Transcript
MR. MIKE ARMACOST: We welcome you here this morning for the press briefing on this report, "To Restore and Renew: A New Report on the State of the Federal Public Service.
I think we are all aware that the public service has been the object of a great deal of attention recently. It seems we're in one of those periods in which, for reasons of national defense and security of the home, the public will rely not only on the quality of our public service, but we'll need to augment it. I think the performance of the police and the fire department in New York, a noble performance, has affected attitudes throughout the country of all public servants in a very favorable way.
The health of the public service has long been a preoccupation of the Brookings Institution, particularly the Center for Public Service, which is directed by Paul Light and Judy Labiner, have made real substitute contributions to the study of the public service. They have just completed a ground-breaking survey of federal employees for the purpose of this report, the Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed more than a thousand federal employees who were contacted at home, and given a rare opportunity to speak quite candidly about their service.
The results of their report have been published as a special take-out section in the November issue of Government Executive Magazine, and I'd like to thank Tim Clark and the staff of Government Executive for their splendid work on this project.
The survey finds that the challenges and expectations facing the public service are greater than ever before. Indeed, in light of the terrorist attacks, we're reminded not only of how crucial a federal public service is in times of crisis, but there is a need, and, according to public opinion, a desire, that the federal government play a larger role in the war on terrorism at home and abroad.
We're very delighted to have this morning Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and former chairman of the National Commission on the Public Service, known as the Volcker Commission, with us. Welcome, Paul. Now let me turn the podium over to Tim Clark, president and editor of Government Executive Magazine.
MR. TIM CLARK: Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here, and my role is to introduce Paul Light and then later on to help field questions.
Paul's most distinguishing characteristic is that for 12 years he's been a columnist, off and on, for Government Executive Magazine, or at least we'd like to think so. He does have other credentials. And I got to know him, I think, first when he was the executive director of the Volcker Commission, the National Commission on the Public Service, which decried a quiet crisis in the public service in 1989.
He then went off to teach at the University of Minnesota, and then went the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia which undertook a major, major league effort to fund research on the public service and on various aspects of government. Many reports and research projects in this town that have been issued in the last several years are a result of Paul's work there in Philadelphia, at the Pew Charitable Trusts. And then, of course, he had migrated south to Brookings, where he heads the Center for the Public Service and is Vice President for Governmental Affairs—that's not quite right—Governmental Studies.
He is the author of 14 books—or is it 14 1/2? We tried to count, and we weren't quite sure. But they incorporate some of this research that I've been talking about. For example, there's a book that was published a few years back called Thickening Government in which Paul carefully documented the fact that government was suffering from more and more layers, and there's something like 35—or is it 50—layers between the top of the agency and the front line worker.
It might be worth noting that, now, in his position as Vice President and Director of Governmental Studies and as Director for the Center for Public Service, he is suffering from some title creep himself. He has a Deputy to the Vice President on his staff now, and also a Deputy Director of the Presidential Appointee Initiative, which he also runs. And I hear rumors that he might be trying to hire a chief of staff, so he may have three or four layers himself before we know it.
Another book that he wrote, and that we had the privilege of publishing in summary form in the magazine, was called "The Two Sides of Government." And that's the cover of the January 1999 issue. He later updated it in this issue here in which he made a very interesting argument that government is under-measured. When Clinton said the era of big government was over, he was relying principally, if not exclusively, on the decline of civil service headcount, 1.8 million people. This way of measuring the federal government, which seeks to measure all of the jobs in the economy that are a consequence of federal spending or regulation or other activity, puts the headcount at 17 million, or one in eight jobs in the economy. And I think that study has helped to change the debate about what truly is government. It has effected the debate about outsourcing, and so on.
Another book he's written, he wrote recently, was entitled The New Public Service, playing on this theme. If you are in public service, does that mean you're in government? No, not necessarily. You can be doing the work of the public sector in other parts of the economy, including the nonprofit sector and the for-profit sector. His current column in Government Executive Magazine, as usual, pulls no punches. He takes on Mitch Daniels, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, as someone who is more interested in a kind of ideological outsourcing initiative and not truly interested in developing the capabilities that arguably we need in the federal government and contrasts that approach to the approach taken by Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. I'm not going to say any more, except to say that we are privileged once again to have published this very interesting report on federal workers' view of their own workplace that Paul is now going to describe.
MR. PAUL C. LIGHT: I'm going to talk for just about 10 or 15 minutes about the report and then turn this over for comments from Paul Volcker, who is both taller than me and more distinguished for sure. Before getting going I want to thank the team at the Center for Public Service that helped put this together: Judith Labiner, Mary McIntosh from Princeton Survey Research, Sherra Merchant, Michael Wiesenfelder, Susan Stewart, Elizabeth McAlpine and Bill Fanaras. All were involved in this at one time or another.
The team at Government Executive has been terrific, if often brutal. Most notably Tom Shoop, who's sitting in the front row, who called me upon getting this piece and said that he had gotten the assignment—somebody had to do it—to edit this gigantic piece, and it's beautifully set and beautifully done. And I appreciate the input of Anne Laurent who was not involved in the editing, but has always scared me into being more aggressive and having more confidence in the research, to let the research speak more powerfully on some of these issues.
The Washington Post this morning argued, or took a look at, these data and came to the conclusion that we've got a lot of poor performers in government. But I want to talk just briefly about a more nuanced portrait that emerges from this study, which I had originally titled "Against the Odds." That was the original working title.
We also tried the title, "The Quiet Crisis Roars," but somebody over at Government Executive said, well, crises don't roar, lions roar; you can't use that title. I think it was Tim Clark, who was correcting me yet again on my poor grammar.
We do have a strong public service in the federal government but the main point I want to leave with you today is that it is woefully, and I use that term very deliberately, woefully under-resourced and under-supported.
There is a substantial number of federal employees who come to work each day wanting to make a difference to this country, but they do so against the odds. They report to us that they do not have the access to training, technology. They do not have the access to information or staff needed to do their jobs well. Now, that doesn't mean that they are not doing their jobs well, it means that they're doing their jobs against the odds in spite of the lack of support from their agencies, from the president, and from Congress. Moreover, I'd say to you that they tell us that they have been over-reinvented, over-reformed, over-layered over the years.
A substantial number of federal employees do say they have been reinvented—it's about 75 percent—which begs the question, where were the other 25 percent during the Vice President's reinventing campaign? John Palguta from Merit System Protection Board has done quite a bit of surveying on these issues. I don't know how you could be a federal employee and miss the reinventing. But that may say something about reinventing government and its penetration down to the lower levels of government. But of the people who say they've been reinvented, or their organizations have been reinvented, federal employees say that the reinvention has made their jobs either somewhat or more difficult to do.
In the private sector, our matched sample says that there is less reinventing, but the reinventing that does occur is more effective in making jobs easier to do. So we have a situation here where we've got talented people, the vast majority of federal employees who are committed and come to work to make a difference, who are under-resourced and under-supported. Now that doesn't mean there are not problems in the federal service. I guess that's a double negative. There are problems in the federal service, I'll talk about them.
But I want to say today that, you know, this is a survey that is both positive and troubling. It should be affirming to those of you who care about the federal public service because there's an endurance and a perseverance in the federal public service, but there has also been 12 years, maybe 15, maybe 20, of benign and deliberate neglect of the public service, and we need to do something about it.
Now, in this survey report I define five components of a health public service. So I guess because I've got this gray beard and I've worked on this long enough, I decided that I get to decide what constitutes a healthy public service, and you can disagree with me; that's okay. I get a regular, weekly phone call from the White House or OMB telling me that my stock is in free-fall, they don't like what I'm saying about the presidential appointments process, they don't like what I'm saying about outsourcing. They disagree with me frequently. You all can join the club.
I said that there were five characteristic of a healthy public service. Number one, that a healthy public service is motivated primarily by the chance to accomplish something worthwhile. That's what makes it a public service. Pay, security, and benefits are important but the thing that should bring a federal employee to work each day at the core of his or her existence is the desire to serve this country.
Number two, that a healthy public service is composed and led by the most talented citizens out there. I'm so tired of hearing federal recruiters tell me at the end of the year that, thank goodness, we recruited the top of the bottom quartile this year. We aimed for the top of the bottom quartile and we got it. That is not a healthy public service. A healthy public service aims for the top of the labor market, not just the applicants who happen to find or stumble upon a federal job that might be interesting to them.
Number three, a healthy public service is given the tools and training and organizational settings in which to succeed. I mean, if you get good people who are rightly motivated and you're recruiting talented people, you ought to give them the resources to do their jobs. You shouldn't make it difficult to succeed.
Number four, a healthy public service is rewarded for a job well done. Poor performance is disciplined, poor performance is addressed. And number five, the healthy public service has the respect of the people it serves, both at the top of government in its political leadership on Capitol Hill and in the public at large. The health of the public service according to our research is next.
This is a research study that involved a random digit dialing phone survey of over a thousand federal employees, and the reason we did random digit dialing is that we wanted to catch federal employees at home. We wanted to talk to them about life in their organizations. We said nothing to them at the beginning of this survey about being a federal employee. We just said we want to talk to you about work. What's it like to work in your organization. We didn't want to put them on the defensive by talking about federal government, or what it's like to be a federal employee or a government employee. We just wanted to talk about work.
We did a matched sample of private sector employees, and we're about to go into the field shortly with a survey of non-profit employees to find out sort of what is the state of the public service at large. Many federal employee came to the federal government, I think, for troublesome reasons, for the security, the paycheck, and the benefits. Now, you know, that is just part of the equation. Our matched sample of private employees suggest that private employees come to work for the pay, the security and the benefits. But for me as someone who cares about public service I wanted to see more federal employees saying they came to the federal government for the chance to accomplish something worthwhile. That's not to say that they are out of—completely out of correlation with the private sector, but I wanted to see more of that concern for the public good.
We also asked in this survey an open-ended question saying: Why do you come to work each day? Just an open ended question. And we coded this. Michael Wiesenfelder and Judy Labiner worked immensely to code this, Judy in particular.
I mean, actually here the federal public service compares well with the private sector. The federal employee comes to work each day more motivated by the nature of the job, the challenging work, more motivated by the public good and less motivated by the pay and compensation than the private employees do. And on the airport security issue, which is at hand before Congress right now, I would argue to you that federal employees will do a better job at airport security than private employees. I'm not just talking private employees who haven't been doing a particularly outstanding job before September 11th on airport security. I'm talking about any private employees that we would recruit to do this job through contracts, and we can talk about this perhaps during the question and answer session.
On recruitment of the most talented Americans, we believe, the Partnership for Public Service believes, the Council for Excellence in Government believes, Senator Voinovich and others, the General Accounting Office, we all believe that the federal government is having trouble attracting the best and brightest. There are problems in advertising. If you go to OPM—usajobs.opm.gov, which is the only way you can get to the jobs list, and you look at the hot jobs section, you will not be overwhelmed by the persuasive advertisements you confront. They may be hot jobs, but you need a Ph.D. to understand the descriptions. There are problems in this survey in morale. And I should say, that I do not believe these statistics would be changed dramatically by the September 11th events. I think federal employees actually today are more frustrated than they were before September 11th with the lack of adequate resources, access to training to do their jobs. Our hiring system in the federal government is, not surprisingly, perceived by federal employees as both slow and confusing, whereas private employees see their hiring processes as being fast and simple.
What is ironic to me is that 25 percent of federal employees refuse to declare the hiring system fair. Seventy-five percent said it was fair. It's slow, confusing, 75 percent fair, but 25 percent —that's a substantial minority—did not say it was fair, compared to the private sector which is fast, simple, and more private employees see their hiring system as fair than federal employees. The private sector is clearly doing a better job, "cleaning our clock," so to speak, on hiring our talented employees. And we're all talking about how to give the federal government more capacity to do this quickly.
On tools and resources, this is the very significant downside of the survey for me. There's under-resourcing at all levels of the federal government. There are complaints about information, technology, training and staffing. Fifty-nine percent of federal employees tell us that they sometimes or rarely have the staff needed to do their jobs. Now, there's a little bit of complaining about leanness that you find in any organization. Every organization should have a mission a little bit larger than its staff. That's part of motivating people to work harder. And we should be lean and mean in the federal government, but the private sector does not have the same level of leanness and meanness.
And I think what the federal employees are telling us is that we went just too far with the downsizing, and we need to bulk up. And I think there's plenty of contemporary evidence that we have a long way to go, whether in hiring more border patrol, hiring immigration inspectors. Across the board, we are seeing the effects in this post-September 11 period of under-investment lasting for the better part of two decades. As I said earlier, federal employees also tell us that they were over-reformed, a very high percentage saying that they'd been reinvented, a very low percentage say that the reinventions helped them.
On the fourth measure of the healthy public service, which is being rewarded for a job well done, there's very little evidence in this survey that federal employees believe that they get rewarded for a job well done. They believe the promotion system is not linked to performance. They believe there's no room at the top, middle or bottom for advancement. Pay freezes have worked their will on the federal hierarchy by producing thickening. There's a lack of funding for retention. Although the Bush administration says that 80 percent of the authorities needed to correct these problems are already in statute, those authorities existed in 1989 when the Volcker Commission issued its report. And those authorities require money. There's not a nickel of new funding in the Bush budget for actually using those authorities. So, it's one thing to say the authorities exist, and we'd had those authorities in legislation coming out of the House and the Senate over the years, and from the White House, but we've never put the money into the system.
Hard piece of evidence here that we need to talk about, those of us who care about a strong public service. We have to tell the truth that there are poor performers in the federal government.
Now, I think the number is larger than the less than one percent who are graded as unsatisfactory in the annual performance appraisal process, which I once described as having created a situation here in Washington that resembled "Lake Wobegon East." Fifty-five percent of federal managers in 1997 were rated outstanding, and I'm sure they were. But the rating system itself is plagued by hyper-inflation, and we need to come up or address the issue that there may be higher poor performance than just the less than one percent.
I also believe that poor performance is larger than the 3.7 percent found in a study by OPM two years ago. Federal employees themselves estimate that 24 percent of their peers are not performing their jobs well. That is actually a number that is lower than the private sector. Let me make that very clear, because the coverage of this issue in The Washington Post and on Capitol Hill, likely, will be that there are a lot of poor performers in the federal government. But the number of poor performers in the federal government, is actually statistically equal to the estimated number of poor performers in the private sector.
Where the federal government does more poorly than the private sector is in disciplinary systems. Federal employees believe that the current disciplinary systems do not do a good job at disciplining poor performance. Private sector employees see their disciplinary systems as better, which begs the question: if private employees see the disciplinary process in their organizations has been more effective, why does the number of poor performers in the private sector equal—perceived poor performers—equal the number in the public sector? It could be that if we had a disciplinary system that was a little more pliable, a little faster, than we'd have even lower poor performance in the federal government. I don't know. It's hard data to interpret.
But I want to put on the table that we have a poor performance problem. I also want to put on the table that it is about the same as the poor performance problem in the private sector, and we ought not to make too much of this data, but we ought to do about it for those of us who care about the federal government.
Finally, does the federal service have the respect and confidence of the people it serves? The answer is yes and no. Yes, there's been a surge in trust in government over the last six weeks. Yes, there's tremendous hope that that the federal government is going to meet the challenges. We released a survey three weeks ago that's available at our website, Brookings website, of www.brookings.edu. It can be found on the Presidential Appointee Initiative website. But there is also persistent concern among the public about what motivates federal employees, consistent worries about inefficiency. And even federal employees themselves have questions about whether their agencies can be trusted to help people spend money wisely or be fair. And there's some troubling signs there about whether federal employees see their own organizations as being effective.
In conclusion, there's good news and bad news from the survey for those who care about the federal service. The good news is that we have a better work force than the stereotypes suggest. It's mostly committed, it's mostly making a difference, it's mostly composed of people that we want to be in those jobs. And I'm telling you, I would not take the private sector over the federal work force for anything in the war on terrorism. It's just a better work force in terms of its motivation, coming into work each day, and I think it's a better work force in terms of its perseverance.
That said, the bad news is that the federal public service is mostly standing still right now. There's a desperate need for resources in the agencies. The crying shame here in the survey is that many federal employees do not see that they have the tools to do their jobs. And that is a persistent and significant problem, whether you're talking about information technology, training or, more significantly, staff. The retirement exposure, the talent wars, the under-resourcing, suggest to me that the quiet crisis identified by the Volcker Commission back in 1989 is indeed about to roar, no matter how bad the grammar is.
(Laughter.)
There's nobody better to comment on the quiet crisis then, and the quiet crisis now, the loud crisis perhaps, than Paul Volcker. Mike Armacost introduced Paul. I met Paul for the first time in September of 1988 when I was called to the Volcker Commission to replace Charlie Levine who had died suddenly and was the Deputy Director of the Commission.
I have stayed with this issue, in part, because of Charlie, and we want to honor his memory as we struggle to make some progress on these issues. I was intimidated by Paul Volcker then, not just because he's one smart individual, but he's also a whole lot taller than I am. And I have become over the years very impressed to call him both a friend and a colleague. Paul, you're up to comment on this.
Thank you very much.
(Applause. Momentary breaking in recording.)
MR. PAUL VOLCKER: Well, I haven't heard this eloquence in a continuous way from you before, so I'm very impressed.
(Laughter.)
All those books and columns and everything else. I sit here and I want a clear understanding in the audience. He's "Paul Light;" I am Paul, comma, "Lite." Like Bud Lite, or something.
(Applause.)
We both have an interest in the public service, but you've seen some sample of how Paul has kept after this, at a time when I think a lot of things about the public service, I found this survey encouraging because it didn't look as bad as one would have expected, in a lot of other surveys have shown in recent years about the decline in trust and confidence in government at all levels, and maybe most particularly the federal level. And there was some evidence that this was changing a little bit before September 11th, over a couple of years, some indistinct evidence that the level of trust wasn't quite as bad, that the respect of government employees was not as bad as it had been. But let's face it. The decade of the 1990s was a decade of glory for the private sector. We may have overdone it a bit. Maybe some of the economic events suggest we overdid it a bit in a number of directions. But I think one way we overdid it is in relative deification of the private sector as opposed to the government sector is quite different than the way it was 40 or 50 years ago when I first came into the government. And one of the interesting things now is, of course, whether recent developments will perhaps hasten and reinforce the change in attitude that was perhaps beginning before these recent events. It's hard to take the position that government isn't important and the quality of government employment is not important, in light of recent events.
I am reminded of one famous and infamous director of the Office of Personnel Management, if I recall correctly, that 20 years ago pronounced that it was good enough to have mediocre people in government because, after all, we want a government to do a limited and mediocre job. I think it is very hard to take that position in present circumstances.
I was up at the Kennedy School just last weekend, where they having a kind of annual celebration that they have, and they were giving some awards to distinguished public servants, including—Doug Bereuter actually got one of the awards, and some of the people that contributed to the school and some of the young students. But I have to tell you, that after the events in New York and Washington, while this dinner had been going on for some years, it was a real celebration, I think, amid tragedy, of the importance of public service, the challenge of public service and what Harvard and a lot of other institutions can contribute in a kind of fairly—exuberance is not right word under normal circumstances—but a renewed interest in conviction about what they were doing up here. And I think that's true in a lot of other places.
There is some sense—we have what Paul is doing here in Brookings with Mike Armacost, quite different, I think, in level of intensity and quality and what Brookings itself is doing. Some time ago, the thing that Max Stier is heading, whose name escapes me for the moment—Center for Public Service—
MR. LIGHT: Partnership for Public Service.
MR. VOLCKER: —Partnership for Public Service. Council for Excellence is active, other organizations are getting active. And I think you see some signs of interest even in the United States Congress proceeding the events of last month, which is encouraging. Some of the key senatorial people, particularly on the right committees, have had an interest in doing something about public service, particularly recruitment and making the job more attractive and more manageable. That, I sense, is a little unlike when we had the big Commission on Public Service that Paul referred to, 13 years ago now, 12 or 13 years ago, and we went at it for a couple of years, did a lot of research with this, produced some pretty fat volumes. And Paul came in and drafted, with a little editorial help here and there, the report, made a lot of, I think, very sensible suggestions. It got a prize, actually, the report. Unfortunately, it got a prize for its graphics rather than its content.
(Laughter.)
The graphics helped a little bit. But outside of schools of public administration, the academic community, or inside government itself, it did not get a lot of attention. It was not the mood of the country. And we relabeled it a quiet crisis. And now I think there is a feeling suddenly, maybe overdone, that there is a big crisis in public service. Why didn't we anticipate this terrorism? Why didn't we have an answer to it? Where were all the Arabic speakers? Who were the speakers of languages in Afghanistan we'd never heard of a month or two ago? What's the matter with the FBI? What's the matter with the CIA? These wonderful agencies that we used to think attracted the best and the brightest and did a terrific job, and I'm not saying they don't, because there's a lot of different questioning now than there was before.
Paul has given me a little list of what we recommended 12 or 13 years ago and what's happened since then, and not enough until recently. I think there's kind of a second chance, but we were very concerned at that time that governmental leaders themselves were—political leaders were not paying enough attention to this problem, they were more inclined to badmouth the public service than to talk about its importance, and the honorable role that public servants played. I think that is something that's begun to change a little a bit, as I suggested, and certainly changed since September 11th, with all this enormous respect for New York City policemen and firemen, and other people, and the military itself that flowed out of those events, that you recognize that there are people out there serving us every day that really deserve our respect. But I think that's still got a long ways to go.
What strikes me in the response to some of this crisis is something that's been around for a long time. We inveighed against it in the Commission years ago, and that is, both the numbers of political appointments in government and the increasing difficulty of attracting the right people to those appointments and getting them confirmed.
I was, you know, generally aware of this, we're all aware of this. But I was down here with Paul talking to a couple of senators in May. But he keeps a little checklist of the appointment process, how many people have been nominated, how many peoples names have been sent to the Congress, who's in hearings, who's been confirmed, who's in office. This was in early May. Every cabinet officer, every cabinet secretary at that point had been confirmed. I think there were two deputy secretaries, however many cabinet officers he have, and one assistant secretary in the State Department, as I recall, and one assistant secretary in the Treasury Department. And that was it—in May, three months after the President was appointed. And the Treasury, which I know a little bit more about, the undersecretaries and mostly assistant secretaries I guess were not finally in place until July or August. And you have a major national crisis in September, and you wonder why there may have been a little fumbling in the dealing with that crisis as we spent six months after inauguration day, not after election day, getting the top level of the administration in place.
Now, you're talking here about a handful of appointments. There are 3,000 or so presidential appointments, and in most recent administrations, they never get around to appointing them all, at least not all of them at the same time. By the time the last of the 3,000 get appointed, the first 3,000 have already resigned. I don't think it's any way to run a government, and it seems to me the cure has to come from both directions—fewer political appointments, and you will get better political appointments, and they would find themselves with more authority if they had competent career people at the top level in place in positions of responsibility.
So you've got to work on it in both directions. And I'm afraid that's an area where the earlier commission felt very strongly about, and I don't think there's been any progress at all. I don't know if it's gotten worse, but it's gotten worse in length of time to get people confirmed. I don't know that it's gotten worse in terms of numbers, but it surely hasn't gotten any better.
We spent a lot of time talking the other end of things, the nuts and bolts of government employment, about recruiting and recruiting flexibility, and how you get the word out to people that government jobs are needed. You get the information to the right people. You get them able to come in and be interviewed, find out whether they fit the slot and get appointed for less than six or 12 months. And I still hear the same complaints from college students and others, that getting a job in the government is a kind of obstacle course, it's the grand national of obstacle courses, three times around the ring. And not many horses make the grand national when they've got to jump over that many hoops, and the federal government has that problem, still has the problem, even though I think some measures are taken, partly in response to the earlier commission to change the laws and change the presumed degree of flexibility that some of the agencies had.
I think what run through this all that government's going to have to respect, it's got to have a feeling that it does operate efficiently at a high level. That's a difficult thing to measure and not to talk about, but to get results. And certainly these means of doing something about the poor performers and not everybody rated as excellent and nobody rated as poor, and that's the easy thing for people to do in government when they're not here very long anyway and don't have to take responsibility for the long-range health of the agencies. Something has got to be done about it.
We have had some introduction of locality pay and pay comparability. I don't think it's going far enough, but at least some change has been made. Paul has a statistical bent of mind. He's gone through all the recommendations you've made and he gave a rather generous mark that one-third of the recommendations we made had some implementation. I think you'll have to put the emphasis in the word "some" to come up with as much as a third. And a lot of it didn't. You've got a big pay problem still.
You can count us as having had some influence there because there was a pay reform after our report to join with other things. There hasn't been any pay reform, really, in 10 years, I suspect, that amounts to anything. The whole idea of comparability is reinforced as rhetoric and is not carried out very consistently. [It's] been a persistent problem of the federal government for years and years. There're still all kinds of problems in recruitment and rewarding performance, and so forth and so on.
So, there's a lot to be done. And I just hope we can take advantage of this change in spirit, the sense that there is at least little pockets of support in the Congress for doing something, take advantage out of this great tragedy for actually doing something that should have been done long ago, and more fundamental reform and changing both attitudes and performance.
I am encouraged by the number of different groups that are interested in this at this point. Paul Light is a one-man focal point for much of this. And I know he's sparked up a little group to help him here, and that's all very encouraging. I hope we can all give him the support he needs. And we've been looking pretty hard at ways that we can take advantage of this situation and reinforce what's going on here, reinforcing what's going on in the Kennedy School, reinforcing all the other things that are being suggested here as ways to get some coalescence and get some real reform in this area.
So that's about all I want to say. But I'd be interested in looking at all these experienced people around here and see what they have to say, what comments they might have on this little effort.
MR. CLARK: Let me moderate a little bit and maybe ask the first question.
Paul, I know that you have subdivided the work force into the terrorism work force and the people in the workforce who don't do work on terrorism in this study. And I think you have come up with a figure, and it's through the Presidential Appointee Initiative, that 164 positions now are vacant, basically, at the top levels of agencies that are important in doing that anti-terrorism work. Could you talk just a little bit about that?
MR. LIGHT: Yeah, yeah. I mean this is data that actually Michael Hafken and the Presidential Appointee Initiative maintains. The 164 positions, presidential Senate confirmed positions, involved in the war on terrorism, homeland defense and bioterrorism. Of those 164, 119 are currently occupied. That leaves us with a vacancy rate of about 27 percent. That's not bad. It doesn't give us to know that we don't have a Food and Drug Commissioner yet identified. There's a battle on Capitol Hill between Senator Kennedy and the White House on that position, so no one has been announced. It doesn't give us great comfort to know that there isn't a director of NIH yet identified.
But the number of filled positions in the war on terrorism at large is higher than the number of filled position in government at large. That's a 72 percent fill rate versus about a 58 percent fill rate, more or less. Right, Michael? Michael always comes to these events. He never is prepared to be called upon, and I won't have him stand here. But he's done terrific work on this issue.
Now, if you re-examine these data, and say well, when did they allow, which is what Paul was asking about, you've got about 34 or 35 percent of the positions either vacant or occupied by somebody who was confirmed after September 11th. That looks a little worse, doesn't it?
Then if we, well, what about the positions that are either vacant or confirmed after August 1, on or after August 1? August 1 was a big day. The Senate went out that day. They confirmed a large number of appointees. That's about 44 percent. So we've got a lot of vacancies and we've got a lot rookies. And then if you go back and you say, what about after July 4th?, that number climbs up to about 50 percent. And it's disquieting. Americans shouldn't be troubled by it, but neither can they be comforted by it, and that's the bottom line here. It shouldn't give us pause that those positions are vacant, per se, because there are career people occupying those posts. But there's this whole group of people who aren't there. You just imagine a picture with all these empty frames. So when we look at the homeland security issue, who's not standing up there with Tom Ridge? Well, the NIH director isn't standing there, and the Food and Drug Commissioner isn't standing there, and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Terrorism isn't standing there. And I'm just like—it's like this picture that's kind of cut out, or the picture in the pocket of the character from "Back to the Future" where everybody was sort of fading away.
We can't be comforted by having a full team in place. We're playing seven-person baseball right now. And even the Arizona Diamondbacks couldn't win the World Series with seven.
MR. VOLCKER: They didn't need the outfielders. (Laughter.)
MR. LIGHT: Yeah that's—I'm not going to tell you who I'm rooting for in that series. But we may have a conflict between the New Yorker on this dias and the Midwesterner.
MR. CLARK: Let me ask one other question. Can you talk a little bit about what's going on in Congress, of Voinovich and others showing some interest in Civil Service reform measures? What advice would you give to the Bush administration, which so far seems mainly interested in outsourcing? The OMB Director, Mitch Daniels, has said that he wants to examine 900,000 jobs, or some number like that, to see whether they should be out-sourced to the private sector, which seems in conflict with the goal of attracting better people in the public service. Maybe either one of you could comment on that.
MR. LIGHT: Why don't you start and I'll—?
MR. VOLCKER: Well, my own cynical view of this is lot of hocus pocus. People focus on the number of government employees and you do the same work by farming it out to some "beltway bandits", should I say? Some, they may be very competent, but they also get paid more. And so it's a way to do the same work elsewhere. And I think a certain amount of competition is good. But I do think the government has to—government employees have to be the ones that maintain oversight, even when it's a good idea to farm some of it out. And they have to be very competent people if they're going to do their job well and be well trained and well experienced.
But I think you've got to be careful about what you farm out and what you don't farm out, and there's a case for doing it in some instances. But to the extent it's done just to get the numbers of government employees down, it's not right. Paul suggested airport security is better done by government employees. Well, I don't know whether that's right or wrong, but it shouldn't be done just for some—it shouldn't be farmed out simply to get the statistical number of government employees lower. And you may find out you're doing a bit larger purpose of the government into service (sic). And you want to look very carefully, I think, as to whether that should be a—it is a governmental responsibility. I don't think there's any doubt about that. So it's just a question of how you most effectively discharge what is a governmental responsibility and be pretty careful if you going to farm it out.
MR. LIGHT: In the airport security case, the President and his team have made the argument that we need private contractors because they can be hired and fired fast. Well, number one, it's not that difficult to fire a new federal employee once you have them, as John Palguta and MSPB point out.
Number two, under the Senate legislation, the federal employees hired for airport security have no protection. They are like the Vice President of the United States Hubert Humphrey, who once compared the Vice President as to like being naked in a blizzard with nothing but a match to keep you warm. I mean, under the Senate version of the airport security bill, no protections exist. I mean you could fire a federal employee doing airport security for looking at you wrong, and that employee would have no recourse. In fact, under the Senate Bill the federal employee has much less protection and is much more fireable than the private contractors who would be governed by existing federal laws regarding all sorts of protections against firing for age, race, whistle-blowing, gender harassment and so forth.
Number two, the real problem in airport security is not firing people: it is keeping people. One of the reasons the private contractors are so darn good at hiring people is because they have an enormous turnover problem. So they've gotten real good a finding whoever's out there and getting them on the job. In 1998-99, according to GAO, the average turnover in airport security positions at the 19 largest airports was 126 percent. It averaged more than 200 percent at Logan International, and it was 416 percent at St. Louis Lambert International. Now that kind of turnover rate is the reason why you learn how to hire fast, let me tell you, because you are always out there turning over rocks looking for people to do this function.
You know, I was tempted to say that in the best of all possible worlds we ought to have private contractors hiring federal employees to do this job, because the federal employees are so much better and would come to the job more motivated to do the right thing. But we don't have that best of all possible worlds. I will just end up saying, you know, there is a certain tone in this debate about just getting the jobs out of the federal government.
And on the outsourcing initiative from OMB, I think the OMB director missed a perfect opportunity to set the right tone immediately after September 11th by saying, look, let's take a breather from outsourcing for a few months until we get this thing sorted out. Instead, he came forward and said, through his deputy director, the will be no lessening of the pressure to outsource. And I think that was absolutely the wrong signal. I think it was inappropriate, and I think that OMB still has the opportunity to say "Let's take a breather. We're not going to stop outsourcing in the future, but let's stop it for a few months until we get our act together." And I just think that should have been done and can still be done.
Questions?
MR. CLARK: Questions, yes. Way in the back there.
Q: This question is for Paul Light. You touched briefly on the federal worker and information technology. Is the federal worker these days frustrated by the kind of gadgets being thrown at him and her, or are they able to use the kind of technology that is being created for them to make their work more efficient?
MR. LIGHT: There's a real paradox in the survey because federal employees, when asked about reform, tell us that the effort to modernize information technology has been very successful. It is the most successful reform of the six that we asked them about. The least successful reform, according to federal employees, is the effort to measure results. They think that's been a disaster. They think it has just done nothing for them, and one could argue that that is pretty much the case, that it doesn't matter to things that matter, like headcount and budget.
So, on the one hand, you have federal employees saying that information modernization has been the most successful initiative of the last 10 years or so, and, on the other hand, they are complaining they don't have access to information technology. So how do you square that circle?
One possibility is that we've done well at modernizing technology but we're not keeping up. So, yeah, you do have a computer on your desk, but you don't have the email or the intranet, or you don't have the latest software. Now we do know that the Civil Division at Justice does not have any Microsoft, and we can understand that. You have to go down the hall. There's one machine in the Civil Division that has Microsoft Word and employees can go to that machine and print things out, but they're not supposed to like doing that.
(Laughter.)
But throughout the rest of government, what I think we're seeing or hearing here, and I always say this about survey research—and Mary McIntosh is here, who's my sort of right hand with Judy Labiner on this—that when you're interpreting data, you kind of become like Shirley MacLaine. You're channeling the data, and you're speaking in voices. I think what we're hearing here is that we've made a lot of progress, but we still have far to go, and we've got to get into a routine updating, so that when you get a new system and it's starting to look like it's been three or four years since you got that system, you need to go to the next level. And that's probably what we're getting here.
MR. CLARK: Over there. Yes, Brian.
Q: What role should Kay Coles James at OPM play in improving the public—?
MR. LIGHT: What role should Kay Coles James play at OPM—she's the director of OPM—in improving the public service? Why don't you answer that?. (Laughter.)
MR. VOLCKER: I don't know the woman. But if she's in that job, she ought to take a leadership position. What else can one say? If she's actually in the office, she's confirmed and all that.
MR. LIGHT: I think you have an interesting answer here - that she's in office and he doesn't know her. Okay? One of your most visible, distinguished leaders on public service reform of the last 15 years has never met the OPM director. I think she's got a real task ahead of her to take the personnel leadership back from OMB. And OMB is holding onto this with, you know, with full fist and fury because they don't want OPM to have control over the policy-making apparatus. And Ms. James really needs to say "OPM's in charge of the reform effort. Thank you very much." It's going to cost money and we don't want it to be rooted in OMB, which is against spending money. She's got to aggressively pursue the leadership opportunity, and that involves getting people like Paul Volcker into town to stand with her and say "You're right, OPM should lead this."
MR. VOLCKER: You set me up for that question. (Laughter.)
MR. CLARK: Right here.
MR. LIGHT: I did not set you up. I just—I figured you wouldn't know her.
Q: I'm Charles Jeffress. Anything in the research on the reinvention question or any other research you've looked at recently speak to this thickening of government that you identified some years ago? Are we making progress on that or is it continuing as it was.
MR. LIGHT: We asked a question: Do you think there are too many layers between you and the top of your agency, too few, or just about the right number? If I'm remembering the statistic right, it was 44 percent said too many, a shocking 4 percent said few, too few, and the rest said about the right number. I think we're making some progress at the middle levels, but we've just got a ton of problems with pay compression, you know, layering issues. The Bush administration has launched a de-layering initiative, but it doesn't include political appointees.
Q: Well, they say it does.
MR. LIGHT: Well, it does not.
Q: Well, that's an interesting point.
MR. LIGHT: I'm going to get in trouble again. I mean, they say that political appointees are involved, but they are not involved. And, in fact, the Bush administration has been inventing new titles, just like every administration does. There's a new associate deputy secretary of Interior who had been rejected by the United States Senate, named James Cason, who had been rejected by the Senate in 1989 as an assistant secretary of Agriculture.
The Bush Administration didn't want to go through that agony again, so they created a new position for him as associate deputy secretary of Interior. So you got a situation where—and you know what they do is they say, well, there're so few political appointees. They're just a trivial number, a mere fraction, a mere drop in the ocean. But in terms of the numbers of layers they occupy, it's a significant number. That was the invention of the Volcker Commission to think about not the wrong number, but the layers occupied by political appointees. And political appointees occupy between 25 and 40 percent of the layers at key agencies like Customs, INS. You know, you look at FBI. I mean, you got a lot of layers between the top and bottom of these agencies, and that's part of the problem.
Did you want to comment on that?
MR. VOLCKER: Well, you know, part of the trouble with these numbers of political appointees and the layers—and it's changed over the years, where the political appointees have gone deeper and deeper into the layers—is if you want to motive the best young people to come into government for a career, they say, "Why am I going to come when I can't get very high because I'm going to run into all the political appointees? If I'm interested in a career in government, I better go and become an investment banker so I can retire at 45 and then go in the government at a sufficient level." Now how many of them ever do it in the end, I don't know. But some do, and you get some talent that way. But I don't think that's the way to run the railroad.
MR. LIGHT: Well, we've sort of devalued the coin of the realm here, in a sense. In 1960, thee governors resigned their governorships to be assistant secretaries. I just can't imagine a governor doing that today to be in a position that's eight, nine, twelve layers below the secretary. Although there are still significant assistant secretaryships, the real game is undersecretaryships and deputy secretaryships. The deputy secretary title wasn't invented until the 1950s. And that's when it started popping up, and now we've got chiefs of staff.
MR. VOLCKER: It wasn't invented outside the Defense and State Department until 1973 or so.
MR. LIGHT: But Defense invented the deputy assistant secretary title, which has really been a hoot to follow as it's spread out.
MR. CLARK: Let's go to Jodie Allen now, right in the back of the room now.
MS. JODIE ALLEN: Those of you have expressed some optimism about the possibilities of further reform of a positive sort of the Civil Service now, and certainly the public opinion polls show that it's a good time. But when you look at the current political line-up, this administration that seems to have made further—I won't say destruction, but not positive efforts at federal service one of its major goals, unrelenting goals, and then you have this holding up of airport security legislation on exactly this issue and the administration waffling on the subject. What in the world makes you optimistic that anything can happen?
MR. LIGHT: You have to realize where we've been. So, you know, hope springs from the conditions that existed in 1989.
Do you want to answer that question?
MR. VOLCKER: Well, I just—I wish I could make more check marks here. But this commission that I headed is now out of date. But there're two names that jump out that were on the commission, one Paul H. O'Neill and one Donald Rumsfeld. And so I think there are people in this administration that have had a long interest in the health of the public service generally. And I think the circumstances they face creates at least an opportunity of refocusing by some of the people who have had a somewhat different view in the past. And I hope we can take advantage of that.
MR. CLARK: Anne Laurent?
MS. ANNE LAURENT: We've been conducting a federal performance project now for three years, in large part thanks to Paul's work at the Pew Charitable Trusts. And we found disturbing deep core problems in a number of federal agencies' capability to manage, owing to the assignment to them of conflicting missions or conflicting priorities or conflicting duties. If you take, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration, charged with both security and the promotion of air travel. You take a different situation at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is charged with both tracking down people on the interior of the country who have, for example, overstayed their visas or have no documents, while, at the same time, being under tremendous pressure by business not, in fact, to take away a source of cheap labor. Similar problems at the Customs Service, charged with both deep scrutiny on people and things entering the country while moving those things more quickly into the country. And it goes on and on and on.
I'm wondering if perhaps you might be interested in commenting on the degree to which this core problem is a source of both the under-resourcing and under-staffing and mistraining and misuse of the public service, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, if you might be able to talk about what some solutions to these kinds of very core issues would be?
MR. LIGHT: Well, I think it's an instructive story to note that James Zigler, the new head of INS three weeks before September 11, was out in Northern Virginia complaining about the lack of service and the long lines at INS at a service unit out there. And he was just shocked that there were these lines. How dare we? We've got to speed up the process, and that reflects the mission of INS: to get people in on H1 visas, and so forth, to support the economy.
It's been 50 years—you've heard this from me before—since we've had a top-to-bottom look at the organization of the federal government. That last one was done by a former Republican president who had a mixed reputation after the 1929 stock crash and reinvented the modern organization charge. We did a lot of reorganization in 1950, '51 and '52, and that was the Hoover Commission.
I don't think you can do this one agency at a time by breaking a piece off here or breaking a piece of there. I think we're due for a top-to-bottom scrubbing, and I think that that is the kind of thing that would best be done by a military base closing type commission that had the authority to really do some reorganization. I haven't got a clue, for example, whether we should be breaking up agencies to create the new Homeland Security. We haven't a good cabinet level Homeland Security agent. We haven't had a good track record of building departments over the last 30 years. We're not very good at building czars either, creating czars. Our czars are not very czar-like. They kind of reduce the meaning of the word "czar." You can't have anybody insulted by being called a czar any more because it could mean toothless.
So I think we need a top to bottom scrubbing and, of course, that would be my answer. I mean, another commission, but this one with some bite. So that's my answer.
MR. CLARK: Marion, yes?
Q: —with Public Employee Roundtable. And I have heard several questioners touch on something, but not hone in on it, and that is the role that campaign finance reform ought to be playing here, not just with the morale and motivation of GS managers and SES managers, but with the host of issues that the last two or three questioners have raised. Is there work being done at Brookings, or any place else, on what good campaign finance reform would do before we starting talking about scrubbing the federal government again?
MR. LIGHT: Yes, there's good work being done. I don't know whether Tom Mann is here, but we've got a huge project on campaign finance reform that's been working on this issue. I don't see the campaign finance connection embedded in everything here. I do see some connections on the outsourcing issue. We did a study of how much campaign contributions were coming from outsourcing firms, federal contractors, and it's not insubstantial. But we've got good work going on here with the Campaign Finance Project and I think we've made some progress.
Q: What I am specifically addressing is the conflict between the interest of the consumer, the average citizen, and the special interest groups, and the fact that the influence of special interest groups is tending to permeate —
[TAPE CHANGE.]
MR. LIGHT: You want to —
MR. VOLCKER: Well, I happen to agree with her. (Laughter.)
MR. VOLCKER: I don't know whether it's central for our particular administrative problem as in some other areas. But when I see what's going on in the Congress right now, for instance, tax legislation, I find it incomprehensible, expect in terms of the problem you're talking about.
MR. CLARK: Way back there. Yes, sir.
Q: —very top-heavy workforce now in the federal government in terms of age. I know in Nuclear Regulatory Commission some 60 percent of the people are over 55, expected to retire within—or have the option to retire, and probably will, within the next five or 10 years. Lots of people have referred to it for what it is. It is a sense of a crisis, but also an opportunity.
Can you comment on how that situation can help us get done the right thing?
MR. LIGHT: Well, I can comment. Do you want me to comment?
MR. VOLCKER: Well, I can comment, too, but you comment first.
MR. LIGHT: I think we've got a real opportunity here, if we capture those positions as the occupants leave rather than just filling them by the next person in line. If you were to recapture those positions and pull them up to the chief operating officer level, the deputy secretary level and create a redistribution mechanism for giving those positions back down into the agencies on the basis of the Government Performance and Results Act, suddenly you'd have a Government Performance and Results Act that really had teeth to it. I think we can do some downsizing. I think we can do some flattening. I think we can do some upsizing.
But if you just let the retirements happen and you just fill the vacancies from the next in line, you really are creating a government that will move from its current pentagonal shape. It's not a bureaucratic pyramid any more; it's pentagonal in shape. We are moving towards an elliptical organization chart where you just have this huge middle and nobody at the bottom to do the work, and that creates an outsourcing pressure, and, you know, you have one last federal employee, probably at 2025, I'd guess, you'll have the very last federal employee actually delivering something. Everybody else will be managing the contracts and setting policy. And you can't have that occur, because there are fundamentally and inherently governmental functions that need to be performed. I think you have to be aggressive about taking advantage of the retirement crisis to deal with this.
One other point. I think we've got less of a problem at the entry level than many people believe. I think we've got a real problem at the three-year-to-five-year point, where a lot of people come into government and exit. I think we have extraordinary turnover velocity at the three to seven year mark that we're not dealing with, because when we get a good person in, like a presidential management and intern or a justice fellow, we can't hold onto them.
What's that saying to us? Does that say that we have a problem getting good people, or does that say that we have something going on at the three to seven year mark that is extraordinarily troublesome. And I think we've got some real research to do on that exit point. We haven't had an exit survey of federal employees since 1989. We just get—"I-don't-give-a-hoot" award. I could use a different term here. But we just—we don't even care. We don't have exit interviews with our people as they leave, and we don't know really why people are leaving at the five, six, seven year point.
Am I wrong about that, John? Do we have it? What kind of an employer—really, think about this. What kind of employer has that kind of exit activity and never asks why people left. Really, what does that say about this employer? To me, it says this is an employer that just doesn't care, and that's a responsibility of our political leaders.
MR. VOLCKER: We may not ask them, but I think we know why these people are leaving in considerable numbers. I talked to a group of presidential management interns a few weeks ago, and I brought up this question of the bulge in people leaving and what that was doing to government. And I expected some resonance from the group. Their response was good. We need to get rid of some of those people there, open up some opportunities for us and others at a higher level.
These people come in, and they're filled with enthusiasm, some of them, the ones who get through, and it's a pretty competitive process, and they're happy. But they—my sense is, just talking to them freshly, for the first year or two they're happy because they have things to do and it's new, they're learning. But they've been there three of four years, and they say where's my next level of responsibility? Is there a job here that gives me some real responsibility? And what's happening to my peers who went into the private sector, who at that point are moving very rapidly. So they leave. And I think it's an understandable process that creates a real challenge and management.
MR. LIGHT: Twenty years ago, recruitment and retention were two sides of the same coin. In the Volcker Commission report, we talked about enhancements in both recruitment and retention as essential. I think with the aging and the thickening of the hierarchies, we are now entering a period where recruitment and retention may be in fundamental conflict. The young people are telling us that they come in and they can't see the top, there's no opportunity for advancement, they can't get the work they want, and then we talk about, well, retention; what do we do about retention? And we've got a situation now where these two historically linked ideas are in conflict.
MR. VOLCKER: It might be maybe totally naïve, but having not been in the military and looking at it from afar, so to speak, they seem to do this a lot better than civilian agencies. They do much more emphasis on training. They seem to keep a larger proportion of the people they want to keep, they get rid of the ones, or the ones that aren't going so well do leave. And they have a better system for keeping the ones they want to keep and letting the one's they don't want to keep go, And then you come up with a crisis and suddenly this great—it's the biggest of all bureaucracies, the U.S. Army. People don't like bureaucracy, but somehow you come up to the crisis and you find out they have more trained and educated people than any other government agency to deal with some of the problems that only come up infrequently.
I think there's some lessons that can be learned there perhaps. I —
MR. CLARK: Paul, we have several questions out there in the audience. It's now 10:50. Do you want to go to 11:00, or do you?.?
MR. LIGHT: I think one or two more questions.
MR. CLARK: One or two more questions. This woman here has been raising her hand for some time.
Q: Good morning. My name is Joan Kraft. And I was interested in how you think activitating these large number of reservists might impact the federal work force, and maybe even the ability for agencies to realisz their mission?
MR. LIGHT: How would you say it would impact?
Q: There seems to be large numbers of federal employees that are being activitated now because they're reservists, some in some of the actual security agencies.
MR. LIGHT: I really don't have a clue as to what the impact would be. That's an interesting question. I just don't know. Does anybody here want to answer that question, because I don't. Do you want to answer that question?
MR. VOLCKER: I don't?.
MR. CLARK: Okay, one more question. Is there anyone in the press here who hasn't asked a question and would like to. If not, we'll give the last question to this lady over here on the right. And, Dwight, you can come up later.
Q: What can the agencies and front line managers do right now until Civil Service reform can get through Congress?
MR. LIGHT: Before answering that, I want to just say thanks to Gina Russo for putting together this event, making this happen. She really worked tirelessly on it. I think she's probably asking herself sometimes "What can I do to survive the onslaught of events here?"
I think front line managers need to come to work each day and talk about mission, and just persevere. I really do believe—we've got the Private Sector Council here. We've got Roz Kleeman from NAPA, the National Academy of Public Administration. We've got the partnership, we've got the council. We've got a lot of people activated now around these issues. I think civil service reform is going to come.
The question is in what form and whether its two bills or three bills, or over a six year period, or a three year period. But I think we're in the mood for reform. It's the best period for reform that I've seen since engaging in this issue. I don't know whether it's the same for Paul here, but I've been working tirelessly to convince Paul that it's a very good moment, so if you don't think it's a good moment, I'd like you just to keep quiet.
(Laughter.)
Because I think we've pretty much got him convinced. I think that's a good—do you want to —
MR. VOLCKER: No, I agree with what you say. Well, I'm convinced it's a good moment, yes.
MR. LIGHT: I'd just tell front line managers and agencies "Persevere, baby. Persevere." That's what I'd say. And persevere to all you. Persevere.
Thank you very much for coming to this event.
Tim?
MR. CLARK: Thank you.
[END OF EVENT.]