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 pub