An Agenda for Government's Next CEO

eace in the Middle East. A patients' bill of rights. A possible economic slowdown.

These heady issues are sure to be at the forefront of the presidential campaign and will certainly occupy a great deal of the next President's time.

But like any good chief executive officer, the President can ill afford to ignore some of the less sexy-but no less important-issues that plague the federal government. Tackling problems with the employee merit system, improving agency performance and implementing information technology management reforms won't get George W. Bush or Al Gore on the front pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post. But ignoring them could.

Should the candidates sit down and listen to the people directly responsible for running the government, they would quickly discover a vast number of managerial challenges.

There's the so-called human capital problem-government's growing inability to hire and hang on to the right people. There's the question of making the government more responsive to its customers. And let's not overlook the technology challenges.

A number of these complex issues were discussed during four half-day sessions in July sponsored by the Reason Public Policy Institute, Government Executive, the National Academy of Public Administration, the American Society of Public Administration, the Council for Excellence in Government, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and The George Washington University Department of Public Administration.

Seminar participants tackled management and performance improvement, information technology and electronic government, civil service reform and contracting. The sessions focused on coming up with a series of challenges and recommendations for the country's next CEO. Folks from Reason compiled the data and will present a report to the newly elected President. The goal was not consensus; rather, it was to consider a wide range of problems and possible solutions. Nonetheless, one theme dominated: government's need to find people with managerial experience.

"If someone is selected to be a chief executive of a company, he's selected for his vision but also for his management skills. That's been lacking," said Robert Tobias, director of the Institute for the Study of Policy Implementation at American University and former president of the National Treasury Employees Union.

Performance Pressure

Despite efforts to improve government performance, policy experts and agency officials lamented that few agencies have been able to live up to the promise of the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act.

Jonathan Bruel, senior adviser to the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, aptly summed up the problem: "Demands being placed on government are creating great pressures. More people want to go into national parks. There's a push for prescription drugs [in Medicare]. . . . At the same time that these demands are constantly changing, budgets are likely to stay the same and the employee base is dropping."

How then, the group of policy experts and agency officials wondered, does government improve? Cindy Saboe, inspector general at the State Department, suggested that agencies should do a better job of tying performance improvements to their bottom line.

"There is no one pushing agencies to put a plan in front of their budget," said Mark Catlett, assistant secretary for management and chief financial officer of the Veterans Affairs Department. Few people are asking long-term strategic questions about what the agency will need in five years or how customers' needs will change, Catlett said.

Another priority was finding executives who could actually push GPRA issues down to the front lines. John Koskinen, former OMB deputy director for management, recommended that Cabinet secretaries think of their top deputies as chief operating officers. And, he quickly added, make sure they have COO-type experience running the day-to-day operations of large organizations and can implement management reforms and strategic plans.

Human Capital Crisis

Human resources officials agreed that the next administration must do a better job of bringing quality managers into senior-level posts. More often than not, management experience takes a back seat to policy, according to Robert Nash, White House personnel director.

"I think an undersecretary leads, provides direction and implements policy. So, we absolutely spend more time on policy," Nash said. But he acknowledged that more attention could be paid to real-world management experience.

At the same time, there was widespread agreement that the political appointment process is in dire need of attention. Nearly all of the 40 participants suggested that the next administration streamline the appointment process. They suggested that appointees be given a Washington 101 class so they know what to expect both during the appointment process and once they get into office. Another suggestion was to slash the number of political appointees.

More than anything, though, the panel of human resource experts sought flexibility in making critical personnel decisions, particularly in getting rid of dead weight. Several agency officials said it's too difficult to fire employees whose performance is not up to par. They also want more flexibility to come up with creative recruitment and retention tools. Ideas included increasing pay and linking it to performance, bolstering training opportunities, and letting agencies develop their own retention and recruitment programs.

"We already have a flexible system in place," countered Sandra Payne of the Office of Personnel Management. "Why haven't agencies used [it]? We can't really offer more tools until the ones being made available are used."

Information Is King

As much as human resource professionals want additional flexibility, information technology staffers seek more power-and more direction-from the next administration.

Great strides have been made during the past few years in recognizing that the government must become more e-friendly-most notably, passage of the 1996 Clinger-Cohen IT management reform law. But as with everything in Washington, implementation has been slow. Though the 4-year-old law required agencies to name chief information officers, "I'm the first at the Department of Transportation," said George Molaski, who took office in June 1999. "It's taken [years] to get a CIO. The law has been implemented haphazardly."

Molaski also pointed out that Clinger-Cohen did not fund the CIO Council-a panel of government's top information officers. Nor did the legislation give the council the ability to make governmentwide recommendations.

As government moves to an electronic world, what's needed is an information technology czar, most of the panelists said. Such an official, likely housed at OMB, would be able to set priorities and give information technology officials a louder voice in the West Wing.

Roberta Gross, NASA's inspector general, added that such a measure could help raise the profile of other technology issues facing agencies, including security.

Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., introduced a bill in November requiring OMB to establish and monitor governmentwide policies on such issues as security. "It would change CIOs from paper tigers to having actual responsibility," Gross said, adding that most of her peers in the IG community support the bill.

Polarized on Privatization

One of the top business priorities for the next administration should be reforming privatization policies, according to acquisition executives and industry and labor representatives. "Right now, no one likes the [privatization] process," said Steve Else, director of the Center for Public-Private Enterprise, a consulting company in Alexandria, Va. Else said the next President should create a task force to examine "shortfalls" in privatization rules. Congress is weighing whether to have the comptroller general appoint and oversee a panel of government, industry and labor officials to review outsourcing policy.

Privatization rules outlined in OMB Circular A-76 require competition between federal workers and contractors, with the work going to the lowest bidder. Retired Army Gen. Bill Tuttle, president of the Logistics Management Institute in McLean, Va., and former head of Army Materiel Command, said the A-76 process must require more accountability.

Labor and industry critics contend that once an A-76 competition is completed, the work is rarely recompeted or audited. Therefore the government never knows if it is getting the best deal. John Palatiello, an industry lobbyist, said there should be an outsourcing "champion" in the executive branch. Palatiello said the new administration also should examine ways to create "soft landings" for workers whose jobs are privatized. Soft-landing provisions in contracts guarantee that federal workers whose positions are outsourced receive jobs with the contractor at comparable pay and with similar benefits.

Wiley Pearson, a lobbyist for the American Federation of Government Employees, countered that soft landings amount to bribing federal workers. Pearson said the next administration should halt outsourcing until savings can be verified. American University's Tobias said that dealing with outsourcing in a nonpoliticized fashion will be the next administration's greatest challenge.

George Cahlink contributed to this article.