Government Executive - Authors - Lucas Grindley

Federal workforce needs some tender loving care, says Clinton official

Lucas Grindley — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Harvard professor Linda Bilmes served as an assistant secretary in President Clinton's Commerce Department and is co-author of an upcoming book, The People Factor: Strengthening America By Investing In Public Service, which she wrote along with W. Scott Gould, who has been nominated as deputy secretary for Veterans Affairs. Bilmes spoke with NationalJournal.com's Lucas Grindley about her research and how investing $10 billion in federal employees could yield a $300 billion return. In the first part of the interview last week, Bilmes discussed how to avoid waste and mismanagement in the stimulus package. Edited excerpts follow.

NJ: I know research for the book has been in the works for several years. What have you learned?

Bilmes: This is really a book about the need to invest in the 1.9 million federal workers who are all over the country and who run the government. We have reached the conclusion that when you look at many, many problems confronting the country -- whether it is the flawed intelligence that led us into Iraq, the amount of waste and fraud in the reconstruction effort, the failure of the regulatory oversight of Wall Street, the salmonella in the peanut butter, the lead-tainted toys from China, the post-Katrina debacle, the list goes on and on and on -- what these things have in common is that there has been a breakdown in the federal workforce because of the fact that we have systematically underinvested in the federal workforce for decades. This really dates back to the Reagan era. It's a long period of time in which the federal workforce has not been seen as the key lever to making the government work well.... We are calling for a complete reinvigoration and overhaul of the federal workforce.

NJ: Is this something that can be measured, that you can say at the end "we did this and we got better performance"? Or is it one those times when you are measuring against something that didn't happen, which is bad performance?

Bilmes: That is a very good question. We believe that with an investment of about $10 billion over the next five years, we can reap about $300 billion to $600 billion -- in that range -- of increased services and productivity and direct savings. That's our estimate, which is outlined in the book in excruciating detail.

NJ: How much is savings and how much is increased productivity?

Bilmes: It is a combination of productivity, reduced duplication, reduced fraud -- and a lot of it is getting better bang for the buck out of the service contractors, the contracts which are for services as opposed to buying a thing....

Anyone who has even renovated a home knows that depending on how much you control the cost, you control what's happening. You really think through ahead of time what you're going to need to do, what you can afford, what you can't afford. You think through what happens if the schedule slips, and so forth. That contract can vary from sort of 100 to 200 -- there is a wide scope. And right now, you have a very eviscerated federal contracting workforce -- they have been cut and slashed -- as well as a very, very wide slate of other managers who are supervising contractors who have basically been given no training in how to manage these things and very little authority. So it's not surprising that the amount of contracting and the sort of dollar amount that we're spending are absolutely going through the roof, and with many very widely publicized meltdowns, particularly in the IT area, where the failures ranging from VA to IRS to the Pentagon are legion. And basically, the bulk of our savings and productivity improvements comes from much, much better managing of the multisector workforce.

NJ: President Obama is going to appoint a chief performance officer. Would that person have something to do with making contracts more efficient?

Bilmes: Well, I sincerely hope so.

NJ: Do you think that duty is something that should be centralized under one person?

Bilmes: The leadership for changing the culture of how we really view the federal workforce -- a workforce which has largely been dumped on for decades -- that cultural shift has to come from the very top. It has to come from the president, it has to come from the Cabinet secretaries, and then below that level, the political appointees.... But the political appointees and the senior executives and the senior managers and supervisors need to receive extensive training in the same way, pretty much, that we think about training in the military. Training is a way of life in the military. You're not hired and expected to know how to be a colonel; you go through extensive training to get there. We see a total philosophical shift in the way we think about the federal workforce, which is our bulwark against our enemies both military and economic. That really does have to come from the top.

NJ: Even training costs money, and you note in your book that salaries don't compete with the private sector. Won't it be hard to sell the idea of getting more money for these sorts of things now, in this kind of economic climate?

Bilmes: It may. It may. I think that people don't necessarily recognize how pivotal the federal government is in everything they do. From the minute you wake up in the morning and your alarm clock rings to the time that is established by the atomic clock in Boulder, Colo., and NIST [the National Institute of Standards and Technology]; to eating your breakfast cereal, where all the ingredients are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration; to getting in your car, where all highway emissions and all car safety and so forth is regulated by the federal government; your life is very, very much affected by the federal government. But people don't necessarily see that connection.

And what has tended to happen, we believe, over the past decade is that the media, the Congress, the presidents -- the general public culture has been a sort of "gotcha" culture toward the federal government. A mistake is vastly amplified. You have the successes of government minimized. So there has become this extremely kind of tiny-footed, risk-averse culture in the government that has emerged as a result of decades of criticism and blame in which bold initiatives are discouraged, innovation is discouraged, and trying new things is almost not allowed. I have legion of example in the book. It is partly about money, but I want to emphasize that a lot of it has to do with flexibility and with restructuring of processes like hiring processes and promotion processes and mentoring processes and training processes.

NJ: And you really think that could be resolved, that they could actually be more flexible? The government is not known for that.

Bilmes: I think that this is a fixable problem. I really do. I think when you look around the world, there are some problems that seem somewhat intractable, but this problem of getting a first-class functioning public service and a first-class federal government and investing in a federal workforce, I think, is long overdue to be addressed. And I think it is truly fixable.

The problem of how to recruit top students quickly should not be as difficult a problem to resolve as Gaza. We are treating these problems as if this is some kind of impossible, intractable problem because the government has in the past not been able to fix it. But I truly believe that with a different attitude to the government, a different appreciation, and these days a different economic environment, I believe that the time is ripe to fix some of these problems. And this is essential to maintain the quality of life in America.

NJ: In your book, you point out that the government isn't competitive with the private sector in hiring young talent. Why is that?

Bilmes: We surveyed about 2,000 students for writing the book, and generally what you found -- there was between 30 and 40 percent of students who said they would consider working for the government, so you had plenty of students who were willing to consider working for the government. You don't need everyone to work for the government.... We asked a series of attributes, and then we asked, "Are you more likely to get this in the public sector or the private sector? In the public sector or the nonprofit sector?" And basically what we found is that all of the attributes that people most wanted in a job were ones that the government, they felt, didn't offer. For example, they wanted to work in an environment where you could rise as high as your talents will take you, which they perceived did not exist in government. They wanted to work in a caring environment, which they perceived did not work in the government. They perceived that the government was less family-friendly than either the private or the nonprofit sector.

NJ: Are these perception problems or are they actually right?

Bilmes: That's a very interesting question. And when I presented some of this material to groups of senior executives who come here for executive education at Harvard, that's a question which always comes up. Are these perceptions or is this reality? To what extent is it that the government is not getting its message out? To what extent is it that the government needs to be restructured? And I think there's some of both.

NJ: So what about you? Would you consider going back into government?

Bilmes: Oh, well. That's another subject, that's another subject.

NJ: There are quite a few openings, I hear.

Bilmes: [laughs] No comment on that one.

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Budget expert offers tips for efficient stimulus spending

Lucas Grindley — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Linda Bilmes served as an assistant secretary in President Clinton's Commerce Department and has written extensively about government budgets and the costs of the Iraq War. It's Professor Bilmes these days, as she teaches advanced budgeting courses at Harvard University and consults with local governments on how to become more efficient.

Bilmes spoke with NationalJournal.com's Lucas Grindley about how to ensure that the economic stimulus can avoid some of the problems that plagued Iraq reconstruction funding. Edited excerpts follow.

NJ: You focus on the Iraq reconstruction effort as a recent example of how vast expenditures with little oversight can result in government waste. President Obama has suggested an independent review for the economic stimulus funds in order to avoid some of those problems. Is that sort of independent panel the right way to monitor whether the stimulus money is being spent effectively?

Bilmes: I think that is one way, and I think something along those lines is certainly necessary.... We absolutely understand that large-scale projects, particularly infrastructure projects, are prone to waste, fraud, mismanagement, profiteering, inefficiency. And there is a certain trade-off between how fast you get the money out and how much these problems occur. So the challenge with the infrastructure component of the stimulus package, thinking about the lessons of Iraq, is that we need to find ways to mitigate against these risks at the same time that we try and put money into job creation quickly.

So I would say that there certainly needs to be oversight. There also needs to be very careful prioritization, clear performance measures, clear criteria for awarding contracts and a way to deal with the varying needs of different communities by having a kind of sliding scale of federal matching funds. Not all communities are the same; more affluent communities and poorer communities will have different needs. So if you look through the 15,000 projects on the national conference of mayors Web site that they have identified, you see everything from providing basic drinking water to relandscaping golf courses and everything in between. So I think that one of the challenges of the stimulus package, where you have of course many members of Congress who want money going to their districts and so forth, is to make sure those needier communities have a fuller federal match than communities that may have a project which is maybe a good project but maybe they get a 10 percent federal match as opposed to 100 percent or 90 percent.

NJ: Should that sort of regulation be built into the stimulus now or can it be assigned to an entity to do later?

Bilmes: The stimulus is a very rapidly moving target right now, and I am not familiar with every detail of the House and particularly the Senate bill, which is moving as we speak. But I would say that whether that is written in or whether that is something the oversight board designs or that is done through the regulation of the stimulus, it is going to need some clear oversight and guidelines.

NJ: As Congress sets out to create jobs with the economic stimulus, there's been some debate about whether it should focus on the private or public sector. How should those be balanced?

Bilmes: I think what's important in the stimulus package is to create jobs on the things that really matter that stimulate the economy, whether they are public or private sector jobs. But most of the jobs being created -- as opposed to saved -- will be private sector jobs. Let me give you an example. I'm on the National Parks' Second Century Commission... and so I've become very familiar with the maintenance backlog at the parks. This is basic maintenance like maintaining trails, cutting down trees that need to be cut, painting visitor centers and keeping the toilets working. The backlog of basic maintenance is 8.4 billion dollars, and they've had virtually no investment in the past decade.

Now, the stimulus package is hopefully going to put in about a billion dollars or so of work to try and get some of this maintenance done. But who is going to do those jobs? Well, the Park Service doesn't have the capacity to do all of that work, so to a large extent they will need to hire [private sector] people to do a lot of the work. But they will also need to have the right resources within the Park Service to be supervising the work and doing the contracting correctly and doing the oversight and the performance measures, so that means you will have a primarily private-sector focus, but there may be some government jobs created as well to make sure that this is done properly.

NJ: In your book, The People Factor, you note how long it normally takes the government to hire people, at least compared to the private sector. Are they going to have to speed that up?

Bilmes: There are many things that could be done to make that faster. I think that they will hopefully be able to use some of the existing facility for hiring temporary employees to bring some people in for managing some of the infrastructure projects. But I think it's important to recognize that the stimulus package is, in terms of jobs, not just about creating private sector jobs, but it's about preserving public sector jobs at the state and local level. I can give you an example. ...My students are involved... in the budget office at the City of Boston, trying to help them with some of their financial dilemmas. And the City of Boston right now -- which has been a city with a good financial track record, good stewardship, it has a good rainy day fund -- even so, it has a shortfall this upcoming year of $140 million, which means there is absolutely no way, unless they get money from the stimulus package, that they are going to be able to avoid layoffs.

Now, the layoffs of people who are employed at the city level -- these are people like teachers and policemen and social workers and sanitation workers and emergency medical personnel and so forth. And these are the people that are the most important people in terms of what the public gets from government, in my opinion. And so to not lay them off is the most important first order of business of the stimulus. And probably there are some, you know, 200,000 or 250,000 people around the country who are state and local employees whose jobs will be preserved as a result of the stimulus.

NJ: How can other parts of the country, in much worse economic shape, stay afloat?

Bilmes: Right now, state governments are primarily dependent on income taxes and sales taxes, and so they have very much seen the hit already because both those revenues are dropping this year. But most cities are dependent primarily on property taxes, and since property tends to be reassessed every year, or every other year, they may see a much bigger hit next year when property tax revenues fall as property values are reappraised downward.... They are not allowed to spend in deficit; many of them have very large pension obligations, many of them have got very active unions who may or may not have a good relationship with the city, and the city management may be of variable quality. So I think that a top priority for the stimulus is to make sure that we don't hemorrhage frontline workers and services at the state and municipal levels.

NJ: There have been some recent pushes for increased transparency of budgeting at the state and local levels because they are posting all of this government contract spending information on Web sites such as USASpending.gov. Do you see that sort of increased transparency for the public as actually helping to identify inefficiencies or ways to improve things?

Bilmes: I am in favor of really fundamental reform in the way budget information is reported and displayed.... When you look at budgets in this country, whether it's the federal budget or state budget or whatever, what you are seeing is historical spending patterns. You're not seeing how much it actually costs to provide a service. And so in order to really improve transparency and improve service delivery, I believe -- and I have a book called Budgeting For Better Performance, a forthcoming book for next year, which is on this topic -- I believe budgeting needs to be redone so that it is more of an activity-based budget -- in other words, you can really understand where money is spent to deliver a certain service.... But budgets do not provide us with the information that we need to govern wisely, and this is the kind of transparency reform that we need.

NJ: So in an effort for more transparency you actually have to provide more context to the numbers being posted on the Internet right now?

Bilmes: Right. We really have to look at it as, what service are we providing, how much is it costing to provide this service? Looking at cost is different than looking at spending. If you try and understand how much it costs to fight a fire, fighting a fire actually has a certain amount of cost from the fire department, of course, but it also has a police component. It has an emergency medical component. It has a public utilities component. It may have a component of the public works department or other departments. So the actual full cost of fighting a fire may be very different than looking at the fire department budget. Looking at the fire department budget doesn't really help you to understand what it costs to do things.

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Obama administration launches new White House Web site

Lucas Grindley — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

White House Web site.

Sometime after Barack Obama officially became president, Change.gov began sending visitors to a new Whitehouse.gov that "will serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world," wrote the site's director, Macon Phillips, in an entry on the new site's official blog.

The site initially had a few bugs to iron out. The e-mail sign-up page sent visitors to a contact form that produced an error message when completed. But Phillips promised that it will be the start to increased communication and transparency in the new administration.

The site pledges that "we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it" -- which would fulfill a promise Obama made during the campaign.

A section called "The Briefing Room" promises the most information, housing executive orders, video of addresses, and a tracking calendar of nominations and appointments.

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Targeted Advertising

Lucas Grindley — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

For two consecutive months, McCain beat Obama in the number of impressions purchased on search engines such as Google, paying to ensure that Web users see links to JohnMcCain.com along with their search results. Statistics for June show McCain bought 7 million impressions, compared with 1.15 million for Obama. That's an increase for McCain, who purchased 5.4 million impressions the previous month, and a decrease for Obama, from 1.8 million.

Obama continued his dominance in banner advertising, however, which is traditionally more expensive than search. Obama bought 80 million banner impressions in June, compared with McCain's 16 million.

The McCain team's affinity for search engine advertising began while facing a tight budget during the primary. His advisers say targeted advertising helped him beat better-funded opponents then and will help again now.

The reason search engine buys can be more cost-effective is that they eliminate some of the guesswork traditionally associated with other forms of advertising. The campaign selects exactly where to spend money online after calculating how much it pays per lead to its site.

"We obviously have limited resources in this campaign as compared to Barack Obama, so we have to spend in the most effective way," said e-campaign director Michael Palmer. "We found that form of advertising, where you are getting people who are already looking for something, is a very cost-effective way of getting those people to our site and getting them to do the things we want them to do."

Take for example the McCain campaign's efforts to woo Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters who might be unconvinced that Obama has what it takes to answer the ringing red phone.

While Bill Clinton was telling a TV reporter in Africa, "You could argue that no one's ever ready to be president," users who entered a Google search for "McCain Clinton" found a text ad boasting of the Republican: "No On The Job Training Needed to Be Commander In Chief." For more information, it sent users to "JohnMcCain.com/Experience," which isn't an actual URL. Google lets advertisers create colloquial addresses that disguise longer ones used for tracking the effectiveness of a landing page. Following the link brings visitors to a commercial originally released in March that touts McCain's leadership. An announcer's resounding voice says the next president must believe in protecting America, and he asks, "What must we believe about that president? What does he think? Where has he been? Has he walked the walk?" The ad ends with footage of McCain as a prisoner of war, reciting his serial number to his captors.

Tracy Russo, formerly of John Edwards' online campaign, is known for criticizing McCain's admitted lack of familiarity with using the Internet. But even she's impressed with his campaign's use of search advertising.

"That's a lot more savvy than we've seen from them in a lot of other things," said Russo, president of her online political strategy firm, Russo Strategies.

Still, she said almost all candidates could do more. Instead of focusing just on names, they could emphasize issues.

"All of the candidates should be advertising on gas prices right now," she said. "If you Google to try and figure out where the lowest prices for gas are in town, then you should see an ad for Barack Obama on how he's going to break the grip of foreign oil. You have to go after people where they are. You can't just expect they are going to come to you. You have to think, OK, what is the public searching for right now?"

Obama actually did some of this during the primary campaign, using search engine advertising to fight Internet rumors about his religion. A Google search for "Barack Obama Muslim" returned an ad asserting, "Barack Obama is a Christian. Get the facts at his official site."

After seeing the ad, online marketing expert Daljit Bhurji, who cofounded the Diffusion public relations agency in London, touted Obama's marketing strategy to his clients. It was the first time he'd seen search engine ads used to promote a message instead of a product.

"In the U.K., I have noticed there have been a couple of crises which have affected brands, and they have been quite quick to use Google AdWords as a way to counteract that crisis or counteract rumors," said Bhurji, who credits Obama's campaign with being ahead of a trend.

After more accurate information about Obama's religion spread online, Google's "organic" search results now point to Obama's site for free. And Bhurji hasn't seen the ads since. (Outside groups, both for and against Obama, have since ponied up for the terms.)

Although optimizing a Web site to earn better placement in free search results is a best practice, Bhurji still advises clients to purchase ads. Studies have shown that when a site appears within the free results and also within the sponsored section, searchers consider it more credible.

The problem is not everyone can be the top sponsored ad. Buying ads on Google is like participating in an auction. So if every candidate across the country advertised as aggressively as McCain, then a bidding war for popular keywords could emerge. Everyone agrees that the higher on the list a site appears, the more likely it is to be clicked.

Deciding when to outbid a competitor is a balancing act of goals versus a need to get the most for your money, said Mindy Finn, online strategist for former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

"In my experience, issue words don't necessarily yield strong results like the candidate's names do," she said via e-mail. "If a campaign's goal for their search campaign is conversions, they may decide to yield the top spot on the issues and ensure they can devote the funds to the candidate's name."

Neither of the candidates has bought an impression around every search that mentions their name. But Obama has a lot more ground to cover. Google Trends data reports that people's searches in June included Obama's name more than three and a half times as often as McCain's.

Search engines are taking notice of the attention being paid by candidates across the country. Within the last year, Google created an "elections and issue advocacy" team that its manager, Peter Greenberger, describes as "small but growing," with five people so far. He's watched as the advertising evolves.

"Early in the cycle, campaigns were interested in gathering e-mail addresses and raising money from the base," Greenberger said. "In this stage, you are seeing more of an effort at persuasion."

He speculates that as the persuasion phase intensifies, candidates might become more interested in banner advertising.

"You are not looking for that active voter who maybe knows who he or she is voting for," he said. "You are looking for that more passive voter who is reading information but not quite ready to commit."

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