Our readers apparently have pretty different views of whether Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities statements are useful. KC says they can be faked:

C'ommon people! How could you know that the applicant even wrote the KSA? There's no guarantee. I was in a panel and read someone's writing scoring the max points. Was in the interview and let me tell ya: no way that woman talking wrote the KSAs I scored for that position. I didn't recommend this woman but a guy; my boss hired her. Six months later, my boss was able to "transfer" her out because she discovered she was not who she portrayed to be, and hired the guy I recommended originally. We found out later (with another writing piece) that her husband wrote things for her as she admitted. I said to my boss: "Told ya! I knew this woman didn't speak they way her KSAs were written..." I rest my case. I applaud that the stupid KSAs are finally gone; sometimes they asked the same thing using different words. Time-wasters! If management is interested in seeing someone's writing, they should ask the last 2-3 candidates interviewed to submit KSAs as a deciding factor. There, that's a simple solution.

But Fed HR Employee says it's unclear how resumes differentiate candidates enough to narrow down the pool to candidates who should be asked to write KSAs:

This is reactive medicine. Who is going to screen 1,000 or more applicants for a single position to determine who should fill out the KSA's??? AND BASED ON WHAT? How will managers be able to determine from a generic resume, who is best qualified to interview. I like the elimination of the rule of 3 (and I cannot think of a SINGLE hiring official that would support continuing the rule of 3 despite what the article says). I am VERY concerned that someone is out of touch with reality when I see that type of statement!!! You think "cronyism" was happening before? Now wait until you aren't even asked to submit a KSA in round 2. Based on what? No substantial documentation to support or defend anything.

I do wonder if having folks write KSAs later in the process might help prevent fraud, if only because then interviewers will have a better sense of a candidates' style.

Joel Achenbach's piece on government-sponsored awards for innovation, both as a concept and as a history is really quite good. He points out that there are large advantages to a prize-based approach, but cautions that the contests have to be structured appropriately:

Last September, the Obama administration released the Strategy for American Innovation, which called on agencies to use prizes and challenges. The obvious advantage of the prize approach is that the government pays only for results. The competitors invest their own money in research and development.

...

"You can't just ask, 'invent for me antigravity'-type of questions. Or 'cure cancer,' " said Karim Lakhani, assistant professor of management at Harvard Business School, who has written extensively on open innovation.

To me, the diversity argument for prize competitions is probably the strongest. An individual may be able to create something great, but completely unable to get attention for it through the normal procurement process. But in contests like this, merit will out as long as you've got the right judges.

The Office of Personnel Management is apparently saying that they can't start covering kids through their 25th birthdays until January, even though some health care companies are starting coverage earlier, because of the way federal law is written. If this changes, we'll let you know. But for now, it looks like you'll need bridge coverage for your children until you can get them covered again in January.

One of the things I'm most curious to see about hiring reform, if in fact the details of the plan are announced next week, is what gets done about internships, which are a critical part of candidate recruitment and vetting. There's just so much dissatisfaction with the current, sprawling internship structure. The National Treasury Employees Union is still pursuing legal challenges to the Federal Career Intern Program on the grounds that it bypasses veterans' preference and undermines the competitive hiring process. On the other hand, some groups think the competitive process is keeping promising interns out of government. I don't know how to reconcile the competing concerns. And so far, the Office of Personnel Management hasn't let anything slip about what, if anything, they've figured out about how to do it.

The Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability were talking civilian v. military pay up on Capitol Hill today, and both organizations have some interesting points to make about compensation. On the question of the effectiveness of recruiting bonuses, CBO sagely points out:

The relationship between specific changes in pay rates and benefits and the amount of recruiting and retention is not clear. In particular, a variety of factors--including economic conditions--may have significant effects on DoD's ability to recruit and retain personnel during a given period.

And GAO takes a good look at the methodology of federal pay studies:

While many studies of active duty military compensation have attempted to assess the value of the compensation package, most did not consider all of the components of compensation offered to servicemembers. CBO, RAND, and CNA have assessed military compensation using varying approaches. All of their studies include some components of compensation--for example, cash compensation beyond basic pay, which includes housing and subsistence allowances, the federal income tax advantage, and, when possible, special and incentive pay. However, these studies did not assess all components of compensation offered to servicemembers.

It's always seemed to me that it's not useful to compare military and civilian pay. The motivations and means of compensation are just too different. Someone who wants to do stem cell research isn't going to be the same person who wants to fly jets. The comparison assumes they're competing for the same pool of people. And I think with some exceptions, of course, they're just not.

From the Cable comes the account of Mari Carmen Aponte, President Obama's nominee to be ambassador to El Salvador--who also happens to have dated a Cuban-American who the Federal Bureau of Investigation at one point thought might have been some sort of double agent. The relationship, and her talks with the FBI about it, scuttled another nomination in 1998.

Now, on one hand, I really believe people shouldn't be locked out of government jobs for things they did when they were young. If government is ultimately full of people who spent their whole lives in sanitized preparation to go through a confirmation process, then government is going to have a whole lot less strategic capacity than if it has folks who have had diverse life experiences, who have made mistakes, and who have grown from them.

On the other hand, Aponte was fully grown-up when the relationship happened. It's not like she was 18, and fell for a guy way more sophisticated than she did who concealed a lot of things from her. So I can understand questioning her judgement, especially since she socialized with some of the folks who were involved in Cuba efforts with him. But if the FBI has given her a clean bill of health, intelligence-wise, I think a judgement debate is about as far as it can go. She might have chosen a bad person to date, but it's probably not fair to treat her as if she's actually compromised.

In response to last week's story on the results of a DHS employee survey, one commenter has this to say:

There is currently no means for employees to evaluate their managers in DHS. A simple rating system would be a great avenue for employees to send a message, either pro or con, to upper management regarding whether their first line supervisors are performing well, or making a mess of things. Employees feel powerless to make a change in the selection of poor managers. The agencies' employees will continue to feel this way until they have a voice that can effect change.

So-called 360-degree feedback is already an established business practice. But just as managers need help managing and giving good feedback to their employees, employees would need guidance on how to give good feedback to their managers. And of course just as managers can practice favoritism, employees could skew ratings based on factors other than whether a manager is doing a good job. There's no way for things to be perfect. But more feedback generally is better than less.

Emily Long over at NextGov, a sprightly 22 to my elderly 25, has a great post up on what young people want in a work environment--and why they aren't aware that the federal government might be able to provide it:

The study found that 39 percent of Net-Gens need daily or weekly feedback on their performance compared with just a quarter of Baby Boomers. And they want to know what is expected of them, how they are performing and how that is related to their pay.

The report also found that Net-Gens see on-the-job and one-on-one training, peer mentoring and group activities as some of the most effective job training opportunities. Interestingly, online materials and classes and video games fell near the bottom, negating the idea that all young adults must be reached only through technology.

As a college senior, I didn't see the federal workplace as offering this kind of flexibility and engagement. That's not to say it doesn't, but rather that Net-Gens aren't aware of it, and they may be turned off by the perception that government jobs equate to bureaucracy, immobility and boredom. As the report points out, few government organizations "live their vision on a daily basis, have communicated it adequately and, of paramount importance to the Net Generation, show current or potential employees how they personally contribute to the vision and mission."

In other words, federal agencies might want to wait to make new investments in things they think will make them seem cool until they're sure they've communicated every asset in their tool kit.

By Robert Brodsky

Longtime federal watchers will remember there's no love lost between ex-General Services Administration Administrator Lurita Doan and Scott Bloch, the former head of the Office of Special Counsel. Back in May 2008, Bloch Doan found that Doan violated the Hatch Act for allegedly engaging in partisan political activity during a meeting at GSA's headquarters. Bloch also suggested that Doan should be punished for failing to cooperate with OSC's investigation.

Not surprisingly, Doan is taking a bit of pleasure in news that Bloch is expected to plead guilty this week to withholding information from congressional investigators regarding allegations he used a private technology company to delete files on his work computer. She also has some pointed words for the media. In an e-mail to Government Executive on Monday, Doan says that:

Most have forgotten that Mr. Bloch was desperate to erase those files in order to cover his biased, flawed investigations. But, a much larger story still remains: What happens when those responsible for 'oversight' go too far, falsify records, lie to Congress, conduct propaganda campaigns posting bogus blogs on websites, such as GovExec, for their own, narrow, self-serving purposes? Scott Bloch offers a pointed example (and warning) to anyone that thinks all 'oversight' is consistently unbiased, competent, or free of taint. I find it ironic that when Mr. Bloch suddenly emerged with conjured up charges against me, folks at the Washington Post and The New York Times found space on page one, and in their editorials, gobbling up and swallowing whole, everything that Mr. Bloch had said. And yet, now that, by his own admission, Mr. Bloch is revealed as a contemptible liar, we see hardly a drop of ink on the issue, much less any sort of apology for their own rush to judgment. Of course, this is not the first time there has been a double standard, and I fear it will not be the last.

Grudges die hard in Washington politics. And, as the English author Sir Thomas Browne once said "Women do most delight in revenge."

Updated, With a Note From Robert Brodsky: As the author of this blog post, I apologize to both Ms. Doan and to Gov Exec readers for what I agree in hindsight was an inappropriate comment at the end of this story. Sometimes, we in the media business, myself included, attempt unnecessarily to spice up news that should speak for itself. Ms. Doan's comments have no relation to her gender. The comment was thoughtless and unnecessary.

It's bad enough this sketch is one long slam on government employees, relying on the hoariest of cliches. What's almost worse is that it's simply not funny. Compared to this, the average wait in line at the DMV is a barrel of laughs:

Gabourey Sidibe, they owe you an apology for dragging you into that.

(Hat tip: GovLoop)

Allan Holmes thinks that the Thrift Savings Plan will have a hard time getting young people to start saving because the salaries they're paying aren't particularly high:

But there's still the problem: Who has $2,000 a year at age 19 to sock away? Maybe the investment board can figure how to get around that one.

I'm not sure this assumption is correct. If you're young and newly enlisted, the chance that you'll be going overseas and have a lot of your living expenses taken care of actually makes it a lot more likely that you'll have $2,000 to save. If you look at the military pay tables, someone entering the armed forces at the lowest possible rate of pay will make $1,338.60 each month--and their pay goes up after their first four months. On that salary, $2,000 would be a big savings commitment. And there are definitely fixed costs like student loans and car insurance to consider. But not everyone's going to come in at the lowest rate of pay. And while $2,000 a year may seem like a decent chunk of change, it's less than 10 percent of many service-members' salaries, the conventional wisdom on the appropriate minimum savings rate.

By Elizabeth Newell

On Thursday the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) sent a letter to OMB Director Peter Orzsag and Jared Bernstein, assistant to the vice president for economic policy, asking them to lower compensation limits for federal contractors and extend the limit to apply to all employees, rather than just the top five employees.

"If the Obama Administration wants to limit executive compensation for Wall Street, why aren't they stopping excessive executive compensation for government contractors? Don't the taxpayers deserve that?" POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian said.

Just recently OMB published its annual contractor "benchmark" compensation limit -- $693,151, which is the amount that may be priced into, or reimbursed under, government contracts. Brian said the group is dismayed by the “rdiculously high” limit, particularly during a recession.

“We realize that the formula for establishing this ‘benchmark’ is statutory. Nevertheless, it is an example of the outrageous influence government contractors possess to permit such an enormous amount of compensation to be reimbursed by taxpayers,” the letter stated.

Brian said the group takes no issue with high levels of contractor employee compensation as long as that compensation is not built into the cost of a contract, and therefore being shouldered by the taxpayer.

So it wasn't exactly an episode of Iron Chef. But it was a lot more fun. The Office of Personnel Management on Wednesday hosted its first "Feds Get Fit Cook-off," as part of the agency's governmentwide initiative to promote healthy living among the federal workforce. Melissa Knoll of the Social Security Administration walked away with the top prize, wowing judges with her tomato curry coconut soup with shrimp. Judges included "Top Chef" finalist and caterer Carla Hall and former New England Patriot football player Darryl Haley who had the very tough job of choosing finalists from among the 500 submissions.

Photo by Dawn Lim/Govexec.com

Agencies across government are marking Earth Day in a number of ways today. The Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration are holding an environmental fair in Foggy Bottom today. The Energy Secretary's doing a live chat on the Washington Post. And GovLoop, the social networking site for government employees, did a poll on how green government employees' workplace behavior is. 39 percent of respondents to the survey (which, grain of salt, had a small sample size of 148 people) reported that when they're making decisions about purchasing computer equipment, they take energy efficiency into account. But just half say they turn off their computer and monitor when they leave the office at night. Simply from a security perspective that seems unwise, and it's obviously a big energy drain, too. But if agencies can convince employees to make this relatively small change in their behavior, the gains for both the environment and security could be considerable.

Allan Holmes thinks it's very bad news that a fair number of mid-level managers don't really want to join the Senior Executive Service. If you're looking at replicating the SES, and things that make SES jobs undesirable as the only relevant goasl, there's cause for concern there. But if there's one thing that reporting on human capital has taught me, it's that there's just as much need for steady, dependable, smart mid-level managers as there is for set-the-world-afire executives. If everyone wanted to be a senior executive, totally irrespective of whether being a senior executive would be what they're good at and happy doing, government would actually have a problem. The key is to find a workforce mix: the folks who want to be the leaders, the innovators, the talented 8,000, and the people who will be absolute geniuses at managing teams, divisions, offices, etc.

There's lots of buzz out there about the results of the Senior Executives Association's survey on why federal employees don't want to join the Senior Executive Service. To my mind, though, the most interesting result is that Chief Human Capital Officers think the reasons for that trend are very different than the reasons expressed by potential-SESers themselves. That diversion in perception is important for policy-making: I'll be curious to see if CHCOs reverse their approaches to getting folks into the SES as a result.

The Senior Executives Association has released a new survey of GS-13s and GS-14s GS-14s and GS-15s about their attitudes toward moving up the ranks into the Senior Executive Service. It turns out they're not exactly doing cartwheels over the possibility of joining the government's elite executive corps.

We'll have a full report shortly, but here are a few tidbits:

• "The most significant attractors for considering an SES or Senior Professional position are the ability to contribute more to the mission of the agency, greater opportunity for creativity and innovation, the honor of serving at the highest level, and increased responsibility and authority."
• "The most significant detractors for considering an SES or Senior Professional position are the potential negative impact on the balance of work and family responsibilities, the possibility of being reassigned or transferred geographically, and the complexity of the application process."
• "Although pay was not a top attractor or detractor among survey responses, numerous narrative comments by survey respondents expressed that the difference in pay between a GS-14/15 position and an SES or Senior Professional position is often not commensurate with the increased workload, responsibility, and risk."
• "Despite respondents' stated interest in serving in SES and Senior Professional positions, less than 50 percent of respondents said that the attractors to serving in these positions outweigh the detractors to serving in the positions."

By Katherine Peters

Kudos to the Pentagon Federal Credit Union Foundation for raising money to build a new hotel for veterans needing treatment at the VA Palo Alto hospital. The nonprofit organization is raising $12 million to build the Defenders Lodge, which will replace an existing, dilapidated hotel slated to be torn down. The lodge will provide veterans with free accommodations while they receive outpatient treatment at the hospital and a number of specialized facilities, including the Traumatic Brain Injury Center and the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. According to the foundation, last year nearly 11,000 patients had to find temporary housing while undergoing treatment, sometimes driving as far as 50 miles to find affordable lodging.

I wrote about this last week, but obviously there's a lot of concern out there among folks who are going to be placed on so-called pay retention as part of the transition out of the National Security Personnel System. The folks subject to the holding pens are those whose salaries grew beyond the limits they would have lived under based on their job description under the General Schedule. They'll receive half of the raises their coworkers receive until their salaries fall back into the GS grade they are assigned to by virtue of their duties. From an interview with the new president of the Federal Managers Association, it sounds like the organization's strategy will be to argue that their employees' duties expanded as their salaries increased, and that they should be reclassified as a result. Patricia Niehaus told Federal Times:

We're focusing mainly on encouraging managers to ensure their position descriptions and those of their subordinates are appropriately classified because a lot of people under NSPS went into it with a particular position description, but their positions and their duties and responsibilities have grown dramatically over the past three or four years. So a lot of those positions may not have appropriate classifications under the [General Schedule] system.... [an employee's job] may be a higher graded position now. So we're encouraging [the Pentagon] to look at the actual classification of the position to ensure that it's accurately reflecting the current duties and responsibilities of the position.

Much has been made of the Pew report released over the weekend that shows a distressing drop in trust in many government agencies from 1997-1998 and 2010. But the agency that made the biggest gains, the Internal Revenue Service, might surprise some people. At Fedline, Tom Spoth speculates it's because the IRS was starting from such a dramatic low that improvement was inevitable, and that tax-prep software has softened animosity towards the agency.

But I think it's simpler than that. Of the agencies on Pew's list, it's unlikely that the average citizen will either have direct contact, or recognize that they've been directly affected by, the Education Department, the Food and Drug Administration, NASA, the Centers for Disease Control, the Justice Department, the FBI, or the CIA. On the other hand, there's a good chance that a lot of Americans will have direct contact with the IRS, the Social Security Administration, or the Veterans Affairs Department. Their impressions of the former will, as a result, be shaped by the media, be it news or fiction, by politicians, and by shifting opinions around them. That doesn't mean that the results of the survey for those agencies aren't important--they say a lot about agencies' brands. But the results for agencies that have a lot of contact with individual Americans say more about how those agencies are doing at providing services and working with their customers.

Allan Holmes thinks it's extremely worrying that a survey shows gaps between how worried some agency leaders are about cybersecurity issues, and how worried rank-and-file employees in their agencies are. He says it's a sign that leaders are ignoring the concerns folks who actually do the sweat work on systems have developed as a result of their direct engagement with the issues. But could it just be that the federal government has just done a really good job of impressing on employees that cybersecurity is extremely important? And that the employees whose jobs would be most on the line if there was a breach or other security failure are, justifiably, more nervous about such an occurrence than their leaders, who probably wouldn't be sacked over a single incident?

Seems green, and reasonable to me. Agencies will have to do a good job of making sure employees understand the new mechanisms for getting those benefits that are switching delivery forms. But they've got until 2013 to do it. That's plenty of lead time.

At our Excellence in Government conference this morning, Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry called for a moment of silence for the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. After the attack, Associated Press put together a list of the victims by floor of the building and by agency. In memoriam, I'm reproducing it here and after the jump:

NINTH FLOOR

Drug Enforcement Administration

Shelly D. Bland, 25, of Tuttle

Carrol June "Chip" Fields, 48, Guthrie

Rona Linn Kuehner-Chafey, 35, Oklahoma City

Carrie Ann Lenz, 26, Chotaw

Kenneth Glenn McCullough, 36, Edmond

U.S. Secret Service

Cynthia L. Brown, 26, Oklahoma City

Donald Ray Leonard, 50, Edmond

Mickey B. Maroney, 50, Oklahoma City

Linda G. McKinney, 47, Oklahoma City

Kathy Lynn Seidl, 39, Bethel

Alan G. Whicher, 40, Edmond

Continue reading "Remembering the Fallen" »

I'll be out a conference on Monday, but I thought it was important to dedicate this weekend to the memory of the victims of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. It was 15 years ago on Monday that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols killed 168 people and injured 680 of them. I can only hope that time has brought some healing to the victims and their families, and that no one will inflict such harm in the name of hatred of the government again.

The Office of Personnel Management is apparently building a web-based toolkit for folks involved in every step of the federal recruiting process, and has turned to GovLoop readers for a name. I think Match.gov is probably the cleverest name on the list, but I admit I'm partial to FedsFindFeds. But get in the fray! Theoretically, OPM swag is at stake.

I do recognize that leaking classified information to reporters, or to anyone else, is illegal. And I take it seriously. I've never been in the position of either asking someone to leak something to me, or being the recipient of an unsolicited leak, but I know if I were, I would spend a lot of time with my source making sure they were extremely clear on the legal and professional ramifications of giving me classified information.

But I do believe that laws about secrecy can have multiple uses. There are of course things that if they were generally known would leave us open to enemies foreign and domestic, that would grievously compromise personal information. Secrecy and privacy have their legitimate functions. But they can also be used to obscure things that ought to be generally known, and if they were known, might be fixed. When a leaker exposes a mechanical weakness in a ship design, or a problem with a database, they're forcing action on an issue. When secrecy is being in used a way that harms the national interest, it may simultaneously be illegal to breach that security and the right thing to do. As a reporter, I'm glad I don't have to make those decisions, and I can't imagine how hard it is to make those decisions. Not every leaker is a hero. But not every leaker is a villain, either. In cases like this, nuance is critical.

Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency employee with a top secret clearance, has been indicted for passing classified material to Siobhan Gorman, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal (though she worked for the Baltimore Sun at the time of the leaks), who also worked for National Journal, the magazine I was at before coming to Government Executive. As a reporter covering government, it's an interesting situation to consider. I've always thought that more responsive, relaxed media policies would do agencies a lot of good: they'd make complicated issues clearer, they'd appear more responsive to the public, and they'd reduce frustration on the part of reporters who are sick of "no comments" and staff who want to get important stories out to the public. It'd be a shame if this lead to a crackdown or a backing away of agencies from the media. The law is the law, of course, no denying that. But there are more ways than deterrence and prosecution to discourage people from breaking it.

Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform, went after the size of the federal workforce in general this morning at the opening of a hearing on the sorry financial state of the Postal Service. He claimed that the Postal Service has "more or less" a third more workers than it actually needs, and while insisting that he wants to support Postal workers and make sure they're fully employed, is making no bones about the fact that he thinks the federal government is overstaffed:

It is clear that we have not recognized that the Postal Service has more workers than it needs, and the federal government in general has more workers than it needs....I hope that we will hear about the kidns of synergies the federal government needs to achieve...You must leave here today understanding that Congress needs a plan like any other board of directors that passes the sniff test, that will be reasonable for us to say to the American people....No postal service employee should be given a route that's less than a full day's work.

I know Rep. Gerry Connolly has a strong defense of Postal pay and benefits coming up. It could be a bumpy ride, here in the Rayburn Building this morning.

While Congress was in session, Sen. George Voinovich succeeded in blocking Rafael Borras' nomination to become undersecretary for management. But President Obama appointed Borras during recess, and Voinovich is unhappy about that decision. So unhappy in fact, that he took to the Senate floor last night to lay out his objections. They're detailed, management-oriented, and decidedly non-partisan:

Mr. Borras has never overseen a budget anywhere near as large as the DHS budget. His own assertions indicate that the largest budget he has ever been involved with was a $4.5 billion budget at the Commerce Department. That is roughly one-tenth the size of the DHS $50 billion budget, and Mr. Borras was never directly responsible for the Commerce Department budget. Additionally, Mr. Borras has never managed hundreds of thousands of employees like the 230,000 he'll be responsible for at DHS. At most, he asserts that he was directly responsible for managing 1,500 employees while a U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) regional administrator. He's also never overseen a procurement budget similar to that at DHS, where in 2005 $10 billion was spent on 63,000 contracts. Mr. Borras asserts that the largest procurement budget he has been involved with was one-quarter of that, or $2.5 billion, while he was at GSA. Given the vast difference between Mr. Borras' experience and the requirements of this job, I agree with what two of his former supervisors have told me - that this job is a "big leap" from what he has done in the public and private sector.

He's so upset that he's pulling a bill to give the undersecretary for management a five-year term, something that could have been a major stabilizing force in DHS, because he doesn't want Borras to get the term. No matter what one things of Borras and his qualifications, Voinovich's seriousness and passion for good government, and his good relationship with Daniel Akaka, with whom he's worked for years on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Federal Workforce Subcommittee, have always been refreshingly practical and focused on the issues. I'll be curious to see who replaces him on the subcommittee when he retires after this term.

With a brouhaha building over whether federal buildings should be protected by federal security officers, I had a thought. Should there be a single agency that oversees all federal security officers, like the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Protective Service? If folks are performing similar functions, even if different situations cause them to exercise different standards of security, does it make sense for training and efficiency purposes to have them in different agencies?

When you're the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you can never be sure who you're going to be called upon to meet with on any given day. For the current Joint Chiefs chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, today it was the Muppets:

The characters, according to Mullen's Facebook page, were there for a preview of a PBS special called "When Families Grieve."

Photo: DoD Mass Communication Specialist Chad J. McNeeley

But as Emily Long reports, the Government Accountability Office thinks the Postal Service is among those that can, and it should. As she points out, that's going to depend to a certain extent on what goes down in the collective bargaining process due to happen in two years:

The GAO audit outlined how the Postal Service can create a more flexible workforce, through increasing the percentage of part-time workers and allowing personnel to work in different job assignments. Currently, the agency's ability to reduce or change its workforce is limited by collective bargaining agreements with its four employee unions. These contracts, which cover more than 550,000 employees or 85 percent of the workforce, limit the agency's capacity to hire part-time and contract workers and outsource city delivery routes. And nearly 500,000 employees are protected from layoffs. Another problem, according to GAO: During collective bargaining negotiations, participants are not required to take into consideration the Postal Service's financial situation. Proposed 2009 Senate legislation, however, included such a provision, and GAO is recommending that any binding arbitration take those concerns into account. The Postal Service will begin negotiations with its unions in the next two years.

Participants are not required to take into account the increasingly listing finances of the Postal Service, and with jobs on the line, I can imagine the union will fight to protect them. But some jobs are probably better than none. And I can also imagine a situation in which government decides the Postal Service simply isn't working. I don't think that day is here yet. But it's also definitely not as unimaginable as it once was.

President Obama has summoned world leaders to Washington this week for the Nuclear Security Summit. But at such events, he does more than just hobnob with bigwigs. Here's your proof: The photo below shows the president fist-bumping Lawrence Lipscomb, a custodian who works in federal offices under the AbilityOne program, which helps people who are blind or have other severe disabilities find employment with nonprofit organizations that sell products and services to the government:

The photo was taken on Dec. 3, 2009, during the White House Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth. It was taken by official White House photographer Pete Souza.

In withdrawing her nomination to lead the Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen gets at the interaction between the confirmation process and the way she hoped to manage the office, were she in a position to lead it:

In a statement released by the White House in the afternoon, the nominee, Dawn Johnsen, said she had come to realize that the strong Republican opposition to her nomination had undermined her own goal for the office, which was to restore its reputation for providing legal advice "unvarnished by politics or partisan ambition."

"Restoring O.L.C. to its best nonpartisan traditions was my primary objective for my anticipated service in this administration," Ms. Johnsen said. "Unfortunately, my nomination has met with lengthy delays and political opposition that threaten that objective and prevent O.L.C. from functioning at full strength. I hope that the withdrawal of my nomination will allow this important office to be filled promptly."

Now Congress hasn't just denied OLC a leader, something the agency could definitely use if only to start a conversation about its future and its role, but it's further heightened the atmosphere in which the agency operates. This. Stuff. Matters. A lot. It's disturbing to see Congress act as if it's irrelevant.

I haven't heard a lot of discussion about this, but I often wonder if folks don't apply for government jobs not just because the process is confusing and faceless, but because they're worried about getting lost in an agency and not finding a community. Events like this memorial to the late Sam Hamilton, a 30-year fed who became head of the Fish and Wildlife Service, are a welcome corrective to that:

A number of other co-workers also recalled Hamilton's devotion to his work and family. Dan Ashe, Fish and Wildlife deputy director, recounted how Hamilton kept a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread in his desk so he could "eat on the run," and how he rejoiced when he learned a federal training center had a laundry room where he could wash and iron his shirts.

Corky Pugh, who directs the Alabama Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries, described how he and Hamilton had hunted wild turkeys together many times. They had been scheduled to hunt again Friday.

An after-action report on a meeting of top HR leaders in October reinforced the idea that the best recruiters for any company or organization are people who do the agency's core work. People like Sam Hamilton are what federal agencies should hope the public thinks of when they think of federal service.

Are you a part-time federal worker who works Sundays? If so, you'll like a new proposed regulation from the Office of Personnel Management, which would eliminate the requirement that you be a full-time federal employee to receive an extra 25 percent of your wages if you work on Sunday. Interestingly, in offering more details on the Office of Personnel Management's results-only work environment pilot program yesterday, OPM deputy chief of staff Justin Johnson said the extra-pay requirement on Sundays was something the agency was looking at as a barrier to getting more folks working on more flexible schedules. It definitely seems like folks should get extra pay if they're required to work Sunday and sacrifice personal time and time with their families. But should they also receive it if they choose to work Sundays?

My Twitter feed blew up yesterday as my friends in the open government community went nuts over the open government plans agencies posted on their websites yesterday. It's understandable: this is the end result of more than a year of effort, with the agencies acting as laboratories of innovation for how to convey information more usefully and transparently to the government. Aliya Sternstein over at NextGov has an important piece up explaining how agencies figured out their programs and decided where to set the bar:

The key part of each plan is a flagship initiative that injects one of the three tenets of open government into a major agency undertaking. For example, as part of the Health and Human Services Department's plan, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is developing a Web site that tracks the costs associated with treating Medicare patients in particular diagnosis-related groups, by state, illness and individual hospital. A test version is live. CMS' next major release is expected in the fall.

HHS' plan goes beyond the directive's requirements by describing not one, but five flagship activities. One of the more elaborate programs will by year's end harvest data sets describing health care performance based on quality, cost, access and disease rates -- from the national to the county level.

...

A HUD spokesman said the department didn't want to create a plan that seemed predetermined and set in stone. "The plan is meant to be a living document -- something like a wiki -- that will invite people to be part of the discussion," said Jerry Brown referring to Web pages that anyone can edit.

It strikes me that this initiative and the labor-management partnership councils have a lot in common. They lay out broad parameters for the agencies, but encourage them to find their own solutions. And both should be intensively studied and measured to see what works, what doesn't, and how and why.

Because more than 40 world leaders are coming to town for a major nuclear summit. Lots of Washington, DC will be essentially shut down by security for the event. If you do need to get into the office, DCist has a good, early guide to what transportation will be impacted by barriers, closed roads, diversions, etc. But if you can stay off the roads, trains, etc. Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry would rather you stay out of Washington. He wrote to the Chief Human Capital Officers last night:

Such employees are strongly encouraged to reduce traffic on those days by using car or van pools, Metrobus, and Metrorail. Employees who can work at home or an alternative site are strongly urged to do so, in accordance with their agencies' telework and AWS policies. Employees eligible for AWS are strongly encouraged to take Monday or Tuesday as their AWS day off. If these flexibilities are not available or will not cover absence on Monday and Tuesday, all non-emergency employees who can be spared may request annual leave, leave without pay, and/or the use of previously earned compensatory time off or earned credit hours under an alternative work schedule.

I'm at the Telework Exchange Town Hall Meeting this morning, and Steve O'Keefe, the Exchange's Executive Director joked that the town will be full of "a whole pile of people. The city's pretty much going to be shut down...there will be no parking, metro will be limited, and sure enough there will be ample security." So stay out of downtown if humanely possible. I sure will be trying to avoid it.

Courtesy of the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Mediation and Conciliation Service, who will be coming through Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Oakland, and Washington, DC in May and June to provide two-day training on how to implement President Obama's executive order on labor-management relations. The registration form, which has locations and dates, is up here.

We've already seen the Internal Revenue Service Commissioner push back against the idea that his agency will hire a bunch of new agents, arm them, and send them out to hunt down people who refuse to comply with the mandate to purchase health insurance once that requirement goes into effect. Now, Health and Human Services Secretary is pushing back against the idea that she's going to hire a whole bunch of people to do the enforcement work health care reform assigned her department to perform.

I understand why folks in the administration are doing this. There's a lot of backlash against the bill and political pressure from Republicans. But I think if agencies have to backtrack, if they find they do need to staff up, they're going to be in even more trouble, because they'll be on the record as saying they wouldn't build the bureaucracy. Better to stick to a message of "we will enforce this effectively and efficiently," bear the short-term pain, and not have to go hat in hand later.

I'm sorry, but is it really so terribly hard to file mandatory reports on how one is spending Recovery Act funding? Apparently it's been enough of a problem that the Obama administration is authorizing agencies to cancel contracts or cut off grantees who don't file their reports on time:

"Any prime recipient that has failed to report is not living up to the standards set by [the Obama] administration and must be held accountable by all agencies to the fullest extent permitted by law," the memo stated. "Our efforts to ensure timely, comprehensive and accurate recipient reporting must succeed if we are to effectively meet the transparency and accountability objectives of the Recovery Act."

I realize the projects funded by the Recovery Act are huge and complicated. But if one knows the requirements for reporting going in, and is following basic responsible accounting practices, how can you habitually miss deadlines?

Apparently, a poll of of federal information technology decision-makers suggests they don't think the the federal cybersecurity coordinator is going to be able to push through major changes. Eric Chabrow thinks that this is because in civilian agencies, cybersecurity is sort of siloed, so most IT folks don't perceive that the coordinator will have a big impact on their jobs. But across the functions, the numbers are generally low. Chabrow writes:

Those holding C-level titles were the most likely than other respondents to think the so-called cybersecurity "czar" would make major changes, 31 percent. More than one-quarter of those working in operations (27 percent), security (28 percent) and compliance and risk (28 percent) felt the same. Only 18 percent of respondents classified as working in general IT characterized the cybersecurity coordinator's potential on changing IT security policies as being major.

I wonder if that's an indication that c-level folks are more optimistic about the ability of officials like the coordinator to make change anyway, while rank-and-file folks are less likely to believe that political appointees set to a task like this will be able to institute significant new policies. And the further folks in an occupation classification are from the specific problems the coordinator is going to address, the less likely they may be to believe the changes will be major in such a way to affect their lives.

Obviously, the Congressional deadlock about extending a number of benefits programs aimed at helping folks weather the economic downturn has consequences for the people who receive those benefits. But it's also an illustration of why federal staffing and workflow are so complicated. If this were a business, and a company decided to stop offering a product or performing a service, that decision could be made relatively quickly and cleanly, and the workforce and workflow could be adjusted easily as a result. But federal agencies just don't always know what they're going to be asked to do, and expirations and reauthorizations can create workflow whipsaws, and make it hard to predict what kind of workforce an agency is going to need.

The New York Times' editorial calling for the appointment of a permanent head of the Government Accountability Office is a reminder that even if appointees aren't going the presidential-pick-Senate-confirmation route, getting them into office can still be torturous:

By law, a bipartisan commission of House and Senate leaders is supposed to submit candidates for the job to the president, a lengthy process in the best of times. These are not the best times.

Recently, Democratic Congressional leaders sent President Obama a list of four candidates to run the G.A.O. Two days later, Republican leaders sent a letter supporting three of the four choices, apparently rejecting one and adding one of their own -- and charging that Democrats had cut them out of the loop.

I wish, and will always wish, there was a way to convince folks that the basic functionality of agencies is not a partisan issue. But of course everything is political.

I like this idea a lot: the Office of Personnel Management has challenged DC Public Schools kids in grades 9-12 to come up with videos promoting work in public service for Public Service Recognition Week. The winners will get their videos played on the Mall. I teach some writing classes to kids in the public schools here, and though they don't always have a ton of resources, they are invariably fun, smart, and creative. This should produce some good entries. And it's a nice way to encourage kids to develop useful job skills in video production and editing.

My colleagues at The Atlantic are, um, pretty hard on the Transportation Security Administration. And that's putting it mildly. So I was interested to read Marc Ambinder on why he thinks TSA's new use of intelligence-generated threat data to filter passengers for additional screening is smart. And I think he had a very good summary of the challenges and opportunities TSA faces in getting compliance with its security standards:

The government reserves the right to expand and contract and refine the filter on a daily basis. As trust is critical to security, trust remains the biggest potential area of weakness: enforcement is largely up to entities that the U.S. does not control, including foreign governments and airline carriers owned by private citizens. The U.S. government has ways of covertly monitoring compliance, and there are many more TSA representatives oversees now than ever before. But it is, of course, in the interest of every country who does business with the U.S. and every airline who wants to fly to the U.S. to establish protocols. The Israeli airline, El Al, uses a similar threat matrix to screen its passengers, but it also has the luxury of being able to strictly monitor how its employees (and Israeli government agents) do their jobs.

Shades of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who said pretty much the same thing in announcing the expanded use of the security filter today:

These new measures utilize real-time, threat-based intelligence along with multiple, random layers of security, both seen and unseen, to more effectively mitigate evolving terrorist threats. The terrorist threat to global aviation is a shared challenge and ensuring aviation security is a shared responsibility. I commend our many partners around the world who have taken steps to increase their own security measures through deployment of new technology, enhanced information sharing and stronger standards to keep air travel safe.

My sympathy for TSA has always come from the perspective that it's a new agency, and its policies are not always of its own making: they end up responding to political pressure and politicized fears. That said, the new, intel-baesd policy is smart, and the kind of thing the agency should be very careful to implement flawlessly, not just because it's right, but because being right will help its image.

Really, if an agency does something like accidentally leak the Social Security Numbers of several hundred employees, who decides it's best to wait a year to notify them? I understand that apologizing is embarrassing and painful. But it is always more painful if you wait. Because if you do, the "this agency leaked my data" story becomes the "this agency leaked my data and covered it up" story, or the "this agency leaked my data, covered it up, my identity was stolen and my life ruined" story. It is always, always worse to wait. And it's the right thing to do. The people you potentially hurt matter a lot more than your reputation, and it's better for your reputation if you take action on that principle.

The Republicans are in an awful tiff about it, too, raising the specter of thousands of armed Internal Revenue Service agents stalking the land to enforce the individual mandate to purchase insurance. I realize I'm being a little flip here. And I do agree that it will be good to know, as soon as is reasonably possible, how much federal agencies are going to have to expand in order to implement the bill. But in contrast to the GOP, I would like to know these numbers not because I am terrified by the prospect of several thousand, or even several tens of thousands more folks joining the federal workforce (in an existing force of 2 million, that's not a lot, dudes), but because the number gives us a sense of how hard health care reform is going to be to enforce. A number gives us a sense of how many folks we have to get through the hiring process, how many managers we have to find, how many people we have to get through confirmation processes. The Republicans opposed the bill on the grounds that it was going to grow government. Staffing up is a given part of that. All the pearl-clutching over the numbers now is just a way of prolonging the debate that led up to the bill's passage. It's not based in substantive concerns.

I've been getting tons of questions via email from you guys on health care. Today's column answers, I hope, some of them, as relates to child coverage. Consider this an open thread for more questions if you've got them: we'll try to answer them in subsequent posts and columns. One of the things that's interesting about covering health care reform is the agencies are figuring this out as we are.

Having successfully, if mildly, pranked my boss this morning (sorry, Tom!), I realized I didn't know if federal personnel policy includes rules on practical jokes in the workplace. After a little bit of digging, there doesn't seem to be a blanket ban, although the obvious and usual cautions about not resorting to discriminatory humor apply. And after all, unless you're operating on Chris Rock's level, relying on race, gender, sexual orientation, age, or ability for humor is just lazy. We can always get more creative than that.