New Blood
ooking for the federal government leaders of tomorrow? You're looking for
young professionals like John Calhoon, Susan Schnell and Max Weintraub.
"I could never work in the private sector," says Calhoon, 23. "I need to
know that what I am doing has social merit." He regularly works from 7 a.m. to 7
p.m. at his government job, and brings work home at night. Calhoon says he enjoys the pace and the "hyper-accountability" of his position. "The high
expectations here drive me to do better work," he says.
"I'm concerned about civil rights and women's rights," says Schnell, 22. "I
believe that working in the public service is the most logical way to do
something about them." She also puts in 12-hour days at her government office,
but maintains that "it's worth it because the work is compelling."
"My orientation has always been to work for a better world," says Weintraub,
28. "Working in the public sector enables me to do good things."
Unfortunately, not one of these three is working for the federal government.
Calhoon is a policy analyst in the Colorado Governor's office; Schnell works for
Rep. Floyd Flake, D-N.Y.; and Weintraub is a research associate with the
Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, a nonprofit group.
All three had enough interest in federal service to kick off their careers
with internships at federal agencies. Calhoon and Schnell secured positions at
the Department of Health and Human Services and the General Accounting Office,
respectively, by winning competitive scholarships that the Truman Scholarship
Foundation awards to young people who are "preparing for public leadership
positions to serve the citizenry, assist the disadvantaged, protect resources and restore confidence and trust in government." Weintraub was a graduate
student in environmental advocacy when he worked for the Environmental
Protection Agency through a National Network of Environmental Management Studies
internship.
But the bureaucratic culture of the federal government dampened these
graduates' enthusiasm for federal employment. Calhoon says he felt too distant
from the results of the decisions he was making. Schnell was frustrated with
the layers of approval she was required to go through. "I understand answering
to one supervisor," she says, "but three?" And Weintraub was troubled by what he
saw as a lack of coordination between branches of EPA. "We were fighting each
other for resources," he says. "I wanted a more holistic approach to dealing
with environmental problems."
Experts are concerned that this kind of disillusionment is combining with
other factors to dissuade top-notch twentysomethings from pursuing federal jobs.
The problems include:
- hiring processes that, in the words of one applicant, "don't encourage you to
stick with your quest for a government career";
- disintegration of student hiring initiatives, such as the Presidential
Management Internship (PMI) and Cooperative Education programs, from which
potential federal leaders have traditionally been culled;
- expansion of the nonprofit sector, providing public service-oriented
graduates with more and, some believe, more attractive alternatives to federal
employment.
Last April, 50 federal officials and personnel specialists gathered at the
Office of Personnel Management to discuss ways of attracting young people into
the federal career service. "We have lost much of the excitement of public
service at the civil service levels," said Naomi Lynn, president of Sangamon
State University in Illinois, at the meeting. "Too often our graduates have
entered an environment that discourages innovation and risk-taking. And we've
paid for this."
However, some argue there's little need to worry about attracting students
when few jobs are available. In 1993, agencies needed to hire only 1,097
college graduates to fill management, administrative and policy analyst
positions. Thanks to the downsizing of operations, total federal hiring of
competitive civil service employees has dropped drastically, from 115,700 new
hires in 1989 to 42,700 in 1993.
Since there are so few jobs, does it really matter if fewer Generation Xers
apply for federal jobs? Well, yes.
Getting In
When students ask Judy Kugel, director of career services at Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government, how to get a federal government job, she advises
them to steer clear of "all that garbage with the exam and getting on the
register." Kugel is referring to OPM's most centralized mechanism for hiring new
college graduates, the Administrative Careers With America (ACWA) exam.
OPM
ranks candidates with passing ACWA scores on a register, giving bonus points to
veterans. Agencies using the OPM register must hire one of the top three
candidates on the list who have expressed interest in the type of position,
grade and location being offered by the agency. But, says Kugel, "in the 13
years that I've worked here, I've never known a student to get a federal job off
the register."
A General Accounting Office report on ACWA released in March confirms that
the exam is not an effective federal hiring tool. The report concludes that use
of the exam frustrates both agencies and applicants: agencies, because it is
time-consuming and does not allow sufficient discretion in selecting candidates; and applicants, because "OPM and other federal agencies [make] very
little effort to communicate with applicants beyond notifying them of their ACWA
examination scores." One applicant told GAO, "[I] scored 100 on all tests but
was never contacted about a job. My experience with the ACWA written test was
disgusting."
Understandably then, federal agencies increasingly choose to fill their
vacancies under hiring authorities that allow them greater control. The use of
decentralized hiring methods to fill professional and administrative jobs has
risen by 13 percent since 1984. Last year, agencies staffed 81 percent of their
vacant professional and administrative positions through decentralized hiring
methods. These include internal promotion, direct-hire authority (granted to
agencies when OPM perceives a shortage of applicants for a position) and the
Outstanding Scholar Program (which allows agencies to directly hire candidates
whose undergraduate grade point average is 3.5 or higher or who graduate in the
top 10 percent of their class).
Candidates, too, prefer more direct methods of entry into the federal career
service than OPM registers can offer them. The Kennedy School recommends that
its students contact alumni who work in government for information on job
openings, and then attempt to get hired through the Outstanding Scholar Program.
"I'm convinced that networking -- using contacts from your college, your fraternity or sorority, even your state, if you come from a really small state
-- is about the only way to get a job in the federal government," says Jarrett
Cummings, 24, who recently was hired by the Department of Education.
With "connections" apparently becoming the most efficient path into a federal
career, some worry that the fairness of the federal hiring process is called
into question. As Alfred M. Zuck, executive director of the National
Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA), fervently
asserts, personal qualities such as energy, adaptability, commitment to public
issues and the ability to see the big picture -- not necessarily an Ivy League
degree -- make the "best and brightest" federal government employees.
Yet even those with special ins to government jobs get blocked by red tape,
applicants report. Using Outstanding Scholar authority, the Department of
Education offered Cummings a job in August 1993, but four more months passed
before he was actually hired. "My boss-to-be told me, 'we just have to get
through the paperwork,'" says Cummings.
The result? "The waiting process was demoralizing," Cummings recalls. "I
entered my present job without enthusiasm. It's taken me two or three months to
feel good about working here." In contrast, John Calhoon was hired by the
Colorado State government after "one conversation and a handshake." Calhoon says, "it made me feel as if I was stepping into something dynamic, an
organization with higher standards for itself than the federal government."
Programs Without Protection
Given such obstacles to getting into the federal government, many young people
choose to slide into federal careers through student hiring initiatives -- such
as the Cooperative Education and Presidential Management Intern programs.
Unfortunately, these programs have fallen under seige.
Federal agency managers were so impressed with the employees sent to them by
the Presidential Management Intern Program -- which trains outstanding graduate
students for managerial positions -- that, in 1988, the ceiling on the number of
internships that could be offered through the program each year was raised from 200 to 400. Vice President Gore regards PMIs so highly that he drafted 75 of
them onto the reinvention team that helped him conduct the National Performance
Review.
Yet federal agencies are not hiring PMIs. This year, the program selected
301 finalists (out of 12,000 nominees), but found placements for only 180 of
them. The reason? Faced with slashed budgets, federal agencies are determining
that PMIs, for whom they must pay OPM $ 2,100 a year in addition to their salaries, are too expensive.
The Cooperative Education program -- which gives students from high school
through graduate school opportunities to work on federal projects in their areas
of study -- has also seen better days. Recently, agencies were told they had to
begin counting participants in the program under FTE, (full-time equivalent)
ceilings.
In the past, agencies could benefit from work performed by co-op
students at an annual cost well below that of a full-time permanent employee and
not worry about personnel limits. Even though co-op students typically work
part-time while attending school and so only consume one-quarter to one-half of
an FTE each, FTEs have become too precious for many agency managers to allocate
even in quarters and halves. Consequently, co-op assignments, which OPM
advertises as "the jobs that will produce the managers, professionals and civil
service workers for tomorrow's government," are being reduced.
Anita Alpern, a professor of public administration at American University,
suggested at the OPM meeting in April that the government should show
committment to young professionals by setting aside "untouchable funds for
programs like Co-op Education and the PMI so that it can maintain a consistent
flow of future leaders into the government, even when money is tight." PMIs invest a considerable amount of money in graduate school and time in the
strenuous PMI candidateship. And in taking a PMI position, they "are
sacrificing a private-sector salary for the federal government experience," as
Schnell says. "In the past, the government rewarded them with all the
experience they could handle, and with job security. Today? I know six or
seven PMIs who've been RIFed. That's not much of a reward."
The federal government is hardly in a position to skimp on the psychic
rewards it promises, since its salaries are not competitive with other sectors,
or even with other levels of government. For example, says Zuck, the $ 23,000
average PMI salary is markedly lower than the salaries new graduates can get in
many local governments.
New Ways to Do Good
Ten years ago, says Zuck, roughly 40 percent of students who graduated from
NASPAA-affiliated schools went on to work in government. Only 20 percent do so
today. Brinton Milward, dean of the School of Public Administration and Policy
at the University of Arizona and president of NASPAA, attributes the decline to
"radical changes in the way educators and people in the private sector think
about public administration and management. Today's students are taught skills
-- consensus-building, network-building, negotiation -- that prepare them to
operate in work environments where they have autonomy." Graduates with the new skills want to avoid the hierarchies and excessive oversight that are standard
operating procedure at most federal agencies.
In addition, today's graduates have less reason to endure aspects of the
federal workplace that clash with their training, says Milward. In the past
decade, there has been an explosion of alternative venues through which workers
can exercise their public service ethic -- from quasi-governmental efforts like
the Key Program, which serves troubled youth in the Northeast, to nonprofit
groups organized around single issues like the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
Unlike the federal government, these service organizations tend to be run
according to management principles that young idealists understand.
If the National Performance Review successfully completes deregulation of the
federal government, it will become the kind of organization that new graduates
are seeking -- a government that is, as the NPR puts it, stripped of
"unnecessary layers of regulation that stifle innovation," where employees make
"their own decisions and solve . . . their own problems." But the possibility of
eventual reform can't allow the federal government to alienate young people in
the interim, attendees at the April OPM meeting argued.
Furthermore, says Zuck, OPM must lead the effort. "OPM's role in hiring
college graduates may be changing as the Clinton Administration delegates hiring responsiblity to agencies, but OPM still has a role," he says. "It is
OPM's job to spread the word that, downsizing or no downsizing, the federal
government requires the continuous input of young employees." Richard Whitford,
director of federal information employment programs at OPM, adds that OPM also
has a duty to disseminate information about new federal hiring practices and
technology because, "as hiring is decentralized, everyone will need to know what
the rules are."
Why Should the Government Care?
Donna Beecher, deputy associate director for career entry at OPM, points out
that the federal government's ability to recruit young talent has improved
dramatically since the days when its hiring problems were dubbed the "quiet
crisis" within the civil service. "In the late 1980s, the federal government
was having real trouble filling positions with highly qualified young
professionals," she says. "Today, we don't have the same shortages of
applicants, and agency managers tell us they are very happy with the young
professionals that are coming to work for them."
Despite the constraints of working in the executive branch, many young
professionals who work for agencies seem happy too. Jarrett Cummings' job as a
program analyst in the Department of Education's Higher Education Incentive Programs Division makes him feel as if he is doing something valuable: "I review
budgets of potential grantees. I get to save taxpayers money while still
ensuring that federal funds get to good programs," he says.
Former PMI Denise Flanagan, 26, enjoys her job as a management analyst for
the Defense Civilian Personnel Management Service because, she says, "I'm
interested in how you manage a huge organization- and the U.S. federal
government is one of the biggest."
Laura Anne Giantris, 25, who has quickly
risen to the level of a GS-11 supervisory investigator at the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, notes that "many smaller federal agencies lack adequate
staffing and funding, so they cannot afford to under-utilize the talents of
their young professional staff. My job at EEOC has always pushed me to my
limits."
With fewer jobs to fill, and highly qualified, energetic young professionals
like Cummings, Flanagan and Giantris willing to fill them, why should government
care that its work environment and cumbersome entry procedures have driven some
other young professionals away?
Because the twentysomethings who are in government today might not be there
tomorrow. Today's graduates desire mobility in their careers, something the
paper-heavy federal hiring process cannot easily provide.
"The notion of entering one organization and working there for 30 years is dead," says Zuck.
"Now, portable skills matter, as does the ability to move horizontally among a
set of similar organizations -- within a single sector, and across the public,
private and independent sectors."
Flanagan confesses to an interest in working for city government at some
point in her career. "With my federal government experience, I would have ideas
on how to interject local government concerns into a political process that is
controlled by federal government priorities," she says. Giantris plans to go to
law school.
Also, young outsiders have designs on entering the federal service a few
years down the road. University of Chicago law student Maren Lee, 24, explains:
"When I graduate, I'll have to work for a private law firm to pay off my student
loans. But I am so pleased with the experience I had interning at GAO last year
that I fully intend to return to the federal government -- hopefully to work for
the Justice Department." Bill Wood, 29, a consumer-education advocate for the
U.S. Public Issues Research Group, a national nonprofit organization, says,
"I'd like to follow the example of Ann Brown, the chairperson of the Consumer
Product Safety Commission, who established her credentials on the outside,
working for the Consumer Federation of America, and then moved into the federal
government, into a position of some authority."
The do-gooders of the 21st century want to move among advocacy groups,
congressional staffs, service organizations and all levels of government.
As
they do, the barriers separating different public service venues will crumble.
If the federal government is to share in the circulating talent, it has to free
up its hiring procedures to allow employees to move in and out of government
with ease. Moreover, it has to cultivate a federal work environment run on
innovation, idealism and hard work -- to ensure that entering federal service is
something young professionals want to do.
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