GovernmentExecutive.com

It seems to be Whoops Day today. Bullet point one:

The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, its pages marked "highly confidential," that gives detailed information about hundreds of the nation's civilian nuclear sites and programs, including maps showing the precise locations of stockpiles of fuel for nuclear weapons.

The article seems to imply that the information released isn't hugely more detailed than what's already public knowledge. Reading the back-and-forth about who might be responsible for the leak, however, is a non-confidence-inspiring experience.

Then, there's this:

Nearly a fifth of the equipment -- including computers -- assigned to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory workers laid off in 2008 could not be immediately accounted for after their departure, according to a report released Tuesday by a U.S. Energy Department inspection office. In addition, nine laptops were reported stolen from the lab's employees between July and January -- four of them having been left in plain view inside cars, the report noted.

Don't worry, though, it's not like LLNL is home to any incredibly sensitive technologies or anything like that. This incident, however, actually has an interesting management dimension. Ed O'Keefe, covering the latest incident, makes the point that this is in some ways a human capital and transition management issue:

Amid budget cuts, Livermore laid off more than 2,000 staffers last year, with roughly 750 receiving termination notices on the same day they were asked to leave. "All of these terminations potentially necessitated updates to the property database, but the involuntary terminations had the potential to pose particular challenges because of the immediacy of individuals' departures." (Departing workers may have been more focused on stunned good-byes than mundane paperwork related to the disposition of government computers. Shocker.)
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The big problem here? Training. The lab didn't provide adequate guidance to employees about keeping tabs on equipment, relying instead on an informal training process. Chalk this up as another example of a government agency trimming training costs from tight budgets. But also add this to a long list of incidents involving the loss of government property at the hands of employees who fail to follow the rules.

A solid reminder that procedures are important, but they don't mean much unless you've got a workforce with the training and morale to carry them out.

So this is why John Berry started his first day early: he spent the first two hours of that day standing in the lobby at the Office of Personnel Management, shaking hands with and introducing himself to his new employees. Folks I talked to said that's a first for a director, and it's certainly consistent with the tone Berry said he wants to set at hist confirmation. Another first: Berry is the first director to arrive with his top leadership team entirely in place at the agency, which should help him off to a fast start. That's been a huge problem at other agencies, noticeably Treasury. Obviously the strains and pressures are different. But Berry and his colleagues at OPM will play a big role in making sure agencies have what they need to spend and oversee stimulus funding effectively, so I'm sure he'll take whatever head start he can get.

This is one of the bad things about serious backlogs: sometimes people lie to reduce them. At OPM Director John Berry's confirmation hearing, Sen. George Voinovich pushed him hard to commit to clearing the security clearances backlog and to familiarize himself with the proposals to do so. Berry said he would, but the news that federal prosecutors have charged six investigators in two states and the District with lying about whether they did the work to properly check the backgrounds of employees up for clearances will probably--and should probably--shoot that review to the top of his priorities list.

The Postal Service is cutting a rural airmail service, at savings of $46,000 according to Federal Times. I'm actually not shocked by this, and thing service contractions will probably become more common as electronic communication becomes increasingly dominant and universal. But getting mail remains one of the great simple pleasures of life, especially when it's something you're excited to receive, and for folks who aren't yet wired, it's a lifeline, especially because rural areas are some of the places most underserved by high-speed internet service.

John Berry begins his first week as director of the Office of Personnel Management today, and while I'm sure he's relieved the confirmation process is over, I am as well. Nominations are a pain to cover. The person you're writing about typically isn't available to the media, so you spend a lot of time running around and talking to people who worked with the nominee five or ten or fifteen years ago and stringing together stories that do a lot of speculation about what positions the nominee might take and what they might be like in office. So I'm glad reviews are going to get underway, and policies are going to start getting made.

And it's not just me I'm glad for. Requests for personnel reform are piling up, and the stimulus in particular has created a real impetus for change. At the beginning of the last new administration, OPM director Kay Cole James didn't get confirmed until July 11, more than three months later than Berry got confirmed. Three months may not seem like a lot, but if Berry gets up to speed three months earlier, and starts making policy three months more quickly than his predecessor at the beginning of an administration, that's a good thing.

Jezebel, a women's blog in the Gawker Media family, runs an occasional series about old-school romance novels. This week, they feature one that centers on a progressive, spunky, 1955 human resources manager, that apparently features dialogue like this:

"It's so simple. People, employees, are the core of any business. No number of machines or methods or merchandise are of any use unless you have efficient, willing employees. They're human beings. You have to treat them humanely."

Cute!

I don't know the vote yet, but Colleen Kelley sends the following:

I am pleased to see bipartisan approval by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee of the nomination of John Berry to be director of the Office of Personnel Management. This office plays a vital role in the federal government and I believe he will bring to the job an in-depth understanding of the critical role federal employees and their agencies play in helping resolve many of the problems our nation now faces. I look forward to his speedy confirmation by the full Senate.

More to come.

Matt Yglesias points to Lee Sigelman's crunching of the numbers from the most recent Office of Personnel Management biannual survey. Sigelman found that the four dimensons federal employees rate their agencies on--leadership, performance, talent and job satisfaction--were closely correlated, and so you could use them to produce an overall ranking of agencies from best-run to worst-run in the eyes of their employees.

I'm glad to see this data get some wider play, if only because it reinforces the fact that rank-and-file employees are the folks who often have the best perspective on how their agency is doing. But I think it's not actually useful to boil the numbers down and say that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is doing quite well, and the Broadcast Board of Governors not so much. Combining all four dimensions makes for a handy chart, but it actually steers conversation away from the specific reasons why employees perceive their agencies well or poorly. Workers may think their agency does a poor job of recruiting strong talent, and then also does a poor job of rewarding excellent performance. But while they may be likely to think both of those things, the solution for each problem is different. And solving each problem individually has to happen for agencies to become fully successful.

OMB distributed initial guidance to agencies today on how to implement the stimulus package. We’ll have a full story up in a few hours but I wanted to share some initial thoughts, particularly on agencies’ reporting requirements for Recovery.gov.

-- Agencies must establish policies for posting to the ‘Announcements’ section of the site in press release form in addition to providing the financial data and summary descriptions of all major actions.

-- Recovery.gov will not just consolidate existing data; it requires more extensive reporting than existing regulations. For example, under the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, agencies are only required to report information above $25,000 to USASpending.gov. The stimulus act requires reporting on ALL funding, although guidance on reporting these small actions is till forthcoming.

-- OMB is stressing the importance of accuracy in Recovery.gov data. Agencies are expected to complete reviews of the information before it is posted on the site and an information quality point-of-contact will be listed on each agency’s Recovery.gov page.

-- For contracts over $500,000, agencies must provide a summary of the contract or order, including a description of the required products and services, to be posted online.

Points like these litter the 62-page memo. Some of the recovery reporting, I imagine, will just entail extending the parameters of existing requirements, but some will cost significant time and effort. Writing press releases and reviewing financial data takes manpower; do agencies have it? The other unknown is the extent to which the White House and OMB can come down on agencies for complying with these reporting guidelines. It’s one thing if agencies are dragging their feet to avoid being transparent, it’s quite another if they don’t have the capacity to meet the requirements.

Sister site Lost in Transition points out that if Hilda Solis is confirmed, 230,000 federal employees from State, Interior, Transportation, Commerce, the CIA and Labor will be run by former Congressmen. That's a lot of department and agency heads without a lot of organizational management experience. There are some exceptions (Leon Panetta ran the Office of Management and Budget, for example.), but it's going to be very interesting to see how these new leaders adapt to the management challenges they encounter.