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Return to Article: Lawmakers to renew push for public service academy

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  What an excellent idea! It's about time that our society see the importance and value in public service and how it can develop future leaders of tomorrow.

  Jen Posted July 30, 2007 5:55 PM
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  This idea of a public service academy does have merit but it should not select students via the existing Congressional Nomination process. The Coast Guard Academy was able to bypass this antiquated system because they started out with "six men and a boat" and before Congress figured out that they were out there they were beyond and out of reach. The USGA is not having any difficulty filling their class each year.The class size of 1250 is also too large. Everyone knows that a third of all academy classes are awesome, a third, average and other third, awful. Author Bruce Fleming pointed out in his book Annapolis Autumn that nearly 50% of appointments to the US Naval Academy " failed to meet academic requirements." We can do better than this!

  Brian M. Douglass Posted June 5, 2007 12:16 AM
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  Wow! Lots of emotions on both sides of this proposal. Here are a couple of thoughts. First, many of the problems complained about by those commenting are due to poor management. Does this not suggest the need for some improvement in this area that this institution might provide?

  Yes I know about the political nonsense, but you are always going to have that to contend with, even in the private sector. Second, is everyone clueless as to the size of federal budgets and expenditures? The cost of providing such an academy is dwarfed by the amounts that could be saved by only small percentage of improvements in the management of these expenditures. I agree that these grads should not be fast-tracked over currently serving feds. They need to be mentored in the real world. I also agree that more should be done to provide access to advanced education and degrees by currently serving feds. It is shameful and stupid that more has not been done in this area of graduate training previously. Today's world is complex.

  We don't need a partisan litmus test for entry. We just need a merit and ability based system where the sharpest minds and best qualified people are running things instead of those chosen by the politically correct special interest group lottery system. Merit should prevail. Let the best ideas win, and the ablest people rise, and everyone including the taxpayer will benefit.

  Give the students a good mix of theory, education and practical experience. You can't really get that at all the existing Schools of Public Administration since these are profit making institutions and often focus on State and local government problems not federal ones.

  GovExec.com reader Posted March 20, 2007 5:05 PM
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  It's interesting that a previous commenter riffed on sending the Bush twins to this academy and, thence, to Iraq. You know, that's not a bad idea. They may have their Fathers' courage and not run away from service in Iraq as have so many cowardly career Foreign Service Officers.

  But my real interest in commenting is to propose some balance in the new public service academy. I think we can agree that intellectual diversity is not practiced or upheld in the federal civil service hiring system and, as the result, the federal workforce is badly unbalanced politically. Millions of Americans are disenfranchised by career bureaucrats making decisions that support the growth of government and the regulatory state. Congress cannot effectively provide oversight of the entire, enormous, federal bureaucracy.

  For that reason the academy bill must be amended to require a balancing of political views among attendees. One way to do so would be to adopt practices similar to the color-based "diversity" recruiting requirements now widely practiced among federal departments and agencies. Your amendment could require at least fifty per cent recruiting from universities and colleges known to have predominantly conservative student bodies, and you could mandate equal recruitment advertising in media with predominantly conservative readership, viewership or listenership.

  In this way we may be able to foster intellectual diversity among the academy student body and, eventually perhaps, interject some balancing conservative membership into the federal workforce of the future.

  I am certain that those Govexec.com readers who are not intellectually bigoted will support this proposal.

  GovExec.com reader Posted March 19, 2007 12:49 PM
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  I think the first two students of the Public Service Academy should be the Bush Twins. Their first assignment upon graduation? Service at some rural school in Iraq or Afghanistan for 12 to 24 months, minimum.

  GovExec.com reader Posted March 18, 2007 5:41 PM
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  Public service, huh?

  Why not be honest and name it "The Northrop Grumman - Lockheed - Halliburton Service Academy?"

  Make all graduates of this academy serve one year in Iraq as payment for their free education and I'm all for it.

  Vet Posted March 16, 2007 11:33 AM
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  As I said the last time around, this is a bad idea. The costs of building the infrastructure and funding the staff of this academy (from janitor to professor to administrator) would be staggering. There are a great many elite schools that were designed to mold future civil servants. 2Twoof the most famous are the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the Woodrow Wilson School for International Studies at Princeton. That most of the graduates of these schools don't become civil servants is beside the point. If the government wishes to offer conditional scholarships to schools like this (i.e. the person has to be a civil servant for a minimum of five years after graduation), I'm all for that. If the government wishes to work with the staff of schools like this to tweak the curriculum, I'm all for that as well. This would seem to be a far more economical route (in more ways than one!) than to build a brand new academy from the ground up.

  Furthermore, I can just see them building this academy and then having the graduates see the civil service jobs they get A-76ed out of existence. What would we have gained then, I ask? Just a thought.

  David Posted March 16, 2007 9:35 AM
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  Unbelievable! My minimal request for training dollars for my six GS employees was cut to $9,000 dollars for the whole year for the whole group. A hiring freeze is in effect for my command so we can't hire replacements for vacant positions, they are paying folks to retire early, we are denying payment of entitlements to soldiers because they missed an extension date by a week, veterans are filing lawsuits because agencies are not following preference rules and now we are going to create an academy to train our future leaders at a cost of $200 million a year. They left out the billion dollar building that will have to be in place. So when they graduate, what do we do with them? Put them in charge of employees who have spent years making their bones through actually executing the missions? Are we going to put them in front of the veterans who earned their entitlement to priority consideration for jobs? They will be nominated by members of congress to get in? Will they wear MIB ("Men in Black") outfits while in training?

  Four years of college on my tax dollar to become the saviors of the system. I will feel so much safer having one of these folks overseeing counter-terrorism efforts than that old retired major that also applied for the position. Who cares if he had 18 years experience and spoke several languages? The MIB graduate has seen every episode of "24."

  Not much I can do about this except write to my congressman, the election is over. I guess I will just focus on finishing this memo I am writing to justify purchase of paper for my printer.

  ORF Posted March 15, 2007 5:49 PM
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  An intriguing idea, indeed. However, like everything else in the federal government, from special hiring programs right on down to who gets which parking space is all political. It is another gimme program for the "haves" in the civil service brewing - or in this case, the "haves'" children. All others that could benefit will either get shut out or won't bother to apply. And the final insult is more tax dollars spent with no value added for the taxpayers that are footing the bills.

  Are there any programs proposed that could help out older feds who are being squeezed out due to BRACS, RIFS, downsizing, rightsizing, etc? I guess they are on their own.

  GovExec.com reader Posted March 15, 2007 5:15 PM
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  Why? At my command they send the military to public schools like Duke and Northwestern to learn how to be managers. Civilians get no training opportunities because no funds are available for training. If this goes forward all we will be doing is training people who will leave federal service at the earliest opportunity because once they are exposed to how things really work they will not want to be a part of federal civil service.

  GovExec.com reader Posted March 15, 2007 4:17 PM
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  You would have to keep politicians away from this group; otherwise we will only get what we have in there now.

  Dan Posted March 15, 2007 2:58 PM
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  While it's an intriguing idea, I doubt it will ever work. As a younger and newer civil servant (less than 10 years in service and under 40), obtaining any type of promotion has been a nightmare due to the attitude of others who think you put the time in, or move around, work between GS and NAF, then get promoted. Right now, there's little (if any) training or mentoring available for new and younger managers.

  GovExec.com reader Posted March 15, 2007 1:01 PM
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  I like this idea, on initial review. Anything that would contribute to improving the perception of public service in the eyes of good potential civil servants would be a good thing. I wonder though about how it would be implemented. One of the key functions of the service academies is indoctrination into the culture of the service. Admittedly, they screw up at it, as all human-operated organizations do. But when they screw up, it is noteworthy in part because it is rare. But what culture would a civilian academy indoctrinate? I doubt we could get agreement. Perhaps the "moral equivalent of ROTC" is better -future employees could go to any of a number of schools and interact with a local staff.

  MDDake Posted March 15, 2007 10:29 AM
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  This country has hundreds of outstanding schools of public administration, and still some want to spend $41,000 per student per year (of taxpayer money) to create an academy with "a process much like that at the military service academies." (Will that include the graduates being sent to places like Iraq?) Can someone explain why the graduates of our current schools of public administration are not up to the task?

  Thad Juszczak Posted March 15, 2007 7:38 AM
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  This is one of the stupidest things Clinton and Moran have done in a long time. For $205 million annually of my money we could provide $4,000 tuition scholarships to 51 students to attend the great state schools the country offers. The students would be required to work full-time in government for two years for each $4,000 they receive. If they do not graduate they should reimburse the government the amount received over a five year period and work for the government one month for every $100 they received. Do not build a new school because it will be costly, political, poor quality and grow beyond control of the Congress like everything else. This is a really bad idea and Congress should kill it fast!

  taxpayer Posted March 15, 2007 7:06 AM
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  This is a wonderful idea, one that I fully support, even as I do not stand to benefit from it.

  That said, I would like to point out two minor issues that should be examined as collaterally or directly relevant:

  1. Just because young people will graduate from this academy (if built) does not give a free pass or entitlement to "fast track" promotions over people who have "scraped" their way up the ranks over the years. I think a concern by some current mid-career government employees will be having to complete with someone half- their age and one-tenth the "real world" experience being channeled up the command chain simply because they attended this academy. Yes, it should count for something, but not at the expense of experience and the wisdom that comes with age.

  2. If you want to give parity to current mid-career government employees, the government should offer more opportunity for these people to pursue graduate education opportunities to make them more competitive. For example, DHS has a partnership with the Naval Postgraduate School to fully pay (tuition, travel, lodging and per diem) for a Master's in Homeland Defense; the problem is, they only accept 20 (yes, twenty) students per six-month period, and not all have to be DHS employees; hardly enough opportunity for the large number of potentially worthy employees at DHS. Perhaps offering to pay for a worthy employee's graduate education in exchange for "X" years of continuing employment with the government might provide a much needed morale boost for employees who have stagnated in their current jobs.

  GovExec.com reader Posted March 14, 2007 7:45 PM