on the excise tax:

"Indexes the thresholds for inflation; raises the threshold in 2018 automatically if the per-employee cost of the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan's standard option in 2018 exceeds that amount for 2010 by more than would have been expected if the threshold were indexed based on general inflation for the same time period."

So does that mean the excise tax is at all meaningful? If it's just going to be indexed to FEHBP growth, what's the incentive for employers to keep cost growth below the rate of inflation?

As promised, the National Treasury Employees Union filed a petition with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, seeking to become the sole representative of 40,000 Transportation Security Administration employees.

NTEU's rival, the American Federation of Government Employees, filed a similar petition in February. Both unions are asking for an election to determine the issue.

Currently, transportation security officers officers do not have the right to collectively bargain. A bill which would open the agency to unionization was approved by the House Committee on Homeland Security, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, but has yet to receive a vote on the floor.

In its release, the NTEU noted that it already represents 24,000 employees at Customs and Border Protection, which--like the TSA--is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Office of Personnel Management has launched a new, extensive website for its Feds Get Fit program, and one thing I thought was fascinating is how many programs are being coordinated by the Federal Executive Boards. The FEBs were one of the first issues I really covered extensively when I got to Government Executive (that, and Federal Aviation Administration staffing were the first real stories I fumbled my way into when I was learning the beat) and I've always been amazed by the range of programming the Boards have to handle. They've got to be the most flexible bodies in government, and yet there's little focus given to them. The Senate, perhaps miraculously, passed legislation to give them a sensible funding mechanism last November, but the House hasn't gotten to it yet. We'll just have to see what happens once health care's over, I suppose. But it's a shame to see other Congressional business, especially something like this that is bipartisan and practical, languish.

Tonight, at 10pm, FX is premiering Justified, a new show about U.S. Marshals in Kentucky. I got an advance look at the first couple of episodes for a review I wrote for The Atlantic, and I really recommend the show. Purely from an entertainment standpoint, the show crackles:

But when Justified surprises, something it does more and more frequently as the episodes go on, the show is marvelous. Raylan's the source of many of those surprises, a man who jokes about putting out an all points bulletin on Cab Calloway, charms the pastor of an alternative black church by telling him a story about escorting a fugitive to a Peter Tosh show, or considers himself loyal to a man who ducked out of his offer of witness protection. And his colleagues emerge from the background, at one point with a trunkful of guns and the skills for a major-league shootout, at another moment with sniper's advice on how to handle a stakeout.

And from a federal employee standpoint, while Raylan, the show's main character, is kind of a loose canon, he's also an extremely smart and empathetic investigator. His coworkers are principled, deftly sketched, and extremely competent. It's one of the richer portrayals of federal law enforcement I've seen in a long time.

This National Public Radio story about how the Human Services and Public Health Department of Hennepin County in Minnesota has moved to a results-only work environment is fascinating, and as a portrait of the first municipal agency to truly throw out the office as a key concept for work, I think important. What the agency's done is figured out exactly how many people need to be in the office to deal with face-to-face meetings at any given time, created a rotating schedule to meet that that need--and essentially taking everyone else off the clock and a requirement to be in the office at any given time.

It's a dramatic, if not radical, development, to be sure. The state government of Minnesota signed up for the program, designed by a private company, with the intention of decreasing commuter traffic. But it's turned out to be a productivity boost instead. And the story addresses a number of key issues, among them:

1. Favoritism: I hear this as a concern with telework agreements very frequently. The Human Services and Public Health Department dealt with this by moving everyone into the program, and working on problems with performance or adjustment as they arose, rather than holding the program out as a carrot.

2. Adaptation issues: The piece interviews an employee who was a skeptic, an office traditionalist, who ended up won over by the program. I think the idea that there are folks who are going to be intractable and impossible to win over to new methods of working is probably untrue except in an extremely tiny minority of cases. The idea that everyone will adjust to new ways of working immediately is silly, too. Agencies need to understand that these changes are transitions and plan accordingly.

3. Synergy: The story does acknowledge that face-to-face interactions between employees need to happen sometimes, particularly when the agency's discussing new ideas. I don't know that anyone believes that the workplace should vanish entirely for moderate-sized employers and larger companies. But it can definitely be used in an extremely different way, and to much more specific ends.

But there is something ironic about a blog that writes a great deal about social media and advanced technology, and has an RSS feed that, when you click on an individual entry, ALWAYS leads to an error page. Someone should fix that.

By Robert Brodsky

Recipients of Recovery Act funds that fail to publicly report on their spending could soon face stiff penalties. An amendment added to the Senate jobs creation legislation, sponsored by Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va. and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, would authorize the Attorney General to pursue civil penalties of up to $250,000 against grant recipients who knowingly and consistently fail to report their spending.

Last month, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board announced that recipients of more than 1,000 stimulus grant awards, totaling more than $500 million, had failed to file their required spending reports in the fourth quarter of 2009. Nearly 40 percent of those non-complying recipients had not submitted the required reports in the previous reporting period as well.

"We were promised accountability and transparency when we adopted the Recovery Act last year," Warner said. "Unfortunately, in some cases, we simply are not getting it."

A final vote on the bill is scheduled for Wednesday.

The amendment also instructs agencies to update the performance measurement tools used to gauge the effectiveness of stimulus-related spending by July 30, 2010. By Sept. 30th, federal agencies would be required to begin submitting quarterly reports to Congress and publicly disclose the results of programs that are funded through the Recovery Act.

As of the end of January, the board has received more than 1,700 fraud complaints related to stimulus funds, according to a quarterly report released by the Board on Monday. The board and agency inspectors general have opened147 investigations, accepted 43 cases for prosecution, denied six cases for prosecution and referred five for alternative resolution, the report said.

I didn't read the Office of Personnel Management's new strategic plan with an eye towards information technology, but Brittany Ballenstedt over at Wired Workplace did, and she makes what seems to me to be a very good point:

While the plan includes some notable investments in IT, I was somewhat surprised that it did not emphasize more investments in technology and social media, especially when it comes to recruiting and retaining the workforce of the future. Do you think technology will be central to accomplishing many of OPM's long-term goals?

Maybe it's just that IT isn't OPM's bailiwick, and specific tech requests or plans will come out in future budgets. But the idea that improvements to technology, especially for communication, are critical to the future of personnel reform strikes me as essentially correct.

I apologize for the delay in continuing this series: the combination of a heavy dose of breaking news and a looming feature have kind of eaten up my time over the past couple of weeks. For those of you just joining us, this is the third in a series of posts on classic readings about how bureaucracy works. The first was on DiMaggio and Powell's "The Iron Cage Revisited," the second on James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy. This week, I want to talk about Ian Kershaw's "'Working Towards the Führer.' Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship" (JSTOR access required, apologies).

While both of the pieces I've written about prior to this impressed me because they placed things I'd noticed through observation and reporting into coherent, systemic accounts of why bureaucracy works the way it does, Kershaw's piece does the opposite, deconstructing common ideas about a very famous bureaucracy. It feels somewhat odd to think of the Nazi government in the company of the bureaucracies in democratic countries I've read about in other works. But once I got past that conceptual obstacle, it makes a lot of sense as a frame of analysis. I think most of us, when we think about the Nazi regime think of an extremely high degree of coordination, systemic action, and centralized coordination. The plans required to carry out the Holocaust, and to coordinate a massive, multi-front war effort at the same time are extremely detailed, complicated and interactive. The extensive records of the Holocaust required a major bureaucratic effort.

Continue reading "Bureaucracy Reading III: Ian Kershaw's "'Working Towards the Führer.' Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship"" »

Maybe even by the end of the month, says Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator Dan Gordon. Gordon doesn't appear to be dropping a lot of hints about what the draft definition will look like, only that he's focusing on "specific matters" rather than broad changes. I'm curious about what he'll come up with, and also how it'll interact with other changes in personnel policy the administration might also be pursuing. If the definition of "inherently governmental" makes it harder to outsource federal jobs, would the unions be more likely to accept pay and personnel reform? Would overall job security be worth trading for slightly more uncertainty in pay? I'll also be curious in general to see if the planning and conversations of last year translate into a lot of action on personnel and management policy this year. And if that action proceeds, where interest groups make their stands, and where they back down.

Brittany Ballenstedt has a good new post up at Wired Workplace about the disjunction between young employees' expectations of what workplace technology will be like and what's actually available in federal workplaces:

Andrew Krzmarzick, director of community engagement for GovLoop and writer of the Generation Shift blog, said Friday that the results of the survey should be a wake-up call for federal agencies to begin paying attention to the ways Millennials have grown accustomed to working and communicating.

"Let's say the Baby Boomers showed up to work and found there were no land-line phones," Krzmarzick said. "That's the kind of shock that the Millennial generation is experiencing when they get into an office and are not issued a workstation or a laptop, find that there's no high-speed Internet, or realize that social media is blocked."

I definitely think it's important for there to be continuity between how federal agencies reach out to new employees and what kind of communication tools they provide once they get there--or at least clarity about what the differences are going to be. Obviously young federal employees going into agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency can't reasonably expect as open-source an environment as they experience in the outside world. But if agencies with less classified missions are acting on the assumption that their younger employees are communicating via social networking when they hire them, they shouldn't assume that those employees will be ready or comfortable totally leaving off their preferred methods of communicating when they enter government.

I was a little surprised, if not shocked, when Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag stepped up to defend federal salaries earlier this week. And now Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry has gone after the Washington Times for relying on data from the CATO Institute, which he says in influenced by an anti-government stance. He's also using the data from the Combined Federal Campaign to argue that federal workers are generous and charitable, especially consider what they're paid. Given that Berry strongly emphasized the CFC and federal community service last year, those efforts appear to have generated an argument for him to use in just this situation.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, and I'm not sure what the most politically effective way to push back against the argument that federal employees are paid too much is. The arguments on both sides are rooted in data that's difficult to explain clearly: there are questions of methodology in the surveys, job definitions, sample sizes, frequency that you've got absorb before the data becomes really clear.

If I were the federal government, or federal employee unions, I think this is what I'd do. I'd find a lot of specific employees in the public and private sectors, figure out what their salaries are, and run ads comparing their work and their pay on a very individual basis. People have a lot more difficulty saying that a specific person who caught a potential terrorist, or created a life-saving medicine are underpaid. Just from a strategic perspective, I think asking folks whether they think individual federal employees are undervalued might be an effective way of asking those questions if your interest is in preserving federal pay--or raising it.

I wanted to say one thing about this week's column about the impact of large inventories of unresolved cases at agencies like the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Backlogs like these don't build up out of nowhere. They're the product of circumstances and resource allocations, most definitely not of negligence, or ill-will.

For example, the EEOC projects that more than 100,000 private-sector complaints will get filed by the end of fiscal 2010, and that the total number of public- and private-sector complaints that have yet to get resolved will rise from 73,951 at the end of fiscal 2008 to 87,807 by the end of fiscal 2010, an increase of almost 14,000 cases. In fiscal 2009, the agency got to hire 155 new employees, and hopes to hire an additional 140 this fiscal year. The agency estimates that those new hires mean the agency will be able to process 15,000 more cases each year, an impressive rate. And EEOC's also going to target new training and guidelines at reducing the backlog.

Clearly, the agency has good intentions, and is putting its resources towards getting cases resolved. But situations like this also reveal the limits of both the appropriations process, and the market. In an ideal world, of course, EEOC would be able to hire staff based on demand: when complaints spiked, they'd have the authority and the money to hire exactly the number of staff they need to resolve complaints as quickly as they'd like. But of course they--and every other federal agency--don't have that luxury (or depending on how you put it, that basic freedom). They're dependent on a glacial appropriations process that appears to have no sense of urgency about agency needs, and requires them to think not just about what they need, but what they can make do with. And the truth is, EEOC workers aren't low-level service workers. They're highly educated and trained professionals; you need lead time to get them ready to do their jobs, so you can't count on hiring folks one day, putting them to work immediately, and then getting rid of them when you (think) you don't need them any more.

And really, ultimately, case loads are about the atmosphere in American workplaces, both public and private. Ideally, it would be great to have a full roster of closed-out cases, not just because it would make things easier for the EEOC, but because it would mean we'd have a workplace with less bias and discrimination.

At least he did at the National Treasury Employees Union legislative conference yesterday. Does that mean the Office of Management and Budget is prepared to approve the package of hiring reforms that Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry sent over several months back? I'd expected that package would have moved out of OMB by now. But if I've learned one thing in my reporting here, it's that in federal personnel policy, things always take a little longer than any of us expect.

This may be an idle thought, but for those of you out there who keep a close eye on the State Department, I'd appreciate some insight into this question: are questions of USAID's staffing and budget dominating the coverage of the strategy review under way there because they are the critical questions? Or because USAID has aggressive stakeholders and its roles is very much enhanced because of Haiti, etc.?

Maybe this is an abundantly obvious thing to say, but if we're going to have a discussion about waste or resource priorities in the Census, one obvious answer is that we really ought to be able to fill out Census forms online. If the Internal Revenue Service can handle tax information safely and securely online, surely we can do the same with the ten questions on the Census form.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's parsing of words around the question of whether or not Joe Stack, the man who flew a plane into an Austin, Texas IRS building, was a terrorist. She says Stack "had his own personal issues and personal motives," and even though "he used a terrorist tactic...an individual who uses a terrorist tactic doesn't necessarily mean they are part of an organized group attempting an attack on the United States." By that criteria, it's only possible to be a terrorist if you use a "terrorist tactic" AND are a member of an organized group. I'm not sure Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber. Both of them carried out their acts as individuals. And I think defining terrorism in a way that doesn't include them is pretty dangerous, minimizing the nature of their attacks.

Also, I'm not sure Joe Stack's anti-government animus counts as "his own personal issues and personal motives." Stack's manifesto made clear he met with lots of other folks who shared his anti-IRS views. Those circles were definitely looser than al Qaeda cells, and I'm certain there are a lot of people in those circles who are horrified by Stack's actions, even as others rush to claim him as a hero. But that doesn't mean that Stack didn't have an ideology, and that he didn't try to terrorize federal employees and the federal government. By that definition, I remain convinced that he's a terrorist, and not just a common murderer.

By Elizabeth Newell

OMB Director Peter Orszag spoke at a Government Executive leadership breakfast this morning, and we have stories posted on his comments on federal pay and combating distrust in government. But a couple other comments stuck out at me.

On the SAVE Awards:

Orszag strongly insinuated that many of the cost-saving ideas submitted through the SAVE awards process were not worthy of transparency. While he said the primary reason that only four of the ideas were make public was to allow for candid internal discussions, he made several jokes about the quality of the ideas and said "many were not as promising as one might have hoped for." Here are some other quotes on the awards process.

"On a quality- adjusted basis, we might be a little below [the more than 38,000 ideas submitted]. We had a selection process for highlighting and including in the budget the best ideas... I think the issue really is similar - and we're continually evaluating this question - to the internal discussions on the budget. Before decisions are made, what is the balance of transparency versus preserving the discussion."

"What I'd like to do is take the maybe four or five hundred of them that were at the bottom of the distribution and share them with you to give you an idea of the somewhat sordid process we went through."

On a management agenda:

Orszag also made it pretty clear the administration won't be spending time coming up with a catchy name for their management agenda, a la the Bush Administration's President's Management Agenda (PMA) or the Clinton era National Performance Review (NPR).

"I don't know that a cute name is what's necessary. I think what we need to do is do the hard work. If we succeed in significantly transforming the IT backbone of the government and working with [OPM Director] John Berry on significantly improving not only the hiring part but the other components of the human capitol agenda, those will be huge, lasting fundamental changes that will make the federal government work better for decades to come. There are other additional things that need to happen that we're acting upon - contracting a good example - but in terms of the underlying core function of the federal government across every agency, that IT backbone and a high-performing workforce are, I think, the two foundational pieces to an improved federal government."

Obviously, it's been controversial, and Census officials ended up trying to explain their strategy again on CNBC. As someone who wasn't old enough to participate in the previous Census independently, I've been fairly impressed by the Census's bread-and-butter outreach. When I came home last week, there was a flyer stuck on my door explaining the Census and privacy issues. And a letter from Robert Groves, telling me that my form will be arriving in a week and asking me to please send it back, came in the mail last night. I certainly was thinking more about the Census generally because of the television ads (which I really do think are quite witty), but now it's on my calendar as a specific task for next week.

I'm at the National Treasury Employees Union 2010 Legislative Conference, and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., just launched a full-throated attack on the filibuster:

"I want to talk about the way the Senate has to clean up its act. Let me tell you, I am frustrated as hell at the United States Senate. And I'm mad as hell, and I don't want to take it any more. And why am I mad? Because it now takes 60 votes to get anything done. I thought in the United States, America should rule. Every single day, more gets said than gets done. And I know you're grumpy. Grumpy's a good day for me. WI'm part of a young group of Senators who want to change the filibuster rule. I think that is a dated rule from another century. This is the kind of rule that helped Jesse Helms when he tried to filibuster the civil rights bill."

Changing Congressional rules is hard, but it's interesting to see the health care fight build momentum for those changes.

Over at GovLoop, Sandy Ressler, who has been a federal employee for 25 years, has kicked off a terrific debate (registration required) over how to stem the tide of negative opinion, and even violence, against federal employees. Among his commenters' suggestions:

-It's time for a modernized federal public relations system: "What did Toyota do when their image was destroyed by the recent recalls? They really amped up their PR/advertising campaign to focus on what they were doing right and proactively tried to address the concerns that their customers had. Historically speaking, the a government agency's public affairs function has been at best, understaffed, and at worst, non-existent. They're too often led by people without a public affairs/public relations background and they're among the first functions to get cut when there's a budget crunch. Should we really be surprised then that the public image of government has decreased over time? This isn't a question of open government or Gov 2.0 - it's a question of basic PR and marketing."

-Management support matters: "The best way to turn this around is to get the chain of command to support the employees. The employees don't make up the rules - they just enforce them. Management needs to be focused on the work place environment so the "worker bees" can get their jobs done. If management can be more receptive to employees training needs and sit in the offices collecting a pay check - then shame on them. Supervisor need to be out interacting with their employees to find out what is going on out on the floor. Supervisor need to set the example and be willing to pitch in when event on the ground become overwhelming and set the proper priorities."

It's a great, productive conversation. Definitely worth checking out.

By Tom Shoop

Remember the allegations back in January that an Office of Management and Budget employee had threatened "to make life miserable" for an official at the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general office if the IG complained to Congress about his budget? OMB Director Peter Orszag promised an expedited review of the charges, and he has delivered.

The Washington Post's Federal Eye reports that Orszag told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Friday that the OMB employee, a career staffer, will soon face disciplinary action.

Threats of budgetary retaliation are "unacceptable at OMB," Orszag said. But he added that the incident appears to be isolated.

By Robert Brodsky

The number of Executive Branch political appointees could be dramatically cut under a bill reintroduced in the Senate Monday.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz. and Russ Feingold, D-Wis., are pushing the Control Spending Now Act, which would cap the number of political appointments at 2,000. The senators previously introduced the legislation in the Clinton and Bush administrations but the bills were not enacted.

"Over the last year, a common theme I have been hearing from Wisconsinites at my listening sessions is frustration with the growing government bureaucracy," Feingold said. "Unnecessary bureaucratic positions not only waste taxpayer dollars, but also make government less effective and less responsive to the people it represents. In the face of record deficits, this bill offers a good way to save while improving the way government works."

Since 1980, the number of political appointees in government has risen by nearly 28 percent, creating added costs and bureaucracy, the senators said.

"In this time of economic crisis, we must do everything possible to eliminate waste and make the federal government smaller and more efficient," McCain said. "This bill is simple--it will save money and result in a more streamlined Executive Branch."

The legislation would leave it up to the Executive Branch to determine how to reduce the number of political appointees, providing them with one year to make the cuts. Positions outlined in the Constitution would not be affected by the bill.

If enacted, the Congressional Budget Office previously estimated it could save $872 million over ten years.

By Robert Brodsky

The hierarchy in small business federal contracting has been thrown into chaos as the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled last week that HUBZone small businesses "take priority" in procurement awards above firms owned by socially or economically disadvantaged individuals or service-disabled veterans.

The court's ruling , which was unsealed on March 2, would create a pecking order in small business contracting, with HUBZone companies, which operate in low-income urban and rural neighborhoods, at the top of the food chain. The decision states that agencies must now consider whether HUBZone companies can compete for a contract before awarding it under another small business program or on a sole-source basis.

The decision by Chief Judge Emily Hewitt supports an earlier ruling by the Government Accountability Office and essentially rebukes guidance issued last summer by the Office of Management and Budget and the Justice Department.

We'll have more on this story later today.

The debate's been heating up in comments over at a story I wrote on Friday about whether $100,000 is a good threshhold number to use to talk about federal pay. Beyond that question though, I think it's important to understand that patterns in pay are the product of long-standing system and of long tenure, and that it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to radically change compensation policy in response to fluctuations in the economy.

While the economic situation is grave, and its impact on many American families is extremely serious, the recession also isn't going to last forever. I have neither a crystal ball nor a sophisticated economic model to hand, so I can't say how long it's going to last. But immediately slashing federal salaries is something that would take time to pass and to implement, and by the time it was implemented, it's entirely possible that the economy would have recovered. Reversing those cuts would then take additional time, during which the federal government would be disadvantaged in comparison to recovering private sector firms. Because a lag is inevitable, it's impossible to make public sector pay match the economy's rise and fall inevitably, and following behind those economic curves probably would do more harm to the government's ability to recruit and retain qualified employees than it would help reduce the deficit or impart a sense of fairness to laid-off Americans.

And really, federal pay is going to look a lot lower on the aggregate when an entire cohort of long-tenured, highly-paid federal employees retires, and is replaced by workers starting at much, much lower salaries. Those employees' salaries will rise over time, of course, but so do most people's, commensurate with experience. Higher federal salaries are a rising and falling curve rather than a permanent condition, and folks would do well not to get in a permanent panic about it.

Sen. Richard Lugar's concerns about how a potential reorganization of the State Department would impact its arms control offices, which he says are functioning well in their current arrangement, highlights one of the key problems of shaking up a big agency or department. And that is that no matter how poorly an organization is functioning overall, there's probably an office or division somewhere that is doing quite well, perhaps in ways that are directly related to its present situation within the larger organization. The challenge is to figure out how to preserve that functionality and the benefits that office is accruing from its positioning while everything else changes around it. And to figure out if the larger goals of the reorganization outweigh some temporary discomfort or readjustment for folks who are comfortable, happy, and functional already.

When the Office of Personnel Management announced its reorganization early this year, one of the key goals was for the agency's organizational chart to be easily comprehensible to outside observers. I haven't heard any complaints about the reorganization, but if there were, it would be interesting to weigh that pain against the value of comprehensibility, which after all, is also about convincing outsiders of the agency's usefulness and functionality.

Over at the Washington Independent, Spencer Ackerman makes the terrifying point that it's hard to point to something that will get you permanently barred from getting federal contracts. Whether or not you believe the federal government should use its massive purchasing power to push for certain economic ends and social goals, I think we can probably agree that efficacy and efficiency are worthy goals to pursue, and if major contractors fail to meet performance goals on, say, two contracts, they ought to be in the doghouse in some way. I just finished reading Peter Feaver's excellent Armed Servants (about which more to come), and one thing he makes very, very clear is that relationships between principals (like the government) and their agents (like contractors) don't work unless there is a credible threat of punishment. Right now, there's not. And that should change.

The Obama administration, via Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, has been attempting to tighten up use of recruitment, retention, and relocation incentive payments for some time now. And now we've finally got extensive data on the use of those incentives in 2008, the last year for which numbers are available. More on this to come on Monday, but a few things to note:

-The payments aren't that big: The average relocation incentive is $13,000, the average retention payment is $6,284, and the average recruitment incentive is $7,543. This isn't private-sector signing-bonus money. And it's one-time payments. $6,284 is not a lot of money to accept to stay in a job, particularly if you're walking away from a long-term higher salary and greater earnings potential.

-The payments are in the fields where there are shortages: 11 percent of recruitment incentives went to "patient examiners," 5.64 percent to "practical nurses," 3.69 percent to pharmacists, and 3.60 percent to nurses. 6.09 percent of retention incentives went to nurses, and 5.96 percent to "practical nurses."

-The payments were relatively proportional throughout the workforce: General Schedule employees make up 66 percent of the federal workforce, and they got 65 percent of the benefits.

It's becoming overwhelming, this wave of attacks on government facilities and government employees. This time, it's two Pentagon Force Protection Agency officers who were shot: the gunman who attacked them, John Patrick Bedell, is dead.

Gawker's tracked Bedell's obsessions, including libertarian views towards government, 9/11 Trutherism, marijuana legalization, and attempts to create an alternate currency. Unlike Joe Stack, who flew a plane into an Internal Revenue Service building in Austin, Texas, Bedell didn't appear to have an exceptional grievance against any given agency. And the chances of him being traced to, or taken up as a hero, by anti-government groups seems somewhat smaller; his obsessions were too eclectic.

I honestly don't know what's more frightening to me, the idea of a widespread anti-American ideology that inspires attacks on the country, or the prospect of private, unconnected hatreds leading individuals to try to kill government officers on their own. With an ideology, we can understand it, we can study it, we can try to respond to it, or change course, or circumvent it. With these lone, angry men, the prospect of identifying them and preventing their attacks on government facilities seems like an impossible project.

Apparently, I'm not the only person annoyed about anonymous holds. Gabrielle Martin, president of the American Federation of Government Employees' National Council of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Locals, writes:

Congress is made up of people of various races, sexes, cultures, political parties and philosophies. It is really a sad day when a member of Congress, which itself is a diverse body of thought, places a "secret" hold on a nominee. The public process allows issues and concerns to be questioned, addressed and ultimately there will be a vote on the nominee. On the other hand, a "secret" hold suggests the absence of a legitimate concern.

The EEOC is an important law enforcement agency that is hampered by the lack of permanent leadership. Saddled with over 90,00 cases backlogged and an unwillingness to change the process or add staff, EEOC's ability to address its mission remains impaired. Ultimately, it is the constituents of all members of Congress - both employers and complainants who remain at risk in the face of the "secret" hold and the absence of a confirmation vote.

Jessica Lambertson's story about how the National Treasury Employees Union and the National Credit Union Association have come together to start a labor-management partnership council ahead of the March 8 deadline for simply submitting their plans to do so, raised some interesting questions for me. Are efforts like this, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to restart a partnership council which happened even before President Obama's executive order mandating that agencies restart them, going to have to be adjusted to meet the National Council's standards and be certified? Is data being collected on the successes of these early efforts from the get-go? If not, that would seem like a wasted opportunity to collect as much performance data as possible from a effort that many admit was marred by a lack of data on how well it actually functioned the last time the Clinton administration set up these partnerships.

By Robert Brodsky

The small business contracting community lost one of its long-time leaders last Friday, as Murray J. Schooner, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, passed away at the age of 74. His son, Steve, is co-director of the government procurement law program at The George Washington University, and a well-known figure in the acquisition community.

Sometimes referred to as the 'godfather' for supplier diversity in government contracting, Murray Schooner was the former director of procurement and socioeconomic business development for Unisys Corporation for 27 years, a job he retired from in 2006. Since 1979, Schooner has been a tireless advocate for small and disadvantaged business contracting programs, particularly women-owned and veteran-owned small businesses.

His resume included a stint as national co-chairman of TRIAD, the small business advisory panel to industry and the federal government; chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Minority Purchasing Council; vice president of the Maryland DC Minority Purchasing Council; member of the Defense Department Mentor Protégé Round Table; member of NASA's Prime Contractor Round Table and a fellow at the National Contract Management Association. Most recently, Schooner served as vice president of FEDMINE.US, a database-driven Website that aggregates federal contracting data.

Schooner was a graduate of Boston University and served 21 years as an Army infantry officer, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He served in combat in Vietnam earning the Bronze Star, the Air Medal, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and the Combat Infantry mans Badge. He later earned his masters degree in procurement and contracting from George Washington University

An excellent tribute to Schooner appears in the February 2010 edition of Vetrepreneur magazine.

By Robert Brodsky

The Obama administration's often-discussed but yet unannounced High Road contracting policy, which would give additional weight in the source-selection process to labor-friendly companies, is drawing strong reactions from all sides of the acquisition sector.

On Friday, the watchdog groups Project on Government Oversight and OMB Watch, along with the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, sent a letter to President Obama urging support of the policy.

"When contractors pay very low wages and benefits, taxpayers often end up getting a bad deal," the groups said. "Work quality can suffer and the government bears hidden costs because taxpayers need to provide income assistance and benefits to low income families, such as Medicaid and food stamps. In practice, this amounts to something like a government subsidy for low-road companies, while high-road companies are placed at a competitive disadvantage."

Not surprisingly, contracting organizations have a different take on the proposal. The Professional Services Council said Tuesday that the 1965 Service Contract Act already mandates that contractors pay their employees prevailing wages and benefits for their industry sector and geographic location.

"Workers deserve to be paid a fair wage," said Stan Soloway, PSC's president and chief executive officer. "Under the SCA, it is the government -- not the company -- that dictates the prevailing wages and benefits that must be paid. And the premise of the SCA is that these prevailing wages are, in fact, fair wages," "To the extent that wages might be deemed inadequate or the SCA does not function as intended, the logical redress would be to focus on the Labor Department's management and enforcement of the law and the wage determinations process it requires."

So, I have a question. If 1) it's not legal for Senators to place holds on nominees without a) announcing the hold in the Congressional Record or b) making a public statement about the hold 2) a Senator has failed to do those things, and yet is holding up nominees to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 3) why should the Senate honor the holds? I really do find this incomprehensible.

I think the Senate has a genuine problem in not requiring its members to play by its own rules or defend their positions. If someone out there believes that because Chai Feldblum is gay, she can't serve reasonably and objectively on the EEOC, they should come out and make that argument, see if it succeeds or fails, and then move on. This mucking about in the shadows and putting everything off forever is useless, and worse, damaging in its delays.

Alec MacGillis's excellent story on the difficulties of closing a small Labor Department office that tracks international economic statistics to determine how the U.S. is doing in comparison is a good example of a basic fact: government agencies just don't go away and get replaced on a regular basis. Whether that lack of a market dynamic is a good thing or not is obviously a hotly-debated question. Obviously, from an organizational perspective, it takes a long time to stand up a new agency and get it functioning. The cycle's very different from the time horizon for setting up, say, a restaurant, and determining whether it's successful. And it would be incredibly wasteful if agencies were getting created and dismantled every time there was a shift in the political winds, both in terms of time and money. That said, perhaps the threat of competition might encourage agencies to act more quickly to implement management and process changes (although contracting out would seem to be a test case for this, and I'm not sure there's evidence that the prospect of being contracted out has improved efficiency anywhere, though I would be very interested to know if there was).

But I think it's notable that a lot of commentators don't understand that there isn't a cycle of standing up agencies and disbanding them at all. Understanding that that's the case, and why that's the case is a necessary step before you can even begin having these "shrink the government" conversations about what ought to go.

Federal highway inspectors and hundreds of other employees at the Department of Transportation may soon be able to return to work, after Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., dropped his objection to legislation which would authorize the National Highway Trust fund for an additional 30 days.

After repeatedly blocking the bill, using parliamentary maneuvers, over the past four days, Bunning relented after reaching a deal with Senate leaders, which will allow the Senate to vote on his amendment, to pay for the bill's $10 billion price tag.

Two thousand Transportation workers were indefinitely furloughed on Monday, after the highway trust fund's authorization expired and the Department could no longer re-imburse states for highway projects. The extension would also extend unemployment benefits, COBRA health insurance, and other federal programs.

UPDATE: The bill is passed. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a released statement that employees should report to work on Wednesday.

Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., has been appointed to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Somehow, I doubt he's going to have the same relationship with Democrats, or with anyone who works on federal management issues, that George Voinovich, for example does, given Brown's recent spate of remarks on federal employee issues. But I could always be proven wrong.

According to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of militias and related anti-government groups in America shot up from 149 in 2008 to 512 in 2009. The report doesn't include figures on the membership in these groups, which I think we need to fully judge the importance of that increase--if 363 people have dubbed themselves one-man Liberation Armies, I don't know that that's a major trend or disturbing development. But if these organizations are big enough to be creating websites, showing up on law enforcement radar, or making the news (which is mostly how SPLC finds out about them, though they do field research of their own), that's a troubling rate of increase.

Anti-government extremists are dangerous for a lot of reasons. They murder people, of course. But even if they never escalate to violence, they encourage people to treat their problems as general rather than specific, and to turn away from actually trying to solve those specific problems. By extrapolating targeted problems into general ones, anti-government groups actually obscure specific things that are broken in government, making them harder to fix. And by convincing people not to even try to engage with government to fix their problems, militias allow people to blame government while absolving themselves of any role in making it better.

I understand that government is large, and has both functional and customer service problems. But it's not going away. Efforts to make it so will only end up with people dead.

Rumor has it Mark Harmon, AKA Gibbs, could be leaving the show at the end of the season. I hope it isn't true, since he's the strong core of the original show. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

I suppose I ought to get excited about the prospect of a new policy that would provide advantages in contracting to companies that pay higher wages and provide better benefits. Certainly, such a policy would be sweeping, affecting huge swaths of the American workforce and major government expenditures:

By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said.

Because nearly one in four workers is employed by companies that have contracts with the federal government, administration officials see the plan as a way to shape social policy and lift more families into the middle class. It would affect contracts like those awarded to make Army uniforms, clean federal buildings and mow lawns at military bases.

But if the Obama administration does this by executive order, it's hard for me to believe that the fire will be proportionate to the smoke generated over the policy by the administration, labor and business lobbyists alike. If, in fact, this does happen by executive order, it'll be overturned for sure the next time there's a Republican president, and we'll have yet another issue like labor-management partnerships that whipsaws every 8 or 12 or 16 years, far too short a time to provide meaningful policy change. In fact, by the time such an executive order was researched, designed and implemented, there might be very little of an Obama administration left, and therefore very few contracts that will expire and be replaced within the remaining time that the policy is in effect.

If the administration decides to pursue this through legislation, it's a different matter, of course. But I'm exceedingly skeptical that such legislation would pass. The Chamber of Commerce managed to handily nuke the Employee Free Choice Act. And while there may be arguments that this wouldn't diminish the number of jobs since the government would provide a steady market for them, I haven't been impressed by the Democrats' ability to press such arguments in Congress. We'll see. But I don't know that this is worth getting verklempt over yet.

Apparently, the FBI got called in to respond to a mysterious substance at a Utah Internal Revenue Service office. A couple of folks got treated on the scene, but for unreleated medical conditions. I'm glad everyone is okay. And I don't want to jump to conclusions about connections to other acts, or anything else before the FBI's investigation is concluded. But I don't know if it's more disturbing if these are random acts, or part of a pattern.

By Robert Brodsky

The Government Accountability Office has found that more than 100 former Bush administration officials converted to career positions at federal agencies through a process known as "burrowing in."

In a brief report released today, the watchdog found that 143 that former political appointees and congressional employees from 26 federal agencies converted to career spots from May 1, 2005, through May 30, 2009. Eighty (56 percent) of the 143 reported conversions were made by five agencies: the Departments of Justice (32), Homeland Security (18), Defense (13), Energy (9), and Commerce (8). Sixteen other agencies reported no such conversions.

The controversial practice of "burrowing in" is when agencies allow appointees to remain in government at the end of an administration by giving them career jobs without making them go through a fully competitive application process. In November, the Office of Personnel Management pledged to crack down on the practice.

The New York Times' obituary of Robert Myers, the actuary responsible for setting the Social Security retirement age, is a fascinating illustration of one way people get into civil service. The Times notes:

In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, Mr. Myers was unexpectedly offered a six-week stint on the Committee on Economic Security, a Roosevelt administration panel that was drawing up blueprints for America's first comprehensive social insurance programs.

The six-week job turned out to be a career that spanned decades and placed Mr. Myers at the center of America's great debates about the government's role in the economy and how to create public safety nets affordably. Actuaries measure risks, and for much of his career Mr. Myers was concerned with the risk that the government might build an old-age program that promised more than it could deliver.

In other words, Myers went into government temporarily, found a project he was interested in, and stayed there to pursue it. I don't know whether converting contractors, or political appointees, or any other class of employees en masse is the answer to the government's recruiting and hiring challenges; in fact, I'm pretty sure it's not. But finding ways for folks to try out government service, and to realize the multiplicity of projects and opportunities to use their skills that exist in government agencies, might produce a good rate of return.

In case folks are interested:

-The Office of Personnel Management is hiring a classification specialist (or specialists). I single this out because OPM put the listing in the newsfeed section of their website on the main page. I'm not sure I would have noticed it otherwise. But if you're a private-sector worker looking to come into government, an announcement like that sure is easy to find.

-With what seems like quite good timing, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service is opening up the application period for grants aimed at improving federal-sector labor-management relationships. With agency-level labor-management forums kicking off this spring, I imagine there will be a few places that could think of good uses for that money. The deadline to apply is June 30.