Next, before the year is out, I hope to introduce recruitment and hiring reforms that will make us more aggressive in our outreach to the best potential candidates and more competitive with the private sector in our hiring methods and timelines. These reforms will make it easier for applicants to apply for our jobs and easier for hiring managers to hire the best and the brightest.

I'm not sure whether this will come in a stand-alone bill or whether it'll be part of a budget outline for next year released by the White House. But this was something Berry has promised to do. And so far, he's done a better job than many administration officials of meeting his deadlines, or at least getting within the ballpark of them.

Instead of meticulously parsed grades and steps, maybe we should consider career ladders with just three stages: apprentice, journey-level, and expert. What if we drew bright lines between these stages, and had a high bar to enter each? Would having your rank follow you no matter what job you're doing, instead of having it tied to a specific position, be more appropriate for the 21st century? What if you could go from one job to the next at the level you belong, without the HR staff needing to shoe-horn a justification for it?

Maybe such a three-stage system could help ensure that we're promoting the best people, and it would take some of the pressure off of the hiring decision. We don't want hiring managers to be paralyzed by the thought that they're hiring people for life.

Maybe the entire apprentice stage is probationary, or maybe the probationary period is shorter, but instead we require an affirmative step to keep someone on at the end of their probation instead of automatically tenuring them.

So we have the concept of setting a high bar at the beginning of each of the three stages. What might that bar look like? For me, the three most important qualities are fairness, comprehensiveness, and transparency. Fairness means that we build workable standards, apply them uniformly, hear all voices, and do not leave ultimate decisions at one person's discretion.

This sounds strikingly similar to things I've heard out of the Federal Managers' Association. Maybe that's coincidence, or maybe ideas are starting to come into line. Either way, I'm intrigued, both by the concept, and by the possibilities for implementation, which could be challenging. And I'm interested to see all these ideas come into sharper relief.

"I believe that the problems in foreign assistance effectiveness are largely those of poor leadership and supervision, to be solved by the streamlining of executive branch responsibilities rather than the creation of yet another layer of infrastructure," Webb wrote.

Webb was talking about the bill's proposal to create a Council on Research and Evaluation of Foreign Assistance, or CORE, that would have oversight powers over all government foreign-assistance programs, a key component according to committee staffers.

When I wrote my first post about this commenter Danielle Ellingston wisely chimed in that some of the changes in the bill might be quite important and minimally interfering:

I don't disagree with any of this. I just want to emphasize that I think the review is important. It's initiated from within, it's a wide-ranging effort, and it could be the most significant legacy--whether it succeeds or fails--of Sec. Clinton's time at State. The more the ground changes under the reviewers while they're still working, the harder it will be for them to turn out a coherent, up-to-date report. That doesn't mean that bad policies or problems should be allowed to stay frozen in amber at the department and continue to cause trouble while the review is going on. But as much as State and Congress can stay on the same page, I think that's a good thing. At some point, State is going to ask Congress to authorize funding for reorganization, or new staffing, or whatever. And Congress will want State to be in a position to implement its changes. Goodwill, and a sense that neither side is usurping the other's management efforts, may be difficult to maintain, but it's critically important.

As expected, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee moved the nomination of Daniel Gordon to serve as the administrator of federal procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget Thursday afternoon. Gordon's nomination was approved by voice vote.

Gordon, the former deputy general counsel of the Government Accountability Office, is expected to easily win approval of the full Senate when he comes up for a vote.

Congress has twice stalled on the legislation, which would give up to $60,000 per year in scholarship money for those who pledge to pursue "mission critical" occupations within the government after graduation. In 2008, Rep. David Price, D-N.C., introduced it as a stand-alone bill, and in March of this year Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., offered it as an amendment to a larger bill. Neither efforts received a vote.

Price and Rep. Michael Castle, R-Del., again introduced the bill, H.R. 3510 this July, and it is currently before three House committees.

In one key area, the Voinovich/Gillibrand version will go further than the legislation in the House. Although the language of the bill hasn't yet been revealed, according to Voinovich's comments when he introduced the measure, it would cover both undergraduate and graduate students. Price's version in the House would only help fund graduate studies.

The Partnership for Public Service has long been an advocate of the legislation. Earlier this year, the Partnership released a study claiming that the government's efforts to protect cyberspace were hindered by a lack of available experts. The goal of this program would not only be to make sure that the government gets more of the talented and well-educated professionals and technicians out there--it would also help grow more of those people at the ground level.

"The only way our nation can fill these jobs with top talent is to raise our game in recruiting and investing in our federal workforce," the organization said in a released statement.

You can read more on this topic here and here.

I understand that it's hard to sync up the timing of agency actions with Congressional calendars, and that Senatorial relationships and prerogatives can't always be built and pursued in ways administrations would like. But the more synced up all those factors can be, the better chance the policies and changes that will be made will be stronger. That way, State and Congress don't run the risk of acting at cross purposes.

"Now, engineers study a lot in college. They neglect very important extracurricular activities. My girls went to school with engineers, [and] they said, 'Dad, they don't know how to dance, they don't know how to dress, they don't even know how to talk.' "

Isn't that a bit stereotypical? And doesn't it ignore the fact that there are, you know, female engineers?

Think of it this way. While Americans may have complex feelings about issues like the treatment of detainees, it's not an issue they're directly affected by. The Central Intelligence Agency isn't coming after you because they think you owe more taxes than you do. They aren't taking longer than you'd like to remediate a former industrial site you think might make a dandy playground for neighborhood kids. You never have to stand in line to mail a package to your aunt at a CIA field office. It's much harder to have a personal good experience of an institution you never interact with, but it's impossible to have a bad customer service experience with an agency that's totally inaccessible to you.

The Obama administration is hitting back against charges that Recovery Act jobs figures are unreliable and overstated.

In a post this morning on the White House blog, Ed DeSeve, a special advisor to the president for the stimulus, argues that while some relatively minor errors have been discovered, they do not change the "fundamental conclusions" that between 600,000 and 700,000 direct jobs were saved or created in its first seven months.

"It would be great if every report filed was correct the first time, on time, and contained no errors," DeSeve wrote. "But that's not realistic when 130,000 reports are being filed in a 10 day period. It would be great if the reviewers at the federal agencies could have found all the mistakes in the 20 days they had to do the job, gotten the reports back to the recipients to be fixed, and reposted - but again, that isn't realistic."

DeSeve also made a little news, verifying for the first time that 10 percent of stimulus recipients have yet to file any reports.

Earlier this week, ABC News discovered recipient reports which state that jobs were created in congressional districts that do not exist. Other media accounts have found anecdotal overcounting of jobs.

Government Executive reported last week that job totals may have been systematically undercounted as well.

Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has seized on a document which shows that the Recovery Board and the Office of Management and Budget purged 12 questionable recipients reports which claimed that a total of 60,000 jobs had been saved or created because they appeared unbelievable.

Issa sent a letter to Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney on Monday calling for an asterisk or footnote on Recovery.gov alerting visitors that the data is unreliable. "I am concerned that the RATB web site may be spreading inaccurate and misleading information to the American people," the letter said.

The dispute will come to a head Thursday as the Oversight Committee conducts a hearing on the stimulus implementation.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Rep Darrell Issa, Calif., is calling for the Office of Management and Budget to be present at an upcoming hearing on the stimulus. The Thursday hearing, called "How Recovery Act Recipients Account for their Use of Stimulus Dollars," will feature witnesses from the Government Accountability Office, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and the Education and Transportation Departments. But Issa says new information shows OMB is playing a more significant role than previously thought, particularly when it comes to filtering job creation numbers.

The minority committee office is citing a document obtained by USA Today which lists 12 stimulus fund recipients whose reports contained "unrealistic job data". The document states that "at the request of OMB, and with [RAT] Board concurrence" the reports were omitted from the most recent posting of data to Recovery.gov.

Issa and his staff say this instance is just one of many indicating serious issues with stimulus job reporting, but that it also shows OMB's significant role in vetting these jobs numbers.

"Now we learn that OMB is playing an active role in trying to filter information. Given this hands-on role that the administration is playing, it would be appropriate to have OMB represented at Thursday's hearing," Issa said.

The whole exercise makes me wonder about the wisdom of reporting requirements. It seems to me that there needs to be a balance between the value of compliance and the resources required to do comprehensive reporting on human capital goals, or any other subject. The goal of reporting requirements ought to be not simply measurement of trends but compliance with requirements: you ought to be reporting to prove, for example, you're making progress in the number of veterans you're hiring, or the fact that you're improving your retention rates. If reporting requirements consume enormous amounts of agency resources but don't actually act as an incentive for agencies, they may not be worth it.

There is a value, of course, in keeping track of agencies things continue to do poorly at. But those statistics are only useful if there's work going on behind those numbers to figure out why agencies aren't improving. Numbers are just numbers. If there are good processes attached to them, that's when they become meaningful.