Group balks at Obama proposal to thin federal management ranks
Job cuts would lead to government inefficiency, says coalition representing more than 200,000 managers.
Federal managers on Thursday urged President-elect Barack Obama to consider alternatives to a reform proposal that would reduce the number of mid-level managers in government.
"An arbitrary cut of managers based upon an across-the-board ratio for all of federal service is not [emphasis in original] the answer," wrote the Government Managers Coalition in a Dec. 17 letter to John Podesta, co-chair of the Obama-Biden transition team. "Instead, we encourage you to think about the long-term impact that qualified managers have on the ability of an agency to meet mission critical goals." The coalition is made up of five federal executive and management professional associations that represent more than 200,000 government managers.
The group pointed to the attempts of former incoming administrations to create a more effective government by focusing on what they often view "as a bloated federal workforce." The Clinton administration, for example, designed the National Performance Review, which called for increasing the ratio of one manager to every seven employees to one manager for every 15 rank-and-file workers. NPR also resulted in the reduction of 377,000 federal jobs, the coalition noted.
"In reaching President Clinton's reduction goals, agencies eliminated thousands of management positions without any measurement of the effectiveness of the effort and undoubtedly have had a direct impact on the increasing backlog of cases at the Social Security Administration and Veterans' Affairs," the letter said.
Obama announced his government reform plan at a campaign appearance in September, pledging to fire managers of poor-performing programs and to appoint a White House "SWAT team" made up of government professionals to review programs for waste and efficiency.
The coalition encouraged the Obama administration instead to focus its agency reviews on determining where managers are needed, discovering which critical skills are required to accomplish tasks, and developing and training managers to lead their subordinates effectively within the context of government and agency performance goals.
Before taking a scalpel to the ranks of management, the coalition advised the Obama team that it would be most effective to allow the Government Accountability Office to study the consequences of actions taken in the 1990s that initially reduced the number of federal managers. A review of the effects of those earlier cuts on agency employees and customer surveys, existing goals, and performance measurements would be particularly useful, the letter stated.
Bill Bransford, general counsel for the Senior Executives Association -- one of the five groups in the coalition -- said on Thursday that despite all the protections federal employees generally have, thinning management's ranks could be accomplished through reductions in force, attrition, reorganization, or by moving some managers into nonsupervisory roles.
But Bransford said the outcomes of any of those actions would be problematic, given that most of the coalition's members are facing heavier workloads and more responsibility, not only for federal employees, but also contractors.
"All five groups felt that the feedback they'd gotten from their members on the effects of the cutbacks in the 1990s was problematic and that those effects are still being felt," he said. "Any further cutbacks would result in a loss of government efficiency."