Government Executive - Authors - Karen Rutzick

Conflicting Images

Karen Rutzick — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Facebook, MySpace and other social networking Web sites now host civil servants ranting and agencies recruiting-mixed messages abound.

The future of the federal workforce is on display on social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and the picture is mixed. Young employees are baring their personal predilections and their agencies' peccadilloes on the sites at the same time government recruiters and boosters are using them to troll for talent. In the dissonant mix, opposing messages can cancel each other out.

On MySpace, Brennan, a 30-year-old federal employee in Washington, writes that he's a "nice guy" who "ideally would like to have more free time to sit back and relax." He doesn't want to stay in government forever. He's a weekend D.J. who'd like eventually to devote all his time to music. Christi, a financial analyst for the Navy and a former ballerina, tells the world on Facebook she thinks Journey is "the best band ever!," and she married a Marine a year ago. "They say the first year is the hardest," Christi writes. "If that's true, we have a very easy life ahead; this year couldn't have been better." Sally writes congressional reports for the Interior Department's Inspector General's Office. She also loves "European soccer; jeans; my Maltese, Georgie; tequila shots; sushi, sushi, sushi; taking pictures, [the clothing brand] Raw7; [manicures/pedicures]; funky haircuts," according to her page on Facebook.

As federal employees, Brennan, Christi and Sally usually are shielded from the public by layers of regulation and public relations management. But on Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, federal employees speak freely.

Anyone can create a mini social networking site. Users fill in their names, relationship status, work, hobbies and favorite movies. They upload photos of themselves and friends, then link to friends' pages, creating a web of connections. On MySpace and Facebook, users can write messages on each other's pages, join groups of like-minded people, such as "I Drink Pop, Not Soda," and find out about friends and meet strangers anywhere in the world. MySpace now counts 67 million users; last summer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought the site for $580 million. Facebook is smaller but gaining popularity, with about 24 million members. There are countless others, such as Tribe.net and Joga.com.

Peer to Peer

Federal employees are not writing only about manicures and music on social networking sites. They write about their jobs, too. Terrance, who works in Washington as a federal safety investigator, describes his position as "indentured servant." The Facebook group "I'm a Government Employee" has six members and this description: "Do you have 18 supervisors? Are you required to file a 10-page report on every phone call you receive? Is your paycheck less than what you got for an allowance in third grade? Then you must be a government employee! Welcome to your support group."

The "Young Gov't Professionals in DC Metro" Facebook group has 19 members. "If you're . . . under 35, a government employee in the DC Metro area, the rest of your co-workers are old and boring, and you want some people to go out with after work (besides your creepy boss who keeps hitting on you!) . . . then this is the place for you," reads the description.

Meanwhile, in December, the CIA's National Clandestine Service set up a Facebook group to recruit new employees. Wired magazine reported in January that the CIA kept its group for two months and posted a 30-second spot on the popular video-sharing site YouTube promoting the agency. Thousands of people signed up. Michele Neff, a CIA spokeswoman, told Wired, "It's an invaluable tool when it comes to peer-to-peer marketing." In January, CIA Director Michael Hayden told USA Today the agency had hired 15 percent of its workforce in the previous two months.

In fact, the entire intelligence community has tapped into electronic networking. Missed connections among intelligence and law enforcement agencies were blamed in part for the failure to prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. To more tightly bind the anti-terrorism corps, the office of the Director of National Intelligence created an electronic Yellow Pages for intelligence employees, the Analytic Resources Catalog. It's a "comprehensive database that provides . . . leaders with a detailed inventory of the thousands of intelligence analysts in the [intelligence community], according to their expertise and experience," states the DNI strategic human capital plan released in June 2006.

"If you want to know who in the community is analyzing the subject of Iraq, you should be able to call up the database of all analysts on the subject of Iraq, no matter what agency they are in," former DNI John Negroponte said in a 2006 speech to Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Negroponte wasn't the only one to pick up on a desire and a business case for networking.

Connecting people might be the key to recruitment, according to a recent study by a federal agency advocacy group. Last year, the Partnership for Public Service released "Back to School: Rethinking Federal Recruiting on College Campuses," examining the Internet's role in federal recruitment. The Washington-based partnership is a nonprofit group dedicated to improving federal recruiting and retention.

"Personal connections trump technology when it comes to generating interest, even among this Internet-savvy generation," according to the May 2006 report. "At the same time, the Internet is students' main source of detailed information once their interest has been piqued. Personal connections are not simply preferred sources-relationships have a direct impact on student knowledge of and interest in a government career."

The report points out that real-life interactions must supplement agency and job-finding Web sites to draw young workers. Social networking sites hold the promise of both, permitting interaction among job-seekers and current em-ployees and allowing agencies to provide easily accessible, attractive online data. But they also present the peril of too much information.

Perception Problems

Jaclyn is not the image of a happy, ambitious civil servant, at least not on her Facebook profile. There, she's a federal employee who loves the TV comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm and college basketball. Here's how she describes her job:

"I spend my mornings grabbing a cup of coffee, taking a morning walk, reading the papers. I make a few calls here and there, check on a few things, then send people around to do those things. . . . I take a leisurely lunch usually somewhere with cloth napkins, always with a glass of wine. . . . I come back usually in time to catch the mail round and I send out a few pieces of personal correspondence . . . before I know it I take an espresso break, usually on a nice day indulging myself with a good book at a café table . . . . I finish the afternoons with a few e-mails and a roundtable discussion about the weather."

It's hard to know how serious Jaclyn is, but her description does not do much to shatter a public perception that bureaucrats are lazy and overpaid. In 2001, Samuel J. Heyman, an investor and former assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut, donated $25 million to launch the Partnership for Public Service to battle the very image that Jaclyn's profile projects. The partnership has conducted surveys, worked with agencies to reduce the time it takes to hire civil servants, hosted a speech by Barack Obama encouraging public service and launched dozens of other projects.

"I think the image of old workers who are simply pushing pencils and paper is actually a misperception," says Tim McManus, vice president for education and outreach at the Partnership. "I think the more we're able to highlight real feds, the more that perception or misperception" disappears.

To highlight "real" feds, the partnership is taking a stab at a more traditional form of social networking. With a $4 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the Partnership has created a speakers bureau to bring talented federal employees to college campuses to recruit new blood. The Partnership also is beginning an online database of these speakers and other federal employees.

The idea is that potential hires will eventually be able to search current federal employees' profiles by high school, hometown, university, job, department, specialty or a host of other possible factors. If you are an engineering student from Ohio State University, you can find out where Buckeye engineers are serving in government.

But will such databases counteract profiles of federal employees such as Geoffrey, who works for the Homeland Security Department and describes himself on Facebook this way: "I'm 21 years old; I'm a federal officer for the Department of Homeland Security. I don't go to school, but plan on taking some courses. Good in computer, ran a computer repair company for a year." And what about the truly disparaging content on some social networking sites. Facebook has a group called "Help Save Michael Chertoff From Starving to Death," featuring a skeletal photograph of the DHS secretary.

"Every time we see Michael Chertoff, he is seemingly a little closer to the end," the group's page says. "When Bush puts him back in his cage at night and gives him his three Skittles for the day, he never complains. That's why we need to fight to save Chertoff. . . . This grassroots campaign ensures that for just 30 cents a day, you can feed a starving Cabinet member. Hang in there, buddy, we're coming for you."

Dipping into the freewheeling, sometimes snarky atmosphere of social networking sites could backfire for good government boosters and federal agencies. "Is it a risk?" the Partnership's McManus asks. "Yeah, I think it is, but I think it also does bring some real life to the experience, and . . . the beauty of the social networking space is that it's not simple." The risks and rewards of open communication on networking sites mean that some in government are clamping down on them while others are imitating them.

In May, the Defense Department announced it was blocking access to MySpace on its network. It blocked YouTube and a handful of other sites as well, citing bandwidth concerns. Also in May, Premier Dalton McGuinty of Ontario, Canada, blocked government employees from using Facebook, setting off a firestorm of Canadian media attention and backlash from employees, including a Facebook group called Stop McGuinty's Crusade Against Facebook. So far, U.S. agencies haven't followed suit.

There are no governmentwide guidelines for the use of social networking sites, and no agencies have asked the Office of Personnel Management for such guidance, says Kevin Mahoney, OPM's associate director for human capital leadership. All of OPM's online energy has gone into the USAJOBS.gov Web site, which was dramatically overhauled for the better in the fall of 2003.

It's a straight job posting and application site-similar to Monster.com and other mainstream job search sites- supplemented by specific information on federal pay and benefits and veterans hiring. About 300,000 people search there for jobs each day and a million people post résumés every year. It follows all of the strict federal security and privacy guidelines for personal information. "The social networking sites are really meant to connect people," says Mahoney. "Even if you go into MySpace, if you look at Washington, D.C., there's a government thing you can click on. It theoretically takes you to government jobs, but it also takes you to other entities for a fee [that] will give you the same list you can get on USAJOBS for free."

'Facebook for Feds'

"One of the things that we found in just talking to young people in the federal system was this sense of isolation," says Carl Fillichio, vice president for innovation and public engagement at The Council for Excellence in Government, another Washington nonprofit advocating for good government. "It wasn't just the young fed at the VA in the Dallas office that's isolated from the VA. It was the young fed in the Department of Veterans' Health at the VA in Washington who felt isolated from other young people within their building."

To rectify the situation, the council launched YoungFeds.org Web site last fall. Billed as the "Facebook for feds," in an article on the front page of The Washington Post's business section, the Web site offers blogs and message boards and opinion polls for the new generation of government workers. It does not, however, offer social networking.

Fillichio doesn't like the social networking label for YoungFeds.org. "We got some criticism when we announced that this was a Facebook for feds . . . but that's not the point," he says.

Instead, the site focuses on arranging in-person meet-ups and thoughtful commentary by a few participants who write weekly columns, he says. And it's still evolving-the council is weeding out the spam and adding video content and online surveys. When the council teamed up with the Gallup Organization to gather a focus group about federal issues, using contacts through YoungFeds.org brought three times as many volunteers as were needed. "The researchers from Gallup literally fell out of their chairs," Fillichio says. "It takes weeks [usually] to recruit 12 people."

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Data brings out disparities in promotions, performance ratings

Karen Rutzick — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

How did Congress know about the discrepancy? Stroman handed over the data himself -- at least indirectly. And he's glad that he did.

Stroman is managing director of the Office of Opportunity and Inclusiveness at GAO. When Comptroller General David M. Walker hired him in 2001, he gave Stroman a mandate to promote diversity at the agency. Stroman responded with a controversial suggestion: publicize all the agency's promotions and performance ratings by race, gender, age, disability, veteran status, location and payband.

Senior GAO officials warned that this move would open the door to lawsuits and fuel unhappiness. But Walker approved the idea and Stroman began releasing the data annually on GAO's intranet. Sure enough, from 2002 to 2005, the data revealed a gap between performance appraisals of blacks and whites. It also showed that the gap widened the longer employees stayed at the agency.

"I have stood outside the Rayburn House Office Building wearing a suit and a tie during the middle of the day, trying to hail a cab, only to have that cab driver pass me by in order to pick up a white person standing less than five feet behind where I stood," Stroman told the committee. "Race, gender, ethnicity, disability, age and sexual orientation do matter."

Airing the data on the intranet was the first step to solving discrimination, according to Stroman. "What gets measured gets done," he says. "It becomes, I think, the linchpin to improving diversity."

Stroman believes GAO is the first and only federal agency to release diversity data to employees. In fact, a number of federal employee groups -- including Federally Employed Women and the African American Federal Executive Association -- went to Congress recently with a request for data. They want the Office of Personnel Management to offer more detailed information on how many minorities, women, people with disabilities and veterans each agency employs. They didn't go so far as to ask for data by promotion or performance rating.

"Current OPM reports group all minorities in grades GS-14, 15 and [the Senior Executive Service] together," William A. Brown Sr., national president and founder of AAFEA and retired senior executive at the Army Corps of Engineers, told Congress in May. "This presents a distorted view of diversity. We need an accurate baseline to measure progress or lack thereof."

Brown and his group are asking GAO to conduct a detailed study of diversity across all agencies. He wants to know, for example, whether his suspicions are true that blacks who reach the Senior Executive Service are older than others in the SES, giving them a shorter turn in power.

Brown's urgency to get the data stems from the opportunity he sees to diversify the upper ranks of government as many retire in the coming decade. Stroman wants to protect employees from the new wave of pay for performance. He says such pay systems pave the way for discrimination by giving managers more room to be subjective.

Middle managers, they said, are the ones who actually handle the promotions and performance reviews that executives from on high analyze for diversity. "The middle management layer seemingly douses the spreading diversity fire, smothering it through inertia rather than outright opposition," according to the report.

To fan the fire, these executives say, give middle managers the data. The Conference Board recommends releasing diversity data four times a year.

"A common and legitimate complaint on the part of middle managers is that they don't know the score," the report noted. "They're used to getting that data on a regular basis on inventory, productivity and response times and are expected to monitor these regularly and take necessary corrective action. Diversity should be no different."

"When [employees of color] get their ratings back, it is a surprise to them oftentimes," Stroman says. "There is a different level of communication going on with regard to performance with staff of color than with white staff. I think that reflects the culture that we live in. Having difficult discussions at work is difficult in any setting, but when you overlay that with gender, race, sexual orientation, it becomes more difficult. That disadvantages the staff of color."

But as much as Stroman and Walker believe in their system, it has opened them up to congressional backlash.

Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia, said at the hearing that members of GAO's Blacks in Government branch came to him with concerns about the disparity between black and white analysts. The performance ratings had greater consequences for employees since a pay restructuring took place at GAO gave some employees a chance at higher pay and capped others at a lower level.

Other critics complain that the raison d'être for GAO's diversity office--dealing with discrimination com-plaints--languishes. Janice Reece, general counsel for the GAO's Personnel Appeals Board from 1999 to 2005, told lawmakers that GAO was underfunding Stroman's office.

"The lack of resources for the operation of the civil rights office, or the office of opportunity and inclusiveness, has created substantial delays of processing in [Equal Employment Opportunity] complaints," Reece said. "The delays caused many employees to inform me that they wanted to forgo their claims of discrimination completely."

Stroman's controversial approach of airing diversity statistics is starting to pay off. When GAO first started disseminating promotions and performance review data, employees who worked at the Washington headquarters were shown to have higher marks than their counterparts in field offices such as Atlanta, Dallas and San Francisco. After the disparity was revealed, ratings and promotions nationwide leveled out almost immediately. This shift gives Stroman hope that parity can prevail.

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Hard Numbers

Karen Rutzick — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The Government Accountability Office's Ronald Stroman exposes disparities in promotions and performance ratings.

Ronald Stroman was hauled before a joint Senate-House hearing in May to explain why black analysts at the Government Accountability Office were receiving lower performance ratings than their white counterparts.

How did Congress know about the discrepancy? Stroman handed over the data himself-at least indirectly. And he's glad that he did.

Stroman believes GAO is the first and only federal agency to release diversity data to employees. In fact, a number of federal employee groups-including Federally Employed Women and the African American Federal Executive Association-went to Congress recently with a request for data. They want the Office of Personnel Management to offer more detailed information on how many minorities, women, people with disabilities and veterans each agency employs. They didn't go so far as to ask for data by promotion or performance rating.

More important than giving diversity data to Congress or even to advocacy groups is sharing it with middle managers, according to a new report from The Conference Board Inc., a nonprofit business research group in New York. Written by executives from corporations such as Avon Products Inc., Hewitt Associates, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Safeco Corp., among others, the report finds that middle managers are the biggest roadblock to diversity initiatives. Middle managers, they said, are the ones who actually handle the promotions and performance reviews that executives from on high analyze for diversity. "The middle management layer seemingly douses the spreading diversity fire, smothering it through inertia rather than outright opposition," according to the report.

To fan the fire, these executives say, give middle managers the data. The Conference Board recommends releasing diversity data four times a year. "A common and legitimate complaint on the part of middle managers is that they don't know the score," the report noted. "They're used to getting that data on a regular basis on inventory, productivity and response times and are expected to monitor these regularly and take necessary corrective action. Diversity should be no different."

In Stroman's discussions with GAO employees, he singled out a central reason for the discrepancies in performance scores: Managers were afraid to talk to their employees of color about their performance reviews. "When [employees of color] get their ratings back, it is a surprise to them oftentimes," Stroman says. "There is a different level of communication going on with regard to performance with staff of color than with white staff. I think that reflects the culture that we live in. Having difficult discussions at work is difficult in any setting, but when you overlay that with gender, race, sexual orientation, it becomes more difficult. That disadvantages the staff of color."

But as much as Stroman and Walker believe in their system, it has opened them up to congressional backlash.

"It would appear that African-Americans at GAO have been harmed by the restructuring, and this brings into question the fairness and credibility of GAO's performance management system," Davis said at the hearing. Other critics complain that the raison d'être for GAO's diversity office- dealing with discrimination com-plaints-languishes. Janice Reece, general counsel for the GAO's Personnel Appeals Board from 1999 to 2005, told lawmakers that GAO was underfunding Stroman's office. "The lack of resources for the operation of the civil rights office, or the office of opportunity and inclusiveness, has created substantial delays of processing in [Equal Employment Opportunity] complaints," Reece said. "The delays caused many employees to inform me that they wanted to forgo their claims of discrimination completely."

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Indomitable Spirit

Karen Rutzick — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Resiliency helps people embrace change and overcome crisis. Can it be taught?

With the click of a pen, the future of Lindy Ritz's organization went from stable and secure to tumultuous and uncertain. On Sept. 30, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed a law that drastically altered the business practices of the Federal Aviation Administration's Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City.

Soon thereafter, Ritz became director of the 5,000-person center, which supports FAA training, logistics and aviation safety services. "Ten or 15 years ago, you would consider our world was pretty predictable, a clear-cut aviation function and guaranteed customers," says Ritz. "Today we're pretty much an entrepreneurial organization trying to look at the bottom line."

The law put Ritz's center under a franchise fund, meaning all the administrative functions it provides-including accounting, payroll, training and information technology-have to be purchased by various government clients instead of funded through congressional appropriations. "Customers love you or leave you," Ritz says. "And they have the ability to do that."

Even cost-of-living pay hikes suddenly depended on attracting customers; nothing was certain anymore. But something funny happened amid the turmoil-the Monroney center improved. And Ritz loved every minute of the uncertainty. "There was an excitement," she says. "There was an anticipation of where is this going to lead . . . it has been extremely rewarding."

In February 2005, President Bush named Monroney a center for excellence for financial management. It's one of four organizations governmentwide held up as examples from which other agencies are to learn and buy financial management services.

Under any circumstance, change can be scary. Some of the biggest changes afoot in government are personnel reforms. At the Defense Department, the National Security Personnel System is supplanting the 58-year-old General Schedule with performance-based salaries and pay raises that some say are subjective.

The GovernmentExecutive.com comments section is filled with bitter prophesies about life under the new system:

"Does the NSPS training include 'bootlicking 101' so they know just how low they will have to go to get a promotion under the new system?"

"It's all an expensive attempt to relieve government employees of hard-won pay and benefits. If they stopped this effort, they would have the money they need to keep the system the same."

Cynicism is rampant in government, especially now that agencies face continual demands to deliver more services with less funding. In such an atmosphere, it seems impossible to get people to embrace change. So how does someone like Ritz emerge from this environment to undertake a complete agency makeover with excitement and turn it to her advantage? She chalks it up to one personality trait: resiliency. "It starts with senior leadership on down," Ritz says. "It's your ability to bounce back and thrive in an environment of constant change, and assuming that things will always be changing."

The Office of Personnel Management, which sets federal human resources policy, concurs. OPM developed a list of 22 traits federal employees must demonstrate to become Senior Executive Service members. They include political savvy, conflict management, decisiveness and resiliency. In OPM's words, a resilient employee "deals effectively with pressure; remains optimistic and persistent, even under adversity. Recovers quickly from setbacks."

Ritz demonstrated resiliency in 1997. She probably has displayed it a thousand times over throughout her government career. But it wasn't until the Oklahoma Federal Executive Board put on a workshop for federal executives in April that Ritz put a name to it. "It was like an 'aha,' " Ritz says. "Sometimes you know what qualities work, but you don't wrap it up and say, 'It's resiliency.' But I've always adhered to the idea that you can't be a victim thinker and you need to take complete control of you."

Ritz's aha moment came courtesy of a figure who lately has become a hot ticket on the federal speaking tour, a man who purports to carry the key to resiliency.

The Man With the Answers

Al Siebert has snow-white hair and a soothing voice. He likes to be called Al and ends his e-mails with a recommendation to "give hugs, take naps and have a happy heart!" He's a clinical psychologist, with a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He taught management psychology at Portland State University for more than 30 years and runs the Resiliency Center, a consulting and research operation in Portland, Ore.

His interest in resiliency grew from his fascination with survivors. He met Holocaust survivor and psychologist Dr. Viktor Frankl while at the University of Michigan and was struck by Frankl's successes despite his brutal past. Siebert wondered how it is that some people overcome terrible circumstances, while others crumble. He wrote a book, Survivor Personality (Practical Psychology Press, 1993), on the subject and made his first inroads among federal agencies. "I got more and more requests from the Forest Service and public agencies to come and give us a talk about how we can be survivors [when] our budget is cut, we're being downsized," Siebert says.

When USA Weekend magazine published a cover story on resilience in March 1999, Siebert was quoted. The story also featured the fledgling positive psych-ology movement headed by Martin E.P. Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and past president of the American Psychological Association. Positive psychology focuses on how to make people happy, rather than what causes mental illness. After the cover story ran, "man, the phone started ringing and requests came in," Siebert says.

Siebert followed Survivor Personality with The Resiliency Advantage (Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., 2005). "This book shows you how to sustain strong, healthy energy in nonstop change, bounce back quickly from setbacks, and gain strength from adversity," Siebert promises in his introduction. No small feat.

The difference between a survivor personality and resiliency, Siebert says, is that resiliency can be taught. He believes there are five drivers of resiliency:

Optimize your health and well-being.
Develop good problem-solving skills.
Develop strong inner gatekeepers.
Develop high-level resiliency skills.
Discover your talent for serendipity.

He offers advice such as: "When you are hit with a major unexpected difficulty, get a pad of paper and write the master question at the top: What are the most important questions I should be asking? Start listing questions such as: What is happening? . . . Where do I fit in the scene?. . . Then search for answers as fast as you can. The more quickly you grasp the total reality of what is happening, the greater resiliency advantage you have."

And throughout the book, Siebert sprinkles psychological research and personal stories, such as that of Gert Boyle, chairwoman of the board of Columbia Sportswear. Boyle took over her husband's small business after he died suddenly, and turned it into an enormous outerwear and ski wear retailer.

Siebert's work apparently resonates with federal employees. He has given workshops to dozens of groups, including the managers at the Hanford nuclear cleanup site in Washington state, the Bonneville Power Administration, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Postal Service and the Veterans Affairs Department. OPM hired him to lead workshops at its management development center in West Virginia.

But is this stuff for real?

Proactive

John Sykes' resiliency turned a scathing audit into a nearly sycophantic one. A program analyst in the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency, Sykes has seen reorganizations, private-public competitions, centralizations and decentralizations.

Right now, EPA is centralizing computer functions at a Durham, N.C., office, where Sykes works. EPA is running an A-76 job competition there. "Whether the contractors or the federal people win, we're going to change," Sykes says. That's why, when OPM's Center for Leadership Capacity Services sent out its offerings for February, Sykes homed in on Siebert's resiliency seminar.

Like Ritz, Sykes realized during the class that he was resilient, even if he hadn't called it that. In 1992, EPA's inspector general issued a blistering audit that showed agency employees were improperly interacting with contractor staff and directing them to do work not included in their contracts. Sykes says the audit was devastating to employees.

Anticipating a follow-up, Sykes made an unusual move. He called up the IG's office and asked for help in cleaning up his shop. "I called the IG; they were floored," Sykes says. He told them, " 'It'd be best if we do it now. I know you're going to come.' I was proactive. All you can do is make me better. Even if you put me down to the ground, I can do better. I can learn. I can bounce back."

In 1998, the follow-up report found that problems persisted, but there were one or two bright spots. Sykes' office was one of them: "The project officer was very knowledgeable . . . [and] established and implemented effective controls," auditors wrote. Controls included visiting sites where contract employees worked to inspect them for proper workspace, tracking training records, reviewing work orders and stressing to employees which contract employees to deal with.

So if Sykes already was resilient, what did he get from the class? Commiseration and camaraderie, to start. "I'm interested in how the other agencies deal with" budget cuts and personnel reforms, Sykes says. He also found that managers who successfully surfed turbulent times emphasized communication with employees-a lot of it, all the time, even if the only news is that managers don't know exactly what is going on. Sykes adheres to the model, communicating even with potential adversaries like the IG. But can his resiliency be bottled and sold?

Dumb Luck

George Bonanno has his doubts. He is an associate professor of psychology and education at Columbia University who specializes in resiliency. He recently published a paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology about survivors of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He and his colleagues identified 12 predictors of resiliency for survivors, including some surprises, such as chronic illness.

During a telephone interview, Bonanno puts down the receiver for a moment to retrieve Siebert's book from the shelf. Siebert had sent him the The Resiliency Advantage some time ago, but Bonanno never read it. Glancing at Siebert's levels of resiliency and some of his suppositions, Bonanno comes to a quick conclusion: "He's making stuff up."

"He may be a perfectly nice guy and this might not be bad stuff," Bonanno says. "But he's making it up."

As it turns out, the key to resiliency might not be answering Siebert's resiliency questions on a legal pad. In fact, Bonanno's research has identified a group of predictors, some mundane, others uncontrollable. In addition to chronic illness, there's having a social support network and financial viability. "The gist of all of this is: These things are not sexy," Bonanno says. "Some of it is just dumb luck."

Siebert, of course, says research backs his claims. His book is littered with footnotes, including venerable sources such as the American Psychological Association and Oxford University. But the conclusions he reaches by tying together their findings haven't been peer reviewed. "Peer review is a good thing because it keeps us from publishing crap," Bonanno says. Siebert acknowledges he's considered an outsider by the world of academic psychology. "They always ignore me," he says. "At the national level, the leaders want to get credit and want the public attention for it. I just keep making myself useful."

Within government agencies, people still credit Siebert with guiding them through workplace white water.

No Poker Face

James O'Neill is a program manager at the Social Security Administration's Baltimore Center for Employee and Leadership Development. He comes from a big Irish family known for big emotions. And he doesn't hide them at the office.

SSA employees have been on tenterhooks since January, when then-Commissioner Jo Anne Barnhart left after six years. Employees knew little about the intentions of the new commissioner, Michael J. Astrue. O'Neill's team had no idea whether Astrue would back the leadership competencies his team had developed.

"We'd just achieved a great deal of buy-in from our previous leadership on the competencies," O'Neill says. "We were facing uncertainty about whether our activities were going to be approved." On top of that, SSA has seen tough budget times. Democrats' decision to hold the agency's budget at 2006 levels instead of passing a new appropriation for fiscal 2007 sent Barnhart to the Hill with warnings of 10-day furloughs without additional funding.

In addition, O'Neill's family was dealing with illnesses and a death, and other employees in his office faced similar problems. So O'Neill felt a strong pull when Siebert brought resiliency training to the agency in December. And O'Neill left the two-day on-site training course feeling bolstered. He decided to open up in the office about his family's troubles and let an employee stop traveling while her mother was ill. He called Siebert's class "life-affirming."

Like Ritz, Sykes and O'Neill, Maj. Wistaria Joseph at Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Okla., also took Siebert's resiliency exercises back to her office. She used the lessons to help her staff of human resources specialists deal with the advent of the new Defense personnel system. The Bush administration's effort to consolidate administrative functions among a few agencies and companies spurred Shelly McAllister, a senior budget analyst at the Office of Management and Budget, to bring Siebert to speak at the American Association for Budget and Program Analysis conference last year. She says the consolidation, known as the lines of business initiative, is "the biggest thing to come along in the budget community for a heck of a long time," and analysts need resilience to stay on top of the changes. Siebert's lessons might be controversial, but they're also resilient. He's scheduled to teach a three-day seminar at OPM's West Virginia training facility in September.

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Duty Calls

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

As a federal employee, you're already doing your civic duty every day just by showing up to work. But that won't get you out of another responsibility: jury duty.

Even FBI Director Robert Mueller wasn't immune to the summons. In May 2006, Newsweek reported that Mueller spent five and a half hours in a Washington courtroom before being dismissed from the juror pool for a murder trial. Mueller, a former prosecutor, had tried cases in front of the presiding judge.

Then in July, The Washington Post's "Reliable Source" column reported that the jury pool for the D.C. Superior Court held both White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Federal law requires all employers, public or private, to give workers time off for jury duty. But the law does not require employers to pay their salaries during trials. Nonetheless, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 87 percent of employers offer paid leave for jury duty.

Federal employees certainly fall in that 87 percent. Whether you're a full-time, part-time, permanent or temporary employee, the government will pay your salary during jury duty. It's called court leave, and using it doesn't reduce your annual or sick leave.

There are a few rules to court leave that have been refined through the years. It can also be used if you're called as a witness, including for depositions that are not in your official capacity. Don't expect court leave if you're testifying on your own behalf, however.

If you're using annual leave when called for jury duty, the court leave will substitute for it and keep you at your old leave level. But if you're on leave without pay, court leave doesn't apply.

If you work a full day and then serve on a grand jury in the evening, you're entitled to a day of court leave the following day to compensate.

If compensated for jury service, federal employees must fork it over to their agencies. In other words -- there's no double dipping. The exception is money paid by the court to cover expenses such as transportation. That you can keep.

To get court leave, show your supervisor your summons. Get a certificate of attendance signed by a court official to document your service and submit this to your supervisor when you return, too.

A short note to Pay and Benefits Watch readers: After two years of writing this column, I'm leaving the magazine for other pursuits. Brittany R. Ballenstedt, who reports on pay and benefits for Government Executive already, will take over. Thanks for reading.

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Seeing Is Believing

Karen Rutzick — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Budget graphic offers a new way to understand agency funding.

Jess Bachman was working at an Urban Outfitters store in Burlington, Vt., in 2004 when inspiration struck. There must be a way to visualize the federal bud-get, he thought. It might seem an odd idea for a man working in retail. But Bachman, a 26-year-old University of Massachusetts graduate, says, "I tend to deconstruct information, whether it comes from a company or the U.S. government."

He put his graphic design background to work. What came out more than a year of late nights later is Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Taxes Go, a graphic representation of the entire federal discretionary budget. "It's an experiment in do-it-yourself oversight," Bachman says.

It's also a massively complex image. A black background is webbed with interconnected circles, each representing a government agency or program. Circle size depicts each organization's portion of the discretionary budget. Military spending is on the left and nonmilitary spending is on the right.

Interesting comparisons easily jump out. Sprouting from the National Institutes of Health circle are two smaller circles. The National Institute of Mental Health takes in more than $1.4 billion in the president's 2008 budget proposal, while its sister agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases receives almost triple that: $4.6 billion. The Transportation Department's circle dwarfs the State Department's. Much of Transportation's budget goes into highway projects. Both are minuscule compared with the Army, Air Force or Navy circles.

Within the Executive Office of the President, the Office of Management and Budget is given $710 million, but a separate $1 billion goes toward unanticipated needs. Bachman's research showed that money went to Iraq reconstruction. "What's that doing in the White House?" Bachman says. "It's a little weird."

The EOP's unanticipated needs are just one budget trick Bachman discovered in his years of research. "There are ways to tax people without actually making it a tax," he says. One of his favorite examples is the Federal Communications Commission, which appears on the poster as a tiny circle with $420 million in appropriations. "In the FCC there's this $6 billion thing called the universal service fund," Bachman says, "[which makes] sure everyone has communications access, particularly in rural areas. It's a huge fund, a lot bigger than the FCC itself. The government pays for it by making the companies that provide the service do it for free." Telecom companies in turn often pass this expense on to consumers.

Death and Taxes, which Bachman updates each year and sells through his Web site, thebudgetgraph.com, also illustrates which agencies are the biggest losers and winners year to year. The Housing and Urban Development Department lost 23 percent in funding for housing for the elderly in one year. On the flip side, the Energy Department got a 22 percent bump up in science funding.

Federal budget numbers can be ambiguous, too. For example, the United States Institute of Peace shows an 11 percent gain over last year. But that's a temporary increase so the $30 million agency can build a new headquarters.

Overall, it's a lot of in-depth knowledge for Bachman. "Some people consider me a de facto expert," he says. "I don't really like that. I'm just really a graphic designer." But he's a designer with a purpose. "I want the federal budget to be something that is not so inaccessible that people don't even want to deal with it," he adds. "I want to force it into the mainstream culture." It's not surprising that many of his customers have been federal employees. They tend to work for agencies in the Defense and Energy departments and the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation, which had a $1 billion budget-an 8 percent increase from 2006.

Bachman gets feedback from buyers as well. One customer, who hung the poster on his office wall, wrote: "I work for DoD, and I enjoy reminding my fellow civil servants of the trust and confidence placed in us by the taxpayer as evidenced by the sheer magnitude of dollars they send us. For me, it's a helpful reminder of how lucky I am to work here and that I'd better accomplish something meaningful with these resources."

An employee at Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Roane County, Tenn., went a step further. He works on advanced visualization and has displayed Bachman's graphic image on a 10-foot high monitor in the lab.

Bachman has sold about 1,200 copies of the 2007 edition of Death and Taxes and the recently completed 2008 version is available and selling for $28.95. For $10, customers can order a copy of the poster online and have it sent to their state representative or senator, with a note pointing out a particular agency of interest. The Boingboing.net Web log sent a lot of customers Bachman's way, and word spread virally. "I track where all the referring links [on the Internet] come from, and I'll go to the forum," Bachman says. There is "every single type you could imagine . . . Christian mothers and one from atheist parents."

Bachman has quit retail and works full time on the budget poster and other graphic design projects. Moveon.org recently asked Bachman to sell the poster on its Web site. Urban Outfitters hasn't called just yet.

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Double the Money

Karen Rutzick — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The Thrift Savings Plan's recent rapid growth is mostly due to new participants.

Andrew Saul, chairman of the board that oversees the federal Thrift Savings Plan, called it a milestone when the 401(k)-style retirement savings program for 3.7 million federal employees and retirees reached $200 billion at the end of 2006. TSP had doubled its worth since 2000, and Saul predicts that it will reach $300 billion by 2010.

Great news for investors, right?

Not necessarily.

The TSP's rapid overall growth doesn't mean individual accounts are gaining at the same rate. In 2000, just about the time the plan hit the $100 billion mark, Congress extended the TSP to include members of the armed services.

Two and a half million members of the military are eligible to participate in the TSP, and a little more than 550,000 have signed up. (Incentive is lower for service members, who receive a separate pension, and therefore the government does not match their contributions to the TSP.)

New contributions account for more than double the TSP's growth from investment earnings. And while there is $100 billion more in the plan, there also are 1.2 million more people with money in it. By contrast, the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), which has 1.5 million members and is the richest pension fund in the United States, weighs in at about $235 billion. CalPERS gained twice as much from investment earnings than from new contributions last year, with an overall 2006 rate of return of 15 percent. TIAA-CREF, a private company that runs 401(k)-style programs for academics and nonprofit professionals, also is making double-digit market returns, 11 percent in 2006.

Unlike TSP, CalPERS' participants don't pick their investments, and their payout isn't based on how the market performs. TSP participants pick their investments, putting about a third of their money into the G Fund, a reliable but low-performing government securities fund. It doesn't earn huge returns. "[The G Fund] is such a great investment, let's be honest," Saul said at a December 2005 Board meeting. "It gives you such a great rate at no risk at all. So you'll always have more investors in the money market than you would in other plans."

Lower returns

In 2006, a third of the Thrift Savings Plan money was in the G Fund, with a reliable but low return, dragging down the overall growth from investments. The TSP doesn't calculate an overall rate of return.

Fund	Portion of TSP	Rate of Return
C Fund: Common stock of large domestic companies	36%	15.79%
G Fund: Government securities	33%	4.39%
I Fund: International investments	10%	26.32%
S Fund: Stocks of smaller domestic companies	8%	15.30%
L Fund: Fixed-income bonds	5%	4.40%
L 2020: A mix of the five basic funds for people retiring in 2020	3%	13.72%
L 2010: A mix of the five basic funds for people retiring in 2010	2	11.09%
L 2030: A mix of the five basic funds for people retiring in 2030	2	15.00%
L 2040: A mix of the five basic funds for people retiring in 2040	1	16.53%
L Income: A mix of the five basic funds for people ready to retire.	0	7.59%

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Personality Test

Karen Rutzick — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Agencies use psychological profiles to cultivate teamwork.

Everybody has a type, including Phil Varnak.

"I'm an extrovert," says Varnak, a labor relations consultant and former manager at the Interior and Veterans Affairs departments. "Extroverts tend to run over introverts. If introverts are thinking about an answer, extroverts will ask two or three or four more questions before they can even answer the first."

Varnak learned his lesson as an employee of the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver in the mid-1990s. His nine-person human resources office hired a consultant to improve its teamwork. The consultant wielded an increasingly popular tool: the personality test.

In this case, it was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI, as it is known in human resources circles, was created in the 1940s by the mother-daughter team of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, based on Carl Jung's psychological types.

MBTI neatly categorizes everyone into one of 16 personality types, a combination of Extroversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling and Judging-Perceiving, based on answers to questions such as:

"Are you more attracted to a person with a quick and brilliant mind, or a practical person with a lot of common sense?"

"When you start a big project that is due in a week, do you take time to list the separate things to be done and the order of doing them, or plunge in?"

Federal agencies have been using the test for decades in an attempt to improve management.

Jeffery Hayes, co-president of the company that owns the Myers-Briggs, says government agencies account for about 20 percent of sales at CPP Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.

Myers-Briggs results are supposed to illuminate employee personalities and ease collaboration. Varnak's office consultant sat his team down and walked through the personality types of everyone. For an office that handled the rather concrete work of staffing, budgeting and awards, the rather elastic stuff of personality seemed to make a difference.

"Individuals who leaned toward the feeling end of the scale want to consider the views of individuals and how they're going to be affected," Varnak says. "Finding this out . . . really assisted us in understanding how others would respond."

That means for some, the human touch helps. For others, it hinders. Knowing your own type is the first step for wannabe leaders. That's the stance taken at the USDA Graduate School Executive Leadership Program, which uses Myers-Briggs heavily.

The $3,500 program involves nine months of training for employees at the GS-11 to GS-13 levels hoping to gain supervisory experience. At the end of the program, teams present the results of a long-term project, such as marketing products to increase visitors to an obscure park service monument or a program to collect data on congressional budgeting.

When new students come to the leadership program, the Myers-Briggs is one of the first things they do. Their project teams are formed from the results, though organizers are careful to put a diverse mix of personality types into each group.

"The purpose is so they understand how to work with people who have different preferences," says Sharon Barcellos, program manager for the USDA Graduate School. "That is valuable to our program, but then it is extremely valuable to them when they go back to their organization and have to work with people that work in a different mode than they work."

Varnak and Barcellos are hardly alone in using the psychological test in an effort to boost efficiency. The Agriculture Department, Office of Personnel Management, Federal Reserve, Environmental Protection Agency, Army and Navy use Myers-Briggs, according to Hayes of CPP. At EPA, employees have become certified to analyze the results of the Myers-Briggs. "We have actively encouraged members of our training staff to become qualified to administer the MBTI," says Brian Twillman, organization development specialist at EPA headquarters.

"A substantial number of the managers and staff know their preferences for how they are energized, gather information, make decisions and organize or interact with the world around them. This self-awareness leads to better personal and working relationships."

CPP is offering a do-it-yourself online version of the test, called MBTI Complete. Instead of a trained consultant or in-house administrator, employees can take the test and read an interpretation of their results online.

Myers-Briggs has the name recognition and is trying to stay fresh with its new online version, but there are competitors. At the U.S. Geological Survey's Office of Employee Development, the personality assessment of choice is the Dominance Influence Steadiness Conscientiousness test, according to Alan Ward, training coordinator in Denver.

"The DISC instrument is a little more contextual and [has] a little more preferences for behaviors that are a little less dyed in the wool," Ward says. Employees "can apply it to their work situations a little more readily."

Ward used Myers-Briggs in the past, but says, "I would literally use the word dated. It ran its course."

Varnak and Barcellos would disagree. Barcellos says some of her students have said the test is so good it even helped them at home. They'll say "for years my husband and I couldn't come to an agreement on how we deal with this, but now I understand it is how he makes his decisions," Barcellos says.

Similarly, Varnak and his wife started giving the Myers-Briggs at their church. "We've had couples come up to us after they've taken it and say 'that has saved our marriage,' " he says.

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Stalked by Census

Karen Rutzick — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

My face of government won't let me be.

I have a stalker. Her name is Shirley and she works for the U.S. Census Bureau.

Shirley calls me more than some of my friends from childhood or college. She calls more than my cousin at UCLA law school. Shirley writes, too. And she stops by my apartment, slipping business cards under my door while I hide in the dark. So far, she hasn't come to the office, but she did call my managing editor once to track me down.

It started more than five years ago, when I was still in college. My family was one of 62,000 households randomly selected for the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Since I was considered part of that household when the survey started, I'm stuck in it.

"It's like some sort of lottery, except I didn't win one that gives me money," my stepmother, Cynthia Rutzick, says.

SIPP is a more intensive version of the Census Bureau's once-a-decade routine. Every four months, federal employees across the country prod participants for the most personal of information.

Shirley knows my income, my savings and how much interest my checking account earns each quarter.

Yes, Shirley, I'm still single. No, not widowed. Just single.

And no, Shirley, I probably don't save enough because I don't have any stocks or bonds or CDs or an IRA or anything other than my 401(k), even though you ask me every time. I already feel guilty about that.

I'll admit it: Shirley only stalks me because she has to. If I'd just answer my cell phone when "census lady" pops up on caller ID, I'd get it over with in 15 minutes. But I'm in Boston watching my boyfriend run the marathon or on my way to a Hanukkah party on the National Mall or, say, busy at work. And I dread answering all those private, guilt-inducing questions. Last year, I avoided the calls and visits for weeks, thinking they would take me off the study eventually. They only became more persistent until I caved.

"I thought I'd try you at home," Shirley says in one voice message. "I'd appreciate a return call. I do have a deadline to meet. I know you know about deadlines, being a reporter and all." Her messages get increasingly dire as a couple of days pass.

"This is Shirley," she says. "I'm desperate to meet my deadline. Please, please call me. I take phone calls as late as 1 a.m. Did try calling you at work a few times. I am desperate to speak with you. Please call me."

I understand that the survey is important. It measures vital government programs, including food stamps and Medicare, and private ones such as health insurance and labor unions. Congress uses the results to make decisions.

I asked Shirley once if other participants protest, too.

"Most people think we're being nosy; it's none of our business; this, that or the other," she says. "We don't think it's asking too much to give up a little bit of your time to make a difference."

I agree, mostly. But I also think there's another impact to consider. For most Americans, their only contact with federal employees-and their government-is interaction with Internal Revenue Service agents or Social Security workers. Maybe natural disaster will strike and they'll talk to a FEMA employee. Rarely do average Americans encounter people from the Patent and Trademark Office or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as important as their work is.

If I didn't write for Government Executive, for me, the face of government would be Shirley from Census. It's a face that just won't let me be.

The survey was supposed to wrap up last fall, but last March, 530 researchers, including two Nobel Laureate economists, wrote to Congress asking them keep the SIPP going. Funding was granted. Shirley will be calling in August.

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Getting to the SES

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 31 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

A federal employee's ultimate pay raise comes with entrance to the Senior Executive Service, where salaries top out at about $170,000 a year.

But to snag one of the 6,000 or so spots in the SES, employees have to attain a very specific set of skills and knowledge. The Office of Personnel Management calls them Executive Core Qualifications. There's a myriad of them, and they can be hard to demonstrate. Employees looking to make the jump to the SES are advised to tailor their career moves with the qualifications in mind.

The criteria were developed from a 1991 OPM survey of 10,000 supervisors and managers in public and private sectors.

The five qualifications are broken down into a number of subsections. For the "Leading People" category, for example, employees must demonstrate that they can develop other employees, leverage diversity, build teams and manage conflicts. That's hard to prove. OPM suggests training as one way to get there.

As a result, such training has an audience. In late April, the African American Federal Executives Association announced a new training initiative for its members at its annual conference in Williamsburg, Va. It's a leadership development program that will pair current and retired SES members with up-and-coming federal employees to help them with resumes and interview techniques, and give them a chance to gain needed experience.

The program will start in September, and about 75 people immediately signed up.

"We're swamped, absolutely," said William Brown, the association's president and a former senior executive retired from the Army Corps of Engineers. "I was surprised at how quickly everyone jumped on it."

For employees who don't belong to the AAFEA, there are many similar organizations that offer training courses, though not all are as comprehensive. These include Federally Employed Women, the Society of American Indian Government Employees, and the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Government group. The Chief Human Capital Officers Council houses the announcements for many of these training programs on its Web site.

OPM also offers workshops on obtaining the qualifications to reach the SES. Check with your human resources office to see if OPM is coming to your agency, or to request a workshop. In the meantime, the Commerce Department keeps a Webcast of a session from last year on its Web site.

OPM also suggests -- not surprisingly -- that wannabe SESers attend its overnight training programs at the Federal Executive Institute and Management Development Centers. They've even got a class called the Senior Executive Assessment Program in Colorado. For about $6,000 and one week of your time, you will "receive feedback from multiple sources, including superiors, peers, subordinates, [and] coaches, assess your potential for SES selection or rising to higher SES levels, receive personalized performance assessments on the ECQs necessary for the SES and develop an Individual Development Plan to improve your ECQs."

Perhaps the clearest road to the SES is the Senior Executive Service Federal Candidate Development Program, which after completion allows employees to be selected for SES jobs without normal competition. The program is tough to get into, though. In 2004, 50 were accepted out of 4,700 applicants. Brown's group and others are asking OPM to expand it.

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Model for Health Coverage

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 24 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

For the most part, federal employees, retirees and their family members are not among the 40 million Americans lacking health insurance. But that doesn't mean they won't be affected by the growing health care debate.

Health care policy is proving to be a more central issue in the 2008 presidential election than in the past. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, a Republican candidate, told attendees of an AARP conference in February: "I would dare to say the 2008 election is going to be all about health care."

There is Iraq, of course. But, to the extent that health care is important, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program is part of the debate. The idea of giving American people access to the same health plan as members of Congress is politically solvent. If the FEHBP is opened up to the general public, though, it could change the demographics, which could influence premiums and make managing the program costlier.

In 2006, two successful contenders for Senate seats -- Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. -- used the FEHBP model in their health care platforms. Klobuchar advocated opening the program to the uninsured and McCaskill supported using the program as a model for a new health care system for small businesses.

Putting aside Thompson and a few other exceptions, the Democratic presidential contenders have tended to focus on health care much more so far than their Republican counterparts. Some Republicans, including John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, don't even mention health care on their Web sites.

But the Democrats mostly do. And three of them -- Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson -- use the FEHBP in their platforms.

Richardson has the most prominent reference to the federal employee plan.

Richardson would seek to "open up existing sources of affordable, portable coverage to more Americans," his platform states. "Working families and small businesses will be able to purchase coverage through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan."

Under Richardson's proposal, not only would private sector employees be allowed to enter the FEHBP -- the government would help some of them pay for it. Richardson suggests "an advance refundable tax credit based on income will help families obtain coverage through the FEHBP."

According to a local New Hampshire media outlet, Foster's Online, Richardson spoke about health care in Barrington, N.H., in early May.

"Businesses and individuals should be able to get the congressional plan," Richardson said. "If you can get it for the Congress and federal government employees, you should be able to apply to the Cadillac plan that the Congress gets."

Clinton's Web site does not mention opening up the FEHBP, or any specific plan to bring the universal health care coverage she advocates. But in a March 26 town hall on ABC's television program "Good Morning America," she made it a possibility.

"I believe that one of the ways we can get health care for everyone is to open up the federal plan that's available to members of Congress," Clinton said. "That would be one way that we could say to you that you have the same right as anybody in Congress."

Obama, too, has yet to unveil a detailed health care proposal. But he is certainly familiar with the FEHBP, touting his support for health care technology in the program as a way to decrease costs. His election Web site says that "Senator Obama worked with Senator Harry Reid, D-Nev. to introduce the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program Efficiency Act to leverage the federal government's purchasing power to encourage the development of health information technology."

And according to The Des Moines Register, during Iowa campaigning in April, "Obama hinted during his later stops Thursday that his plan would likely include government assistance for some uninsured to enroll in insurance programs such as those offered to federal employees."

Watch for the FEHBP to be offered as a health care solution, especially among moderate candidates who would not go as far as a single-payer plan.

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Still Pushing

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 17 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

With only 18 months left in the Bush administration, the president's federal personnel chief is clamoring to make some key changes before time is up. Office of Personnel Management Director Linda Springer is focusing on short-term disability benefits and electronic retirement records, among other improvements.

In an interview this week with Government Executive President Timothy B. Clark, Springer laid out her priorities.

A short-term disability benefit, which would include paid maternity leave, is something of a change in policy for OPM. In 2001, the office issued a report arguing that agencies don't need to offer paid leave to federal employees when they have a baby or adopt a child.

Doris Hausser, who at the time was acting associate director for workforce compensation and performance at OPM, said, "The federal government's leave policies and programs compare favorably with benefits offered by most private sector companies…. a paid parental leave benefit would not be a major factor in enhancing [agencies'] recruitment and retention strategies."

But Springer said this week that short-term disability is "probably the one big hole we have right now. That's actually a recruiting problem. Women of childbearing age would prefer to go to a company with a maternity benefit than one without it."

The plan is still in its infancy; OPM is working with other agencies to hammer out specifics before proposing the new benefit to Congress. But OPM definitely is "trying to find a way to offer short-term disability benefits, to include maternity," Springer said.

Right now, federal employees must use a combination of paid annual leave, paid sick leave and unpaid leave when they take time off to care for newborns. Short-term disability also would cover injuries or illnesses that require federal employees to take time off for a few months.

Springer hinted that the new benefit might be an insurance offering, similar to the other new benefit that federal employees received recently -- dental and vision insurance -- in that there would be no employer subsidy. That formula would make the plan easy to swallow for budget-minded legislators. It would also make it less of a benefit for federal employees. But Springer's not sure yet.

"The one thing we know is we need it, and with our buying power we ought to get a good rate," she said.

An electronic retirement system, on the other hand, is much farther along. Already, OPM has signed contracts to buy ready-made electronic retirement processing systems. Work is under way to scan thousands of pages of records into the system.

In February 2008, the first 25,000 federal employees will be able to view their personnel records online. Springer hopes that by the following February, the entire civilian workforce will be in the new system. That depends on continued congressional support, though.

To that end, last week Springer brought a congressional delegation to a mine in Boyers, Pa., an hour north of Pittsburgh, to see the 150,000 file drawers full of federal employees' paper records. About 8,000 are scanned each day.

"At this stage in the administration, the safe ground to be on to continue to be effective is to focus on the employees," Springer said.

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Fight to The Finish

Karen Rutzick — Tue, 15 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

As the Bush administration winds down, tensions between careerists and political appointees heat up.

Rebecca McGinley exemplifies the best of career civil servants, or the worst of political appointees, depending on whom you ask.

For some, she is a bright, hardworking young lawyer who was hired into government for her skills. She is an apolitical workhorse who naturally transitioned from a political appointment to a career federal job. For others, McGinley is a Republican political crony, improperly using connections to win special treatment and "burrowing" into a career job, demoralizing her co-workers.

In April, the national nonprofit advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility raised the alarm on McGinley, an attorney at the Office of Special Counsel, accusing her of burrowing in.

Special Counsel Scott J. Bloch, an appointee, hired McGinley as principal special assistant, a political appointment, when he came to the agency in January 2004. Later, he moved her to another political slot, deputy special counsel, for a brief period before hiring her as a career attorney in the investigation and prosecution division, reporting to a career supervisor. Shortly thereafter, McGinley took a six-month detail at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia. Only career employees can receive detail assignments.

PEER is publicizing an anonymous account from an OSC staffer who says that Bloch converted McGinley because he "owed" her. "The top federal officer charged with protecting the merit system [is violating] core merit principles with impunity," says PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "The special counsel is supposed to enforce anti-cronyism rules but, under Scott Bloch, cronyism has become the prime management directive at OSC."

Then there's the other version. OSC spokesman James Mitchell says McGinley is hardly a crony; Bloch didn't know her before he hired her. Indeed, in the alumni magazine of her alma mater, Central Missouri State University, McGinley says as much: "When an attorney friend called and informed me that the U.S. Office of Special Counsel was looking to hire someone like me, I immediately made the call," she said.

Mitchell says McGinley's reputation is as a workhorse, not an elephant.

"She had a reputation of being able to go through big piles of cases," Mitchell says. "Scott doesn't even know how she votes . . . she just rolled up her sleeves and dug in with the career force."

McGinley is not alone in facing scru-tiny. At the Justice Department, another young attorney resigned after her role in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys was questioned. The Washington Post quoted an anonymous former career Justice official who said that Bush appointee Monica Goodling, senior counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and liaison to the White House, "forced many very talented career people out of main Justice so she could replace them with junior people that were either loyal to the administration or would score her some points."

As we enter the final 18 months of President Bush's tenure with the Democrats now controlling Congress, the age-old tension between career employees and political appointees is heating up.

Rare Peek

Almost a decade ago, the most respected career executives in government gathered for a morning of reflection. They belonged to an elite group-winners of the Presidential Rank Award. About 60 are feted each year in the State Department's glittering diplomatic reception rooms for their "strength, integrity, industry and a relentless commitment to excellence in public service." In 1998, away from the wine and chandeliers, the group met in a quieter setting, as they do every year. The objective of their meeting was an intellectual one: to examine their relationships with political appointees. The gathering was run by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Senior Executives Association, which documented the discussion. The resulting monograph was a rare, candid peek into the tension between political and career employees.

"If a political and a careerist were both told to get ice," one government official said, "we'd go get a glacier, slow moving and large. They'd go get a hailstorm."

"My single biggest job is to act as a dam to keep [some policies] from getting further down the line," another careerist said of political appointees' eagerness to make policy changes.

Such tension makes for good policy, says George Krause, a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies bureaucracies. "Their biases offset one another," he says. "Political executives are only thinking of the short term, whereas civil servants are thinking of the long term. They're invested in the agency and its long-term mission, and they don't want to look foolish if they're too optimist or sanguine."

The tension seldom is discussed openly. The anonymity of that day's discussion allowed career executives to share with unusual frankness their secrets about handling political counterparts.

"We are loyal to the government of the day," another official said. "A lot of times [political appointees] have sort of a vague vision, but when you ask them, 'What do you mean by this' or "How are you going to get this done,' that's when you lose their attention. When you go in and say, 'It sounds like you're going this way and here are three ways we can get it done,' they love it."

"It's kind of like the elephant in the living room that no one talks about but everyone knows is there," says Carol Bonosaro, president of SEA, which advocates for members of the Senior Executive Service, the top careerists in government, and sponsors the rank award dinners. This year, the newest crop of award winners will discuss the topic again, with a focus on whether political appointees are using career employees' talents to the fullest. Nine years later, careerists still question whether politicals value them.

Bonosaro's group has begun taking the tension public. In February, SEA announced its 2007 legislative priority: the "restoration of career leadership." It's not a George W. Bush thing; SEA leaders say career employees' powers slowly have been reduced over 20 years. They break down the subject into a number of separate issues. The first is McGinley's charge, burrowing in. It's a term used when appointees improperly move into career positions, extending their political party's influence past the next election.

In this arena, there's the case of William Cowen, solicitor at the National Labor Relations Board. NLRB is often at the center of controversial political decisions in the union world. Last year, for instance, the board ruled in the Kentucky River cases that many workers were ineligible for union membership because of supervisory duties. Thousands of nurses were deemed supervisors even if they had few managing duties, such as scheduling other nurses.

In January, Cowen took the NLRB solicitor's job, a career position as the board's chief legal officer and adviser on questions of law and policy. Before that, however, he had two political jobs, first as a recess appointee by President Bush to one of the five board member slots. After Cowen's one-year recess appointment expired, the head of the board, Robert Battista, hired him as his executive assistant. Cowen's move from a partisan position to the supposedly neutral agency adviser spot has caused some of his colleagues to bristle.

But Cowen insists his career switch is not burrowing in. "Burrowing in is not a concept that applies," Cowen says. Burrowing in is "when someone who is not qualified for a position is inserted for political reasons. My résumé speaks for itself on my qualifications." Indeed, Cowen began his legal career in 1979 at NLRB. He stayed for six years before entering a private labor law practice.

Regardless of résumés, the Office of Personnel Management sends out a memo during each presidential transition, warning agency heads not to permit burrowing in. Near the end of President Bill Clinton's tenure, in March 2000, then-OPM Director Janice Lachance issued a memo forbidding the conversion of Schedule C appointees to competitive positions without OPM approval.

On the flip side, agencies sometimes switch from traditionally career positions to political ones. It's another one of SEA's concerns, one it shares with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. In January, just before the Democrats officially took control of Congress, Kerry shot off one of his first letters as the head of the Senate Small Business Committee to Donald Winter, secretary of the Navy. Kerry questioned Winter's recent decision to convert the chief of the Navy Small Business Program from a career to a political position. "This is un-acceptable," Kerry wrote. "For program continuity and consistency, it is critical that this position remain a career SES."

Kerry told Winter he believed that "the staff that is charged with managing the day-to-day contracting and procurement process for the federal government should be as free from political influence as possible." Winter didn't budge. In his March 20 response, he told Kerry that his "decision to offer the position to a well qualified and experienced appointee from the private sector offers the department a valuable and renewable source of ideas."

'Creep Downward'

The Navy's small business position is no anomaly, according to John Euler, former chairman of the SEA board and retired Justice Department senior executive who served twice in Iraq in civilian roles. "I think over the last couple of administrations, there's really been a creep downward of political-level appointments," he says.

Sens. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, introduced a bill in February to elevate a careerist to the Homeland Security Department's No. 3 spot as undersecretary for management. Not surprisingly, DHS Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson doesn't like that idea, because it would diminish his own authority. But, he says, he and DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff are prioritizing the promotion of career employees to "visible" positions across the department to ensure a smooth transition into the next administration.

"When I was working [at the Transportation Department] for Andy Card . . . he said to me the very first morning that I started work for him-that was his first morning as secretary of transportation-he said let's make certain that in this department we treat the career people and political people as the same team," Jackson says. "No difference, no caste system, no prejudice one way or another. If somebody proves they're not worthy of trust, we'll deal with that as it happens. Let's start from this basis. That's exactly the right way to govern the federal government."

Euler says he admired and respected the political appointees in the civil division at Justice, but there was a difference in teams. "A lot of the sort of what I would call operational policy-level work, I think, has been taken over by political appointees instead of the career senior people," Euler says. "There was much more micromanagement on things like briefs you would file in court and what we were doing piece by piece in litigation. It was important litigation, but the level of editing and rewriting was uncalled for."

And now, close review has been codified, at least for regulations. In January, President Bush issued an executive order requiring agencies to have a politically run policy shop oversee regulations. In the press, the order was portrayed as a business win over government regulation. Policy shops now have to justify the "specific market failure" that their regulation is addressing. But within agencies, the order was viewed as a win for polit- ical appointees over career employees.

"Typically, regulations and the development thereof had been seen as in essence involving legal questions: 'Let's delineate and further detail what the legislation meant,' " says SEA's Bonosaro. "Now by inserting greater political review, it is a clear message that it is seen to have political dimensions."

Care and Feeding

Successfully navigating their relationships with political bosses is a big part of what lands those 60-odd distinguished executives their Presidential Rank Awards each year. "Learning how to engage effectively with political appointees is learned on the job," says Peter Zimmerman, a professor at the Kennedy school who leads the morning reflections with the winners.

The execs in Zimmerman's 1998 session laid out a few tips:

Drop a note to a new executive to "plant a seed that you're on the team."
Develop relationships with appointees' key advisers.
Project confidence.
Research an appointee's background and find commonalities.
Don't become just a "yes" person, but don't become an obstructionist, either.

Some career employees in the current administration have mastered the care and feeding of appointees, earning respect in the political world and even appointments of their own. Take Ryan Crocker, a career Foreign Service officer who was tapped as ambassador to Iraq. There's also Linton Brooks, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration and a career Navy officer with decades of experience in the Defense Department, and Charlie Allen, DHS' assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis, who started his CIA career in 1958.

Having former career employees at the top is good for agency management, says David E. Lewis, a Princeton University politics professor who is writing a book on the subject, Politicizing Administration: Policy and Patronage in Presidential Appointments (Princeton University Press). He uses scores from the Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool, management grades for agencies, and from OPM's survey of the federal workforce to determine which agencies are thriving. "Agencies run by appointees and those that have a higher percentage of appointees get lower evaluations," he says.

But higher management scores and higher employee approval don't necessarily mean more success in applying and creating policy. Bush's executive order reminds the federal workforce that's his goal.

Lewis has found that Republicans tend to put more appointees in agencies they consider liberal-the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development departments, for example. Democratic administrations layer their appointees into what are perceived to be more conservative agencies, such as the Defense and Treasury departments. Layering of political appointees, adding new links to the chain of command, is another focus of SEA's legislative agenda. The number of levels of appointees at many agencies is "excessive," according to the association, and the effect is "to move career executives further from top political leadership."

Paul Light, a professor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service, says President Kennedy appointed about 90 assistant secretaries in 1960 compared with more than 200 installed by President Bush. Many of the extra slots were mandated by Congress to oversee new programs or beef up management.

"Information has difficulty getting up the hierarchy, guidance has a hard time getting down," Light says. "There's lots of distortion. It is implicated in every major meltdown over the last 30 years from the Challenger to Hurricane Katrina." While political appointees make up much less than 1 percent of all federal employees, they account for 40 percent to 60 percent of the layers in government, Light says.

SEA wants hard numbers to demonstrate its suspicions, but so far, they don't exist. OPM publishes the Plum Book, listing political appointments, every four years. The last one is from 2004. Among other things, SEA wants to know the number of positions fenced off as career-reserved SES positions. In the 2000 Plum Book, 2,802 positions were listed as "general" and as "filled by SES career appointments or vacant." In 2004, 4,555 such positions were listed, leading some to wonder whether positions previously designated as career reserved are now general and therefore open to appointees. "We need data; we need hard information," SEA's Bonosaro says. "What Congress can do is help get us the facts."

Democrats appear willing to help. In May 2006, after the Government Account- ability Office released a report on 18 cases of improper burrowing, Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Danny Davis, D-Ill., then in the minority, listened. They wrote to OPM Director Linda Springer, saying such cases "are a threat to the civil service system both because they implant less qualified personnel into the government and because they tarnish the integrity of the federal merit-based hiring system." Waxman and Davis asked Springer to go beyond GAO's recommendation to review the situation and change its policy for the future.

Springer responded that no changes were necessary at this time. Now Waxman heads the Government Reform Committee and Davis leads its subcommittee on the federal workforce.

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Student aid chief took home $250,000 in bonuses

Karen Rutzick — Mon, 14 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

An executive running the Education Department's Federal Student Aid office took home more than $250,000 in performance bonuses over the last four years, a period in which the office's oversight capabilities have been called into question.

Theresa Shaw, who is stepping down in June as chief operating officer of the office, received the bonuses under a 1998 law aimed at modernizing the organization's management. For fiscal 2003, Shaw took home a $71,250 bonus. She received a $60,000 bonus for fiscal 2004, $65,000 for fiscal 2005 and $65,000 for fiscal 2006, according to the department.

By comparison, for fiscal 2005 -- the most recent year in which numbers have been published by the Office of Personnel Management -- 66 executives in the Education Department received an average $10,652 bonus. Shaw also was given a $20,000 raise when the department increased her base salary of $144,600 to the statutory limit of $165,200 in November 2006. Shaw, who has headed the student aid office since September 2002, has won accolades for her management improvements, including earning the office's removal from the Government Accountability Office's list of high-risk federal programs and reducing student loan defaults by 40 percent.

But Shaw's office has been under increased scrutiny relating to its oversight of the student loan industry since revelations of improper financial ties among universities, companies and government officials came to light. In one instance, Matteo Fontana, who worked with Shaw at Sallie Mae before both came to Education, was put on administrative leave because he acquired at least $100,000 in stock in a student loan company, a perceived conflict of interest.

"The office of federal student aid under Ms. Shaw's tenure has been characterized by a lack of oversight and negligent administration of the student loan program," said Michael Dannenberg, education policy director at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. "Her office has cost taxpayers and students hundreds of millions of dollars. To find out that she got a bonus is just stunning."

Dannenberg's calculation is based in part on recent revelations that student loan companies -- most notably the Nebraska-based company Nelnet -- used a loophole to receive a government-guaranteed 9.5 percent rate of return on loans offered to students at much lower interest rates.

In January, Education officials struck a deal with Nelnet that allows it to keep $278 million in federal subsidy payments obtained through this loophole in exchange for not billing an additional $900 million.

In May 2003, Nelnet sent a letter to officials at the Office of Student Aid, including Shaw, detailing the company's plans to use the 9.5 percent loophole. Shaw's office did not stop the company from acting.

An Education spokeswoman did not respond to a request to speak with Shaw. But in a press release announcing Shaw's departure, Secretary Margaret Spellings touted her achievements.

"Her leadership and depth of experience will be sorely missed," Spellings said. "She made performance and results a top priority, establishing performance standards, metrics and reporting at every level. FSA now delivers more aid to more students at a lower operating cost with greater accuracy than at any point in its history."

In October 2005, the House Government Reform subcommittee overseeing the federal workforce invited Shaw to testify about her management accomplishments and how other agencies could emulate them.

Shaw was able to receive large bonuses because in 1998, Congress anointed the student aid office as the first performance-based organization under then-Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government initiative. PBOs were meant to run more like private-sector businesses.

Executives at the agency had to commit to annual performance goals, and were rewarded with hefty bonuses if successful. The chief operating officer is eligible for an annual bonus of up to 50 percent of his or her salary. Executives also were given personnel and procurement flexibilities to meet their goals.

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Performance-Based Perils

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Recently, the personnel reform effort at the Government Accountability Office -- which had been hailed as an archetype of governmentwide reform -- has been called into question by members of Congress and certain employees, who have moved to form a union. Now another star of the federal personnel reform movement is being doubted.

This time, it's the Education Department's Federal Student Aid office. In 1998, Congress anointed the FSA as the first performance-based organization under then Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government initiative. PBOs were meant to run more like private-sector businesses.

Executives at the agency had to commit to annual performance goals, and were rewarded with hefty bonuses if successful. Salaries and bonuses for most top executives can go up to 125 percent of the maximum Senior Executive Service pay rate. The chief operating officer is eligible for an annual bonus of up to 50 percent of his or her salary. Executives were given personnel and procurement flexibilities to meet their goals.

But now, Theresa Shaw, COO at the student aid office, has announced her resignation, effective June 1. Shaw's shop is being scrutinized for alleged weak oversight of the student loan industry, after improper financial ties among universities, companies and government officials came to light.

A statement from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Shaw planned to quit in February, before the student loan scandal broke. Others link her resignation to the agency's problems.

Michael Dannenberg, education policy director at the New America Foundation, told The Washington Post that Shaw's "tenure has been characterized by lack of oversight and negligent administration of the student loan program."

Whether Shaw's departure is directly related to the scandal or not, her resignation casts a shadow over an agency that was touted by both Republicans and Democrats as a model of modern public management. In October 2005, the House Government Reform subcommittee overseeing the federal workforce invited Shaw to testify about her management expertise and how other agencies could emulate it.

"Let me congratulate you on the vast improvement in the student loan program," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., said at the time. "The taxpayers are happy, and I'm sure that the consumers, colleges and universities, and particularly students themselves, [are happy]."

"Share with us how you had such great success," said Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev.

Shaw credited her office's improvements -- FSA had reduced student loan defaults by 40 percent since fiscal 2000 -- in large part to personnel flexibilities granted by the PBO status.

"Our hiring flexibilities allow us to fill critical and time-sensitive resource needs faster and to pay salaries closer to market rates for similar positions in the private sector," Shaw said at the hearing. "With this flexibility, our average period to hire is 34 calendar days versus 200 calendar days for the most recently federal hired career staff subject to the usually competitive processes. We have used our hiring flexibility to hire staff with needed skill sets obtained in the private sector, to augment the skill sets of our federal career staff."

All the bonuses and flexibility weren't enough, apparently, to stop department employee Matteo Fontana from acquiring at least $100,000 in stock in a student loan company. And they weren't enough to encourage adequate oversight of student loan companies, either.

Thursday, Spellings will testify before Congress. She probably will face tougher questions than those that awaited Shaw at the 2005 hearing.

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Darfur Divestment?

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Two weeks ago, an anonymous diplomat at the United Nations leaked a confidential report to the press. Sudanese government officials, the report found, are packing airplanes full of bombs and guns, painting them white and stenciling "U.N." onto the wings, then flying them to the Darfur region where militias use the weapons to murder civilians.

What does this latest discovery of deceit, four years into a genocide that has already killed at least 200,000 innocent civilians, displaced 2.3 million and led to untold numbers of rapes, have to do with federal pay and benefits?

Possibly quite a lot, according to Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. Retirement investments in the Thrift Savings Plan, a 401(k)-style program, may be helping to fund Sudan's atrocities.

The Save Darfur Coalition, an umbrella group of humanitarian and faith-based organizations working to stop the genocide, estimates that 70 percent of oil revenues Sudan receives from international oil companies operating in the country fund the military, including the planes in that U.N. report. Some TSP funds may be invested in these companies.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am personally active in the Save Darfur movement, donating both time and money to the coalition.

Lee is personally active in the issue, too. She has visited Darfur three times; the last time was just last month. She also was arrested for protesting in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington last summer.

"The situation in Darfur is deteriorating, more and more people are dying and even humanitarian aid workers are at risk," Lee said after her April visit.

She has reintroduced a bill (H.R. 180) that would require the Government Accountability Office to investigate TSP investments in companies supporting the genocide. It doesn't go so far as to ask for divestment, though it's clearly a first step on that path.

The Darfur divestment movement is gaining ground. Seven states, including California, and several universities have divested money from Sudan.

In 2005, Lee asked then TSP Executive Director Gary Amelio to respond for the record to Sudan divestment.

"The board must make all investment decisions solely in the interests of participants and the beneficiaries of the TSP without regard to other objectives, however meritorious," Amelio said.

When asked to respond to Lee's reintroduction of the Darfur bill, which has passionate backers from both parties, the board referred to its two-year-old statement.

The TSP has gotten a lot of requests over the years to change its investment policies for various reasons. The $200 billion in the plan packs an influential punch, and groups want that influence for their cause. The board's position on Darfur divestment is the same one it takes with suggestions to divest from Iran or environmentally harmful companies.

In April 2005, when Harvard University decided to divest from PetroChina, a Chinese oil company with deep interests in Sudan, Harvard responded to that line of thinking.

"Although Harvard maintains a strong presumption against the divestment of stock for reasons unrelated to investment purposes, we believe that the case for divestment in this instance is persuasive," university officials said.

Why? "This decision reflects deep concerns about the grievous crisis that persists in the Darfur region of Sudan and about the extensive role of PetroChina."

Lee's bill only seeks information on TSP investments, because it's impossible to know right now how much of federal employees' savings are in funds that include the offending companies. Once that is known, it might be in TSP participants' best interest to go to work as public servants each day knowing they are not funding genocide.

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Move Around

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Every agency in the federal government has its own personality and culture. That point was made quite clear when the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service and American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation released their Best Places to Work rankings for government agencies this month.

If you haven't checked out the rankings yet, they're worth a look. The groups broke down employee satisfaction by agency size and demographic factors such as gender, age and ethnicity.

There are wild variations. Among small agencies, for example, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service took the number one slot. The agency scored 85.6 out of 100 in employee satisfaction. The Federal Labor Relations Authority fell at the bottom of the small agency list, with a score of 18.1 -- an enormous gap.

If your agency is failing to meet your standards, maybe it's time to move to a different one. One of the perks of working in the federal government is that you can jump around from agency to agency and keep your retirement, health and life insurance and vacation days.

Not only that, but in some cases, you can transfer without competing for the job with applicants from the general public. Here are some things to consider in contemplating a transfer to a new agency, courtesy of the Office of Personnel Management.

You can move to positions at any pay level, so long as you meet the standards for the job.

When you first enter the federal government, you usually have career-conditional status for three years. That means you must work continuously for three years before you are given special consideration in hiring and firing. But transfers between agencies don't hurt your three-year stretch.

If you're looking to switch agencies, you have to do your own job search. OPM points to USAJOBS.gov, but networking with colleagues at agencies you deal with is the best way to go.

Agencies sometimes post job announcements under the merit promotion program, in addition to standard listings. If you want to use the transfer to move up in pay, merit promotion is the way to go. On USAJOBS.gov, make sure you answer "yes" to the question "are you a current or former federal civilian employee?" when searching to find merit promotion openings.

You can't bounce around too quickly. OPM requires employees to stay in their job for at least three months before transferring. Probationary periods continue when people move, just like career-conditional status.

Finally, you can't transfer to a select number of jobs that are only available to veterans, unless you are one.

When OPM Director Linda Springer makes her pitch to college students to work in the government, she emphasizes the flexibility and range of opportunities. She told Human Resources Executive Online last year:

"One big thing that we need to do is dispel the notion that if you come to work for the federal government, you're going to be doing the same thing for the rest of your life, behind the same desk, with the same people. Clearly that is not the case. You can do anything you want working for the United States government."

That goes for all of you already in government, too.

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Honey Pot

Karen Rutzick — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: Columnist Tammy Flanagan will return next week. In the meantime, you might be interested in a feature written by Karen Rutzick on the inner workings of the Thrift Savings Plan. The story first appeared in the March 15 issue of Government Executive.

On Oct. 17, 2006, Terry Duffy made an $8 billion purchase. Duffy, executive chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, bought the Chicago Board of Trade. His move made the Merc, as it is called, the world's largest financial exchange, overtaking the New York Stock Exchange. So it is easy to understand why on Oct. 16, Duffy was busy-too busy, it turns out, to attend the monthly meeting to oversee the federal Thrift Savings Plan, of which he is a board member.

It wasn't his first absence.

In their spare time, Duffy and four fellow TSP board members oversee the $200 billion retirement plan. Nearly 4 million people -- federal employees, retirees and members of the uniformed services -- are saving money in the TSP, which functions like a 401(k) with up to 5 percent matching contributions from the government.

Congress created the plan in 1986 as part of the new Federal Employees Retirement System. Until then, employees had received a set pension based on their salary and the number of years they worked under the Civil Service Retirement System.

But CSRS, whose benefits were not portable, locked employees in golden handcuffs. To build their nest eggs, they had to remain employed with the federal government. FERS reduced the amount of pensions, added Social Security benefits to the package and created the TSP, which is portable.

Government automatically contributes 1 percent of employees' pay to the TSP and matches their contributions dollar for dollar up to 3 percent, and 50 cents on the dollar for an additional 2 percent of salary. CSRS employees can participate in the TSP, too, but they don't get matching funds.

As Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., noted during Duffy's May 15, 2003, confirmation hearing: "The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board may be obscure to some, but it is not to the millions of federal retirees and current federal employees who are saving a portion of their earnings in anticipation of retirement."

Duffy responded in kind: "I understand the gravity of the responsibilities that I will be required to fulfill if my nomination is approved. Three million federal employees have invested more than $100 billion to assure a successful and productive retirement."

Four years later, the TSP has more than doubled its worth, but Duffy has been to Washington only four times to oversee it. Since Duffy's 2003 appointment -- he was the last of the five current board members to join -- the board met 42 times through the end of 2006. Twenty-nine of those meetings were face to face; 13 were telephone conferences. Duffy attended 25 of the 42. But for 21 of the 25, he phoned in from Chicago. Minutes from the meetings show that when he did phone in, he remained mostly silent.

Duffy declined to be interviewed for this story, but through a TSP spokesman -- who tracked Duffy down "in a car on his way to an airport somewhere in the world" -- he said, "As far as [my] attendance record, the record is the record."

TSP board members are simultaneously open and elusive. Membership is part time; last year, pay ranged from $4,000 to $22,000, because travel and preparation times varied. Most members are successful businessmen and large political donors. They are both private and public figures. Law requires them to conduct the monthly meetings in public, which they do, but all five board members and the executive director refused requests for interviews about Duffy's record, or the TSP in general.

Former board member Sheryl Marshall, appointed in 2000 by President Clinton, says the meetings are scheduled a year in advance to accommodate schedules. "It's just a responsibility, it's a fiduciary responsibility," Marshall says. "If you're not going to show up, you shouldn't be on the board."

Similarly, Marshall's fellow former board member and Clinton appointee Scott Lukins says, "That's where we did most of our decision-making -- all of it was made at these meetings. . . . You can't be giving your share if you're not attending the meetings."

Luckily for the 3.7 million TSP investors, Duffy's absenteeism is uncommon. By contrast, the other board members have near-perfect attendance records and travel to Washington for most meetings.

Chairman Andrew Saul and member Gordon Whiting live in New York; Alejandro Sanchez is from Florida and Thomas Fink is in Alaska. Saul, Whiting and Sanchez were appointed in 2002; Fink in 2000. They have presided over big changes to the plan -- and some big battles.

High Drama

The new board's very first meeting, in December 2002, was fraught with high drama. The month before, Roger Mehle, the longtime executive director, resigned to return to private law practice. He recommended James Petrick, an attorney and 16-year TSP employee, as his successor.

The previous board approved him for the lifetime appointment. But when the Bush-appointed board convened in Washington that December, Saul, Whiting, Sanchez and Fink forced Petrick to resign.

Their reasoning is not entirely clear. A transcript is among court documents from a lawsuit filed against the board by Mehle and the TSP's original executive director, Frank Cavanaugh, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. According to the transcript, Saul said that shortly after he was confirmed, Petrick called him at his Westchester, N.Y., home and spoke rudely to him, telling him not to talk to TSP staff without Petrick's permission. Saul also said six senior staff members told him they would quit rather than work under Petrick.

Mehle has his own theory. Saul's board hired Gary Amelio, former senior vice president of the retirement division of PNC Bank in Pittsburgh, as executive director. A month after Amelio's arrival, he and the board accepted a $5 million settlement with a contractor to close out the botched modernization of the TSP's computer system.

Under Mehle, who resigned in November 2002, the board had paid Fairfax, Va.-based American Management Systems $36 million for the failed modernization. Mehle and his board sued AMS, beginning a turf battle with the Justice Department over whether the board had standing to sue. Petrick was committed to the lawsuit, but Saul wanted to settle and Amelio agreed.

Whatever the reason, that December, the board handed Petrick a resignation letter and told him to sign it and return to his old job at the TSP or be fired. Petrick had just minutes to decide. He resigned.

Mehle a former Treasury Department assistant secretary under President Ronald Reagan, was chairman of the TSP Board from 1986 to 1994 and stepped down to become executive director. He is passionate about the lawsuit, which essentially alleges that the board violated its fiduciary duty to TSP participants by forcing out Petrick in order to settle the AMS lawsuit.

"[I] regard the things that were done as terribly abusive of the appropriate governance of the organization," Mehle says. He expects the judge to rule this year.

Amelio is now gone -- he left in January for a job as president of retirement services for Ullico Inc. of Washington, which provides insurance and investments for union members. The board selected Gregory Long, who served as the plan's director of product development for a year, as Amelio's replacement.

At his last board meeting, Amelio promised to support his successor. "I'm not going to be filing any fruitless litigation," he says.

In any case, the TSP that faces Long is vastly different from the one Amelio inherited.

Era of Change

Amelio and the board quickly ended the contractor lawsuit and ushered the TSP into an era of change. The biggest development since the plan's inception 20 years ago has been the switch to computerized records, allowing participants to move their investments every day.

After the system went online in mid-2003, Congress ended the two annual TSP open seasons and permitted participants to move their investments among funds at any time. As Saul said in a February 2007 meeting, daily valuation is "the heart of the whole change."

But there's more. The TSP already was the cheapest plan in the country, by a long shot. Last year's annual administrative fee was only $3 for every $10,000 invested, or three basis points. In February, Amelio predicted it soon would drop to one basis point. By contrast, the fee for the least costly 401(k), Vanguard, is 22 basis points.

Federal agencies bear some of the administrative costs. But the cost reduction also is due to the board's aggressive outsourcing of administrative functions. By May 2006, TSP had entirely dropped the Agriculture Department's National Finance Center in New Orleans as its data entry, accounting and call center provider. Instead, it hired contractors SI International of Reston, Va.; Spherix Inc. of Beltsville, Md.; and Switch & Data of Tampa, Fla.

Amelio reduced the operating budget from $101.5 million in fiscal 2004 to $76.8 million in fiscal 2007 by outsourcing and downsizing staff through buyouts.

He also presided over the entry of hundreds of thousands of new participants. The 2001 Defense Authorization Act permitted uniformed members of the military to use the TSP, though by and large they don't get a matching contribution. They also have their own pension system, so a smaller portion of them -- about 500,000 out of 2.5 million, or 20 percent -- contribute to the TSP. Among civil servants in FERS, 85 percent participate, as do about 65 percent of those in CSRS.

In August 2005, TSP officials launched a set of new investment options called life-cycle funds. Celebrated for its simplicity, the TSP had had just five basic options.

The G Fund invests in government securities specially issued to provide a higher return than inflation without any serious risk from market fluctuations. The C Fund invests in common stocks, tracking Standard & Poor's 500 Index of stocks in the largest domestic companies. The S Fund invests in small- and mid-sized domestic companies, following the Dow Jones Wilshire 4500 Index. The F Fund is invested in fixed-income bonds. The I Fund invests in international stocks from Europe, Australia and some Asian countries.

Life-cycle funds are a new, sixth investment option, though they're not actually a new fund. They blend the five basic funds and automatically shift investors' money from a mix of riskier to more conservative investments as participants age.

For example, for a person who plans to retire in 2040, the life-cycle fund will invest 42 percent of funds in common stocks and only 5 percent in the more conservative G Fund. On the other hand, for those headed for retirement in 2010, the life-cycle fund will invest 43 percent in safe government securities and only 27 percent in more volatile common stocks.

Federal employees tend to be conservative investors. Those in FERS put an average of 9.4 percent of salary into the TSP and even those in the older CSRS tuck 9.2 percent into the plan. But they favor low-risk funds. About 44 percent of TSP dollars sit in the G Fund. At the end of 2006, 18 months after their introduction, the life-cycle funds had 433,025 participants and held $17.4 billion, roughly 8 percent of the TSP total.

Power Play

Only Congress can add funds to the plan, but since 1986, lawmakers have done so only at the suggestion of the board. Last year saw a major clash between Congress and the board when more than 200 House members tried to force a Real Estate Investment Trust Fund into the TSP without the board's approval.

They failed when the board ran out the clock on the 109th Congress by hiring an outside consultant to examine the REIT option. Congress couldn't vote to add the fund until the experts had given their verdict. The firm, Ennis Knupp & Associates of Chicago, didn't issue its report until a couple of weeks after the Nov. 7 election.

The Bush-appointed board's assertiveness, revealed in its handling of Petrick, has played out in its aggressive moves to diversify the plan and reduce costs. Amelio, the former executive director, personified this combativeness. At one of his last public appearances with the TSP, while insisting he was leaving for career and financial opportunities, he said: "One of your august members suggested I was getting frustrated with doing battle with the bullies on the Hill. I relish doing battle with bullies, particularly those that have no idea what they're doing."

The "bullies" to whom he referred include Congress members such as Tom Davis, R-Va., ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee; Jon Porter, R-Nev., ranking member of its federal workforce subcommittee; Danny Davis, D-Ill., its chairman; and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Those congressmen -- after intense lobbying by the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts -- supported legislation to make a REIT the sixth fund in the TSP.

They argued that REITs, which allow individuals to buy shares in companies that run apartment buildings, shopping centers, offices, hotels and other commercial facilities, are big earners and that federal employees should have the choice, as do many 401(k) participants, to invest in them. REITs also react differently to market forces than do stocks and bonds, providing diversification, which protects assets, the lawmakers argued.

But board members bristled at the attempt to overpower them. They argued that if Congress imposed a REIT fund, then other interest groups would lobby to add funds. A proliferation of funds could raise administrative costs and reduce participation levels, they said.

The battle led to contentious hearings and a heated exchange of letters. So far, no REIT bill has been introduced in the new Congress.

Meanwhile, the board has its own plans. Members are expected to ask the new Congress for more changes, among them, automatic enrollment of all new employees in the TSP and the designation of the life-cycle funds as the default investment for new participants. Saul predicts the plan will grow to $300 billion in three years.

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Paybanding Evolution

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

IRS Commissioner Mark Everson announced Wednesday that he's leaving the agency to run the American Red Cross. This means he won't be at the agency to see new pay rules take effect.

On Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management published draft regulations in the Federal Register to change the paybanding system at the IRS. Paybanding, of course, is a staple of the new wave of compensation systems replacing the General Schedule across government. Broad pay bands are meant to give supervisors greater flexibility in compensating employees and to allow for pay for performance.

The IRS switched to a payband system for its senior and departmental managers in 2001, but it hasn't put the whole agency onto the system yet. OPM's draft regulations make it clear that employees covered by collective bargaining agreements can't be forced into paybands without their union's consent.

IRS was one of the first agencies to experiment with paybands, and its experience is instructive for all government employees. There are a number of developments of note in the latest regulations.

First, they allow the agency to create a new pay track that lets entry-level employees move up the payband faster than longer-term employees.

Also, the proposal would give the IRS the option to widen the bands. Right now, for example, an IRS payband that goes up to the GS-13 level can include a maximum of five GS grades. The new regulations let the IRS broaden that.

Supervisors also will have more say in determining raises. OPM's regulations would allow managers to take into account the employee's current spot in the band when making that decision, as well as his or her performance review.

In addition to pay raises derived from employees' performance reviews, the IRS also can give across-the-board raises to groups of employees as it sees fit. OPM's new regulations allow the agency to forgo any general increases in favor of entirely performance-based raises, if it wants.

There are a couple of areas that OPM makes more rigid in the IRS pay system. The new regulations require the IRS to put more than one GS grade in a band. That means the agency can't just graft the old system onto the new and call it paybanding. And the rules reiterate that IRS supervisors can't give raises just because an employee has been with the agency for a long time.

It seems this next evolution in paybands provides for more and more flexibility in setting pay. The only flexibility it doesn't provide is the ability to abandon paybanding.

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Building A Better Carrot

Karen Rutzick — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Pay for performance is on the rocks and agency budgets are tight, but dedicated managers still find ways to reward and recognize employees.

Lois Maxwell's $200 steak lunch began as a lark. A supervisor in the Labor Department's Office of Workers' Compensation, Maxwell noticed her team never reached all four of their timeliness goals in a quarter. They often would meet one or two of the benchmarks for adjudicating claims, but never all of them.

"It bugged me," she says.

So at a unit meeting, Maxwell impulsively told her employees that if they met all four of the goals-without ignoring the backlog-she would treat them to a steak lunch. Her challenge began to work. One quarter, the employees met three out of four goals.

"I said four out of four," Maxwell told them.

"You're gonna have to put up, or shut up," employees ribbed her.

Soon, more than a dozen employees were feasting on Kansas City strip, twin medallions, top sirloin and rib-eye at the Hereford House restaurant. The Kansas City Office of the Labor Department's Workers' Compensation Programs met its schedule for processing hundreds of workers' comp claims in a quarter.

That was the beginning of a group rewards system for Maxwell, who started at OWCP in 1981 and is now district director for a division of federal employees' compensation. A few years after the Hereford House lunch, Maxwell asked her 20-person team to hit a milestone that no Labor unit in the country had met. "I remember them laughing at me," Maxwell says. She told them, "I'm thinking: If we do this one, I will take you out to whatever restaurant you want to go to in Kansas City."

This time they dined at McCormick & Schmick's, and her employees ordered dessert.

"Maybe it's a Midwest thing," Maxwell says. "We love food."

'Everybody Loves Money'

Rewarding federal employees is not an exclusively Midwestern thing. President Bush and Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, made it a goal in August 2005, when Johnson unveiled the draft Working for America Act, "to require agencies to better manage, develop and reward employees." The bill would have scrapped the General Schedule pay system for all domestic agencies, instead awarding raises according to annual performance evaluations.

The concept that employees should be paid for the quality of their work instead of how long they've held their jobs is hard to argue with. But making it reality isn't easy in government. Federal labor unions contended the new system would encourage favoritism and cronyism and lead to lower wages over the long run. No one in Congress introduced the bill.

In recent months, even officials at the Department of Homeland Security announced they were giving up on their pay-for-performance attempt, save for a few hundred employees in a pilot project. The Defense Department continues to push for its performance-centered personnel program, but newly empowered Democratic lawmakers have begun to question that, too. So, federal managers are back where they began, with a personnel system that doesn't inherently focus on performance and dwindling budgets to reward employees outside that system. But management experts and managers say money isn't always the most effective award.

"Everybody loves money," says Robert Behn, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "The dilemma comes when you get $2 more than me and that's the only way we keep score. Then I'm bummed out that you got more than me. "Money tends to screw up relationships unless it's handled really, really well," Behn adds. Most agencies have rewards, such as cash bonuses, quality step increases and agencywide honors. But over time, the bonuses and QSIs become expected, and their year-end timing isn't specific enough to encourage repeat behavior. William Wiley is a rewards cynic; he thinks pay-for-performance systems are a waste of time. Wiley, a private practice attorney who was once chief counsel to the chairman of the Merit Systems Protection Board and chief of staff to the general counsel of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, began his career at the Navy. "It's almost insulting to think someone who's working for $85,000 is going to work harder for a $400 incentive," he says. To his way of thinking, there's only one kind of incentive program that works. In 1980, Wiley put a rewards system into place at a San Diego public works center for the Navy. The center employed auto mechanics who repaired Navy vehicles. For every hour the mechanics came in under schedule, Wiley paid them half an hour of extra pay, distributed in lump sums every two weeks. "You would have thought we set them on fire," Wiley says. Before the rewards system, repairs often took about six weeks. After the system got going, "we were [as good as] Goodyear," says Wiley.

What worked for auto mechanics worked for attorneys, too. At the MSPB, Wiley told 35 staff lawyers who reviewed cases and drafted decisions that for every case they completed above the set number of decisions everyone was expected to complete, they would receive $75 more. "Some of the guys worked nights and weekends to get the extra money and some didn't-we didn't care," Wiley says. "We reduced our backlog about 20 percent in a three-month period." He and many others say rewards won't work unless they're tied to specific achievements and are timely.

Purple Silk Flowers

Nonmonetary rewards can work, too. A little competition, mixed with public recognition, is a tried-and-true recipe. So says Don Jacobson, a federal employee who runs a Web site devoted to leadership in the public sector, GovLeaders.org.

A few years ago, Jacobson put up a poster on his agency's wall. He labeled it "Unit Record" and kept track of a task his employees found particularly tedious. One employee was initially much more productive than the rest. Once her record was displayed, others began trying to beat it. "Over the next year, the unit record was broken more than a dozen times by half a dozen employees," Jacobson wrote in an e-mail from Istanbul, where he was traveling. "When I left that job, the record was nearly five times higher than it had been when I put up that first poster. The staff loved it."

Mostly, employees and managers report that a "thank you" does the trick. Jim Fell, director of the Social Security Administration's Office of Disability Adjudication and Review in Cincinnati, calls them "atta boys." Fell gives his employees constant feedback, both verbally and in thank-you e-mails and notes. "Positive feedback does translate into production," Fell says. "I can't measure that, I can't quantify it for you, but I feel that it works."

"It's not just the feedback on e-mail or a note or whatever, it's also . . . taking a direct interest in an employee's future," says Matthew Ferrero, a manager in the Center for Leadership Development at the Internal Revenue Service. "Not just their professional future, but actually getting to know them on a more personal level."

Bob Nelson, author of 1,001 Ways to Reward Employees (Workman, 1994), can quantify it. Nelson, who has consulted for the IRS, General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management and Interior Department, ticks off study after study. One example: a 1982 study by Gerald Graham of Wichita State University, which found that a manager personally congratulating an employee for a job well done or writing a personal note about good performance were the most effective motivators.

Managers can add weight to personal recognition by sending an e-mail of praise to the agency head and copying the employee. Or they can praise employees in front of their peers at a staff meeting. Managers can nominate employees for any of a slew of external awards; even if an employee doesn't win, the nomination is an honor. Managers can use awards budgets to buy gift cards to stores or personalized plaques or certificates to demonstrate real appreciation. "We're not going to give you a list because you can do the right thing and you can do it in a wrong way," Nelson says. "Part of making it work is it has got to be personalized. You have to adjust it to the person.

"We have federal employees whose job is to ride on the range on the border between the United States and Mexico looking for diseased cattle," Nelson adds. "If you gave them a desk set, it's not going to do anything for them."

For Joan Klein, a program analyst at the IRS, it was silk flowers. Two years ago, Klein taught a two-day training class about an IRS computer system she knew well. She did the training in addition to her regular duties and the manager who asked her to do it brought by a pot of purple silk flowers afterward. Klein still keeps them on her desk and says she would do the training again for that manager anytime. "It's rare that somebody really goes out of their way on their own to do something nice for you," Klein says.

John Gatt, who oversees about 2,000 federal employees as head of an industrial operations department at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station in North Carolina, sees incentives as preparation for the pay-for-performance-based National Security Personnel System making its way into the Defense Department. By the end of April, 113,000 civilian employees will be in NSPS.

Gatt started a rewards system for his employees six months ago. It's the first time employees in his department, many of whom are wage grade and repair aircraft engines and other parts, have been rewarded individually. "Knowing that we're going to head down the path toward NSPS, I wanted to start migrating toward that type of culture where individuals were identified and awarded for exceptional performance," Gatt says.

The program is purely peer driven. Employees nominate each other based on certain qualities: work ethic, co-worker relations, customer service, increased throughput, improvements and dependability. A volunteer panel reviews the nominations every month and rewards about 20 workers with an extra $250. Employees can receive as many as four payments a year, but not more than two in a row. Federal workers commonly complain that the same people are rewarded over and over, eroding the usefulness and meaning of incentives and creating bitterness.

Gatt had to vet his employees' concerns with two local chapters of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The unions were open to his idea, though he had to tweak the program. Often, unions can impede creativity in setting up incentives. Perks such as parking spaces and office space often are negotiated and sometimes can't be used as rewards.

Travel and Training Rewards

Generally, there are few governmentwide rules regarding rewards systems. Some agencies have cash limits on spot awards programs, for example. The Office of Government Ethics has a policy about subordinates gifting their bosses, but not the other way around. Also, agencies can't pool their awards budget and buy one nice item, then hold a lottery for employees; the element of chance makes that illegal.

There are a couple of other rules, emphasizes Nancy Kichak, OPM's associate director for strategic human resources policy. One is that rewards must to be related to work product. A manager can't reward an employee who gives co-workers a ride home. Another: Managers cannot solicit donated gift cards from companies as rewards, as some private companies do.

Officials at the U.S. Mint and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency experimented with doling out debit cards instead of cash awards, but accounting accuracy was a problem and they ended the pilots. Managers sometimes use training, travel-especially to a sunny locale-or detail assignments to another office or agency as rewards for good work. This area is murky. "The use of government dollars for training is supposed to train employees to do their job," Kichak says. "Scarce training dollars should be used for training the person who needs the training the most . . . a detail assignment is just like training."

"I think [detail assignments are] another good nonmonetary award for folks that have really done a good job," says John Palguta, vice president of the Partnership for Public Service, "when what they really want is a chance to spread their wings and try working on a different area or a different project in the same office." But Palguta warns that many agencies have strict competition rules for detail assignments. Even so, if employees are outstanding, they might win the competition, and a manager's suggestion to apply for a detail could just be the goad to apply.

Similar care must be taken with travel opportunities. Managers must assign the travel based on merit principles, not as a reward for a specific deed. But employees who deserve rewards for specific deeds are often the ones who win chances to travel. "If I've got a choice between Person A and Person B, I'm going to send the employee that is going to represent me the best," says Tom Burger, national president of the Professional Managers Association in Washington and an IRS manager. On the other hand, he says, "You've got to be fair in the distribution of work. If you as a manager are playing favorites for whatever reason, you're going to get caught up, and it's going to come back to bite you."

Cynics and Eye-Rollers

Do rewards work? Certainly there are cynics and eye-rollers. A reward that's out of balance-such as the $1,500 cash bonus one jaded staffer reports he received after finishing a project that saved the government $1.6 million-can backfire. Yet managers should know their efforts to reward employees mostly are appreciated. Bonnie McEwan, an auditor at the Securities and Exchange Commission, was staggered when top-level executive Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the enforcement division at the SEC, poured her a drink. In February, McEwan and her SEC colleagues implemented a new case management system, working long hours to get it going. Once it was in place, Thomsen hosted a reception in her conference room and served the food and poured the drinks herself to thank employees.

"Honestly, at first I wasn't excited about this reception," McEwan says. "We were working late and it was after work, but it was so nice. It meant a lot to me that she was going around with the trays. Usually the high-ranking government officials don't do that."

"It probably doesn't mean as much to everyone," McEwan admits. "I like the thank yous."

Palguta, from the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington nonprofit organization that promotes federal service, has received many awards during his time in the government-34 years at the Office of Personnel Management and Merit Systems Protection Board-and out of it. His shelf is lined with them. Palguta suggests rewarding employees in front of their peers unless an employee is particularly shy. That way, not only is the employee recognized but colleagues are motivated.

"You've got to prevent it from being gratuitous," says Palguta. "Employees actually know more about how well people are doing in terms of their peers sometimes than their supervisor knows. If the supervisor is simply friendly to everyone and everyone gets a turn at being praised, it starts becoming less meaningful."

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Agents of Tolerance

Karen Rutzick — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

FBI agents are taught about law enforcement at its worst.

There is a photograph in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that captures the attention of almost every law enforcement officer passing by. It's from early 1933, shortly after the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, and it shows a police officer walking alongside a member of the SS-the brutal, elite Nazi guard unit-flaunting a German shepherd.

"It just epitomizes what law enforcement should not be," says Keith Slotter, assistant director of the FBI's training and development division. "It's a very threatening, menacing picture. It's the antithesis of what we want our folks to be."

Since 2000, about 5,000 FBI agents have spent half a day at the Holocaust Museum in an unusual government training program. A partnership between the FBI, the museum and the Anti-Defamation League-a nonprofit organization whose mission is to combat anti-Semitism-the program teaches law officers how to avoid becoming agents of tyranny. "There's a higher moral standard than any employer or boss that everyone is accountable to," Slotter says. "There are basic rights and wrongs."

The museum, near the National Mall in Washington, tells the story of the Holocaust, when Nazis systematically murdered 6 million European Jews and millions more Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, disabled people and anyone else who didn't fit German dictator Adolph Hitler's Aryan ideal. As part of their 21-week training course in Quantico, Va., FBI new agent trainees are guided on a special tour of the museum, focusing on the key role law enforcement played in perpetrating the atrocities. Veteran agents often complete the training later in their careers, too. Afterward, they gather in a classroom to discuss what they saw.

"One of the things you learn in the Holocaust tour is the whole event, it evolved," says Slotter. "It's not something that happened overnight . . . Hitler and the senior-level German government, they pushed slowly to see what people were willing to absorb. It reached the point where . . . there were military or others who were being given direct orders to kill-to shoot someone in the back of the head or push them in the ditch."

Slotter and FBI leaders want agents to think for themselves and avoid the slippery slope of oppression. In the era of the USA Patriot Act, including recent revelations that FBI agents improperly obtained personal information about American citizens, the lessons are pertinent. In a November 2005 speech to the Anti-Defamation League in New York, FBI Director Robert Mueller said as much.

"We understand that we will be judged not just on how we disrupt and deter terrorism, but also on how we protect the civil liberties which we cherish," Mueller said. "That is why the FBI puts a premium on thoroughly training our special agents about their responsibility to respect the rights and dignity of individuals . . . all new FBI special agents make a visit to the Holocaust Museum to see for themselves what happens when law enforcement becomes a tool of oppression."

The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and the new laws that followed them, are at the heart of this training.

"When you're attempting to stop the next terrorist attack," says David Friedman, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League's Washington office, "in the forefront of the thinking of all American law enforcement needs to be the notion that we can only do that by not compromising the protection of privacy and civil rights and due process."

Museum and the league's educators prod trainees and agents to use their investigative skills on the tour. The German shepherd photograph, for instance, is more than just a menacing image. In their classroom discussion, 20 to 50 agents at a time discuss why the Nazis needed the police in the streets with them.

"The [agents] will tell you: They have legitimacy, they are the ones trusted on the street," says Lynn Williams, the museum's director of community partnerships. "They're the only ones able to handle the canine in the middle."

Class discussions lead to questions: Why wouldn't the policeman quit his job? How could the police swear an allegiance to one man-Hitler-instead of to the greater good? The program began in 1999 when former District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey visited the museum. Deeply affected, Ramsey asked the museum to create a training program for his officers, and the FBI jumped on board a year later. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2003, the Justice Department awarded the Anti-Defamation League an additional $100,000 grant to fund the program for the FBI and Washington police. In 2004, officials created a special version of the program for FBI intelligence analysts.

Training law enforcement officers to disobey their own government, when circumstances warrant it, can be tricky.

"It took us two years to really find this conversation," Williams says. "You don't want to say, 'Don't follow orders based on a willy-nilly internal feeling.' You have to find what it is you hold on to."

After much grappling, Anti-Defamation League, museum and FBI officials, and the agents themselves settled on the FBI oath as their guide in ethical dilemmas: "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

The oath is put to test in real-life situations, even in this country. Training participants discuss the not-too-distant collusion of law enforcement with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s murder of civil rights workers in the South.

"They discuss what happened in the wake of 9/11 in which there were door-to-door interviews conducted with Muslim Americans and Muslims who had green cards here," says the league's Friedman, who leads some of the discussions. "They talk about these things very frankly. I think it would be extremely heartening to the American people to see." Officials at the FBI Academy are developing a spinoff of the Holocaust training program. FBI agents and trainees will soon be sent to mosques and into Muslim-American communities to learn about an ethnic minority in the hot seat today.

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Pay Ploy?

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Federal employees who oppose leaving the General Schedule often fear that switching systems is just a scheme to cut their pay.

New numbers from the Congressional Budget Office challenge that premise. According to a March CBO paper titled, "Characteristics and Pay of Federal Civilian Employees," those paid under the General Schedule actually make less than their counterparts in alternate pay systems.

About 80 percent of white-collar civilian employees work in the General Schedule, with the remaining 20 percent falling under a variety of alternatives. In December 2005, the average GS employee brought home $63,000, compared to $82,000 for the lucky 20 percent in other systems. For those classified as professionals, the average GS employee earned $80,000 that year, versus $92,000 outside the GS.

The CBO offers a couple of explanations for the variation. Here's one: "Salaries of employees in the various non-GS pay plans were generally higher than those of GS pay plan workers, a fact that may in part reflect the flexibility that those non-GS plans allow agencies in setting pay."

That explanation seems to suggest that if agencies only had the choice, they would pay their employees more.

But the report's footnotes tell another story: "Alternatively, those higher pay levels may reflect the differences between GS and non-GS pay systems in the mix of jobs that each covers."

And another: "Another reason for the higher pay of non-GS workers may be that such employers, unlike those governed by the GS pay system, need not seek approval from [the Office of Personnel Management] for enhanced pay when critical personnel are in short supply."

Indeed, many agencies sought Congress' permission to leave the General Schedule because they couldn't pay enough in the old system to attract and retain their high-earning breed of employees. These include financial agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and scientific ones such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As the Defense Department continues its march toward implementing an alternate pay system for tens of thousands of employees -- not necessarily in elite professions -- it will be interesting to compare these numbers again in a few years.

For now, CBO breaks the numbers down further. Analysts examined the range of pay in these systems. For GS employees, the range between the 25th and the 75th percentile of salaries is $36,000. Pay for non-GS employees is less evenly distributed, with a $52,000 range. That means there's greater volatility, and greater pay potential in alternate pay systems.

Even if new pay systems are definitively proven not to be ploys to slash federal pay, it's the volatility that will continue to discomfort some.

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Caring for Others

Karen Rutzick — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Federal salaries support more than the employee earning them. More than half of government workers care for someone other than themselves -- either children or elderly parents. Twenty percent more expect to care for someone else eventually.

In many cases, federal employees' children are cared for at home. According to a Government Accountability Office report issued this week, 51 percent of employees with infants provide care for them at home. Forty-nine percent of those with toddlers provide care at home, as do 47 percent of employees with preschool-aged children and 39 percent with kindergarten-aged children. The second most popular option for all ages was care in someone else's home, followed by care in a nonfederal day care center. A small portion used federal centers.

To ease this responsibility, Congress passed a law in 2001 permitting agencies to fund federal employees' child care. But lawmakers didn't appropriate extra money for the program, much like the student loan repayment benefit in government. In fiscal 2005, only 4,400 federal employees received student loan repayments. The GAO report reveals that, similarly, only 2 percent of federal employees with children receive child care subsidies.

There's another program that federal employees aren't using to pay for these costs: the Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account. GAO found that only 7 percent of employees with dependents have one.

Such accounts allow employees to make pre-tax salary contributions into a savings account to pay for care of dependents. The Office of Personnel Management says employees can "save 20 percent to 40 percent on covered expenses," including child care, baby sitters, summer camp and before- and after-school care for children younger than 13, with the accounts. Employees can stash up to $5,000 a year in these accounts.

Many of the respondents said they don't use the accounts because they didn't know about them or didn't know how to use them.

Employees are using schedule flexibilities to care for their dependents. Across agencies, 28 percent of employees used flexible work schedules to handle their needs, and 18 percent used compressed work schedules to that end.

In the Education Department, 86 percent of employees surveyed said scheduling flexibilities are important to the decision to stay at their jobs. In the Justice Department, 64 percent of employees said the same.

This is another chapter in a long-told story about federal compensation. Government agencies may not always offer top-notch monetary compensation, but they do offer a work-life balance that's hard to beat. Federal employees may not be able to afford an au pair, but they can work odd hours around their kids' school schedule.

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Loud and Clear

Karen Rutzick — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Homeland Security's Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson answers to his employees.

As the No. 2 guy at the No. 1 most watched agency in government, Homeland Security Department Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson answers to Congress a lot. He's testified 11 times since taking the position two years ago. Jackson answers to his boss, Secretary Michael Chertoff, too, with whom he says he usually meets five to eight times a day. But it's rare that Jackson, whose job puts him in the chief operating officer role at DHS, has to answer directly to the 200,000-plus employees who work for him. On Jan. 30, however, Jackson did.

That day, the Office of Personnel Management released findings from its 2006 Federal Human Capital Survey, which it conducts every two years. Of 36 federal agencies surveyed, DHS ranked 36th in job satisfaction, 36th in results-oriented performance culture, 35th in leadership and 33rd in talent management.

Jackson is a blunt man; he rapidly ticks off memorized lists of priorities and policies in his Texas accent. Down the hall from his office, he points to a photograph on the wall of ground zero in New York and barks, "That's why I'm here."

In his Jan. 30 memo to employees, Jackson told them, "These results deliver a clear and jolting message from managers and line employees alike. I am writing to assure you that, starting at the top, the leadership team across DHS is committed to address the under-lying reasons for DHS employee dissatisfaction."

Two years earlier, DHS employees had put their agency in a similar spot on the rankings. "On the whole, it is not significantly changed from OPM's 2004 employee survey," Jackson conceded.

Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the think tank Center for American Progress in Washington, noted that DHS ranked last on half the examined topics, including how employees rate the overall quality of work done by their unit and the sense of personal accomplishment their work provides. The department placed second to last on another quarter of them.

The 2004 survey was "devastating in its implications about how well government has taken on the important job of protecting the country against attack and preparing for the aftermath if an attack does take place," Lilly said in his analysis.

Jackson and his team didn't respond too well to the survey the last time around, he admits. But Jackson says he had recently taken the job when the 2004 results came out, and they were a reflection of the uncertainty that comes with creating a new department.

"I could try to use that as an excuse for today, but I won't," Jackson says. "Our job is not to lean on that as an excuse, but to fix that and to understand that and to be more responsive to employees' needs."

The difference this time around, Jackson says, is that DHS officials are paying more attention to OPM's survey results. They got the raw data from OPM and were able, for example, to find a subset of employees within one of the seven DHS components that was dragging down communication scores. Jackson would not reveal which group, but he did say he already spoke to the head of that organization to begin fixing the problem. DHS is conducting employee focus groups to learn even more.

The biggest change Jackson and his crew made in the aftermath of the 2006 results is one he doesn't link directly to the survey. A few weeks after his Jan. 30 memo, DHS officials announced they were scrapping plans to move employees off the General Schedule onto a pay-for-performance system, known as MaxHR.

"We won't be as ambitious with this next iteration of our HR management system as we were the last time around," Jackson says.

That effort was so bold that two federal courts ruled against it and the solicitor general refused to bring DHS' case to the Supreme Court. Even though the court cases targeted the labor relations portion of the personnel system, Jackson and his team dropped the entire program, opting instead to go with a small pilot project with a few hundred intelligence employees.

Jackson says his job as a leader is to know when to push and when to back off, and it was time to back off from MaxHR. "Our employees said [the system] was a cause of great anxiety to them," he says. The next administration will have to decide whether or not to try pay for performance, he adds.

The next administration won't include Jackson. He is part academic, with a doctorate in government from Georgetown University and teaching stints at his alma mater; part businessman, with turns at Lockheed Martin Corp., the American Trucking Associations and AECOM Technology Corp.; and part government official, with positions at the Transportation Department under President George W. Bush and in the Education Department under President Ronald Reagan.

"I'm looking for getting a nongovernment badge for a while; I think that's good for me," Jackson says. "And I have no interest in another government job after this one." If Sens. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, and Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, have their way, though, Jackson's role will change even before he leaves DHS. The senators, who hold the highest spots on the Senate subcommittee overseeing the federal workforce, introduced a bill in February to elevate the undersecretary for management to the No. 3 spot, right under Jackson.

"I am convinced the existing management structure at the department is insufficient, and is hampering its ability to be successful," Voinovich says. The bill calls for a career employee to serve a five-year term as "principal adviser to the secretary on the management of the department."

Jackson is defending his turf: "I don't think that's helpful. I think that will decrease accountability. It does not take into account that people really need to understand with clarity who the deputy is." He agrees with one part of the proposal: putting more career employees, rather than political appointees, in top spots to ensure continuity into the next administration.

"We've taken this on as a priority," Jackson says, "to look for a succession plan for transition and to make sure that across the department we're putting up people who are appropriately trained, who are career, who are very visible and experienced."

In the meantime, what are Jackson's most realistic goals for the remainder of his tenure? "I don't have any goals that are not realistic," he says.

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Closing Loopholes

Karen Rutzick — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Two exceptions to the burdensome federal hiring process could disappear.

Before Sago, W. Va., became synonymous with disaster when a coal mine exploded, the industry already had a problem. In September 2003, auditors at the Government Accountability Office found that 44 percent of federal mine inspectors were eligible to retire in the coming five years. What's more, the Mine Safety and Health Administration had no plan to replace them.

At MSHA, half of all employees retire within one year of eligibility. Training new inspectors-who conduct surprise inspections four times a year in underground coal mines-takes 18 months. On top of training time, "it takes the agency several months from the date an individual retires to advertise and fill each position," GAO said in its report. Who would keep mines safe in the meantime?

In 2004, MSHA officials announced a solution. Agency representatives would travel to sites nationwide for six months to test and interview a cadre of potential mine inspectors. Successful applicants would quickly be hired through the Federal Career Intern Program.

The program is not really an internship. It's a hiring loophole, created by a July 2000 executive order under President Clinton that allows agencies to circumvent the federal government's traditional, and cumbersome, hiring process. Agencies can pick and choose where to advertise, and applicants are easily scooped up without standard competition into a two-year internship. Then agencies can convert the interns' status to regular employment.

In the race to replace retiring federal employees, the approach grew in popularity. In its first year, 400 employees were hired governmentwide. In fiscal 2005, more than 11,000 were hired through the program. That was the year the Office of Personnel Management issued regulations making the hiring provision permanent.

The intern program came into vogue just as another hiring loophole closed. This one was associated with the Outstanding Scholar Program, created in 1981 to settle a class action lawsuit that alleged the old civil service exam discriminated against minorities. The parties agreed that while the government worked out a new exam, agencies could hire college graduates with at least a 3.5 grade-point average into specified jobs without the rigmarole of regular competition. But the government never rewrote the exam and 25 years later people started to notice.

Last fall, the Merit Systems Protection Board ruled in cases against the Agriculture and Veterans Affairs departments that their use of the Outstanding Scholar Program violated veterans preference. In government, veterans are supposed to be given a leg up in competing for jobs. OPM no longer uses the Outstanding Scholar Program, and it's advising agencies to consult their general counsel's office before they do.

With Outstanding Scholar on its way out, the Federal Career Intern Program became even more important for hiring everyone from mine inspectors to budget analysts. Many thought the intern program was fairer than its predecessor. It applies veterans preference, for example. But the National Treasury Employees Union begged to differ. On Jan. 24, NTEU filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia contending that agencies are using the intern program beyond its intent.

"Within the last few years, the FCIP has really become the hiring method of choice for an awful lot of federal jobs," says Colleen Kelley, president of NTEU. As a result, union members are being kept out of competition for these jobs, she says.

"If you're really a believer in the merit system, you hire the best person no matter where you find them," says John Palguta, vice president at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service in Washington. "Unions would prefer you look to union members."

Many agencies that were contacted for this article declined to comment because of the lawsuit, including OPM. But shortly after NTEU filed the case, OPM Director Linda Springer issued a short but telling statement: "We believe the NTEU suit is unfortunate. In light of the pending departure of hundreds of thousands of employees to retirement, the federal government needs every available tool to ensure we have an effective workforce, including the Federal Career Intern Program."

The loophole hasn't closed just yet.

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