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Feds in D.C., Montgomery, Prince George's, Arlington and Fairfax Counties, Alexandria and Falls Church, rejoice: you get Inauguration Day off!

If you were keeping an eye out for late-breaking executive orders or rule-making by the Bush administration, take a look at this one. It's a doozy, exempting parts of the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, Justice, Transportation, and the Treasury from collective bargaining rules on the grounds that their "primary function [is] intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work. It is further determined that chapter 71 of title 5, United States Code, cannot be applied to these subdivisions in a manner consistent with national security requirements and considerations."

More to come on this in a story I'm working on now. But make no mistake, this is big news.

The Obama administration has announced that it's taking a step forward into a new copyright regime by announcing that everything on its transition website, Change.gov, will be covered under a Creative Commons license, which basically means anyone can reproduce the content on the site or use it as the basis for a document of thei own. It's a pretty progressive, if basically cost-free, step. But the real genius of the announcement is in the quotation the team got to describe the initiative, from blogger James Grimmelmann:

"Attribution 3.0 is the Barack Obama of CC licenses: modern, dignified, generous, and tolerant.”

If they can get their hands on quote like that, they sure could be raking it in at a PR firm. But I guess change is a pretty decent side benefit for a job.

In light of the news that the Senior Executive Service and its feeder pools are getting somewhat more diverse, I think Phil Rucker's point here is well-taken: Obama has appointed an unprecedented number of women and minorities to fill national security roles in his Cabinet, but he has not broken the generational barrier in any significant way.

I think this is going to be an interesting question for the Obama administration. The president-elect himself is in an interesting position. I've heard him called both a late Boomer and an early Gen-Xer, depending on which year range you're using to determine the generations. Either way, he represents a generational turnover. But whether there's space at the top for a new and younger generation of leaders to join him, and whether those younger leaders are considered ready to advise the president at the highest level, are issues only Obama can decide. At the same time, the administration has to reckon with the fact that it activated a new generation of voters at higher levels of enthusiasm than ever before. And those young voters could be powerful lobbying voices for an Obama administration, but they also are the people that Obama will need to begin recruiting to serve in the federal government in his role as the executive branch's CEO. Obama appealed powerfully to a sense that America needed to turn the page when picking their president; I wonder how he'll reconcile that with the need to pick experienced hands, and also provide symbols of youth and the future in his administration's leadership.

I spoke too soon, clearly, on the resources question at State. Spencer Ackerman has a great post up on a potential coming resource shift between the military and civilian wings of our national security apparatus.

Hillary Clinton directed some of her first words as the next Secretary of State to civilian employees of her new department this morning, saying:

I thought of those other Americans in our foreign and civil services working hard to promote and protect our interests around the world. And I thought of the daunting tasks ahead for our country. An economy that is reeling, a climate that is warming. And as we saw with the horrible events in Mumbai, threats that are relentless.

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We must pursue vigorous diplomacy using all the tools we can muster to build a future with more partners and fewer adversaries, more opportunities and fewer dangers for all who seek freedom, peace, and prosperity.

Reaching out to your new employees is always a good idea, especially when those empoyees feel their ranks are thin and they're strained and not getting enough training as a result. As a State Department employee who met with the agency policy review team told me, what department employees want to hear Clinton say is "I will fight for you." Today's press conference didn't get into staffing or resource issues at State or USAID. And of course it takes more than warm thoughts to build solidarity between a workforce and a Secretary. But Clinton may have done herself a favor by mentioning her people first.

Bruce McConnell over at the IBM Center for the Business of Government has a really helpful look at who the transition will impact, and how, complete with charts showing the layering of different kinds of government officials and the relative size of those pools, and graphs suggesting how the phases of the transition present different challenges.

But I think this little snapshot is most useful for focusing on the transition as a time of opportunity for new political appointees to adjust their attitudes, and for career employees to advance new plans and initiatives and to take on responsibilities that will help them when they return to their regular duties.

McConnell writes:

The more savvy civil servants have not only participated in the preparation of transition papers and plans, they have developed their own program proposals. They have paid attention to the messaging and themes of the candidates, and have aligned useful program improvements with the incoming opportunity.
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Career officials may spend considerable time acting in positions that will be taken on by politicals. This can be a dangerous but useful activity—dangerous in terms of the need to avoid overreaching, and useful in terms of understanding the pressures involved in the job.

Transitions are seismic events not just because they bring in new leadership and new policy directives from the top: they create opportunities for a thousand initiatives to bloom, and for people other than political appointees to remake their careers. Folks who are writing about what impact Susan Rice's tenure as UN Secretary will have on her future prospects should also be looking for the next leaders to emerge from the civil service ranks, as well. Their rises may not be as meteoric, but they will happen, and they will have trajectories longer than a presidential term.

The entire press release from the Obama campaign is here, and continues below the jump. Have you worked with any of these people? Have thoughts on their managerial styles? If so, let us know.

CHICAGO – President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden officially announced key members of their national security team today: nominating Senator Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, selecting Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remain as Secretary of Defense, nominating Eric Holder as Attorney General, nominating Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, nominating Susan Rice as Ambassador to the United Nations and selecting General Jim Jones, USMC (Ret) as National Security Adviser.

"In this uncertain world, the time has come for a new beginning – a new dawn of American leadership to overcome the challenges of the 21st century, and to seize the opportunities embedded in those challenges. To succeed, we must pursue a new strategy that skillfully uses, balances, and integrates all elements of American power: our military and diplomacy; our intelligence and law enforcement; our economy and the power of our moral example. The team that we have assembled here today is uniquely suited to do just that. They share my pragmatism about the use of power, and my sense of purpose about America’s role as a leader in the world," said President-elect Obama.

"It is an honor to be a part of this team, led by the President Elect – a team that will see to it that America can lead the world not only by the example of our power, but also by the power of our example. I believe we have assembled a national security team that is poised to recapture the totality of America’s strength," said Vice President-elect Biden.

The national security team members announced today are listed below:

Continue reading "Ladies and Gentlemen, Your National Security Leaders" »

In case any of you are checking in between turkey, football, and time with family, have a happy and restful Thanksgiving day!

The representation of women and minorities in the Senior Executive Service is increasing, but not across the board, GAO concludes in a new a report today. The report's key finding:

The representation of women and minorities in the SES and the SES developmental pool increased governmentwide from October 2000 through September 2007, but increases did not occur in all agencies. Over these 7 years, increases occurred in more than half of the 24 major executive branch agencies, but in both 2000 and 2007 the representation of women and minorities continued to vary significantly at those agencies. In 2003, we projected that increases would occur in the representation of women and minorities in the SES and SES developmental pool by 2007. These increases generally did occur.

GAO also looked at when executives are appointed to and retire from the SES. Its analysts found that SESers were 50, on average, when they entered the executive corps and 60 when they retired. Those averages didn't vary much by race, ethnicity, or gender. But women do tend to stay in the SES longer than men: 11.4 years vs. 8.8 years.

NYU professor Paul Light has a good column up today about how the recession is impacting the non-profit sector, and how Obama can adjust his national service plans to give non-profits, especially those stepping in to help families in need, a boost. But it seems to me that one thing Obama should also do is include federal service in his broader call to serve. It doesn't mean that Obama has to include federal agencies in his expansion of AmeriCorps, or in his national service fellows program. There are a lot of programs that can get young people into government already, ranging from the Presidential Management Fellows to the Federal Career Intern Program. But he should at least be talking about federal service, both to build confidence in the agencies that will be carrying out his agenda, and to set the table for more effective recruiting by departments and agencies. It may be more self-sacrificing to earn no money and work in a soup kitchen than it is to take stable wages and benefits to work in a government agency, but it's not necessarily more virtuous or more effective. Both jobs are service jobs, and if Obama plans to offer broad incentives for service, young federal employees should definitely be included.

This is official TSA policy, apparently: yes, you can take your pie with you on the plane, though they recommend it as a carry-on, rather than as checked luggage.

Sorry for the light posting yesterday, folks. A snafu on my end mis-dated a post I meant to have go up while I was on the road for pre-Thanksgiving travel. More today, I promise.

I wrote in that post that now was likely to be a semi-quiet time for management news, since the first several weeks of the transition have given us a look at Obama's management style, but that he's unlikely to get to appointing an OPM director or Chief Human Capital Officers for a while. In that vein, I thought some of you might be interested in the cover story Brittany Ballenstedt and I wrote for the December issue of the magazine, on the factors that have made this transition what it is.

For me, at least, this story was an interesting experience in reporting. I went into the story convinced that no matter who was elected president, the transition would be a disaster. The challenges, I was sure, were just too big. But as Brittany and I talked to a range of government leaders, non-profit heads, and academics, it became clear that folks in every sector of the good government community had risen to the challenge, and we're seeing a lot of that play out now. Transitions are a rough time, obviously, as knowledge goes out the door, and less experienced people come in. It's a period when information and experience can fall through the cracks. But what we're seeing in this instance, in large part because of people like Clay Johnson on the administration, is a transition shaped by a lot of institutional memory, and an intense awareness of major issues.

And that's a very good thing. There's no such thing as a perfect transition. Missteps will be made, names will be leaked, people will withdraw their names from contention. But in this very short period of time, knowing what the issues are and addressing them head-on is a key outlook for the president-elect.

My colleague Mike Memoli, who's filling in for Marc Ambinder over at his Atlantic blog, raises a fascinating question: Is Hillary Clinton actually prevented by the Constitution from taking an appointment as secretary of State?

At issue is the "emoluments clause" in Article One, Section Six of the Constitution. It states that no member of Congress can take a federal office for which the "emoluments" (read: salary) have increased during his or her term in office. And the pay for the secretary of State, like other Cabinet members, went up last year.

The situation has come up before, the Washington Post's Al Kamen noted last week. For example, in 1973, after President Nixon nominated Sen. William Saxbe, R-Ohio, to be attorney general, Congress backed his request to lower the attorney general's salary to the level it was at before it was raised in 1969, during Saxbe's term.

Does this mean that Clinton will have to settle for a lower pay rate than her Cabinet colleagues?

Several years ago, I held a little contest on Fedblog to list people whose names fit their jobs perfectly. I got some great responses, ranging from Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Peter Seaman to former National Credit Union Administration Chairman Dennis Dollar.

I was reminded of that endeavor this morning when the Congressional Budget Office announced its new acting director, replacing Peter Orszag, who President-elect Obama just named to head OMB.

So who's the new guy who's job it is to bring the federal budget to light for lawmakers? Robert Sunshine.