Government Executive - Authors - Ronald Sanders

OPM's subtle shifts could redefine federal HR

Ronald Sanders — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:00:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) published proposed regulations that would, among other things, give its director "delegated" authority to approve agency requests for critical pay (that is, an annual salary equivalent to the vice president's) for certain specified positions. That authority is currently vested expressly with the president, according to the Federal Employee Pay Comparability Act of 1991 (or FEPCA), which established an upper limit of some 800 such critical pay positions governmentwide, although less than a dozen of those have ever actually been approved in that regard.

But as noted, OPM's proposed rules rely on an "implied" delegation of that critical pay authority from the president to the OPM director — after all, the proposed rules in the Federal Register argue that the director is the president's statutory agent, complete with the administrative equivalent of power of attorney when it comes to such matters — and those rules further imply that absent some good and compelling reason, the OPM director will approve those requests. I guess the goal here is to make better use of that extraordinary pay authority, in large part because it has been so little used in the past. That's an understatement if there ever was one(!), and in this narrow instance, I say let's "just do it!"

My own history with critical pay

At the risk of sounding a bit self-serving, I should know what I'm talking about when it comes to critical pay. I was the IRS's first chief HR officer when the Congress gave that agency "streamlined" critical pay authority for 50 positions in the now-vintage IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, thus allowing it to hire folks at a much higher salary than a regular SES position at the time and (more importantly) without all the OPM justification and red tape involved ... to be sure, the critical pay of many of those execs was not as high as the salaries some of them were getting in their private sector jobs, but the psychic value of telling one of those executive recruits that "we'll pay you as much as Vice President Al Gore is getting" did the trick for most of them. And our ability to land them is evidence of how successful we were.

And then, when I went to OPM in 2002, I persuaded my boss, then-Director Kay Coles James, to use the "regular" FEPCA-authorized critical pay authority (one of the very few agency heads to do so) to justify paying that higher salary to OPM's vacant chief actuary position, one that actually reported to me. The person encumbering that position would determine the rates that insurance carriers could charge federal employees for their health benefits, so in our view, critical pay was imminently justified thus, it was far less than a nationally known actuary could command in the labor market. But as with IRS, it was of enormous psychic value, and Director James was successful!

Truth in advertising: I also "owned" the OPM policy and regulations on critical pay when I was associate director of that agency.

However, it was almost 10 years later, when I chaired the Federal Salary Council as a fledgling political appointee in the first Trump administration (from 2018 until I resigned in late 2020 over the then-unadulterated Schedule F), that I really got to know about FEPCA, critical pay and all of its limitations; indeed, despite much official carping to the contrary, I found that the latter authority had barely been used in the time since I had been a career OPM employee. Indeed, it's never ever covered more than a dozen positions out of the 800 authorized, and I convinced the Federal Pay Agent — the directors of OPM and OMB, as well as the secretary of Labor — to include various critical pay "reforms" in their annual report to the Congress. Those reforms would have expanded its use exponentially, albeit through legislation rather than regulatory fiat, but they went nowhere.

Those reforms have been repeated in one form or another ever since, including in various Pay Agent reports, but to no avail. FEPCA and its critical pay positions have remained intact, this despite the fact that they are both woefully obsolete, but that's another story.

And since then, as a private citizen back in 2023, I was part of small group of IRS "formers" who, on behalf of Commissioner Werfel and his team, lobbied the U.S. Congress to provide that agency with the same independent "streamlined" critical pay authority that it once had back in 1998, only to find that our principle opponent on the Hill was not OMB or the Treasury Department — both of them supported the flexibility — but rather, OPM itself (in this case, the Biden OPM) ... they were the ones that argued that IRS did not need such independent authority, as it already existed in OPM. According to them, all IRS needed to do was ask for it.

Hah, fat chance! But its miserly history notwithstanding, that was enough of an argument to prevail, at least as far as the Senate parliamentarian was concerned, and critical pay approval remained with OPM, along with its historically cheapskate attitude! Until now.

Approve the proposed critical pay rules, but narrowly

So, if it were me, I would unequivocally support the proposed OPM rules, IF they're going to be used to narrowly expand (dare I say, liberalize?) the use of critical pay in the federal government. And I would encourage agency heads and their senior career advisors to take the OPM director at his word and submit lots of critical pay requests ... all justified, of course. Hopefully, most will be approved as promised, and we'll approach the 800-position limit in FEPCA.

But I have some reservations that go beyond critical pay, especially with this notion that the OPM director can speak and act for the president under a doctrine of "implied" delegation. That's a very sharp two-edged sword, depending on who's wielding it, so while I personally trust Scott Kupor and his team to wield it as he has so stated in this instance, I'd need to see how else that implied delegation may be used or abused, depending on how it's going to be exercised.

Thus, while I would love to see greater flexibility with respect to FEPCA's (and OPM's) critical pay authority, we need to worry about the precedential price we would pay in so doing. In his recent blog, aptly entitled "Secrets of OPM," Director Kupor asks us to calm down and carry on in that regard, and I agree with him, but actions will speak louder than words, so we shall see.

For example, the other regulatory change recently proposed by OPM — the abolition of the long-standing (but also obsolete) one-year time-in-grade waiting period for promotions under the General Schedule (GS) — should also be approved right away. Indeed, in my view, it should have been abolished years ago. More on that in a subsequent commentary, but what started decades ago as a simple rule of thumb has, in typical OPM fashion, become blindingly formulaic, forcing every federal employee to wait a year before they can be promoted, even if they could demonstrably do that higher-graded work involved from the get-go.

Why? What's so magical about a year? If someone can do the job, let them do it and pay them for it. So, kill it or at least give agencies the opportunity to do so if they so choose.

A subtle shift at OPM?

That said, in a broader sense, the changes I mention here are a great example of an apparent and positive OPM shift, however subtle it may be, if I'm right, that is. For example, the liberalization of critical pay, the recent proposed elimination of the "one-year" promotion rule and even more recently, the "edict" to require some federal employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) — and Director Kupor's contemporaneous blog explaining it — are all potential examples of a recognition that agencies need lots of maneuvering room, that their missions are just too diverse for a "one size fits all" model. I hope OPM's latest missives acknowledge that fact.

To be sure, those headlines can be misleading, and I'm wondering how many other times we've been duped. Take the NDA edict. The headlines say that it covers all federal employees, even though it clearly does not. It is NOT a blanket order, as some have reported. Rather, the edict is at an agency head's discretion, and it is limited to those federal employees that have access to sensitive, confidential (not to mention classified) information. Of course, even in limited form, such a restriction is problematic, but it is certainly less so than the headlines would suggest.

There may be better, less litigious ways to plug leaks to the media, especially given the implications for recruiting talent to civil service ranks, a job already made difficult by the Trump administration, and I fear that many of OPM's changes have been exaggerated and hyperbolized in the same way. But as a "glass half full" person, I'll take what seems to be going on with some optimism. I hope it isn't misplaced.

Ron Sanders is a 2006 Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and served on the National Council of the American Society for Public Administration, as well as associate editor of its Public Administration Review. A career civil servant of more than 37 years (and over two decades as a member of the Senior Executive Service), he was DOD’s director of Civilian Personnel; IRS’s chief human resources officer; senior associate director of OPM; chief human capital officer for the intelligence community; and later, the presidentially appointed chairman of the Federal Salary Council. With a doctorate in public administration, he also served as director of the University of South Florida’s School of Public Affairs and as executive director of the Florida Center for Cybersecurity.

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The ‘new’ Policy/Career Schedule does NOT (necessarily) politicize the federal workforce

Ronald Sanders — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:03:00 -0500

Let’s all take a deep breath. The rules recently issued by the Office of Personnel Management regarding its “new” Policy/Career Schedule do not mean that “the end of democracy as we know it” is upon us. We’re not there yet, although if Trump’s advisors have their way, and he postpones the 2026 midterm elections because of a made-up national emergency (like a war we apparently didn’t start), we may be. But that’s another matter, one I will not even attempt to defend. Rather, this commentary is all about those final OPM rules regarding the Policy/Career Schedule –actually just a renamed, slightly revised iteration of the “old” Schedule F—and my view is that those rules, not to mention the new schedule, are not nearly as bad as folks are making them out to be.

So, it’s deep breath time again! In that regard, I’ll warn you now that this is NOT a “technical” piece that provides the details of the new schedule...if readers want that, there are excellent articles already out there on the internet, including OPM’s own guidance documents, and they can go to them. Rather, this commentary is directed at the real (vs. the implicitly and sometimes intentionally hyperbolic) implications of one’s conversion to the Policy/Career Schedule. And while it is not as bad as many suggest, it could be...and as a result, I do offer some guardrails, both statutory and otherwise—as do the OPM guidance documents, themselves—that would mitigate some of the very real concerns raised by such a conversion. So...

Many federal civil servants are already ‘excepted’ from Title 5 protections

As someone who once presided over a workforce of “about 100,000” civilians in various U.S. intelligence agencies—95% of whom were “excepted” and thus (in theory) with far fewer civil service protections than most of their Title 5 colleagues—I would argue that this new/old schedule does not automatically politicize the federal civil service. Nor do OPM’s recently published rules overtly or covertly establish partisan political “loyalty” to Trump as a litmus test for what used to be one’s apolitical civil service appointment or promotion. Rather, properly implemented, they are all about more accountability, and they may just rebalance a civil service system that, to too many American citizens, had become far too insulated from the reality of the workplace.

It’s worth noting here that in addition to my experience with a large “excepted” civil service workforce that mostly existed (for very good reasons) outside of the Title 5 security blanket, I also resigned from a political appointment in Trump 1.0 as chair of the Federal Salary Council, back in October 2020. That resignation, which was leaked (not by me) and thus garnered far more publicity that it deserved, was over the initial issuance of Schedule F and its true intentions at the time. President Trump had just penned an executive order establishing it, and when I asked senior politicos about its true intentions, it became clear to me that it was all about putting people politically loyal to Trump in the career federal bureaucracy...perhaps in reaction to the revelations of another moreAnonymous Trump appointee (pun intended).

But since then, OPM has done a couple of things that mitigate my fears...and hopefully those of my colleagues. At least those who are willing to take a deep breath.

OPM guidance offers some additional guardrails

In that regard, OPM issued guidance way back in January 2025 (indeed, that guidance was one of its very first of many such issuances since) that took much of the sting out of the new Policy/Career Schedule. It stated that a career civil servant need not support our current president—or more importantly, ANY president—politically, so long as they carried out that president’s particular policy agenda “faithfully” and “to the best of their ability.” In other words, OPM’s guidance said that civil servants are just required to do their jobs, nothing more and nothing less.

Although there’s plenty of ambiguity in that statement, that clarification was enough to establish a legal defense, and had it been part of the original Schedule F Executive Order back in October 2020, I likely would not have resigned.

To me, it’s all about accountability...and the sworn duty of every civil servant, whether they are to be converted to that new Policy/Career Schedule or not. At the end of the day, federal employees can, will and should be held accountable for doing their jobs. That’s just as it should be. And those covered by the new Policy/Career Schedule will NOT be able to appeal a determination to the contrary to a third party. In other words, their termination will be final. Unless they can show that they followed a president’s lawful agenda “faithfully” and “to the best of their ability.”

In my book, that’s not so bad. But there’s more protection in that regard. According to OPM, a covered civil servant cannot be fired for his or her politics. Period. Full stop. Just as they cannot be fired based on their marital status, their sex, etc. Those are all pretexts, and if they are the real basis for someone’s removal, they are all illegal.

Of course, that depends on the transparency of those reasons, and that in turn depends on whether you’re a “glass half full” or a “glass half empty” person. The “half empty” folks (and there are many!) will say that you should give the benefit of the doubt to a civil servant...in other words, he or she should be protected and should only be terminated when a third party (like the Merit Systems Protection Board or the courts) concludes that they haven’t done their jobs. And the new schedule (and OPM’s implementing rules) take away that protective presumption for covered employees.

Those folks assume that those civil servants have performed satisfactorily—they’re given that presumptive benefit of the doubt and it’s up to their superiors to prove otherwise—and thus they should be protected by default. And if you’re converted to the Policy/Career Schedule, that benefit of the doubt, that default, is forcibly taken away from you. Hence the “half empty” view.

But I count myself among the other “half-full” (?) group who say that federal employees should be removed if they do not do their jobs, and unless and until they can prove a pretext, or some other legal reason for their retention, the official proposing their removal (or some other adverse action) should be given that benefit of the doubt. To me, that’s okay. Call me naive, but I trust those managers—most of whom are career civil servants themselves—to do the right thing. So, here’s my bottom line: If an order from my superior, political or otherwise, is lawful, I’m duty bound to follow it as a civil servant employed by the people to serve them. Not only when I like what I’m being told, although that shouldn’t have anything to do with it, but all the time!

And, even if an otherwise lawful order crosses a moral “red line” of mine (believe it or not, that too happens...and it has happened to me), I have the option of resigning based on my conscience. But I should not go “underground” as some would argue—and continue to accept my paycheck from the public—as to do so just underscores the hyperbolic and unsubstantiated fears of a deep state. But leaving is a choice I can make.

Civil servants take an oath to give their best advice...without fear

To be sure, I’m also duty bound to give that political superior my best advice, preferably in advance and preferably in private...even if it’s advice that my political superior doesn’t want to hear. But if after I’ve given that advice, that political superior tells me to “do it anyway,” I will. If it is otherwise lawful. If it’s illegal, I won’t follow it. Even if it’s the Secretary of Defense telling me to do so, I won’t follow it if it’s illegal (Secretary Hegseth, are you listening?). But if it’s lawful, I’m duty bound.

The danger, of course, is that if I tell that politico what he or she doesn’t want to hear, I’ll be fired just for doing so...before I’m even given the chance to “faithfully” comply with a lawful order and carry it out “to the best of my ability” as required by OPM’s own guidance. That’s the worst-case scenario, but it’s a real one, and it’s what has the “glass half empty” folks so worried, however speculative or rare that may be.

And I’ll be the first to admit that it is legitimately worrisome. You cannot have career civil servants who are afraid to speak truth to power, especially in a policy sense, for fear of losing their jobs. I know this all too well, having come from the Intelligence Community, where “speaking truth to power” (in many cases, to the president himself!) was the job!

That’s why I argue that civil servants are owed some transparency—that is, at least de minimis due process—before they can be fired. In my opinion, they are more than just “at will” chattel. They earned the public’s trust, sometimes arduously via the convoluted federal hiring process, and should be treated accordingly. They should be given the reasons for their termination (or any other adverse action proposed against them) in writing and in advance, and among other things, they should also be able to respond to those reasons to someone in their agency other than the official who proposed the action in the first place.

But in my “half full” mind, that should be the end of the matter...no MSPB or judicial review, except perhaps under the most extraordinary of circumstances.

That is not the case today, and as I said, it’s worrisome...on both extremes of the default line. To be sure, there’s plenty of gray here, especially at those worst-case extremes, as many of my colleagues have repeatedly pointed out. So, there is the risk that our civil service could conceivably become populated not by political partisans loyal only to a particular president, but rather by those who are afraid to speak truth to power, out of fear for their jobs.

So, yes, that is a risk, and it’s a real one.

What OPM can do to alleviate those fears

What we need are reasonable statutory guardrails to mitigate that risk. As I have noted, one such guardrail has already been put in place by OPM, although it’s just guidance, and in my view, it deserves to be codified in statute. To do so would give it far more permanence, not to mention a statutory defense for civil servants terminated for arbitrary and capricious reasons, and I’ve argued as much till I’m blue in the face.

But, as long as OPM stands by its own guidance and more importantly, is willing to police and enforce it, career civil servants—to include those who were “fired” because they dutifully (if not willingly?) followed President Biden’s DEI edicts—should be safe. After all, they were simply following the lawful orders of the duly elected president in office at the time.

Is that enough? I don’t know, but if additional guardrails—in the form of more transparency and/or de minimis due process—are necessary, they can (and should) be imposed by Congress. For example, Congress can easily (that is, literally with the stroke of its bipartisan pen) extend the eligibility of Policy/Career Schedule employees to receive recruiting, retention and/or relocation incentives, as well as become eligible for other benefits currently barred by law.

Thus, Congress can do so if it wants. Whether it will or not remains to be seen, but unless and until it does, let’s all take a deep breath and see what OPM does next. That’s what really matters now.

Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a federal civil servant for almost 40 years, including over 20 as a member of the Senior Executive Service. In that capacity, he served as director of civilian personnel for the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, associate director for HR strategy at OPM and associate director of National Intelligence for human capital, as well as the chairman of the Federal Salary Council.

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How to attract tech workers to civil service? Give them credit!

Ronald Sanders — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:37:00 -0500

Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor has announced that the federal government will seek to recruit thousands of private and non-profit sector STEM workers to help agencies solve their technology issues, including more rapid acquisition and implementation...much like the U.S. Digital Service did before it.

Sounds like the “son of” USDS to me, but I’ll let that pass. This wouldn’t be the first time that an administration renamed and redid something done by its predecessor(s), and both Republican and Democrat presidents are equally guilty in that regard. Regardless, the effort is laudable. However, it is made more difficult when the current president denigrates and disrespects federal service (this just after yet another government shutdown, no less!), and interest in such positions—especially amongst those who could command much higher pay and security where they are—is thus problematic at best.

As a result, Director Kupor has since extended the application period, in part because OPM is (allegedly) flooded with too many applicants. Yeah right! If you believe that, I have a bridge I’ll sell you! However, as I said, the effort is laudable, and with the right incentives, Mr. Kupor can attract those workers to the federal service, even if it’s only temporary. So, here are some suggestions:

Legislative authority already exists...it just needs to be leveraged

OPM may be worried about the prospects of “new” statutory authority, and understandably so. That would require legislation and would be difficult today—although there may be more congressional receptivity after the midterms—but I think there is already sufficient legal authority to do what Mr. Kupor wants. It’s in legislation Congress passed in 2013 giving the Department of Homeland Security more personnel flexibility to hire, pay, and deploy civil service cybersecurity workers. Alas, it took years to issue implementing regulations (something I know firsthand), but that’s another story.

Note that this DHS law was followed a year later by legislation giving the Defense Department similar personnel flexibility, so that too is an alternative for OPM to consider. Both require the cooperation of a cabinet secretary, as well as an immediate amendment to existing cybersecurity regulations—either DHS’s Cybersecurity Talent Management System regs or those issued much more quickly to implement DOD’s Cybersecurity Excepted Service—but both are possible. Indeed, much more so than legislation. So too are regulations, including expedited temporary appointing authority, issued several years ago to support the USDS.

All of these options exist today (or could with some regulatory tweaking) and none require new legislation. All of them would appoint applicants to the “excepted” civil service, so that their initial hire, compensation and removal for cause, among other things, could be expedited. And while they would be appointed by either DHS or DOD, that’s far better than having them appointed to a centralized USDS-like entity in the Executive Office of the President, or by any number of other smaller frontline agencies who cannot offer the career progression that DHS or DOD can offer.

As part of that authority, OPM could also provide a “passport” that gives STEM civil service recruits an easy (and non-competitive) “re-entry” to a more permanent civil service position if/when their initial tour is over. Now that’s an incentive!

That flexibility was also discussed as part of the DHS CTMS regulations, so it too is possible. DHS (or DOD) and OPM could also jointly establish this “passport” independently, as an emergency amendment to existing authority. That authority already provides for the non-competitive reinstatement of civil servants, but at the same (generally lower) General Schedule grade held by those individuals upon their departure from civil service. But that authority ignores the grade-enhancing experience that an individual (especially a tech worker!) could acquire in the interim. So, it needs to be modernized!

There is additional pay flexibility already available as well

Every year, OPM, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Salary Council bless a single number that purports to represent so-called “pay comparability” between federal and all other non-federal employees. In that regard, I served as chair of that Salary Council from 2018 to 2020, and at least during my tenure, we knew that single governmentwide pay adjustment number was a fiction, and that different pay rates existed across the nation, depending on one’s occupation....and we also knew that STEM workers were among those who were most negatively affected by that “lowest common denominator” pay adjustment.

But OPM already has the authority to fix that situation too. For example, it could impose a “special pay rate” for STEM workers (which has just not worked, ever! But it is an option) OR better yet, it could also establish more than one GS pay schedule under the Federal Employee Pay Comparability Act—and as a result, more than one annual pay adjustment—each year, including one for STEM employees separate from the rest of the federal government. BLS surveys support that (indeed, it is a much more methodologically sound adjustment), and while Congress would need to endorse it in their annual appropriation, I don’t think they’d dare revert back to a single, “one-size-fits-all” number. Besides, they’ve just blessed a higher annual pay raise for law enforcement feds, so there’s even precedent.

Other incentives are also available NOW!

To be sure, much of what I suggest requires a somewhat centralized approach to managing the recruitment of STEM workers, especially when it comes to managing their post-appointment deployment as civil servants. And while I have often railed against just such a “one-size-fits-all” model, anything that requires the complicity of another cabinet department is an exception to that rule, especially those that are occupation-based. This is one of them, and it’s based on authority that Congress has already given DHS and DOD (with OPM coordination). That means OPM needs the agreement of one or both of those agencies, and in my view, that’s exactly as it should be.

There are other incentives that would appeal to tech workers, and that are also within OPM’s ability to provide right now. For example, OPM, with GSA’s agreement, could mandate that the federal government reimburse new STEM recruits for any/all “first duty station” moving expenses, something that agencies currently have the discretion to approve today. I would even exempt those tech workers who agree to take a civil service appointment from registration and/or recall under the Selective Service System, perhaps even designating the time they spend as civil servants to be “national service” and thus comparable to time spent serving our nation as a military member.

Then there are things like giving tech workers a more enforceable, multi-year “contract” designating them as Emergency Essential (or whatever the term is today), during a future government funding lapse or even a shutdown—something that’s undoubtedly on their minds today of all days—so that they have at least a modicum of job security if they agree to become civil servants for some temporary period. And while I agree with Mr. Kupor that that is no way to appeal to civil service candidates generally, it does address some of their present uncertainty.

Bottom line: OPM can bring more tech workers to civil service...if it’s serious

Thus, there is a lot that OPM can do to attract tech workers to government. And these are all things that previous administrations could have done as well, although they were trying to do so at a time when public service wasn’t held in such public disdain...that needs to stop NOW. But given that tech solutions (especially of the AI sort) are such a key part of this administration’s approach to public service delivery, it does require more than talk. It requires a concerted campaign!

It also requires that OPM address the concerns of those many employers that it is now implicitly competing with for STEM talent. It does not want to get into a bidding war with them for that talent. That’s a losing proposition, especially these days. So, what can it do that doesn’t involve just throwing more money at them?

We faced a similar challenge in DOD when we had to recall lots of non-federal employees who had signed up for the National Guard and the military reserves before the 2003 Iraq invasion, and that led directly to hortatory support by their employers, and eventually, statutory guarantees dealing with their pay and post-service employment. OPM and DOD could even arrange for those workers to receive a reserve commission in the military reserves (they do so for doctors and dentists today), though that may not appeal to all of them. All of that is possible, and while it may require legislation, its chances of passing a potentially reluctant (and divided) Congress are substantially increased with some of the other incentives outlined above.

Of course, such arrangements require a full-bodied campaign. It would also require OPM to “play nice” with those other agencies that may be involved (like SSS, DHS, DOS and/or GSA), but again, I think that’s exactly how it should be. Plus, everything I suggest is consistent with a POTUS who is used to pushing the edge of the legal envelope. So, let’s get to it!

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How to institutionalize OPM reforms?

Ronald Sanders — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:44:00 -0500

As readers know, I’ve argued that the Trump Office of Personnel Management, under the leadership of Director Scott Kupor, has been quietly (and not so quietly) reforming the federal civil service since it has been in office. Not all of those reforms have been good—one of the four mandatory essay questions that federal applicants now have to answer comes to mind—but most have been, and I worry that when a new president is elected (something that’s inevitable), we’ll throw out most of the “good” reforms along with the “bad and the ugly” stuff.

And if we do, we’ll end up where we were in January of 2025...that is, with the same old, tired 1950’s era General Schedule.

So, as a follow-up to my two-part Government Executive series on this (you can find Part 1 here and the second installment in the series here), I’d like to offer some ideas about preserving the good even as we get rid of the bad and the ugly.

So far, this OPM has (mostly) done a lot of good

As much as many would deny it (especially in public), Kupor’s OPM has mostly done a lot of good in the few months it’s been in office. Improvements include a laser like focus on merit as a guiding principle of our civil service system, leveraging voluntary attrition (including incentives like the Deferred Resignation Program) to reduce the size and cost of the federal workforce, rationalizing the hiring and separation of probationary employees, streamlining the appellate and accountability system to curtail pro forma appeals that clog that system, and ensuring that political appointees are involved in the staffing of their federal agencies.

There’s much more, everything from trying to cut the number of personnel data systems to having performance ratings that really matter in retention and Reduction in Force. I would even include abandoning the “old” Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey in favor of developing a more balanced, targeted instrument...even if that means a delay of a year or more (a couple of my colleagues have proposed an alternative that’s worth considering).

Those are all good things, and they should be institutionalized regardless of who’s president. Indeed, one has to wonder why past OPMs didn’t take some of these issues head on, but that’s another matter.

However, OPM has also proposed some bad (and some ugly) policies...

While Kupor’s OPM has been reforming our civil service system in a mostly positive way, in some cases it has also taken it two steps back...indeed, sometimes it has gone all the way back to our dark ages.

For example, while the sad truth is that performance ratings of virtually all federal civil servants are grossly inflated and that needs to be addressed, forcing external quotas or limits on those ratings—something this OPM has proposed—is not the way to do so.

Similarly, making sure that federal job applicants have to do some work—like writing essays about their personal experiences—is a good thing. But one of the essays that OPM now requires is way too partisan on its face. That’s bad, and it’s also ugly, and should just be eliminated.

Another example? This administration’s assault on federal unions and collective bargaining. It’s just unnecessary, not to mention inflammatory. I know firsthand that federal unions can be a pain, but if I ever thought that they or their proposals would impede national security, current law gave me mechanisms to contest them. And what this administration has done (or tried to do) to those civil servants who simply tried to implement the previous administration’s DEI efforts is not only ill-advised but also contrary to its own guidance.

But it’s the overall attack on the civil service generally—the denigration of it and the disrespect of those who are part of it, most directly from the Oval Office—that has been really ugly. Indeed, it’s been over the top. Even worse, NONE of it has been necessary! But that’s for another commentary.

Do we need a second 21st Century Civil Service Reform Act?

So, there’s plenty to argue over, but as we do, I hope we are all willing to admit that this OPM has done some very good things that need to be preserved—and ironically, protected—from the vagaries of future politics. But how do we do so? In other words, how do we avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

One option is for OPM and the Trump Administration to propose a second, 21st Century Civil Service Reform Act this summer, almost five decades after the first one was enacted. At the very least, such legislation would force elected officials in the Executive Branch and the Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, to talk to one another, and at the risk of being pollyannish about it, they may even find their way to commit to a common core of civil service principles, ones that they know are necessary in their heart of hearts.

Of course, there are all sorts of procedural questions antecedent to a vote on such legislation, but assuming willing White House and congressional leadership, they can be overcome. And I don’t care whether those leaders talk publicly or privately, so long as they talk. The alternative is more political rhetoric and political gridlock, and that’s just bad.

Of course, that means that this White House may have to cede some control over this debate. Thus, if the Congress is asked to consider a 2.0 version of the Civil Service Reform Act, they’ll undoubtedly add all sorts of things—especially things advocated by their constituencies—so it will take some discipline to keep any final legislation on point.

But as a practical matter, even with that loss of total control, this administration and its OPM will have more say over such legislation now than it will if (or more likely, when) one or both Houses of Congress flip, potentially as soon as 2026 midterm elections...so, my recommendation is to do it NOW, before then. Otherwise, all bets may be off.

What about a comprehensive set of federal regulations as a fallback?

To be sure, legislation is ideal, but it would take a lot of time that this administration may not have. So, if a legislative approach is too politically daunting, too time-consuming, and/or just plain unworkable, there’s always the regulatory route, something President Biden took when he repealed Schedule F and later, a few months before he left office, issued federal regulations that impeded its return—not stop it, but impede it.

In other words, civil service regulations may act as a “speed bump” vs. a stop sign, but that may be better than nothing.

So, short of bipartisan legislation, a regulatory package of reforms should be considered by OPM. That would take some time too, especially if done right, but given that virtually everything OPM has done to date—the good, the bad and the ugly—has been administrative in nature (that is, in the form of presidential memoranda, executive orders, letters, etc.), this too is an option.

Thus, as a fallback to a bill, OPM could simply gather up all the “good” policy changes that it has promulgated, put them all together as a comprehensive regulatory package in the Federal Register, invite public comment and then just issue them as chapters in the Code of Federal Regulations.

Indeed, I could argue that so long as those reforms deal with internal personnel matters (and they clearly do), OPM doesn’t even need to go the Federal Register route, but doing so doesn’t cost anything, other than time. Instead, it lets lots of different constituencies weigh in, and in this instance, that may be a good thing...venting doesn’t need to change the end result.

But whether those regulations are substantive or instrumental, or some combination of both, they are options that could avoid “the baby and the bathwater” effect. And in my view, that makes them politically and practically viable.

The politics of reform: reality vs. rhetoric

While I haven’t talked to that many legislators, especially on the Democratic side, I have discussed all this with their staffers, and among other things, we’ve all (Rs and Ds alike) commiserated over the fact that those few stalwarts in Congress who used to really care about the “health” of the nation’s civil service—legislators like Ted Stevens, Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye, John Glenn and George Voinovich in the Senate, and Frank Wolf, Tom Davis and others in the House—are no longer serving.

The point is that we used to have a bipartisan group of elected officials—including those in the Executive Branch—who used to care about us. With all due respect, we don’t anymore, and I fear that those that could replace them are too cowed to do so, at least publicly.

What would it take to change that? I personally think asking the “traditional” civil service committees—the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Government Oversight and Reform Committee (or whatever it’s called these days) in the House—to focus on this is just too much. At the very least, it’s a distraction, NOT their primary concern. While it’s important (to me at least) it’s too mundane for them.

They just don’t care enough, in my opinion. So, if it were me, I’d implore the Senate and House leadership to create a bipartisan, bicameral “Select Committee” of legislators (much like the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) who DO care about this...Members who objectively know how important the health of the federal civil service is. Then and only then will we make progress.

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Controlling ratings inflation is a good idea...but a forced distribution isn’t

Ronald Sanders — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 16:11:00 -0500

Performance MUST matter

According to Government Executive’s reporting, the Office of Personnel Management is currently circulating draft regulations that would (a) eliminate the “minimally successful” performance rating for virtually all rank-and-file federal civil servants, and (b) limit the number of top ratings—that is, a rating of 4 or 5 on a potential 5-point scale, or a rating of 4 if there’s no longer a “minimally successful” option—for those same feds, the latter by imposing limits on the number of such ratings that can be issued each year.

I want to focus on the latter; that is, controls on top performance ratings. As a career member of the Senior Executive Service for 20-plus years—I’ve also been Chief Human Capital Officer or equivalent at three agencies employing well over 1.3 million civil servants and was once in charge of Human Resources strategy at OPM—I applaud that goal. It’s critically necessary and a long time coming. Indeed, one wonders why it took OPM so long to address this, but that’s another matter. However, if the goal is to make performance really matter, those ratings controls cannot be arbitrary, and thus, I have some reservations about how they are to be imposed across government.

First, let me say the unsayable: That ratings inflation has been a perennial problem for the U.S. government. Indeed, it’s a problem for all organizations, but while some have solved it, few of my peers want to talk about it on the record. However, I’m encouraged, indeed ecstatic(!), that OPM Director Scott Kupor and his team are not afraid to. We do NOT live in Lake Woebegone, where every federal civil servant is above average. Our “intake system” (that is, the way we hire those civil servants) is just not that precise. It cannot be. That’s what a probationary period is for—and gist for another commentary—but realistically, the vast majority of our employees are NOT above average.

Lake Woebegone they aren’t...but civil servants aren’t chattel either!

For years it’s been too easy to just give someone a too-high performance rating, NOT because they deserved it (those few truly outstanding performers do, by the way), but rather just to avoid the candid-but-difficult conversations that would occur if their annual performance were just “average” compared to their peers, or even below. In other words, high ratings were too often given just to mollify subordinates and make them feel good...especially since their inflated ratings haven’t really meant anything for years.

That may change with another reform that Kupor and company have proposed: that is, changing the RIF rules to give more weight to performance ratings in retention—another positive step that should and could have been taken years ago—by placing far more emphasis on one’s performance rating, vs. one’s veteran status or seniority.

But without imposing some limit, some brake, on the number of top performance ratings, those ratings will continue to be grossly inflated, and everything stemming from those ratings will remain meaningless. Or distorted. And the federal government’s supervisors and managers, those relative few who are responsible for the achieving their agency’s mission, thus must look for other ways (some extralegal) to hold their employees accountable.

However, as noted, that’s easier said than done, especially given the archaic rules dealing with adverse actions for performance or conduct. It is simply too hard today to get rid of those who are demonstrably performing or behaving below standard. And I’m NOT talking about doing so rashly or precipitously or without good cause or evidence, nor am I talking about those new civil servants who may just not be a good “fit” for their jobs, because of a skills mismatch, etc. Rather, I’m talking about those who just don’t perform, and everyone (including their co-workers) knows who they are.

And making most civil servants “at will” is not the answer either. At least not anymore, as that term has been so overused as to become meaningless in and of itself. Traditionally, that term means just that...that someone can be fired “at will” by his or her boss, suddenly and for any (or no) reason whatsoever. But I’ve not met anyone in the Trump OPM that argues for a civil servant’s termination for arbitrary and capricious reasons; that is, for no reason and with no notice whatsoever. Rather, they all say “of course” when I suggest that everyone (not just civil servants) who’s fired from a job deserves to know why, and they also deserve the right to challenge those reasons with evidence.

But that’s not the issue. Indeed, everyone I talk to says due process is fine, just so long as there are NO interminable external appeals (something that’s never been part of that due process in any case), except under the narrowest of circumstances. But today, it’s the years-long, overly legalistic, lawyered-up, forum-shopped, defensed-to-death appeals to third parties like MSPB, EEOC and the courts, appeals that can sometimes take a decade or more to adjudicate. That’s the issue. That’s what those officials (and I) would get rid of.

Our own experience undermines arbitrary controls

But we’re talking about OPM’s proposed controls on the number of top performance ratings that frontline employees can receive. Trying to bring some realism—and hence, some meaning—to the annual performance evaluation process (and everything that that rating drives) is a worthy goal. And while clearly making those top ratings more realistic is laudable, one cannot do so in a way that demoralizes those affected by the controls.

That has been the experience in the U.S. military, which experimented several decades ago with forced ratings limitations, by literally placing an arbitrary cap on the number of “top block” performance ratings that could be given in any given rating cycle.

But what happens when everyone in a military unit, like groups of test pilots or astronauts or Green Berets or SEALs, already “walks on water?” That was the dilemma faced by our military when confronted with the same ratings inflation problem that the federal government faces today, and they abandoned it after a couple of ratings cycles, in part because they risked demoralizing their very best troops by imposing an arbitrary limit on the number that could be realistically rated as outstanding. And the same would be true for today’s civil servants.

Bottom line: We simply cannot risk demoralizing our very best federal employees by telling them that their performance notwithstanding, their annual performance rating won’t (and can’t) reflect it because of some arbitrary, externally imposed limit. That, or those top ratings will be rotated. They’ll be told “It’s not your turn this year, so just be patient.” The point is that while forced distributions and ratings quotas will quickly change the numbers and are thus appealing at first blush, they will not improve overall agency performance, and THAT should be the goal.

Should we then just throw our hands up and surrender to the inevitable...that is, just live with a world in which almost every federal civil servant is wonderful and their annual appraisals are thus meaningless (unless you’re less than wonderful, of course)? No! There are plenty of viable alternatives, and they’re not very complicated.

Give the ‘best and brightest’ the performance rating they deserve

One of them is to focus on agency performance first, above all else, and let it drive everything, regardless of what it shows. That agency performance is exactly what we tried to evaluate when I was Associate Director of OPM, under the tutelage of then-Director Kay Coles James, and with the willing help of career executives like myself, we led the effort to make ALL performance ratings more realistic by clearly linking them to the actual performance of their departments and agencies.

Who evaluated that overall agency performance? In our case, we asked the President’s Management Council, comprised (then as now) of cabinet department deputy secretaries and executive agency equivalents, to do so. As a practical matter, the PMC’s members serve as the Chief Operating Officers of their respective organizations, and as such, we asked them to make those judgments based on the agency-wide performance measures required by the Government Performance and Results Act , then almost a decade old and now even older.

Another option is to rank—not judge but rank—everything and everybody in government by performance against those same metrics...first agencies, then their units, and then employees within those units. First by the PMC and then by agency heads or their Performance Review Boards. And if any of them want to exempt an agency or a unit or a group of employees for any reason (because they’re all good. Or because they tried hard but failed in the face of undue external interference. Or insufficient funding, whatever the reason), let them make the case to their peers.

And what about DOD and its Laboratory and Acquisition Demonstration Projects, as well as its other pay-for-performance arrangements across government, now covering many tens of thousands of employees? Those now-permanent experiments have figured out a way to limit top ratings by using “crowd-sourced” evaluations to achieve a semblance of objectivity, in part because they’ve tied them to budget-limited pay raises and bonuses. What about them? At the very least, OPM’s new rules need to exempt them...and anyone else who has figured out how to achieve realistic ratings.

Bottom line: There are plenty of ways to do make performance matter WITHOUT imposing arbitrary caps AND still keep ratings inflation under control.

What’s critical is that an agency’s top-to-bottom performance ratings should be generally consistent with that agency’s overall performance. Thus, if an agency met or exceeded its GPRA performance measures, one would expect its overall (and/or unit-wide) performance ratings distribution to be high...and vice versa. With exceptions permitted by those making those judgements. But that’s exactly what those making those judgments are appointed to do.

Realistic performance ratings are worth pursuing, but easier said than done

Note in that regard that those judgements, whether it’s by GPRA measures or by ranking or something else, are not formulaic, nor should they be—after all, what happens if say, the Congress interferes in a way that undermines an agency’s performance? Was that a good enough excuse to justify high individual ratings, despite substandard overall agency performance? Perhaps, but that’s for “the judges” to decide.

After all, an agency’s overall performance is a team effort, the result of political appointees, career executives, frontline supervisors and employees, and (yes) even unions working together, so that means that all of them need to be evaluated on agency performance, just as it should be!

To be sure, these are all difficult issues, But as I said, the underlying premise—that is, the performance of government agencies, and the results they achieve—is still what it’s all about, right? And controlling rampant ratings inflation to reveal that bottom line can and should be addressed. That means that however it’s done, performance ratings realism remains a laudable and achievable goal, one worth striving for. So, have at it, OPM!

Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and was a federal civil servant for almost 40 years, including over 20 as a member of the Senior Executive Service. In that capacity, he served as director of civilian personnel for the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, associate director for HR strategy at OPM and associate director of National Intelligence for human capital, as well as the chairman of the Federal Salary Council.

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A federal employee morale survey is worthwhile...but not this way

Ronald Sanders — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 12:00:00 -0500

On Nov. 13, the Partnership for Public Service announced that it would field a privately funded (and fueled) federal employee climate survey—a survey that is required by the law—to replace the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey that the Office of Personnel Management and the Trump administration have now officially “postponed” until at least next year.

That’s the good news. The bad? For various reasons, including its methodology, the Partnership’s survey is too flawed to work, and I say this with all due respect. Thus, we need to revisit this, and here are some ideas in that regard.

Bottom line up front: Employee satisfaction and organizational climate surveys are useful and well worth the federal government doing. That’s a point that I’m sure the Partnership made with OPM Director Kupor—not that he needed it—and I’ll echo it. However, as I’ve said before, the current FEVS was never designed to achieve that goal; rather, it was designed to assess progress against President Bush’s Management Agenda and always needed to be reworked...or replaced altogether.

That will take some time. But it is too important to be rushed. Moreover, it cannot and should not be done unilaterally. Nor should it be done (or analyzed) in isolation.

Thus, even assuming OPM can collaboratively develop a survey instrument specifically designed to measure morale and satisfaction, NO such survey, no matter how well designed, is useful if viewed by itself. To the contrary, such a survey is only meaningful when considered in the context of real results...and in the case of the federal government, that means the many mission outcomes and metrics that each agency has.

That’s what we need to be measuring: The relationship between government employee (and government contractor) morale and climate, results, and citizen satisfaction! In other words, we need to be looking at a much more balanced scorecard! And interestingly, that’s precisely what we fielded in the Internal Revenue Service when we “transformed” it back in 1998. But more on that below.

Let’s measure morale and climate, but not via the ‘old’ FEVS

First things first. As I have noted ad nauseum, the current FEVS instrument was never designed to serve as a true (and recurring) barometer of federal employee morale. As one of the architects of that original survey when I was OPM’s associate director back in 2004, we designed it to measure progress against the President’s Management Agenda. Unfortunately, it has remained largely unchanged since, mainly to ensure—through sophisticated correlation analysis—that longer term trends in employee morale and climate can be measured.

But sophisticated correlations notwithstanding, that desire for long-term trend analysis has been taken to an illogical extreme, and the survey has since morphed into something it was never intended to be.

That is not to say that the federal government and its various agencies do not need some enterprise-wide measure of morale and organizational climate. On the contrary, no modern organization can exist without one. An organization’s people are important, whether they are civil servants or contractors or something in between, and it is thus important to know what they’re thinking and why...as objectively as possible. And it would be ideal if those indicators were able to be viewed year over year, so that longer term trends can be discerned.

However, that goal (that is, to look at those indicators over time) has become an ill-advised end in and of itself. And that’s problematic. Too many argue that given the first point—that employee surveys are critical—the second logically follows: that is, that the current instrument should continue to be administered as it currently exists, so as to ensure continuity. Despite the fact it was never intended to do what it is now being asked to do.

So, I would implore OPM and whomever it may tap to help it (to include the Partnership and others) to take the current pause as an opportunity to redesign the instrument from scratch. And in so doing, make sure that it is useful and that it is tailored to our government and its Constitution.

We need a ‘both/and’ solution to measuring federal agency climate

By itself, a single employee survey like the FEVS implicitly assumes that the federal government is a monolithic employer of only civil servants. But it is neither of those things.

Federal agencies—even agencies within the same cabinet department—have far different missions, and they accomplish those missions with different combinations of government employees and contractors. Thus, the IRS doesn’t do the same thing in the same way as the Comptroller of the Currency or the Bureau of the Mint, nor does the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Customs and Border Protection and Coast Guard and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Homeland Security Department. The same is true of the Defense Department (it’ll always be DOD to me), and lots of others.

And those differences need to be reflected in any survey...if it’s to be a useful one, and not just an exercise in partisan politics. And just taking the current FEVS private doesn’t fix that.

That also means that a “one-size-fits-all” solution won’t work. at least not by itself. Each federal agency serves a different “public” comprised of different co-producers, contractors, constituencies and political coalitions, and those are (or should be) reflected in the result that each agency pays most attention to: That is, how is it serving American citizens?

That is ultimately a question for an agency head, OPM and the Office of Management and Budget, the White House and perhaps even the Congress—after all, as we all know too well, what gets measured gets done—but the main point is that those results really matter, and by definition, they will differ by agency and mission. And those agency-specific results ultimately serve as the true independent variable in any survey.

For example, what does it tell you if employee or subcontractor morale is poor or agency climate subpar, but that satisfaction on the part of the citizens they serve is high? Or vice versa? Or what if an agency’s contractors or its technology are the basis for that satisfaction, good or bad?

Thus, it is not so simple as to identify and celebrate “the best places to work” in the federal government if those places—and the agencies they represent—are performing poorly. And on the other hand, if business results (including technology and more importantly, outcomes), employee/customer satisfaction and organizational climate are all aligned, that’s quite useful...especially to us citizens.

However, as noted, there is also a need to have a common set of metrics that cut across agency lines, especially if that survey is to be useful to OPM, the President’s Management Council and ultimately, the White House. That’s just as important as agency-specific results. So, why not have OPM require agencies to report on a small but common set of climate and morale indicators, even as they are ALSO required to report (succinctly!!) on how well they are accomplishing their own particular missions?

And that should be the case even if those numbers aren’t always rosy. Indeed, they will likely plummet during periods of transformation (we saw as much with the IRS, the creation of DHS and the integration of the Intelligence Community, all of which I was personally involved in), as agencies strive to cut costs, introduce new technology or business processesand/or consolidate operations. That does NOT mean they’re bad or good, just that the status quo is changing. And a survey will help inform us if that is ultimately for better or worse.

Agency performance is not just about civil service morale

So, why not use that combination as a basis for identifying the “best places to work” in American government, in a way that’s unique to our democracy...that is, in terms of mission accomplishment and citizen outcomes?

That’s not a “one-size-fits-all” model, although as noted, it can and should include a common, government-wide set of government employee/government contractor satisfaction and organizational climate metrics specifically designed to measure and compare those things across the enterprise. At the same time, such an approach also recognizes that those metrics are meaningless without tying them explicitly to agency-specific performance and outcome measures.

Taken together, they measure what really matters.

Think of it as a “both/and” solution. Interestingly, that sort of “balanced scorecard” is exactly what we developed under the leadership of then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti, pursuant to the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998. That Act outlawed a singular and myopic focus on tax revenue collection (especially insofar as it had led to hundreds of cases of alleged abuse), so we established a new evaluation system that measured employee morale, customer/citizen satisfaction and business results. In other words, it was far more balanced. And a government-wide approach should take a lesson from it.

To be sure, that “both/and” solution will take time to engineer, but if the ultimate result is better, that should be what also matters...the law notwithstanding.

Here’s yet another IRS example to ponder in that regard. Back when the1998 Act was passed, the legislation included a too-short statutory deadline to train 17,000+ IRS customer service representatives. But when Commissioner Rossotti (and I) arrived back then and took a look that that training, we concluded that it was subpar...to say the least. We subsequently went to Congress and told them that if they really wanted IRS customer service reps to be trained “the right way”—that is, in how to actually solve taxpayer problems within the law—we would have to junk and completely revamp the training...and would not meet the statutory deadline as a result.

In other words, we could meet the law’s too-short deadline, OR we could do it right. And to its great credit, Congress told us to ignore the law and do it right. We did and the rest is history, but the lesson is worth noting.

So, everyone needs to take a deep breath and look at a “both/and” solution that is uniquely (and collaboratively) tailored to our democracy, even if it takes some time to develop. And in so doing, here’s another suggestion: Any prospective survey—whether it’s done privately, publicly or by a combination of the two—needs all parties to talk to one another, on and/or off the record, even if talking becomes acrimonious. That’s the only way we’re going to get this done.

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Stop pointing fingers and put feds back to work!

Ronald Sanders — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 10:18:00 -0400

Enough already. It’s time for both parties—especially in the Congress and the Executive Branch—to stop their partisan finger-pointing and end the shutdown. And in so doing, graciously (or otherwise) give up the political “leverage” that both sides to this destructive debate seem to be seeking and for once, think about US!

Why? Because as a former longtime federal civil servant—among other posts, I was the senior career person at the Office of Personnel Management at one time—I can tell you that that leverage is hurting American citizens, whether they know it (yet) or not!

Do we really need to wait to see those citizens harmed by this shutdown? Especially when most of the harm won’t manifest itself until it’s too late, when many of its most adverse effects will only show themselves when citizens desperately need a safety net. That is, when they need federal assistance or federal money.

In other words, when they’re dealing with a crisis. When they’re hurting and most in need.

By the very terms of our Constitution, soon to be 250 years old, our federal government (among other things) is designed to provide a non-partisan safety net for our citizens. But while much of that safety net's impact has been ameliorated by the seemingly never-ending funding dramas we face every year, its remains have been lost in partisan bickering.

And I’m talking about (and to!) both sides. You are talking past one another, something that happens when you limit yourself to your own echo chamber, but neither side seems to be worried about what happens to us, We the People.

Whether it’s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicting a major storm, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency helping victims in its aftermath. Or whether it’s the Environmental Protection Agency or the Labor Department guarding us from the adverse effects of rampant industrial pollution and cutthroat profit seeking. Or the Veterans Affairs Department faithfully (and timely!) serving those who’ve served us. Or even (dare I say it?), the Department of Education or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission protecting citizens and students from unlawful discrimination in the workplace or in school. Or Department of Defense (or is it the Department of War now?) helping to thwart an illegal invasion, sometimes by just being there.

The examples are limitless. But they all have a common denominator: They require a federal government. And like it or not, they also require competent, apolitical civil servants to impartially serve it...and the American people.

That is not to say that the federal government cannot get smaller and more efficient. It can. Indeed, it needs to, and we need to vigorously pursue that end-state. But with a scalpel and NOT a hatchet. Even President Trump has said as much. And it needs to be done collaboratively, with career civil servants at the table...not to stand in the way of fixing things, but just the opposite. Indeed, they took an oath to do so, so we should hold them to it! Because they know where the “bodies are buried” when it comes to fraud, waste, abuse or just plain inefficiency. And yes, it DOES exist.

Who am I to say this? As noted, I am a longtime career civil servant, an HR professional, and 20-plus-year SES member who’s also held a political appointment (in the first Trump administration), and I’ve seen firsthand the adverse effects of a shutdown on recruiting and retaining talent, especially the technical kind.

I am also a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and I hope that we speak for all of those faceless and selfless bureaucrats (and I use that term fondly) who are responsible for carrying out the laws of our land impartially and without regard to politics or party. All too often, those laws—and the regulations that implement them—are deliberately cumbersome and obtuse, intended to stop the worst of us.

In my view, that’s okay, so long as our citizens understand the reasoning. Thus, we public administrators may make them jump through bureaucratic hoops for good reason, assuming that patience is a virtue of an honest citizenry. Most citizens want to do the right thing, even though we may have to write (and administer) those laws in ways that guard against the all-too-easy abuse of that system.

Unfortunately, we bureaucrats cannot assume the best of motives. They cannot ignore even the slightest abuse, real or potential, else they risk being damned for that too. But that means that those laws and regulations are often difficult to navigate, and when they are, too often citizens needlessly blame the bureaucrat.

That is not to say that many of those bureaucrats are blameless. Some may perform poorly. Or they may “lord it” over their fellow citizens, abusing the power that well-meaning legislators have given them just because they can. So, we need a civil service system that rids itself of them quickly and with prejudice (the current one does not!), and we also need one that doesn’t hire them in the first place (again, the current system does not).

But given that both must be operationalized by imperfect human beings, some of those who perform or behave poorly will inevitably escape accountability.

In other words, no system, however well designed, will be perfect, and Americans need to recognize that imperfection and deal with it—with a smile, and most importantly, with patience—even as they press for personal solutions amidst impersonal laws and regulations. They must recognize that those laws and regulations were ultimately to protect them and their hard-earned money against the abuses of the few of their fellow citizens who may be dishonest.

However, there is good news here. In our original Founding, geniuses like James Madison anticipated this venality as naturally occurring—in other words, it’s inherently human nature—and he and his colleagues tried to design a system of checks and balances that mitigated oppressive government actions...at their root intended to preserve our “life, liberty, and [our] and pursuit of happiness.”

However, Madison and those other Founders never anticipated the evils and abuses of social media, and we must learn how to deal with that phenomenon (just as we learned to deal with the extremes of television when it first burst on our body politic). But in so doing, we need to step back and think about why we’re here, why we created this less-than-perfect Union in the first place: At its root, it was designed to fix things. That’s what governments do, and I think we’ve collectively lost sight of that.

Take immigration. That system is broken, and the fix—despite what the partisans among us say—is neither an open border nor mass deportations. Don’t let criminals in, and deport those that are or who commit a crime while here. But don’t deport those immigrants whose only crime is the pursuit of the American dream, who come to this country, perhaps illegaly (at least technically) to escape violence in their home countries and who are willing to work our hardest and dirtiest jobs (too often illegally as well) to achieve it.

That legislative fix is obvious, at least conceptually. Just give those so-called “illegal’ immigrants” a legal path to citizenship, just like our military does...and just like several legislators (including one Sen. Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State) proposed two decades ago. But however it's done, our national government should just fix the problem.

That was what it was designed to do, and our politicians should stop pointing partisan fingers and get on with it. Even if it means that their chances of being re-elected are diminished. Just fix it! And if, while they’re working on that fix, they can’t pay civil servants, then they shouldn’t be paid either.

Bottom line: We must all recognize that we are all in this together, and that civil servants are just like the rest of us citizens...the vast majority well intentioned, a few unfortunately not. But we all need to focus on and fix the problems we face. And those fixes require a working U.S. federal government of competent, hardworking, dedicated civil servants who are willing to support the way ahead, no matter how difficult.

But that may be asking too much. I think that the public servants I hope I represent would settle for a reopened and functioning federal government, however imperfect it may be. So, we citizens should demand that the president and the Congress—both parties and both extremes and everyone in between—get back to work. And we should also demand that as a first order of business, they put those blameless, selfless federal civil servants back to work in the process.

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A new ‘activist’ OPM is incrementally reforming the civil service, Part 2

Ronald Sanders — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

As I noted in my first installment, there’s a lot going on in the federal civil service world these days—that includes most of “what” the Trump Administration is trying to accomplish in that regard, as well as “how” the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management and the rest of that administration are going about its implementation—so much so that it all can’t fit in one commentary.

So, what follows is a continuation of my first iteration; that is, some more unsolicited thoughts on some of those civil service goings-on. And of course, in the interim, OMB has issued quite controversial guidance regarding a possible government shutdown, RIFs and furloughs, adding even more fuel to the fire!

But in this case, I think things like OPM’s recent decision to cancel this year’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, as well as its actions with respect to probationary employees and periods in the federal hiring process are, like the applicant essays and new SES performance standards I spoke to in Part 1, mostly spot on, and as I’ve previously opined, they represent a welcome (and courageous) activism from OPM. So, taken together, they all make the civil service decidedly better off than not.

Here again, there are some exceptions. Some cross the partisan line, and that must stop. But many are also the product of a one-size-fits-all mentality that OPM needs to revisit. And that’s Part 2 of my rant!

Another example of ‘one size fits all’ thinking

OPM’s recent changes regarding probationary employees and probationary periods offer an example of a “glass half full” approach to reform. My colleagues and I generally support those changes, but for me, I don’t think OPM has gone far enough. After all, OPM’s own rules label probationary periods as “an extension” of the examination process, so I believe a much more tailored approach is in order.

Thus, while my colleagues and I have applauded anything that makes it less automatic to grant probationary employees protected career status, the new rules — in my view, mistakenly — endorse a common, one-year period for that determination (or two if you’re in an excepted service position), no matter the agency’s mission, occupation, situation or circumstance, thereby embracing that same, far-too-traditional governmentwide one-size-fits-all myth that has gone the way of the Dodo bird.

The State Department’s recently hired class of newbie Foreign Service Officers is a perfect example of this. Without getting into the controversy over whether their more senior colleagues should have ever been let go in the first place, how can the State Department tell if their newest class of FSOs is capable of representing our country in embassies overseas after just one year, especially if they spend much of that year in a classroom in the department’s Foreign Service Institute in Virginia? Yet the new rules assume that a single year is sufficient to determine whether these and ALL other new federal employees deserve to be granted career civil service status.

As another example, our Defense Department and Intelligence Community have many occupations that have no counterparts elsewhere in the world, and no academic institution offers pre-civil service education and training to prepare students to perform those duties successfully.

Instead, it often has to occur on the job; that is, after an employee has entered federal civil service. And in many of those cases, one (or even two) years is just not enough. The same is true for mainline occupations in IRS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies too numerous to name.

So, OPM ought to make an employee’s probationary period up to the employing agency, based on reasonably objective occupational criteria—like how long it takes to trust that the employee is sufficiently trained and developed to be “protected” as a career civil servant.

The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey’s cancellation

The cancellation of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey is yet another case in point. Albeit with altogether too much external handwringing, it’s a move that many of us support, albeit for a variety of reasons. Mine is simple: The survey was never intended to serve as a measure of governmentwide morale and organizational climate, and thus, as a “best of breed” indicator of those things, the FEVS is not.

I should know, as I was associate director of OPM when that survey was first developed, and it was only intended to assess the progress agencies made in implementing President George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda. That was revolutionary in and of itself, and it should have been enough to sustain it, but over the ensuing years, that survey has morphed, inadvertently and otherwise, into something much bigger, and it is yet another aspect of the “one size fits all” mythology that needs to be undone.

So, while the FEVS could use a lot of retooling, OPM must also take into account the heterogeneity of federal missions and managers.

To be sure, the Partnership for Public Service, as the survey’s adopted parent, has managed to successfully correlate a few FEVS questions with the government’s “Best Places to Work” each year, and as a result, the survey enjoys considerable credence and media attention in that regard. But the FEVS is still not nearly as actionable as it needs to be, especially at and below the agency level, something most experts say is necessary if you want agencies and employees to pay any attention to it.

In that regard, FEVS results have been parsed by agency and subcomponent, so that they can be viewed and hopefully acted upon below a governmentwide level. But in my view, that implicitly recognizes that there are just too many differences in agency missions and cultures to jam them altogether into a single set of statistics, or worse yet, a single ranking! Simply out, the FEVS does not, and cannot, serve as a single governmentwide measure, at least not without something much more agency-specific to supplement it.

So, OPM (NOT someone else!) needs to replace the FEVS with something state-of-the-art, as promised, but in so doing, it and the Congress must also recognize that the federal government is a collection of employers, not just one-size-fits-all, and act accordingly.

The myth is that the federal government is a single, monolithic employer

Note that I am not advocating a federal government that has no interagency glue — that is, no common set of principles and rules that cover every federal civil servant. Quite the contrary. It needs that glue. But at the same time, I am not advocating a single, “one size fits all” set of rules either. Rather, OPM, in consultation with its clients, should set policies like the length of one’s probationary period by occupation and/or agency.

But those things can still be subject to a common core of rules and policies.

Readers should re-examine the Working for America Act in that regard. WoFA, introduced in the George W. Bush administration back in the mid-2000’s, would have followed the model proffered by the then-fledgling Department of Homeland Security, declaring that certain parts of existing civil service law, like its merit principles, were inviolable — thus providing a common, governmentwide framework — but many others, today etched in governmentwide stone, would be subject to agency discretion That would have permitted far more agency-specific variability (and even collective bargaining), all subject to OPM oversight of course.

In other words, WoFA proposed a both/and approach to civil service reform — a common, centralized governmentwide framework coupled with far more decentralized, agency-level personnel policies tailored to their individual missions — rather than a “one size fits all” monolith.

That more decentralized model reflects today’s reality. Indeed, the fact is that many agencies have gone to their respective congressional committees and have asked to be taken out from under Title 5 and centralized OPM control for that very reason. Indeed, so much so that according to the Government Accountability Office, hundreds of thousands of federal employees have “seceded” from that governmentwide monolith. All with congressional sanction.

Unfortunately, that secession has been random. There has never been a deliberate strategy behind it, and thus no governmentwide glue to bind those agencies together. The Bush legislation would have changed that. And that approach was later endorsed by none other than two successive panels of the National Academy of Public Administration. OPM needs to look at those NAPA reports as a possible way ahead.

OPM’s new activism is welcome but it still needs to be careful

But in the meantime, kudos to OPM Director Scott Kupor and team for their courage, missteps and mistakes (some by them, some by others) notwithstanding.

Bottom line: As a general matter, and perhaps contrary to much popular opinion, I generally like what OPM is doing with respect to its series of incremental civil service reforms. To be sure, some of those changes (to include the recent issuance of its “rule of many” regulation) were mandated by Congress, but OPM’s various other efforts — such as the cancellation of the FEVS and its new accountability and probationary period rules —are, with some exception, long overdue.

Thus, I think this version of OPM is batting over .750 when it comes to pushing through civil service reforms.

That’s right, I think they’re getting it right over 75% of the time, and I’m NOT sucking up in that regard. Indeed, as someone who’s played in this arena for decades, this longtime civil servant must ask, without any partisan bias whatsoever, “Where were previous OPMs when it came to making such changes?” Especially since few apparently require any sort of congressional blessing.

But those reforms aside, OPM’s “one size fits all” approach is just no longer our reality. In fact, our national government is made up of dozens of different departments and agencies, each with a different mission, and literally hundreds of occupations that are supposed to support those missions.

So, while OPM’s incremental changes are generally good, the myth of the federal government as a single, monolithic employer is obsolete and needs to be rethought. That too requires some courage, but this OPM seems to have it.

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A new ‘activist’ OPM is incrementally reforming the civil service, Part 1

Ronald Sanders — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 09:27:00 -0400

There’s a lot going on in the federal civil service world these days, with much of the “what” (like the goal of many of the Office of Personnel Management’s reforms) long overdue. However, far too much of the “how” has been either unnecessarily painful and/or just plain inept — one must ask if the Trump team just doesn’t know any better — so, I thought I’d offer the smart folks in the current administration a few unsolicited thoughts on some of those goings-on.

And there’s too much for a single article, so with the indulgence of Government Executive’s Managing Editor (and sometime reporter) Carten Cordell, readers get two installments from me, with Part 1 below.

In that regard, I think things like OPM’s actions on requiring essay questions in the hiring process, and more controls on inflated Senior Executive Service performance ratings, are for the most part, spot on. More importantly, they represent a newfound (and decidedly welcome) activism from OPM. That’s the good news. And while each of those actions must stand on its own merits, I believe that, on balance, they all make the civil service better off than not. That’s Part 1.

But there are some exceptions. For example, some of OPM’s reforms are wrongheaded and need to be rethought. And even more importantly, taken together, these and other OPM actions seem to rely on an obsolete “one size fits all” model that needs to be revisited. And that’s Part 2 of my rant!

A competent, politically impartial career federal service

First, for the record, there’s a lot that this OPM and this administration have gotten fundamentally wrong, not the least of which has been the denigration and dismantling of the federal civil service. One can reduce it (and its authorities) without all the drama. I’ve said this before, and one must wonder whether, despite all the positive changes made by OPM, young Americans will ignore the call to public service?

Or worse, when this bunch leaves office (and they will, eventually), will all/most of their changes just be undone or repealed by their successors?

I hope not. But that said, much of what has been done has been unnecessary and unnecessarily provocative. One can achieve the very same end-state — in this case, a sharp reduction in the federal payroll or at least its growth — without all the hyperbolic headlines OR the pain and confusion that has been inflicted on those who have had to be let go. Or more importantly, the frustration of those citizens who may have to avail themselves of an agency’s services in time of need. Think the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Social Security Administration or the IRS.

Why not use a scalpel and not a hatchet, as President Trump has himself said? In so doing, the Office of Management and Budget, OPM and a compliant Congress can cut wasteful agency costs just as dramatically and just as quickly, but far more benignly.

And with dignity.

OPM’s hiring reforms are spot-on, but with some exceptions

But even with that, the glass is more than half full. Take OPM’s efforts to reform the awful federal hiring process. While a lot of us have applauded its efforts in that regard, just as many (including me) have strongly and publicly come out against one of the four essay questions — the one about Trump’s executive orders that is so blatantly partisan — that OPM now requires of every applicant for a federal job. And even though OPM, in response to that virtually unanimous pushback, has subsequently said that agencies are not obliged to give that too-partisan question any weight, it’s still required.

Huh? That’s confusing. Especially since only some (but only some!) federal civil servants occupy a unique and potentially powerful position in our democratic system, and as a consequence, our fellow citizens must be able to rely on their competence and non-partisan impartiality under the law. That too-partisan third essay question violates those principles. Worse, it doesn’t even apply to the vast majority of civil servants or government jobs, and to me, it is probative evidence of a dysfunctional “one size fits all” myth.

That said, there’s some good news here, especially if you are a glass-half-full person like me, but at the risk of mixing too many metaphors, I worry about “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” For example, by requiring essay questions, even if one of them is politically problematic (albeit potentially weightless), OPM has made it much, much harder for too-casual candidates for federal jobs to apply with little or no effort, that is, with just the click of a button. And making that harder is a good thing!

In my view, if applicants (again, for some but not all jobs) really want to be civil servants, having them do a little work to apply is not a bad thing! I’m old school in that regard, and as the career civilian personnel director for the Defense Department and the chief human capital officer for the Intelligence Community, I’ve seen too many candidates casually apply for jobs in DOD, the CIA, the FBI or the National Security Agency because they were attracted to an agency’s glamourous (often media-fueled) mission, and we made it just too easy for them to do so.

So, requiring applicants for those jobs to expend a little effort — even with the help of artificial intelligence — is a good thing. However, in so doing, OPM needs to junk the partisan politics and get over its bias towards the “one size” model once and for all, in favor of a far more tailored approach. And in this case, that means NOT requiring every applicant for every federal job to complete three (much less four!) essays. But more on that below.

New SES performance rating controls are also a step forward

This is another example of an otherwise good idea wrapped in a dysfunctional one-size-fits-all package: OPM recently issued final rules that, among other things, would require agencies to expressly limit “top” SES performance ratings (that is, fours and fives on a five-point rating scale) in any given year. That constraint is designed to control SES performance ratings inflation, a problem that has plagued the federal government for years, and at its root, it is a problem worth addressing. Thus, here again OPM deserves an “A” for effort.

In that regard, let’s start with something that most senior career executives (and “good government” organizations) know but will not publicly admit to: That is that SES and equivalent performance ratings ARE inflated. They are simply too high. That is not especially unique to the federal government, but it is a fact, nevertheless. If every career executive (and political appointee) performed as rated, departments and agencies would be delivering public services at a much higher level, and more importantly, American voters would see the difference. But they have not.

So, we should all be able to agree that SES ratings inflation is a problem, and that OPM’s efforts to control them are laudable, but Director Kupor’s well-intentioned solution is just not workable.

In that regard, let us also stipulate that SES members are all by and large, wonderful people. One has to be wonderful just to be selected for the SES. Like general/flag officers in the U.S. military, career executives go through years of testing and performing as they progress up through their ranks to attain their lofty positions. So, by definition, they are all wonderful people.

The problem is that as career SES members and their political superiors are not paid by taxpayers to be wonderful people. Rather, they are paid to perform, and in some cases they just do not.

Just as some of our military’s generals and admirals—all selected on their qualifications and experience and thus all “wonderful” in their own right—may fail when they suddenly find themselves in charge of things. That does not mean they are any less individually wonderful. But it does mean that the departments and agencies they lead (along with the political appointees they report to) are not meeting or exceeding their organization’s performance measures.

Thus, there is a significant difference between individual “wonderfulness” and agency performance. And so long as the ratings of career executives are constrained based on government-wide controls, all those controls will get you is a an informal “just wait your turn” rotation system in each individual agency. That sort of backdoor system gives a career executive a high performance rating every third year or so, when it’s their “turn” to be wonderful, but it doesn’t get to what really matters: Agency (and leadership) performance.

Worse, those inflated ratings—and the financial rewards that come with them—have been used as an informal way of increasing the otherwise-arbitrarily capped pay of career executives. Those arbitrarily limited salaries are a problem too, but inflated ratings (or forced distribution thereof) are not the way to solve it. Instead, there are much better ways to control SES performance ratings inflation and thus better serve the American people.

For example, one way is to focus on agency performance first. That agency performance is exactly what we tried to evaluate when I was associate director of OPM, under the tutelage of then-OPM Director Kay Coles James, and she—with the help of career executives like my colleagues and me—led the effort to make SES performance ratings more realistic. NOT by imposing arbitrary limits on them, but by clearly linking those individual ratings to the actual performance of the departments and agencies those executives led.

Thus, while laudable on the surface, impersonal, arbitrary government-wide performance rating controls have historically failed. That was the experience in the U.S. military, which experimented several decades ago with forced ratings quotas by literally placing an arbitrary limit on the number of “top block” Officer Effectiveness Reports that could be given in any given rating cycle. But what happens when everyone in the military unit, like test pilots or astronauts or SEALs or Green Berets, already “walks on water?”

After all, an agency’s overall performance is a team effort, the result of political appointees and career executives working together, so that means that both need to be evaluated on agency performance, just as it should be! Having said that, OPM gets kudos for trying! But along the way, OPM must abandon a one-size-fits-all model.

For more on what OPM has gotten right...and wrong, stay tuned for my second installment!

Ronald Sanders is a former career senior federal executive of more than 20 years. He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the American Society for Public Administration’s National Council. He has served as chair of the Federal Salary Council, associate director of OPM, DOD Director of Civilian Personnel Policy, IRS Chief HR Officer, and the Intelligence Community’s first Associate Director of National Intelligence for Human Capital.

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Federal collective bargaining is in the U.S. national interest

Robert M. Tobias and Ronald Sanders — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 14:27:00 -0400

While we come from different sides of the federal bargaining table—one a Democrat and former union president, and one a long-time management advocate at that table, as well as a political appointee in the first Trump administration—we both support collective bargaining in the federal sector because we believe in it. Without question, it is the most effective workplace problem-solving mechanism devised by our government.

Why do we need to say this now, on Labor Day 2025? Because we believe that (a) our country has enough problems to deal with, most of which require some sort of government involvement, and (b) we believe that federal unions and the frontline federal civil servants they represent are critical to solving those problems. They contribute to the health of our republic and our government. However, those civil servants have come under furious, unjustified assault by the Trump Administration, in part by two recent actions by the president.

First, President Trump’s Executive Order 14251, issued on March 27 of this year, banned 75% of federal employees currently covered by collective bargaining agreements, ostensibly on the grounds that such bargaining—particularly by “hostile” federal employee unions—undermines our national security. And second, in a separate presidential memorandum, POTUS banned those same employees from voluntarily having their union dues deducted from their agency paychecks and remitted to their unions, making it much more difficult for those unions to acquire the financial resources necessary to effectively engage in collective bargaining.

We must also note that President Trump, in an ironic effort to “commemorate” this Labor Day, just moved on Aug. 27 to exclude even more federal agencies from collective bargaining on these very same “national security” grounds, but the points we make herein remain valid: That is, if POTUS and/or an agency head he has appointed feels that collective bargaining with a federal union has somehow impacted national security, far more precise procedures already exist in current law to raise and adjudicate that concern.

But we believe that President Trump, whether with his past and most recent actions, has failed to provide a convincing rationale for the twin bans, and as a consequence, he should rescind them both, so that our frontline colleagues, those who represent the interests of federal agencies and their employees, can get on with the difficult business of resolving workplace disputes.

Executive Order 14251 simply fails to make a case

Here’s our rationale. Executive Order 14251, cited above, as well as his more recent Aug. 27 order, lists those agencies that POTUS has now declared as having “...as their primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work” as enumerated in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act’s title VII, the Federal Labor Management Relations Statute. And the vast majority of those agencies currently have collective bargaining agreements with the unions representing their employees.

Thus, despite literally decades to the contrary—with workplace disputes effectively resolved via the CSRA—the president’s order would preclude employees in cabinet departments and executive agencies from Commerce to Agriculture and Labor to Veterans Affairs from participating in collective bargaining, including the likes of VA nurses, Social Security claims examiners, IRS customer service representatives, National Park Service rangers, analysts with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and more. Why? Because POTUS asserts that bargaining over their terms and conditions of employment (just as their private sector counterparts and even their contractors do), would allegedly impact our national security.

But neither the EO and its accompanying fact sheet, nor the president’s most recent action, explain how those federal employees, all currently represented by labor organizations, fit the national security criteria in existing law. In our view, a president’s bare and bold declaration that the criterion is applicable, made without any explanation whatsoever, is not convincing enough to supersede that law. We also note that employees in the CIA, National Security Agency and FBI, whose position descriptions describe their national security work, have been validly excluded from participating in collective bargaining for years, by President Carter’s 1979 Executive Order 11271.

Interestingly, those federal employees who may actually impact national security—such as law enforcement officers like uniformed Border Protection personnel in the Department of Homeland Security, whose union has been a strong and vocal supporter of President Trump—are not covered by any such national security exclusion. So says the fact sheet accompanying EO 14251. Why are those employees allowed to bargain and VA nurses, CDC analysts, IRS customer service representatives, etc., are not?

The president’s executive orders are a solution in search of a problem.

The 1978 CSRA already provides two complementary procedures to prevent “national security” from invading the sphere of federal collective bargaining.

First, if an agency believes that a union proposal directly or indirectly impedes national security, it can declare that proposal “non-negotiable” and thereafter, it can simply refuse to bargain any further on that proposal. If the union disagrees with that agency’s non-negotiability determination, it can file a negotiability appeal with the Federal Labor Relations Authority, an agency established by the 1978 CSRA, and have it adjudicated. And if it loses, it may appeal to the federal courts.

Moreover, if there’s a national security exigency, Section 7106(a)(2)(D) of that same 1978 CSRA states an agency may “take any actions that may be necessary to carry out the agency mission in the case of an emergency,” including superseding the terms of an existing collective bargaining agreement. Thus, if an unexpected but bona fide national security issue emerges and impedes an agency’s operation because of its collective bargaining obligations, that agency can declare an emergency and act.

But the president’s orders cite no specific national security threat or incident, past, present or future. Thus, they are unnecessary.

Potential “inconvenience” is not enough to abolish federal collective bargaining

The White House’s fact sheet accompanying EO 14251 states “The CSRA enables hostile Federal unions to obstruct agency management” (emphasis added), and it points to an agency’s inability to unilaterally open existing collective bargaining agreements or to implement midterm changes until that midterm bargaining is completed. It also points to the fact that “the largest Federal union is wildly filing grievances” in an effort to thwart the administration’s agenda. To us that sounds like the give-and-take of a normal collective bargaining relationship, one that Congress has long concluded is in the national interest, first in the U.S. private sector and subsequently, in the U.S. federal government.

A bit of history is in order here. Congress first sanctioned collective bargaining in the private sector with the 1935 Wagner Act because it “encourage(d) practices fundamental to the friendly adjustment of industrial disputes.” President Kennedy later applied that same rationale to the federal sector in 1962 when he signed Executive Order 10988, and President Nixon reaffirmed it in Executive Order 11491 in 1971. Those executive orders—as well as their rationale and their adjudicatory model—were subsequently codified in federal law by a bipartisan Congress in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which included the Federal Labor-Management Relations Statute as its Title VII.

In so doing, that bipartisan Congress passed the CSRA by a vote of 85 to 1 in the Senate and 365 to 8 in the House, declaring that “...experience in both private and public employment indicates that the statutory protection of the right of employees to organize, bargain collectively, and participate through labor organizations...safeguards the public interest... contributes to the effective conduct of public business, and facilitates and encourages the amicable settlements of disputes...therefore, labor organizations and collective bargaining in the civil service are in the public interest.”

Congress was fully aware of what it was doing. Their action then and now represents literally decades of unequivocal support for the push and pull and give and take of collective bargaining. While federal unions may “frustrate” agencies and delay this or any president’s agenda in a non-emergency situation, that frustration is not a justification for extinguishing the right of federal employees to bargain in the federal sector and thereby ignore the public interest that that bargaining serves.

Workplace disputes will still be resolved, no matter what

The reality is that the federal collective bargaining has been supported by every presidential administration, Republican and Democrat, since 1978, save one. For example, presidents from John F. Kennedy to George H.W., Bush supported traditional collective bargaining, and while President Clinton ordered agencies to take a more collaborative approach, as did President Obama, intervening Republican presidents swung the pendulum back to a more traditional model, including President Trump in his first term. However, the current POTUS would go further and eliminate that process altogether, under the guise of ‘national security.’

But we fear that President Trump’s actions, which abolish collective bargaining in most of the federal government because “it cannot be applied...in a manner consistent with national security requirements and considerations,” together with President Trump’s willingness to discharge any federal manager or union leader who fails to follow his policy, will discourage all such contact between political appointees and/or career federal officials and union representatives. All of the benefits of collective bargaining in the federal government will cease. And that is bad.

Bottom line: The actions of the Trump Administration are unnecessary, unjustified and not in the public interest. They should be rescinded, either by the president himself and/or by the Congress.

Both Robert Tobias and Ron Sanders are elected Fellows of the National Academy of Public Administration. Sanders, a civil servant for almost 40 years (over 20 as a member of the Senior Executive Service), served as director of civilian personnel for the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS—where he first met Robert Tobias—and associate director for HR strategy at OPM, as well as the chair of the Federal Salary Council in the first Trump Administration. Tobias is the former National President of the National Treasury Employees Union, where among other things, he served as the "voice’"of over 90,000 IRS employees; he has also been a longtime leader and commentator on the federal labor movement.

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What should we do with the ODNI? One plank owner’s thoughts

Ronald Sanders — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:46:00 -0400

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has just released its proposed fiscal 2026 Intelligence Authorization Act, and it includes what’s left of Sen. Tom Cotton’s, R-Ark., legislation to “reform” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Among other things, the SSCI’s proposal would eliminate Cotton’s original ODNI “cap” of 650 Full Time Equivalents and instead give DNI Tulsi Gabbard 90 days to identify “the maximum [staffing] level required” for its mission...whatever that is. And that’s the $64 question!

As an aside, the bill would also move some of the centers out from the Office to various Intelligence Community agencies, change some of the senior titles, move the National Intelligence University to the National Defense University and impose other changes too complex to enumerate here. But all seem to have a common goal: that is, to reduce the size and presumably, the reach (“intrusiveness”?) of the ODNI. However, while the SSCI legislation is an improvement over the Cotton bill, most of these changes still deserve much deeper independent study, rather than a relative rush to judgement...indeed, those changes warrant the same level of intense scrutiny afforded their origins back in 2004 (see below).

And as I said, there remains a fundamental, a priori question that someone needs to address: What’s the ODNI’s mission? What role (if any) should ODNI play in the collection, production and communication of US intelligence in this, the 21st century?

A bit of historical background

At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, the principal reason for establishing the ODNI in the first place can be found in the ashes of 9/11 and to a lesser extent, the subsequent Iraq weapons of mass destruction debacle...in other words, by looking squarely into the “rear view mirror” of history.

Thus, ODNI was created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act in part to break down the historic stovepipes—as personified by the distrust and lack of information and intelligence-sharing among IC professionals—that existed before 9/11. To quote the congressional committee studying that tragedy, those agencies failed to “connect the dots” and thus may have failed to stop it. And unless we want a repeat of those twin tragedies, what we learned then needs to be taken into account now, even as we may look forward.

We will never know whether 9/11 could have been prevented with more interagency collaboration, but we do know that the bureaucratic silos and insularity that characterized the IC before—with its agencies divided by separate cabinet chains of command, departmental budgets, core intelligence specialties, etc.—was the reason the ODNI was created in the first place.

However, its initial intent has seemingly faded, potentially leaving individual IC elements to fend for themselves. That is particularly the case with the smaller IC agencies, those hidden in mega-departmental budgets. Just look at what’s happening with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, an important IC component that has apparently been lost in “big” State’s priorities. So, while the fiscal 2026 Intel Authorization Act is a good place to start a re-examination of all this, it still begs that seminal question posed above: That is, what should the ODNI’s mission be?

My perspective as a long time senior civil servant and ODNI “plank owner” is relevant here. Indeed, I was one of the first appointed to that fledgling Office and came to it having helped “stand up” and/or transform the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department and even the Senior Executive Service, among others. Note that that perspective, along with those of many of my original ODNI colleagues, is recounted in a recent special issue of the Central Intelligence Agency’s respected Journal of Intelligence Studies and is also worth a read.

That special issue treats all this in depth, but it is easy to summarize the challenge. As one of Ms. Gabbard’s DNI predecessors (accurately!) observed, collaboration and information-sharing has always been an “unnatural act” amongst bureaucratically separate IC agencies, and that must be the starting point for this discussion.

Five options for ODNI’s the future

There are at least five viable options to consider in that regard: 1. No ODNI at all, an option rejected by the Congress back in 2004 when it passed the IRTPA. 2. A minimal oversight role that would lightly oversee the activities of the IC’s many agencies, opining on things like their budgets and who is to lead them, but without any clout to decide them. 3. A coordination and collaboration role, in which ODNI would actively facilitate more information sharing amongst the IC’s agencies, and where necessary, coordinate the content of their intel assessments, advising POTUS and/or the Congress on them as appropriate.4. An independent integration and production role, in which ODNI would have the capability to do all the above, as well as to synthesize and produce its own separate intelligence collection and/or analyses (or evaluations of agency products) where necessary and independently report to POTUS, the cabinet or the Congress as required.

Of course, there’s a fifth option as well: consolidation and control of the IC as part of a centralized Department of Intelligence reporting to POTUS as a member of his/her cabinet, much like DHS’s Secretary after the merger of some 22 agencies in the Homeland Security Act back in 2004. That would vest a Senate-confirmed Secretary of National Intelligence with “authority, direction, and control” (just like other cabinet secretaries) over the various agencies currently comprising the IC. But while that option was considered in the debates surrounding the IRTPA, it upset way too many bureaucratic “kingdoms” back then, and it would likely suffer the same fate now.

However, while Options 1 and 5 were both soundly rejected (for good and not-so-good reasons) in the debate presaging the IRTPA, the ODNI has evolved incrementally since, as bureaucracies are wont to do, in part because it served as a convenient place to “hang” various organizational orphans (like climate change, for example) because there was no better place to put them.

Of course, each of the options above has staffing (and thus cost) implications as well, ranging from having “none” to a role that would staff ODNI at current or even higher staffing levels. That said, an oversight role could probably be staffed within the original 650-person Cotton cap, especially if (a) the various more operational centers and NIU were moved out from ODNI and their staff “head counts” not counted against ODNI, and (b) the CIA’s “old” Community Management Staff, which ODNI took over as part of its original complement, were to be reviewed and its staffing revised once the ODNI’s mission was expressly clarified.

Simply put, unwinding the DNI now (and/or dismantling parts of the IC, like INR), without any real forethought, would inadvertently risk returning us to those same bureaucratic silos and stovepipes that existed before 9/11, much to our peril.

Before closing, a word about the National Intelligence University. I’ve been on its foundation since its inception (I even “owned” it at one point during my tenure at ODNI—before NIU and its head count bounced back to DIA—so I know a little about it.) And I reluctantly support realigning it (again) to the NDU, as proposed by the SSCI...vs. killing it outright, as the Cotton bill would have proposed.

The latter was not a good option. Intelligence remains an obscure, arcane discipline, and it needs “deep thinkers” to understand it, just as joint warfighting needs “deep thinkers” (both senior military officers and senior civilians) to do the same. NDU has a long (and congressionally supported) history of “professional military education” in that regard, and DOD is big enough to absorb the NIU staff and mission without missing a beat. So, the SSCI’s proposed transfer to NDU, while not optimal, is better than nothing, just as long as someone remains in the business of teaching intelligence to current and future leaders.

Decide on its purpose first, then staff it

But to belabor the point, the SSCI has left open the fundamental question: What exactly is the ODNI’s role? And whether that role is determined by the Congress, POTUS and/or (by default) the DNI, it should NOT be made blindly, and certainly not without more in-depth study.

So, here is the bottom line in all of this: The Congress needs to take a deep breath, avoid a rush to legislative judgement and ask itself and lots of others (like current and former DNIs) just exactly what the ODNI is supposed to do. And I would argue that the antecedent reasons that led to its creation are still extant, so as a consequence, I would still have it perform a “coordination and collaboration” (perhaps on steroids) role as originally intended.

But that’s just me. Smarter people than I need to weigh in on this important issue—after all, our national security is at stake here—and it warrants much deeper independent study, so I would ask the SSCI to commission the National Academy of Public Administration to look at this...under strict time limits, so that this does not gather any dust, and more importantly, so that we do not inadvertently trigger another 9/11.

And unless and until Congress changes the law, the DNI must and should continue to serve (and be staffed) as “the President’s principal intelligence advisor” as required by IRTPA, whether anyone, the current DNI included, likes it or not.

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US civil servants: Do we love them or hate them? Or just thank them?

Ronald Sanders — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 10:25:00 -0400

If the current celebrations in Washington, D.C.—like Public Service Recognition Week and the Partnership for Public Service’s annual Sammies awards—have reminded us of anything, it’s that we should be thanking our public servants (both present, and yes, former) all year long, not just now...when it’s fashionable, and we can all get our pictures taken in our tuxes and formal gowns doing so.

You see, we Americans traditionally have a “love-hate” relationship with our national government, and so too do the public servants who work for us, whether in uniform and otherwise. They actually personify that relationship...and are stuck in the middle of all that. On the one hand, we (and they) treasure the individual freedoms that are guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and many of us may just want our government to leave us alone. However, paradoxically, we also want our government to protect us from harm, especially in times of extraordinary crisis...like now.

Our individual freedoms have to be balanced by the greater public good, and frontline public servants are stuck with doing the balancing. And in that regard, they don’t get to be as “empowered” as their counterparts in the private sector, as motivating as that may be. Instead, they are duty-bound to do the bidding of “We the People.” That makes the jobs of civil servants very, very hard, and it’s something we should never, ever forget!

And that’s not an easy balance to strike, especially during things like the attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, but it is one that is also playing out invisibly every day on the far less dramatic front lines of public service, where individual, largely unsung public servants — everybody from intelligence analysts, park rangers and nurses, to doctors, ICE officers and even building and food inspectors—have to choose between their (and their fellow citizens’) individual freedoms and the broader public interests that they are sworn to protect and preserve.

Indeed, these days it applies to almost every civil servant, and nothing brings their difficulty into sharper focus than the events of these past few weeks and months.

To be sure, one could argue that the same is true for American citizens of all stripes, not just public servants. They too have to choose between their personal safety (and that of their fellow citizens) and their individual liberties. And it’s further complicated by social media, including the nefarious Russian kind, that deliberately clouds what’s real and what isn’t.

That is not an easy choice to make these days, whether you’re a civil servant or not, and as our fellow citizens struggle with it, they personify and operationalize this “love-hate” relationship with our government. They too worry about that “government” infringing on their rights (perceived, editorialized or otherwise) and their freedoms.

But that paradox, that “love-hate” relationship, is even more relevant on the frontlines of public service, insofar as it affects the thankless day-to-day work of our public servants. First, while it may be “the government” that our fellow citizens both love and hate, that gestalt manifests itself in the interactions, infrequent or otherwise, that they have with those front-line public servants, including (these days) those who are virtual. Given the financial and economic pressures that every American faces these days, those interactions can be testy and tense—just think about those who call “the government” to demand to know the status of their still-not-received tax refunds, Social Security checks or FEMA help and get what they perceive to be the runaround.

That testiness may be endemic, a paradoxical product of just being an American, and that my friends is what makes American public servants different. They may not be as “empowered” as their private sector peers, but they still have the privilege of serving the public. Almost without exception, they have responded to that paradoxical call, sometimes at great personal risk, and in so doing, they’ve given us yet another reason for expressing our appreciation to them, not just during Public Service Recognition Week or after the Sammies, but always! For their task is an unenviable one, and it is also unending.

This paradox goes back to our founding, when Publius debated the nature of our fledgling democracy in the Federalist papers. Those Founders understood that the acts of individual citizens, all perfectly and personally rational, could still have a deleterious affect collectively, and that led them to create a system of checks and balances designed to curb and channel the inherent excesses of those individual interests and their factions. They also predicted tension between the individual and the collective, albeit normally a healthy one, but as we fast forward to today—what with the “No Kings” rallies and the like—we see that tension playing out more violently on our very streets.

Thus, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the United States was created in part to strike a sometimes-tense balance between individual freedoms on one hand, and the greater public good on the other. After all, freedom is never free; it requires compromise, something we learned (at least in theory) in high school civics classes. However, unfortunately, “compromise” has become a dirty word, so much so that I was once accused of seeking one (by a staffer for a legislator) as if it were a pejorative.

That has to stop. But more importantly, our front-line public servants—those who find themselves in the middle of that debate, trying to strike that lofty balance whether they know (or like) it or not—are the government, and that is a part of their jobs that remains especially unsung and unappreciated.

So, in addition to thanking public employees for all the often-distasteful things that they do all the time, I think we also need to thank them for trying to help us find that balance…between our ingrained American antipathy towards “government” on one hand, and the need, sometimes grudgingly acknowledged, for what it does on the other.

I saw that first-hand way back in the late 1990’s, when I was the first Chief HR Officer for the IRS. Trying to overcome a history (indeed, a mindset) of taxpayer intimidation, the Service was under a congressional mandate to become more customer friendly. That’s not easy for a tax collection agency, but it’s all about balance, and led by then-Commissioner Charles Rossotti and others, providing “service to each, [and] service to all” became our new mantra.

Intended to strike a balance between the needs of an individual taxpayer—that’s the “service to each” part—with the laws of the many, as reflected in the far more general tax code enacted by their elected representatives in Congress, that is the crucial question. And our IRS employees demanded to know which one was more important. But then, like now, there’s no right answer to that. It’s not either/or but both. It’s a balance, and it can be tense at times. But it’s up to frontline civil servants to find it.

I saw the same thing play out in our Intelligence Community, with analysts trying to balance our nation’s national security interests with their own self-preservation...as manifested by what they thought their elected superiors and appointees wanted to hear. That’s a choice that no one should have to make, then or now, and we need to do everything we can to protect those individual civil servants from having to make it.

Then, as now, it comes down to the way each public servant tries to strike that balance between individual freedoms, including their own personal safety, and collective responsibility...as they just try to do their jobs.

That was not an easy thing to ask of civil servants then, but it seems that it is even harder to ask of them now. But we must...and we must be grateful that they are willing to answer that call. Its importance is underscored by today’s headlines, and it is one that is occurring every day on the front lines of government, where individual public servants have to find that tricky balance between the individual freedoms afforded them and their neighbors (including the freedom from harm), and the public interests that those public servants are also sworn to protect.

So, the “love-hate” relationship that we Americans have with our governments is especially relevant now, after the “glow” of PSRW and the Sammies have worn off. For our nation’s public servants, that means that they’re all too often “damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” and for that, we owe them an extra dose of appreciation...always!

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OPM’s new performance management rules are (mostly) spot on

Ronald Sanders — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 16:54:29 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management has just issued detailed new requirements for agency performance management systems, and while I will take issue with some of the details on technical and policy grounds—especially anything that even hints at political partisanship—I think they’re a step in the right direction, especially insofar as they take on things like the perennial problem of inflated, “everybody gets a medal” annual performance ratings.

Yes, those new rules are incredibly detailed, particularly if they’re intended as the “be all and end all” of federal performance management. As promulgated, they leave little to no room for federal agencies to field systems that are equally rigorous but better reflect their different missions and cultures. Thus, the new rules may be construed as “one size fits all” in that regard. I hope I’m wrong, because if they work as clearly intended—that is, by setting a governmentwide floor for this year’s performance cycle and beyond—they needn’t be.

More agency realism and the ‘floor’ established by OPM

If the new standards are intended as “the minimum daily adult requirement” for performance evaluation—one that brings sorely needed rigor and realism to a critical management activity that unfortunately, has lapsed—then they’re a net positive. And I would argue that like a spoonful of castor oil, they’re necessary. Too many agencies have surrendered when it comes to the real burdens and return on investment of performance management, opting to make the process so simple as to become largely irrelevant, a necessary evil required by law, as in, “Okay, if we have to do it, let’s make it as painless as possible.” To me, that looks too much like waving a white flag.

Take so-called “pass-fail” systems. OPM’s new rules ban them, and that couldn’t come fast enough. Under such systems (and they’ve proliferated), almost no one fails and virtually everyone passes. I don’t know if our civil servants are that good, but I do think that most employees don’t really like pass-fail, as they allow managers to avoid making often-difficult distinctions in employee performance. Even though everyone knows they exist (especially the employees themselves).

The fact is that employees perform at different levels, the result of a whole host of factors like training, fit, ability, motivation, work habits, distractions at home (and work) and yes, just plain old bureaucracy...inefficiencies that have festered over the years. But that doesn’t mean surrender. Just the opposite!

Maybe we’ve lapsed because the stakes are so low. When it comes to pay, an employee’s compensation is basically on automatic pilot (even the Government Accountability Office says so!), a function of the time clock and a pulse. Seniority and survival prevail over high performance, at least to date. And while OPM’s new standards attempt to use current law to reward that high performance, the fact is that the decades-old General Schedule was just not built to do so.

Requiring (often hard) performance distinctions is a good thing

Or maybe it’s because we don’t invest in and support our managers when they make those difficult distinctions. That too needs to be addressed, but at the agency level. With some exceptions, like the now semi-permanent Acquisition and Lab “Demonstration Projects” in DOD, performance distinctions made by managers have no real consequences, so it’s no wonder that many of them just don’t bother to make those distinctions.

I don’t blame them—we’ve given them too much to do and not enough training to do it—but at the same time, that doesn’t mean we need to accept that everyone’s performance is the same and should therefore receive the same (typically inflated) rating. That’s just not true and getting real when it comes to annual ratings is worth tackling.

That also applies to retention, and OPM gets credit for tilting at that windmill too. Today, retention is pretty much automatic. Non-probationary employees almost always get a job for life and then receive as much as a 35% increase in salary—from Step 1 to Step 10 in the GS system—just by virtue of patience, pulse and an “acceptable level of competence” (whatever that means).

Some (hopefully many) employees may really be motivated by public service and do not care about performance, pay and/or retention distinctions, but my own experience says otherwise.

Equity theory says performance distinctions matter

You see, I’m a proponent of ‘equity theory’ when it comes to motivation. It says that one pays close attention to the efforts of one’s co-workers, what they “give” on the job and what they “get” for it in return. It suggests that employees will adjust their efforts up or down to ensure “equity.” But in my cynical experience, if an idealistic, high performing “baby” civil servant sees more seasoned co-workers just punching the time clock, that person will eventually do the same. After all, it’s just not worth the extra effort, at least so says equity theory.

Of course, I’m generalizing, as workers are motivated by a whole host of things. But the decades-old GS system generalizes too. When its rules explicitly say that time-in-grade matters above all else, many employees will behave that way. That does not mean that they or their peers do not (or did not) have what Jim Perry calls “public service motivation” but the weight of that system, permeating every aspect of one’s working life, may eventually dull if not destroy that intrinsic motivation.

Among other things, one way to combat that resultant apathy is to focus on performance management, both day-to-day and over time, and OPM’s attempt to control ratings inflation, as well as to ban pass-fail systems, are both good. Not easy. But good. Many of today’s performance appraisal systems just ooze mediocrity. They implicitly (and unintentionally?) encourage and reward it, and while that mediocrity may be okay for some, I think American citizens, as well as most federal civil servants, have soundly rejected that notion.

Thus, I think employees actually want managers to make performance distinctions (their own, as well as peers’), so long as they’re seen as fair and accurate. Achieving that has always been the challenge, but that’s a problem worth spending some time on. What’s not are pass-fail systems that simply give up and say all employees are alike when it comes to their performance, when everyone knows that they are not.

We need more accountability, not less

A quick word about my friend Erich Wagner’s excellent story in Government Executive on this subject, in which an anonymous HR director is quoted as saying the new rules ignore two harsh realities: the current system’s lack of pay consequences, and its impact on RIFs. I agree with that assessment, but in contrast to that unnamed source, I think that impact is a net positive.

I’ve already talked about the need to make individual performance and pay distinctions matter, but there are problems with the governmentwide system that need fixing too. Thus, while governmentwide pay “comparability” has been a problem for the federal civil service almost since its inception (for example how do you value tangible benefits like pensions?), tackling that problem—perhaps by modernizing the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act—is also something we seem to be avoiding.

I didn’t do so when I chaired the Federal Salary Council, but my efforts to “reform” that law (and fully fund those government agencies that implement it) largely fell on deaf ears. It’s just too convenient to rail in the media about the seemingly intractable but in my view, mythical “pay gap” between federal and non-federal employees, rather than try to reduce it through methodological fixes like more occupational differentiation (something the labor market does as a matter of course), vs. paying some far more than the market says they deserve...and some far less.

Erich’s unnamed source also suggested that the new rules will have an impact on RIF. I agree, but for good reasons, not bad. The performance management system should make more performance distinctions when we run a RIF, not less! Indeed, I think performance distinctions, if meaningful, ought to be determinative when an agency retrenches. But like so many other things, that too has become irrelevant. We should want to retain our best, highest performers—not our most senior ones—when we RIF and I hope the “new” OPM encourages agencies to do so.

Bottom line: Give OPM an ‘A’ for effort...but with some caveats

The bottom line here is that OPM’s new standards are pretty good, especially if you 1. shed any hint of political partisanship—we haven’t talked about that, but I’d refer you to Erich’s article, as it does a good job of pointing those out in order to preserve a nonpartisan civil service—2. back off of any plug for forced ratings distribution, in favor of more realism and—3. allow for more stringent, agency-based systems that better reflect government’s variety of missions and measures.

But as I said above, I’m old school in that regard, as well as a naively optimistic “glass half full” person, and I will always argue that we should keep and reward our very best civil servants, even if that’s hard! So, the new OPM rules, especially if clarified as I hope, are a step in the right direction. Now, if only there are people still willing to come work for the federal government, after all the DOGE carnage and talk about “throat slashing.” But that’s another matter.

Ronald Sanders is a former career senior federal executive of more than 20 years. He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the American Society for Public Administration’s National Council. He has served as chair of the Federal Salary Council, associate director of OPM, DOD Director of Civilian Personnel Policy, IRS Chief HR Officer, and the Intelligence Community’s first Associate Director of National Intelligence for Human Capital.

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Neglect the IC’s human capital at our peril

Ronald Sanders — Mon, 19 May 2025 10:58:00 -0400

Last week, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence did a YouTube interview with a reporter in which she bragged about abolishing her Office of Human Capital—apparently because it was too focused on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—for savings of $150 million. But it’s her views on that larger issue—the health of Intelligence Community’s human capital—that concerns me, especially the implicit idea that we can “just throw the ‘human capital’ baby out with the ‘DEI’ bathwater” and survive.

For the record, that does NOT mean that the IC or the ODNI (or the rest of the federal government for that matter) can’t become smaller, by reducing staff, restructuring itself, leveraging modern technology, etc., and not just by eliminating DEI initiatives. But it does mean that it must be done with great care (and caring).

Why? Because the IC’s people—the workforce of “about 100,000” military, civilian and contractor personnel—is perhaps its most powerful and potent asset, with a multitude of skills both esoteric and mundane that can only be neglected at the country’s peril. But they are spread all over the bureaucratic map, with separate budgets, staffs and even chains of command, and “herding” them into a more integrated, coherent whole is something only the DNI can do.

Indeed, as one former DNI described it, the integration of all these INT disciplines and agencies into a more coherent whole is an unnatural bureaucratic act. That’s why the Congress created the DNI in the first place, and neglecting the IC’s human capital will ultimately lead to mission failure. Just look at what happened on 9/11.

Leveraging the IC’s human capital is a mission imperative

On that fateful day in 2001, the IC was grossly understaffed, the result of hatchet-like budget cuts over the previous decade that reduced the IC’s capacity to below-critical levels. Ironically, those were some of the very same savings that the current administration is seeking once again.

But the IC’s capability gaps were even more pronounced. Before and immediately the 9/11 attacks, our nation’s intelligence agencies had far too few people with the ability to speak Arabic, Pashtu, Urdu and other exotic foreign languages, much less be able to “blend in” and gather intelligence undercover on the streets of Riyad, Jalalabad or Cairo, or even CONUS multi-ethnic cities like New York or San Francisco.

Even the Russian language and culture had become fallow in the IC of mid-2001...after all, the Cold War was over, and we’d won it, right?

Bottom line: The IC (and the nation) were in a ‘people deficit’ on 9/11. The IC could NOT effectively perform its many missions—it just didn’t have the collective capability, capacity or, perhaps most importantly, the culture of collaboration to do so—and none of us would argue for an encore of that dismal date and its immediate aftermath.

DNI Gabbard can change that, but that’s not something she can do overnight, or by herself. It takes five to seven years of concerted, IC-wide effort to recruit and develop seasoned, experienced intelligence officers, whether they’re operators or analysts or support people. But it also takes leadership commitment...that is, the will to do so. And that’s still a question for the new DNI.

Six human capital challenges for the DNI as the leader of the IC

And therein lies my caution to her. You simple cannot neglect these things, even briefly, without paying a price many years downstream! So, here are six “big” human capital issues that Ms. Gabbard should be losing sleep over when it comes to the IC’s human capital...before some adversary mistakenly thinks that that we are too tempting a target.

Is the head count right? This has to do with the number of military, civilian and contractor personnel directly engaged in or supporting intelligence operations...in other words, its capacity. And while that assumes some overlap in furtherance of “competitive analysis” (you don’t wany a single POV when it comes to national security), that overlap can easily grow to into redundancy. So, how much is enough? Only an honest broker like the DNI—who can judge the capabilities of individual agencies—can find the right collective balance. And we’ve seen what happens when that number isn’t right.

Does the IC have the right skills? Capability goes hand-in-hand with capacity, and that too cannot be neglected. The IC needs all the skilled “collectors” it can muster—undercover FBI, CIA, Drug Enforcement Administration and Defense Intelligence Agency agents, among others—both here and/or overseas. But the IC also needs skilled analysts who can interpret what its agencies collect. It even needs expert accountants, financial specialists and, these days, lots of cyber ninjas...literally every skillset you can think of! And all these skills take time to be developed (or recruited), deployed and ultimately combined to form a whole.

Does the IC have the right mix of contractors? The IC includes a significant contractor workforce, and they are just as much part of the IC’s human capital as its military and civilian employees. They are also just as dedicated to the intelligence mission. Indeed, the nation would not have been able to recover after the 9/11 attacks if it weren’t for the “formers” who’d found their way to contractor rolls and could be redirected until the IC could recruit, develop and deploy “inherently governmental” staff to take their place...and thereafter rely on contractors for the surge, spot and gap-filling capabilities they are best at.

How is the IC’s morale and its culture? Back in 2005, when the ODNI was first established, employee climate survey results for some agencies were so bad that they’d been classified as SECRET to hide a counterintelligence risk...that’s a far cry from 2024, when the IC was recognized as one of the federal government’s ‘Best Places to Work.’ But this is more than just morale; it is also a matter of IC-wide culture. The IC wants and needs people who are not afraid to “speak truth to power” even when their superiors may not want to hear it. That takes courage, and if you neglect it, you risk a replay of the mythical Iraqi WMD. And accountability to one’s craft and agency (and our nation) is not the same as political loyalty.

What about the IC’s senior leadership cadre? In one of its clearest human capital mandates, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act told the fledgling DNI to ensure that the IC’s agencies would be led by senior civilians who understood the complexity of its all-source, multi-INT operations, something that clearly was not the case before 9/11. Senior civilians could no longer be developed in agency silos and stove pipes but rather had to be “joint” (like flag officers in DOD, who needed to be able to conduct integrated military operations). And because this meant lengthy interagency assignments, this too requires the ODNI and the IC agencies to work together.

Can the IC field a diverse, mission-capable workforce? This is NOT about DEI, but it is about IC diversity, especially at an operational and analytical level. That’s a true mission imperative in the IC, not just another political slogan. As we have noted, the IC needs seasoned officers who can “live” in foreign cultures, speak foreign languages and dialects fluently and be able to do so anywhere in the world...including in U.S. cities. Blonde, blue-eyed WASPs just won’t cut it. In the IC, diversity is not just a nicety but a mission imperative, and it can still be achieved in a manner that is politically correct.

All of that that underscores the importance of the IC’s human capital, as well as the DNI’s leadership in that regard, and they represent my most fervent concern. I won’t comment on the options that I hope the DNI is considering when it comes to accomplishing the IC's mission more efficiently (options that range from a controlling central staff to a more collaborative, decentralized approach), because each has its pros and cons, as well as their costs and savings, and as noted above, they are all beside the point.

The point is that collectively, the IC’s human capital cannot and should not be taken for granted, and whatever option DNI Gabbard chooses in her promised efforts to streamline her new office and/or the IC, she needs to recognize that fact and back it up with her leadership. Our security depends on it.

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To support or to sabotage: Public service and public servants in an American democracy

Ronald Sanders — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:19:00 -0400

The dilemma: To support or to sabotage

Our nation is facing an inflection point, and civil servants, ‘good government’ organizations—like the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), the Senior Executives Association (SEA), the Partnership for Public Service (PPS) and others—and the Trump administration all have some strategic choices to make...all in furtherance of what should be our collective goal: To best serve the American public.

Bottom line up front: These three groups can work together constructively and collaboratively to move the country forward, or they can separately undermine and sabotage those efforts (in some cases deliberately) and continue down what is an ultimately counterproductive path.

First, stop denigrating public service

In case it’s not obvious, I abhor much of what this administration is doing...not the “what” of it, which I tend to support—but rather, “how” it’s going about it. I’m especially disheartened about the way that it has dismantled and denigrated much of what is good about government. Indeed, it looks like it’s trying to throw ‘the baby out with the bathwater’ and in the process, undermine federal service for years to come.

One can still cut the waste in government—there’s plenty, whether we’re willing to publicly admit or not—without treating federal employees with ‘throat cutting’ disdain. It’s not their fault. Most came to federal service with a passion to serve, and even if you have to let some of them go, you can preserve that passion. After all, feds are a cheap date...all one has to do is show us some symbolic respect (and maybe some gratitude), and we’ll follow you anywhere. Even if that’s out the door.

So, being more transparent, giving employees information and due process, providing them with post-employment support and even thanking them for their service, however brief, costs little. But the ROI is off the charts.

And at the end of the day, if it truly wants to serve the American public, the Trump administration will still have to lead the federal bureaucracy, however small it may eventually be. And you don’t do that by denigrating your employees.

That doesn’t mean you can’t change government quickly. Bureaucrats can ‘slow roll’ things if they want...even if it means violating their oath, but that’s much more likely when they’re bullied (that’s just human nature), and while bullying may win you some battles, it’s the war that matters.

But we also need to remember the election

As bad as the Trump administration (or at least some of it) has been, the fact is that a solid majority of Americans voted for all this. And even if it continues to do what it has done to date—and ignores the miniscule cost of a little respect—that’s beside the point.

What is? The oath every federal employee takes. That oath profoundly shapes how those employees act in our uniquely American democracy, whether they’re respected (or thanked) for it or not!

Thus, unlike other democracies, U.S. civil servants do not exist independently of politics. Rather, they have emerged since our Founding out of necessity, as our government’s functions have grown more complex. That complexity required expertise, not political loyalty, and it still grounds a politically neutral, merit-based civil service.

But bureaucrats are not inherently powerful. Their power is derivative, a product of our messy political system. Simply put, the power that federal civil servants have over our citizens is NOT independent of the political decisions that may grant it.

In my view, civil servants, especially those who operate at the interface between the ‘deciding’ and the ‘doing’ of government, have a sworn duty to privately give their best advice to a new appointee, just as that appointee has a duty to listen to them. But at the end of the day, political appointees are not bound by that advice, and if they give a lawful order to a career civil servant, the latter is duty-bound to carry it out...or leave.

And this has profound practical implications for public servants and the larger ‘good government’ community that may speak for them. Like it or not, they both must salute to the will of “We the People” in doing what they do. But that does NOT mean that public servants must obey whatever Americans vote for, regardless of its consequences.

However, that’s a real dilemma.

What are “good government” organizations to do?

That dilemma becomes especially difficult when it comes to representing the interests of federal civil servants. That’s one of the roles that organizations like NAPA, the Partnership, ASPA and others have taken on, and they have emerged as the voice of the public service.

But they too have some choices to make.

On the one hand, the civil servants they represent have a mandate to be politically impartial. Yet they must do so with an administration that seems to be doing everything it can to disrespect them. So, what should those organizations that are squarely in the middle of that debate do?

One option would have them discount or even ignore the results of the 2024 election and take on both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the new administration’s agenda. Or secondly, they could ‘wait and see’ what the courts and the Congress have to say about all this.

Or they can accept the results of the election and help the new administration succeed, its rhetoric and transgressions (deliberate and otherwise) notwithstanding. Indeed, they can do so without endorsing either. After all, it’s the public that counts here!

But at the end of the day, “good government” organizations cannot act as if the public servants they represent operate in a vacuum. They do not, not in the U.S. anyway, and if those organizations choose (or default to) Option 1, they risk leading those civil servants astray. Federal employees are not independent. They cannot be insulated or divorced from the politics and the public(s) they serve, and in my view, “good government” organizations cannot actively or even tacitly encourage them to resist or oppose what “We the People” have said.

Because to do so is to implicitly assert that the election was somehow ‘rigged’ and its results somehow suspect.

That does NOT mean that the current administration is going about the ‘how’ of this the right way. And therein lies the dilemma. Can organizations like NAPA and ASPA accept the goals of the new administration and still argue that there is a better way to achieve them?

I say yes! But by the same token, those same organizations cannot say they support the new administration’s agenda and then do things that thwart that agenda. Rather, their constituents are sworn to faithfully implement that agenda, and that means that for better or worse, they are there to support the lawful orders of POTUS.

But there is a middle ground that allows “good government” organizations to support (or at least accept) the ‘what’ but argue that the ‘how’ can be just as fast but far less opaque and harsh...that is, it can be accomplished without jeopardizing the very public service itself.

However, in so doing, they need to start acting like generals. Like them, they must accept the goals of a new Commander in Chief, so long as they are lawful, even if that means individual soldiers may need to be sacrificed to achieve them. That doesn’t mean they don’t care. Rather, it means that the objective is paramount. And the same must be true of “good government” organizations. They cannot take the view that every government employee, agency or program must be preserved at all costs (literally and figuratively).

As I said, that does NOT mean that those organizations must be silent. No, they should not be quiet about the ‘how’ of it. Nor should they be silent about the longer-term implications for America’s public service. Indeed, I think it is their duty to speak for the practice of public administration. And that means that while they may accept what “We the People” have said, they can and should provide their best advice as to how that can be more benignly achieved.

That is their job, after all.

And while there are some who will argue that these organizations should take what is a more pronounced and partisan course, I believe that they cannot do so and still stay true to the greater mandate from the American people. Rather, their path must be guided by one bedrock principle: We all operate in a uniquely American democracy, and we must never lose sight of that fact. Thus, when “We the People” speak, we cannot ignore their voices, except at our peril.

Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, an elected member of the American Society for Public Administration’s National Council, and a former Board member of the Senior Executives Association. A retired civil servant with almost 50 years of service (more than 20 as a federal senior executive), he served as director of civilian personnel at the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, associate director for policy at OPM, and CHCO for the US intelligence community, as well as a VP for a big government contractor, director and faculty member of a state university school of public affairs, and a state official. The opinions expressed above are his and his alone.

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Making sense of the chaotic state of the civil service

Ronald Sanders — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 16:00:13 -0500

Federal workers who received the “deferred resignation” offer on Jan. 27 have been debating what to do amid confusion about the details of the deal. There is a lot of misunderstanding (and lo and behold, even some disinformation) these days about what exactly is going on, so the editors of Government Executive asked me to try to explain some of it in layperson’s terms...that is, in plain English, “non-HR” speak! That’s no easy task, as we HR professionals (with lots of Office of Personnel Management and congressional help) have made this far too complicated, but I’m going to try to keep it all as simple as possible.

This originally started off as a “simple” explanation of Reductions in Force, but it turns out that there are a lot of layers here, as well as a bunch of antecedent steps that need explaining as well. So, I’ve put all of this in the form of eight questions:

(1) Is this all legal?

(2) What if I change my mind?

(3) But doesn’t Congress have to authorize or appropriate funds for this?

(4) Am I even eligible?

(5) Should I worry about the deadline?

(6) What’s the real number of those taking the “deferred resignation” offer?

(7) What happens if someone leaves voluntarily?

(8) What happens if I don’t take a “deferred resignation” and am impacted by a RIF?

As readers can see, the “big” one about RIFs is last. That makes for a very long article, but you can just jump to the question(s) that most concern you.

For the record, I’ve vetted this with other HR pros, some still in government and some not, and for the most part, we’re all in agreement about what the rules say, but not always, so in some cases, readers are stuck with my personal interpretations of those rules. Where that’s the case, I’ve tried to say so. And I’ve also tried to keep my political views well hidden, as hard as that may be these days. With all those caveats, here goes…

Question 1: Is this all legal?

That’s probably for the courts to figure out, but I personally think it is. Virtually all of the individual resignations I’ve seen over the years are “deferred” in that they are never effective on the date they are submitted. Rather, they are almost always “deferred” until some future date—typically one to two pay periods in the future—so, “all” that the Trump administration has done is apply this on a mass scale through the end of the current fiscal year. Indeed, one has to applaud the creativity of it.

But does that mass application somehow make it illegal? Probably not. As I said, individual deferred resignations are not at all uncommon. So, while a court has delayed the across-the-board offer (at least as of this writing), my bet is that an appellate court, or eventually the SCOTUS, will find them to be OK.

That means that neither the courts nor Congress will likely bail you out; you’ll still have to decide yourself, based on your own unique individual circumstances. And while it may be worth equivocating just a bit on the legality of a “deferred resignation,” I can pretty much promise if someone takes that offer, legal or otherwise, that will be enforceable. Even more so if you take the “early retirement” option that’s recently been added to the mix. It’s a contract, and if a current or former federal employee relies on that offer to make life decisions, then I can almost guarantee that a court will enforce it. But that does NOT make it right. That’s another matter.

Question 2: What if I change my mind?

It may not matter, especially if the agency has already done something with the position you have vacated (see below). But know this: If you change your mind—that is, if you take a “deferred resignation” and then, before its effective date, you have second thoughts and want to withdraw it—your agency may refuse to do so. By yet another law, agencies have the discretion to accept or reject your attempt to withdraw your resignation, and no one can predict whether they will exercise that discretion and let you recant. They could tell you’re out of luck, and that you must stick with your original resignation decision. So, if you take a “deferred resignation,” assume it’s irrevocable.

Question 3: But doesn’t Congress have to authorize or appropriate funds for this?

Unfortunately, I don’t think so. At least not if standard budget rules apply. First, the “deferred resignation” offer is technically NOT a buyout. There is no money involved and no outlay of funds, and thus, calling it a buyout is a misnomer. Moreover, there is NO actual agency “civilian pay budget” for Congress to approve, so there is nothing to authorize or appropriate. If there were, we’d be having a different conversation. But an agency’s civilian payroll (which, outside of the Defense Department, usually constitutes up to 85% of an agency’s congressional appropriation) is embedded in that agency’s larger Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budget and once that’s authorized and appropriated by Congress, that’s it. Indeed, Congress has imposed strict controls on moving money into and out of that O&M appropriation, but so long as the agency stays within that top-line amount, there is no need for additional congressional approval. Thus, “deferred resignations,” even on a mass scale, have NO actual civilian pay impact.

Rather, as noted, civilian payroll is funded out of an agency’s O&M account, and that account covers all sorts of other various and sundry things, from paint and carpet and furniture to civilian payroll and the cost of support contractors. So long as an agency stays within that top-line number, there is NO Anti-Deficiency Act problem. And to make sure it does, an agency just needs to NOT immediately backfill the vacancy created by a departing employee. And since the money for those now vacant positions has already been appropriated but not yet spent, there’s plenty of opportunity to avoid and/or cover any ancillary expenses. That probably makes your head hurt, but that’s as simple an explanation as I can come up with.

So, it doesn’t really matter whether an employee leaves, either because of an actual $25K buyout (later increased to $40K for DOD) or because he/she takes a “no cost deferred resignation” and administrative leave. So long as the federal agency stays within their much larger O&M budget to cover any expenses associated with those options (which they can easily do just by waiting a bit to backfill the vacancy created by a person voluntarily departing), they’re OK. To be sure, there may be some OMB folks who’d take issue with this, but bottom line: in my view, NO additional appropriations are necessary, and there is NO Anti-Deficiency Act issue. As I have said, the people who came up with this were very creative in that regard, but as noted, there are lots of other issues at play here.

Question 4: Am I even eligible for a “deferred resignation” ?

Unfortunately, that too depends on your individual circumstances, made even more complicated by the addition of OPM’s Voluntary Early Retirement Authority to the mix, but it also depends on decisions by your agency. That’s the main difference between a mass offer of “deferred resignations” and a far more localized decision about your own continued employment...the two are very, very different. One is governmentwide, and the other is confined to your agency and even your own commuting area,

Let’s focus on the latter. At the end of the day, your agency head (or the person acting for that appointee) can determine whether you are even eligible for a “deferred resignation.” And some agency heads—like the secretary of Veterans Affairs—have “exempted” some 300,000 VA employees from even taking the “deferred resignation” offer. Others, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and our intelligence services, are less clear in that regard, so if you’re uncertain, I’d ask a supervisor and/or your HR office for the latest information. But again, taking that “deferred resignation” offer and your continued employment are two very different things, so don’t let others sway you in that regard. YOU have to decide what’s best for you.

Question 5: Should I worry about the OPM deadline?

The deadline, whenever it may be (as of this writing, it’s been extended by a few days) is important, mainly because the Trump administration needs a “forcing function” to get people to make a final decision. Otherwise, we’ll just procrastinate, right? So, my advice is to pay attention to that deadline, whenever it is. Respect it and meet if you can. BUT don’t blindly rush to do so if you’re at all hesitant. You must still make your decision based on your own personal circumstances when and if you can.

For example, if you already know you can get a job in the private sector, or you know you can comfortably retire (especially now that VERA has been added to the mix), maybe you should take a “deferred resignation.” And if your position is at risk—for example, if your official Post of Duty is likely to be eliminated, or if you signed up for remote work and you do not want to relocate to your home office’s official location—you may want to think about it as well.

But if you’re unsure, don’t rush it. Odds are that there’ll be an extension of that deadline, either as ordered by a court and/or as issued by OPM and/or your agency, if they don’t get the number of voluntary takers that they need.

Question 6: What’s the real number of those taking the “deferred resignation” offer?

This is something that we were concerned about back when we first introduced Voluntary Separation Incentive Pay (otherwise known as buyouts) in DOD. And it should be a concern now. How many of those taking the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” offer would have left anyway? That’s what “rent taking” is. It’s a term used by economists to describe those who are paid—or in this case, who accept something of equivalent value, like a “deferred resignation” and administrative leave—to do something they would probably have done for free. Historically, over 100,000 employees leave the federal government each year, voluntarily and otherwise—that’s normal attrition, or what is called the “quit rate” that you’ve heard so much about—through a combination of retirements (regular, and if approved by OPM, VERA), resignations, etc. So, when some official claims that over 60,000 employees have accepted the “deferred resignation” offer so far, that is probably true, but most likely some significant percentage of that number would have left anyway, even without the offer.

Question 7: What happens after someone takes a “deferred resignation” and leaves?

Let’s assume that someone takes a “deferred resignation” offer and leaves, or at least signals that they intend to do so by the end of September 2025. One of two things can then happen next.

One, if the departed employee’s agency is trying to downsize (that is, by reducing the agency’s overall headcount of federal employees in their budget, especially in the position’s commuting area), they would just cancel the vacant position and “harvest” the payroll savings for their larger O&M budget.

Or two, if the agency is more interested in assuring that the person eventually filling that job would help them implement their policy or program agenda (in other words, to ensure policy alignment between that person and the Trump administration’s agenda), they would backfill that vacancy with someone who promises to do so. Of course, that also assumes that the person they select also has the qualifications to do the work—that is, the job would be filled based on merit (that’s another Trump executive order). That may be what’s happening in our Intelligence Community and in CISA: Both need all the skilled positions they have and then some, so reducing head count isn’t an issue with them; rather, they may be concerned about ensuring policy alignment.

But therein lies the potential rub of a Schedule F 2.0 (otherwise known as the new, still-draft Policy/Career Schedule) and the confirmation of Russ Vought as the new OMB director. He has been a champion of Schedule F, so it’s probably coming soon to a theater near you. The latest version of that says that those covered by it cannot be fired for their political views so long as they faithfully follow the lawful orders of the Trump administration and its appointees. That’s the good news. The bad? That could too easily turn into a political loyalty test, with the politicization of an impartial, politically neutral civil service the likely result. That’s what everyone is concerned about.

Question 8: What happens if I am impacted by a RIF?

Get ready for the game of musical chairs called a Reduction in Force. First, let’s explode a myth. There’s no such thing as governmentwide layoffs. Unless and until someone in Congress changes the law—and to be sure, this could happen in an omnibus FY 2025 budget reconciliation and/or an extension of the national debt limit—a RIF is dependent on the budgets and appropriations of individual agency, cabinet, and/or subcabinet bureaus. And those budgets and appropriations eventually trickle down to a federal organization’s Post of Duty and commuting area. That’s where an agency’s headcount of federal employees, and the funds to pay them, is usually determined. And that’s where RIFs are defined...by what’s called a competitive area. And in almost every instance, they are local, typically defined by geography. So, that’s where we need to start.

For example, let’s assume that I’m someone who works remotely full-time outside of the commuting area generally served by my POD. For example, my job has an official POD in Washington, D.C., but I took a remote job offer that allowed me to work (and live) out of my home in Omaha, Neb. With all due respect, that remote job is almost certainly at risk of being eliminated altogether and functionally transferred to a D.C. POD. Indeed, getting full-time remote workers to return to their official government offices was supposedly the original goal of the administration’s “deferred resignation” offer. And in those circumstances, a RIF doesn’t matter.

But if, on the other hand, your POD is likely going to continue, albeit perhaps at a reduced staffing level, and your agency doesn’t get enough “deferred resignation” takers, then a RIF may be necessary. And your vulnerability in that case depends on a whole host of things, starting with your employment status. Thus, if you’re a recent hire (that is, a probationary employee), you have almost no protection and can be let go with just a simple Termination Notice, so be prepared for it.

But if you’ve been around for more than a year and you’ve earned career-conditional or (even better) career status, you may survive. But there’s still more to it than that. Your survival will also depend on whether you’re a veteran or not. Veterans are the most protected employees in a RIF. In other words, they’re the last to go, and by law, non-veterans are laid off before them. So, your veteran status matters as well.

Once all that has been determined, a retention register is developed by an agency, usually by commuting area, and it lists employees in seniority order by employment status, veteran status and more recently, by performance rating. Then the real fun begins. The most senior employees in each of those various categories ‘bump’ those employees who are junior to them (as we have said, seniority matters) and ‘retreat’ into their jobs. As a general matter, veterans bump non-veterans, who bump probationary employees, etc. and so on. Until some number of employees at the end of that daisy chain of personnel actions—typically non-veterans with very few years of service—actually lose their jobs.

That’s the musical chairs part of all this. But all of this is usually confined to an agency’s POD/commuting area and is driven by that agency’s budget and appropriation as well as that agency head’s decisions regarding structure, geographic distribution, needed vs. surplus skills, etc. And that agency head may be a political appointee or beholden to one, so take that into account. I know that’s mind-numbing—we haven’t even talked about qualifications standards (which are usually—but not automatically—waived by an agency in a RIF so that employees can “bump” into more positions) or performance ratings. The latter can also affect RIF standing, with higher performers retained over lower ones, all other things (like veteran status, etc.) being equal.

Based on my experience, there are anywhere from five to seven personnel actions (mainly comprised of the “bumping” and “retreating” that I mentioned earlier) before the last person in this dizzying daisy chain is involuntarily sent off the rolls. But in almost every instance, employees who are bumped retain their pay and/or their grades (that’s yet another law), and employees who are laid off also get whatever severance pay they’re entitled to, along with unemployment compensation, so if there are any savings to be had in a RIF, it only comes after a couple of years. Crazy? Yes. Time consuming and expensive? Also, yes. But a RIF is far more scalpel-like than the offer of mass “deferred resignations,” insofar as it can target surplus skills and not just head count.

But here’s the bottom line. If staffing in your POD is just being reduced, say from 100 down to 75 FTEs, then you have to calculate your own individual odds of being one of those 75 federal employees left standing. And if your odds are poor—if you’re a probationary employee, a recent hire, a non-veteran with relatively few years of service, etc.—you need to consider taking a “deferred resignation,” because you are most likely gone, gone, gone.

Can this process be reformed? Yes, to that too, but that takes an act of Congress, and you be the judge as to whether that’s likely. And until then, while there is no such thing as governmentwide layoffs, it is generally true that for every person who voluntarily retires (early or otherwise) or resigns (deferred or otherwise) and leaves their federal job, that likely means a fellow employee is “saved” as a result, assuming everything else is equal.

In the end....

To sum up, let me add three apparently contradictory things. First, let me belabor the point. YOU have to make a decision. Just YOU. Assume that no one—whether that’s a plaintiff in a lawsuit, a court, and agency head, the Congress, or least of all, the media—will bail you out. Even given the somewhat ambiguous legality of a “deferred resignation” offer, if you take it, it will almost certainly be enforceable, especially if you take early or ‘regular’ retirement. And even if you don’t, you have until the end of September before any of this actually happens, and it may all be resolved by then. So, decide!

Second, no one guaranteed any of us public servants a job. Rather, our jobs are dependent on the services, both direct and indirect, that we provide our fellow citizens, and by the laws and regulations (and appropriations) that operationalize those services. And if the president or Congress—as the democratically elected representatives of our fellow citizens—conclude that they are unwilling to pay (or pay as much) for those services, our jobs may go away. That may sound harsh, but that’s the way it works in a democracy, especially one with a capitalist economy. No one of us is guaranteed a job!

However, at the same time, those federal jobs that do continue to exist need to be filled by the very best people possible—people with the best skills, the best work ethic, the most accountability, and above all, the strongest public service motivation. Our country needs you. It always will, even in times like these, when it may seem otherwise. And while public service may mean something different these days (for example, new hires will probably move in and out of government several times in their careers, making a 35-year career in the federal civil service like mine an anachronism), the U.S. government still needs good people, whether it’s for a few years or for many. So, if your personal circumstances permit, stay the course. We need you now more than ever!

Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a retired member of the federal civil service (with more than 20 years as a member of its Senior Executive Service). Among other posts in the federal, private and academic sectors, he served as director of civilian personnel at the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, associate director of OPM, CHCO for the U.S. intelligence community, director of the University of South Florida’s School of Public Affairs, vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, and chairman of the Federal Salary Council. He is also a first-generation American, the son of a U.S. citizen and his immigrant war bride.

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DEI and diversity: Is there a difference?

Ronald Sanders — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 08:00:00 -0500

Yes, DEI and diversity are different, and banning one does NOT mean that we should abandon the other. And I say this no matter who the president is, or what he (or she) may order. We are a nation of laws, after all, and that means something to me.

In that regard, one of the first things that President Trump did upon taking office was to dismantle the federal government’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices—his White House has even gone so far as to require that their staffs be identified and placed on administrative leave—and that’s drawn all sorts of gasps from those who fret over such things. I’ll admit to doing so as well.

But after thinking about it, I had to ask, “What’s really going on here?” Does Trump’s executive order really outlaw efforts at achieving federal workplace diversity? And the answer, at least in my view, is a resounding “no!” It’s one thing to dismantle one of the previous administration’s signature initiatives, quite another to abandon the ideal of a U.S. civil service that looks like America, and while I won’t comment on the first, I have and will always support the second.

Whatever one says about Trump—and there is certainly much to say about him—he has issued a series of executive orders and presidential memos that, taken together, focus on creating a truly merit-based America. To be sure, they’ve been accompanied by a lot of noise, noise that has probably muddied an otherwise lofty and legitimate purpose. But as a career civil servant who has always put the principle of merit first, last, and always, that is something that I have strived for throughout my professional career.

But that’s different from DEI. To belabor the point, establishing (or abolishing) DEI offices and staff is NOT the same as abandoning efforts to improve the federal government’s diversity. Those latter efforts have been around for years—in those agencies that do most of their work overseas, like the State Department, USAID, and our foreign intelligence services, it is even more of a mission imperative—and in my view as an HR professional, the words in the EO are spot on.

However, by definition, those efforts also encompass attempts to ensure equal opportunity for all—that is, to level the playing field and make sure everyone is given an equal chance to achieve and demonstrate that merit—and that’s where this gets tricky. In trying to ensure equal opportunity, one is allowed (under certain circumstances) to take what are otherwise discriminatory factors into account in making various employment decisions, including applicant recruiting, on-boarding and acculturation, training and education, deployment, and the like. It even includes workplace justice and discipline.

After all, that’s the essence of a merit-based civil service too, isn’t it? Those laws that establish the overarching (and uniquely American) principle of merit also concomitantly promote equal opportunity in all employment decisions. But as I said, that’s easier said than done.

Balancing merit with legitimate, legally sanctioned affirmative action to correct past (and avoid future) race, age, disability, gender, and other forms of illegal discrimination has always been difficult. Indeed, it’s something that has often found its way to the Supreme Court, in past decisions like Bakke, Bollinger, and much more recently, those involving the North Carolina State University System and Harvard College, in which SCOTUS has dramatically redrawn the lines of legal discrimination in furtherance of affirmative action.

That said, I do think that it’s especially telling that in its most recent rulings on that very emotional subject in college admissions, SCOTUS has in effect “carved out” the various U.S. military academies because of the importance that we as a society place on having a military that reflects the diverse complexion of America. And the last time I looked, that society included the federal government and its civil service, so I would argue that that same principle applies there as well.

That’s why one must read the full text of the "Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” executive order and take a deep breath. To be sure, that EO does take a blunt instrument to killing former President Biden’s more formal DEI efforts—for example, by abolishing government DEI offices, as well as by cancelling government contracts with DEI provisions or services contained in them—but while that may be overkill, there are lots of other inherently positive things in that EO that I fear may get lost in all the hand-wringing.

In other words, I really worry about “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” by those charged with that EO’s implementation.

In making this “baby vs. bathwater” distinction, I do not quarrel with those civil servants who branded (or re-branded) themselves as DEI experts. My bet is that many of them are former EEO specialists, which will help in their longer-term placement, but like many government contractors, they suddenly find themselves on the outs by virtue of arguably overzealous execution of the above executive order. However, in my view, they were just trying to meet the expressly stated requirements of the “government of the day” (that is, the then-Biden administration) and its hunger for DEI-related products and services. Obviously, that’s changed.

Nor do I take issue with those of my professional HR colleagues who are now trying to place those former EEO specialists in other, non-DEI civil service positions that may not be so publicly visible (and politically charged). After all, these are all probably good public servants, and they deserve to be treated as such. The vast majority probably just continued to do what they’d always done in good faith—that is, end any and all discrimination in the federal civil service and in so doing, ensure equal opportunity for all of its employees—so revenge and retribution should be off the table.

Bottom line: While DEI as a discreet function, with discreet funding, budget, staff and contracts, is clearly no more, that that does NOT mean that federal diversity efforts are dead. Those efforts are alive and well, and federal agencies should not be relieved of the difficult but necessary burden of trying to balance individual merit while at the same time, ensuring equal opportunity for all, in every personnel decision that impacts our civil service ranks. That’s not easy, but that’s our job. It always has been, and nothing has changed.

Ron Sanders is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a retired career member of the Senior Executive Service. Among other posts in the private sector and academe, he served as director of civilian personnel at the Defense Department, chief human resources officer for IRS, associate director of OPM, CHCO for the US intelligence community, Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton, director of the University of South Florida’s School of Public Affairs, and chairman of the Federal Salary Council.

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Do hiring freezes work? It depends...

Ronald Sanders — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 11:50:00 -0500

It’s Cold Outside...and IN!

It’s a few days after Inauguration Day in Washington, D.C., and the temperature is still bitterly cold! But it’s not only freezing outside! It’s just as cold inside as well. Our new president has imposed a government-wide hiring freeze, so that attrition, both natural and incentivized, can work its magic and bring the federal government’s rolls down fast. But folks should not panic. We’ve been through this a couple of times before (at least I have, as have many of my gray-haired colleagues), and we’ve learned some lessons along the way, lessons that I hope the new administration is heeding.

But before I offer up those lessons, one needs to start with a fundamental question—that is, do hiring freezes and attrition really work as intended—and the answer is that “it depends.” It depends on what you’re after, and if you’re after short term savings, that’s clearly the way to go. But that also has longer-term consequences that those who set annual agency budgets, appropriations and staffing priorities need to heed as well.

A Few Factoids to Consider

First a factoid: Non-DOD agency budgets are upwards of 80% internal staff costs, and if you add contractors, that number can approach 90%. That’s how much it annually costs to pay those who do an agency’s work.

And here’s a second factoid: On average, the federal government has an annual attrition or ‘quit’ rate (comprised of separations, resignations and regular retirements) of between 5% and 7%. With a workforce of almost 2.0 million employees, that means somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 employees leave every year. And if you don’t back-fill all the vacancies they create, you get significant short-term savings...maybe even enough to satisfy the DOGE.

Couple that with OPM-approved Voluntary Early Retirement Authority and Voluntary Separation Incentive Pay of $25,000 apiece, and you can bump that quit rate up by as much as a couple of percentage points. And if you want to go even further and separate all those in a probationary status (again, something the Trump administration is about to do), the numbers—and the savings—get even better.

So, There’s Good News and Bad News

So, if you want to reduce federal rolls quickly and in a big way, the Trump administration’s hiring freeze (plus attrition, of course) is the way to go.

That’s the good news. The bad? When you reduce federal rolls this way, you can do so quickly and painlessly, but only your very best employees will leave...that is, the ones with the most experience, that have the most marketable skills (like cyber ninjas and nurses) and/or the highest performance. You’re literally at their mercy. They drive down the numbers individually, as they exercise their right to look elsewhere and that has performance consequences. In other words, the employees with other nongovernment employment opportunities will go. And of course, this also kills the prospect of recruiting new ones to replace them, but that’s for another day.

To sum up, hiring freezes and attrition—even incentivized, VERA/VSIP-fueled attrition with lots of exceptions—results in severe skills imbalances over the medium and long term. But that matters only if one cares about them. If you don’t, if you’re just after savings, this is the way to go.

However, if you worry about ‘hollowing out’ the government, about reducing its rolls to the point where it can’t perform its missions, what’s the alternative? It’s to first identify surplus skills and then conduct a merit-and-skills-based Reduction-in-Force. In other words, one can choose to use a scalpel, rather than the blunt instrument of freezes and attrition. That scalpel can be painful—after all, it guarantees that you’ll have involuntary separations—but it gets at reductions the “right” way: That is, by shedding those skills (and employees) who are truly surplus.

Of course, that scalpel has other consequences too. It takes a lot of time—perhaps as much as a year, although I think that can be accelerated—and any savings are offset in the short term by the transaction costs of a RIF, as well as money for unemployment compensation, severance pay, buy-outs (which, for non-DOD agencies, remains frozen at $25.000 per taker, the same as in fiscal 1992, when they were first established), and the like. So, it’s complicated. But bottom line: while it takes longer and doesn’t save you as much as fast, RIFs can get you where you want to go too. And with fewer long-term consequences.

And while a scalpel gets you to the same place, it means involuntary separations, and given today’s seniority-based RIF rules, those can have a disproportionate impact on those with the least of it.

However, as I said, it’s complicated, and more importantly, there is an antecedent requirement that makes such an approach even more problematic in this inaugural year of the Trump Administration: To do this the right way—that is, with real, programmatic funding cuts and strategic workforce planning rather than an across-the-board, ‘salami slice’ approach to reductions—requires a thoughtful agency budget, something only the new Congress (working with the Trump White House and newly appointed agency heads) can provide. Will Congress exercise its constitutional authority to do so? Only time will tell, but while time is pending, all federal hiring seems to be frozen.

A Short History Lesson

We went through this same Hobson’s Choice in DOD back in the early 1990s, when everyone was in search of the so-called ‘Peace Dividend’ at the end of the Cold War. In the Defense Department of 1992, that meant newly hired women and minorities would suffer. However, recall that that too was another presidential election year, so guess what? The George H. W. Bush administration chose the relatively painless way—a freeze + voluntary attrition, with the addition of newly-created VSIP to further drive down the rolls—and the Democrat-controlled Congress went along with it.

The goal then was to bring down DOD military and civilian rolls (and budgets) as quickly as possible—we even had dramatic, congressionally imposed end-strength cuts to deal with—so that the resulting savings could be redirected to domestic programs and priorities.

We told our DOD leadership, and through them the George H. W. Bush (and later, after he was elected, the Bill Clinton) White House, that we could do this the ‘easy and relatively painless way’ through a freeze and voluntary attrition, or we could use the far more painful and more attenuated scalpel of RIFs. We knew that the former would result in long-term skills imbalances, but in an election year—any election year—the choice was obvious.

And as DOD’s career Director of Civilian Personnel Policy at the time, I didn’t blame our elected leaders for choosing the painless short-term solution; after all, I was among those who thought that we could eventually correct those long-term skills imbalances.

Unfortunately, the Cold War turned out to just be on ‘pause’ back then, so my optimism turned out to be extremely naïve...but that was about the end of the Cold War, not about this.

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Want to reform the federal government? Start with career execs

Ronald Sanders — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 17:00:00 -0500

Want to reform the federal government’s vast bureaucracy? Start at the top, with the Senior Executive Service. They set the tone—they personify the “trickle down” theory in organizations—but how to make them more responsive AND more efficient and effective? That is the question, and it will take more than a Schedule F to do so. It will require rethinking and “reforming” just how those execs are developed, promoted, deployed, rewarded, and retained.

No easy lift, but in so doing, we might just realize the original vision of the SES, first articulated by the late President Jimmy Carter and the principal architect of his civil service reforms, Scottie Campbell (the first OPM Director, as well as a friend and mentor), may they both rest in peace. They envisioned a mobile corps of senior career leaders moving purposefully across the whole of government—at the behest of the American citizens they were sworn to serve—to deal with its most interconnected, endemic, “wicked” problems.

Unfortunately, that’s a vision that has never been realized. And it is NOT going to be just by reissuing something like Schedule F, or by enacting some of the pay and performance management reforms suggested by my colleagues—although what I recommend is not incompatible with either. But what I advocate is much more fundamental, and it will take time to achieve. The good news is that it’s been done before.

All we need to do is look to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s revolutionary civilian “joint duty” program as a model. That program dramatically changed the entire life cycle for developing IC leaders, and in so doing, it better equipped them to “connect the dots” after the twin tragedies of 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq revealed unfortunate gaps in that regard. And now those leaders are much more able to devise and execute strategies to deal with today’s formidable, fundamentally interconnected threats to our Nation.

Unfortunately, those challenges are no longer limited to intelligence. The world around us has changed dramatically, typified by the interconnectedness of everything. COVID 19 and other public health challenges are but one of a whole host of examples that include immigration and border security, breakthrough technologies like CRISPR and artificial intelligence, global warming and climate change, a rising China and bellicose Russia, etc.

Simply put, we are all connected, and the world we find ourselves in requires career government executives (among other leaders) who are not just narrow subject matter experts. Rather, we are in desperate need of leaders who can address the Whole of Government/Whole of Nation challenges that characterize this brave new world. That was the prescient vision of Carter and Campbell back in 1978, but why now?

Well, there was a little something that happened last November (the presidential election, remember?) and the country—including OMB and OPM—has new leadership. Coincidentally, we are also celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2004, and that law may just have one of the answers to our current problems.

In that regard, I’ve just served as guest editor for an issue of the CIA’s Journal of Intelligence Studies providing a retrospective of that law . I also co-authored an article in that issue on the IC’s civilian “joint duty” program, and in my view, the latter bears further consideration as a governmentwide model.

The IC’s approach, patterned after one pioneered by the U.S. military, is quite straightforward. At its root, that model, like its military counterpart, requires at least one yearlong interagency (or equivalent) assignment as a prerequisite for promotion to one of the thousands of executive-level positions in the IC’s six senior services. The ultimate goal of these ‘out of body’ experiences was to create a network of trusted interpersonal relationships that would serve as the IC’s connective tissue when it came to information sharing...and where appropriate, action both covert and otherwise.

Above all else, that model requires something every SES member signs up for: Individual mobility—geographic, functional, organizational, etc.—but in the IC’s case, it must be acquired before someone is even eligible to be considered, much less selected to senior executive rank.

That program was specifically authorized by the IRTPA, hence the connection, and it was patterned after the one forced on our military (yes, forced!) by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1985. But unlike that law, the IRTPA did not give the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where I’d just gone to work shortly after the IRTPA was signed, the authority to go with that authorization. That was deliberate. Indeed, it has been all too common in Washington, a signal that Congress had to leave it to bureaucrats like me to figure it out.

That authority was not the only one left vague by the IRTPA, but we ODNI “plank owners” knew that going in. That deliberate ambiguity led to many years of frustration, all recounted in gory detail in the stories linked above, but my purpose in writing this is not to rehash history. Rather, it’s to urge that the basic elements of that model be adapted and adopted for the entire SES corps.

Why should our nation’s new leaders take on something this disruptive (as it surely will be)? Because in the view of many, including myself, our brave new world requires it. To belabor the point, everything and everyone is now connected, and we need career execs who can discern and act upon that fact.

But as in most things like this, it is easier said than done. Here’s the heavy lifting that I think is required:

First and foremost, OPM needs to begin establishing and requiring a sixth Executive Core Qualification that denotes skill and experience in leading inter (interagency, interdepartmental, intergovernmental, international, etc.) operations.

Such an ECQ is essential, especially at the top of the SES—for example, for those who are Direct Reports to agency heads—so that may be a way of phasing it in. But it is critical, nevertheless. The IC has one (we called it Leading the Intelligence Enterprise), and it was fundamentally new, not just involving temporary coalitions (something in the current ECQ model), but a new skill denoting the creation of a more permanent, sustainable network of trusted relationships amongst key actors outside of an exec’s chain of command.

And like its five brethren, that sixth ECQ should be accompanied by a series of empirically derived sub-competencies—things like the ability to lead across external organizations without formal authority, an intimate knowledge of the various institutions and actors in an enterprise, the skill to deliberately build and leverage trusted social networks amongst those institutions and actors, etc.

All of these are required in today’s world, and most of them can only be acquired through some sort of developmental assignment...in other words, joint duty.

Lastly, such a model requires a bureaucracy to oversee it, and I do not mean that in a pejorative sense. Those who choose this new leadership path must do so formally, as part of a competitive, merit-based admissions process, and their development as potential agency leaders cannot be left to their own personal motivations and circumstances.

Here again, we can look to the U.S. military for guidance, as it has “managed” joint duty assignments amongst its eligible uniformed officer corps to meet the prerequisites for flag promotion established by Goldwater-Nichols. SES promotions are no less important and should thus be similarly managed.

In my view, that IC model—which I personally (and painfully) helped implement when I was the IC’s Chief Human Capital Officer back in 2005—was unprecedented, especially insofar as it developed leaders for the entire Community and the Nation, not (just) their individual agencies. That is something that is still too rare in the too-stove-piped federal government. More importantly, that program has had much to do with creating a true “culture of collaboration” in the IC, something we need across the board.

Bottom line: Our career senior executives should be considered a valued and valuable national resource, a “corporate” one that is managed accordingly...and not the chattel of the individual agency heads and cabinet secretaries who appoint them.

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Politics vs. Policy: Building partnerships with new appointees

Ronald Sanders and Mike Mears — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:00:00 -0500

Elections have consequences.

Among other things, they bring new political appointees to leadership positions in an agency or program, and they will supervise or oversee career civil servants. The latter are duty-bound to follow the lawful orders of the former. That’s as it should be in a democracy, and despite all the mainstream/social media rhetoric, this election is no different than any other.

So, the two of us, both longtime career civil servants, have put together a “Survival Guide” for our career civil service colleagues to help them weather the transition. Some of those pearls of wisdom are summarized below, but the full text of our guide can be found at the links provided after our bios below. Our secret is to recommend that career civil servants use a little bureaucratic jujitsu to leverage the energy and enthusiasm of a new appointee/boss...to get on his or her side of the equation (where public servants belong anyway) and focus on ensuring that the services they provide will continue, and perhaps even improve.

In that regard, we do not advise our colleagues to go underground to thwart the agenda of a new appointee or a new administration, but rather, to take the “high road” and help a new appointee achieve constructive and lawful changes.

At the same time, we also encourage the new administration to avoid the myth that all civil servants are Democrats and should thus be “cleansed” from civil service ranks. Rather, most civil servants believe that “government is the answer,” and these days, there is only one political party that seems to agree with that. That was not always the case—after all, it was Republicans that first came up with the principle of a merit-based civil service—so the current GOP administration should remember that.

In any event, we recommend the following eight survival steps:

Rule 1: The Interregnum—what to do before the transition. Stay calm—career civil servants are still the incumbents, and they should act like it. While changes like reassignments or issuances such as a Schedule F 2.0 may loom, they need to remember that they have some time. So use it. And in that regard, we would avoid “Acting” roles (especially now, unless established by the new administration), as they come with visibility, and that can make career folks a target when a permanent nominee arrives. And if they’re already in such a role, they need to maintain a low profile.
Rule 2: Accumulate information only career civil servants. As career civil servants, their expertise is invaluable. So, they should take charge of the new appointee’s "onboarding" process, providing detailed data, metrics, and insights demonstrating their value. And they should control the narrative by ensuring they’re involved in developing and presenting key documents and discussions, not to censor or spin them, but to send the message that they’re the appointee’s partner.
Rule 3: Dust off their own agenda. Like any good civil servant we’ve ever known, we’re betting our colleagues have observed all kinds of inefficiencies that could use correcting, and now’s the best time to identify those that, like the Venn Diagram below, correspond to the changes that both they AND their appointee have in mind. In other words, they need to find the common “low-hanging fruit” (even if that fruit is big!) for them to champion, preferably as a political/career team.

Rule 4: First impressions matter. We recommend that career civil servants build rapport and trust early by affirmatively meeting with the new boss on his or her terms. Don’t wait for them to ask, and they should make sure they’re seen as clearly there to help, not hinder. Show genuine interest in the appointee’s vision through open-ended questions such as: “What attracted you to this role?” and “What are your biggest priorities for the next six months?”
Rule 5: Look for and pursue common wins. Career civil servants should showcase projects that demonstrate their ability to execute the new administration’s vision. In that regard, they should reframe their proposals to align with the appointee’s agenda, even presenting them as new, joint solutions to shared priorities. Use language that reflects their values, such as efficiency, transparency, or impact, to establish themselves as a trusted advisor. And they should jointly celebrate accomplishments through large and small recognition events. Visible wins foster better relationships and trust between career and political appointees.
Rule 6: Help the new boss cope with “strategic exhaustion.” We know that change in government is inherently complex and time-consuming. In other words, it’s complicated. Career civil servants need to ensure that the new appointee fully understands the numerous bureaucratic checks that make even small changes feel laborious. Highlight the importance of ensuring "due diligence" in that regard, in part to manage the appointee’s expectations. In our experience, most appointees don’t realize they’re already a year or two behind the curve, at least when it comes to budgets, so we’d remind them that substantial changes often take years and emphasize the need for patience and process.
Rule 7: Always have a Plan B. Not every transition will go smoothly. We are not so naïve as to suggest that to be the case. Some career civil servants will face an appointee who refuses to respect legal or ethical boundaries, so they need to be prepared to leave. For those eligible, early or regular retirement may be an option. For others, they should explore career alternatives like consulting or contracting, academia, or private-sector roles. Treat the challenge as an opportunity for growth. But above all, they must start looking early, even if they never have to execute their escape plan.
Rule 8: Think about those below. Finally we’ve fund that during times of high stress and uncertainty, our colleagues need to remember that the need for communication with their employees doubles, yet stress and urgency instinctively cut that communication in half. We hope our colleagues resist this instinct. Even if they don’t have all the answers to their employees’ concerns, it’s OK to say, "I don’t know." We also suggest that they where possible, they walk around (even virtually) and "show the flag." These actions can reassure employees far more effectively than formal memos or emails ever can.

In that regard, career civil servants should never, ever say “you can’t do that” to a new appointee...that is exactly what that new appointee expects them to say. Our advice is to get into the details: what the law says, what agency regulations say, and most importantly, if they want to change one or both, how they can best go about it. Make it about "how" and not "what."

Instead, career civil servants need to think seriously about those personal “red lines” that cannot be compromised; for example, (1) staying on the legal side of what the law or regulation currently says about their program or policy area, as well as how to go about legally changing them; and (2) perhaps most importantly, where their own conscience stands in a particular matter. And if either of those "red lines" are crossed, they must be prepared to say so to the new boss. After all, some appointees are zealous and won’t take “This violates the law, but here’s how to change it” as an answer. So, you should ALWAYS have a way out -- another government job, a sabbatical, retirement, a position in the private or nonprofit sector, etc.

Bottom line up front: The survival of an individual career civil servant still comes down to the relationship that he or she develops with their new appointee-boss, even in the headliner agencies like the Education Department and the FDA. Our guide will help them prove their worth to the new administration—and get through those initial difficult days and weeks and beyond without compromising on the law or the essential services they provide to fellow citizens (or their sanity). After all, we are willing to bet that the citizens they serve will still want—indeed, demand—those services, so if career civil servants are there to serve, how can they best work with a new appointee to do that?

There’s a lot more in our Survival Guide, but in all of this, our best advice is just not to panic. We think civil servants ought to take advantage of the time the law and/or custom gives them...they should still get a reasonable “get acquainted” period (if they’re in the SES, the law says it’s as long as 120 days), and we suggest that they use it to prove their “worth” to a new appointee...in other words, to get on the same side as that appointee by focusing on how that appointee can legally achieve what he or she wants to do. And know that career civil servants are in a position to do so because they’ve demonstrated the innate skills to "tame the tornado" during and after transition.

Ron Sanders is a former career senior federal executive of more than 20 years, serving as HR chief for DOD’s civilian workforce, IRS, and the US Intelligence Community, as well as associate director of OPM and Chair of the Federal Salary Council. He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the American Society for Public Administration’s National Council.

Mike Mears is a former GE executive and CIA operations officer who graduated from West Point and Harvard Business School; he started and ran the CIA Leadership Academy and retired as CIA’s Chief of HR. His upcoming book is CERTAINTY: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation.

The authors’ complete Survival Guide can be found at www.publicavirtu.com.

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Schedule F 2.0...can it be that bad?

Ronald Sanders — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 06:00:00 -0500

Most civil servants are worried about what the Trump administration is going to do with respect to a new (and potentially improved) Schedule F, especially as its appointees and associates attempt to ‘deconstruct’ the administrative state.

Well, I’m here to tell you that Schedule F "the sequel," is coming. It’s inevitable. I can’t tell you whether it’s coming right away—that is, on Inauguration Day or the day after—or six months from now, after the While House has undone the speed bump the Office of Personnel Management put in its way. But it’s coming, and soon, to a theater near you!

However, whether that’s good or bad depends on two things: 1. how it’s going to be implemented; and 2. where you sit in that administrative state.

With regard to the latter, I’d worry if I were in a headline-grabbing agency, like the Education Department or the Food and Drug Administration, but even there, I’m betting that you’re going to have a chance to prove your worth to even the most draconian of rightwing reformers. However, while I know that that’s easier said than done, I’d suggest that you reach out to a good lawyer, your union or your favorite professional association, like the Senior Executives Association, or even to me, for advice on your individual case.

That said, I’m personally even more worried about my initial concern; that is, how a new Schedule F will be wielded in Trump 2.0...and by whom. Here’s the question before those vying for that role. Is a new Schedule F going to be all about assuring policy alignment (that’s GOOD!) or will it be all about partisan political loyalty (that would be very BAD!)? That’s a very sharp two-edged sword, with the first edge benign at worst. But the second is decidedly malign, and that is what we should all be afraid of.

And unfortunately, in my view, the potential for abuse far outweighs everything else, at least for now. So, it’s likely going to be bad. But is it as bad as some say? Is it the "end of democracy as we know it" bad? As I said, that depends, not so much because of the wording on its face (if we go by the language in the original), but because of those who could potentially implement it.

On its face, Schedule F was all about holding career civil servants accountable for faithfully executing democratically established policies, and if read that way, it was (and would be) spot on. However, its implementation remains open to interpretation, and in so doing, it creates a very sharp two-edge sword, between entirely legitimate policy alignment on one hand—something every president should expect of those in the career civil service—and blind, partisan political loyalty on the other.

To be sure, career public servants have a duty to provide "frank and fearless" advice (as the Aussies say) to their political superiors, in other words, to ‘speak truth to power’ to elected and appointed officials. And those they speak to have a concomitant duty to listen. But at the end of the day, if the latter says ‘do what I want’ anyway, and what they want is lawful, career civil servants are duty-bound to salute, or leave.

We work in a democracy. That means that when ‘We the People’ speak, career civil servants are duty-bound to act accordingly.

I know this too is an oversimplification. After all, Congress makes laws that are ambiguous, sometimes deliberately so, and the Supreme Court notwithstanding, you need career experts in a particular policy or program to administer them. And therein lies the danger of the two-edged sword, the gray area between policy alignment and partisan political loyalty.

I personally think this is all unnecessary. While all of us have personal opinions, those of us in the public service can and do manage to leave those opinions at the door. We are (or should be) there to do the people’s business. In the words of one of my colleagues (himself a career public servant who’s served in both uniform and mufti), quoting from the Band of Brothers TV series, we “salute the uniform, not the man.” Substitute "office" for "uniform" and you have what the vast majority of us think.

However, I fear that other, equally sharp edge to a new Schedule F. By "excepting" certain career civil servants from regular, competitive civil service rules (including the too-many, too-complex protections they now enjoy), it would allow nefarious actors to recruit and retain only political loyalists in those “policymaking and policy-influencing” positions that today are filled by careerists on merit. And that doesn’t even begin to worry about those in the career SES and equivalent, who, according to OPM, aren’t even covered by all this.

Bottom line: A new Schedule F (and the mindset that comes with it) could allow partisanship to permeate the ranks of apolitical civil servants.

In that regard, there’s the longstanding myth that most civil servants are Democrats and must be ‘cleansed’ by a GOP administration if it is to succeed. However, it is far more nuanced. In my view, the career civil service is populated by those who believe that government is the answer—after all, that’s why they’re there—not (as my namesake Ronald Reagan once said) the problem, and that bias happens to be most compatible with today’s Democratic party. But that does NOT mean that most career civil servants are Democrats. I know too many who are not. So, the White House should not buy into that myth.

To be sure, a new president should expect policy alignment AND political loyalty from those he or she appoints. But by the same token, new presidents should not want a career bureaucracy that tells them what they want to hear, out of fear for their jobs. We saw that phenomenon in the U.S. Intelligence Community before the 2003 Iraq invasion, and it is not what the public should want.

And if that creates tension between elected and appointed politicians and those in the career civil service, that is healthy. Because at the end of the day, civil servants still work in a hierarchy, and if a superior in the Executive Branch and/or in the Congress gives us a lawful "do it anyway" order or piece of legislation, we can either follow it...or we can leave.

I know that’s much easier said than done—laws and lawful orders contain too many ambiguities and contradictions—but the principle is valid, so we should at least start there.

Thus, politics and partisanship are not bad things, but they are part of a larger system of checks and balances, and the career civil service is part of the latter. So, even if a new Schedule F is inevitable, it remains to be seen whether it will be used for "good" policy alignment or for "bad" political loyalty. I’ve always been told to hope for the best but plan for the worst, so while I’m hoping for the former, I’m expecting the latter. I hope I’m wrong.

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Why plugging leaks sometimes means protecting leakers

Ronald Sanders and Steven Lenkart — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 14:42:54 -0400

Cybersecurity breaches have become ubiquitous, almost as common as street crime (and almost as commonly perpetrated by such entities as criminal gangs, state actors, and everything in between). And sadly, most of the breaches that ensue are the result of social engineering. But the consequences really matter, and that is especially true if you’re a member of the U.S. military, a federal employee or a government contractor.

If you’re one of those things, you possess valuable information (or access to it) and are part of what cybersecurity specialists call the ‘attack surface.’ So, chances are you’re a target, especially if a counterintelligence intrusion is perpetrated by the proxy of a nation-state with nefarious intentions.

For example, who among us hasn’t unthinkingly connected with someone on Linked In or Facebook who we don’t know...and may not even exist as a real person. The CI experts call this a counterintelligence ‘dangle,’ and it can lead to all sorts of complications. Unfortunately, this happens all the time, in the spirit of information-sharing and collaboration with colleagues both known and unknown, and it is integral to the scientific process.

In our view, it is better for counterintelligence professionals to know about attempts to compromise cleared personnel than not. And it is better to encourage self-reporting than to drive victims ‘underground’ in efforts to hide what they did.

But it is also risky from a CI and national security standpoint. And this excludes those individuals who are deliberately party to a cyber breach, like Edward Snowden or the young, naïve airman who revealed secret war plans simply to show off.

Congress must step into the breach (pun intended). It must provide a form of amnesty that, where appropriate, forgives these shadowy practices. Such a law would encourage the self-reporting of any potential foreign or domestic cyber/CI intrusion without disproportionate punishment to the self-reporter.

In our view, it is better for CI professionals to know about these attempts than not. And it is better to encourage self-reporting than to drive victims ‘underground’ in efforts to hide what they did. That is especially true when a military member, federal employee or government contractor has access to what the ‘dangle’ seeks: protected, confidential, sensitive and/or classified information.

Such a law must also take the seriousness of a breach into account, with the ‘forgiveness’ proportional to potential damage. But in our view, it takes more than the admonition “See something, say something” to do so, especially if employees are punished if and when they do say something.

At its most basic level, such legislation must protect employees from the suspension of a security clearance, their access to sensitive/classified information or even their performance rating, if they report suspected activity that may be suspicious but not yet criminal.

Such ‘pre-crime’ activity may include receipt of a suspicious email, attachment, or online link (Freedom of Information Act requests are a favorite ‘attack vector’). Such voluntary self-reporting should receive full amnesty, at least in the first instance, as should any reporting of actual, observed activity, such as direct contact or other observed interaction by a suspicious person or organization.

And of course, such protections should be afforded to anyone who unknowingly or unwittingly facilitates the release of protected information, and upon realizing it, reports it after the fact. That’s bad, but it’s still not too late, because any CI professional will tell you that it’s better to know about a compromise — even after the fact, if immediate — than not.

Amnesty should also be considered even for someone who self-reports an intentional release of protected information because they or a family member or relative were under duress. This too is a favorite of cyber spies who prey on U.S. citizens with vulnerable extended families or relatives overseas, particularly if the self-report provides valuable or actionable CI information.

Of course, one must ask, “How many times should a person be forgiven?” That too depends on the gravity of the activity, as well as its frequency. Will more training help? Or is it time to come down hard on someone who commits too many mistakes?

Each and every case is different. Thus, while legislation may establish the principle of amnesty under certain circumstances, as well as a general framework, in our view, implementation must be left up to individual agencies dealing with individual cases – by CI professionals where they exist, or inspectors general where they may not.

And whenever a case has a critical national security impact, the agency should immediately bring in the FBI and the Intelligence Community.

The point is to avoid having agencies officially do or say things that no matter how well intentioned, inadvertently discourage self-disclosure. In extreme cases, termination and criminal prosecution may still be appropriate, but the counterintelligence value of a self-report must also be considered in any action against an individual.

Here’s the bottom line: Military members, federal employees, and government contractors with access to sensitive information must be able to ‘say something’ without fear of reprisal or disproportionate impact on their jobs. Otherwise, they will hide, and we will read about the disclosure in the media. Better to prevent such disclosures in the first place.

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The 3 duties of public servants

Ronald Sanders — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 06:00:00 -0400

A lot is going on in Washington right now, and much of it ultimately comes down to the actions of career public officials. As they respond to the vagaries of politics—whether it’s a return-to-office edict or a potential government shutdown—these officials are squarely in the public eye. So are the political appointees they report to.

As an admittedly old school career executive, as well as a former political appointee, here’s what I learned from some bureaucratic legends on both sides of the ambiguous divide between politics and administration. Among other things, those people taught me that career execs and appointees share three fundamental duties that they simply cannot shirk.

Career executives must speak truth to power. They have a solemn responsibility to give political appointees and elected officials their best advice, without fear of putting their jobs at risk. They take an oath to do so. And that’s the problem with proposals like Schedule F, which would replace much of the career civil service with political loyalists potentially motivated to tell elected and appointed officials whatever they want to hear.

In giving their best advice, career execs are entitled to their personal political opinions, but those opinions cannot consciously color what they tell an appointee. Senior career officials must interpret laws and rules that are often ambiguous, but they still have a duty to speak the truth (as they know it) to those they report to. That takes courage, but it comes with the job.

Political appointees have a duty to listen. In our system of government, political appointees also have a responsibility, one based on the oath they take: to take the advice they are given by career execs into account—whether they like what they hear or not—before they act. This is every bit as important as the duty that career executives have.

And it, too, takes courage. And while it might occur in an explicitly political context that makes due diligence hard on an appointee, I have no sympathy. That’s why appointees are appointed—to make the hard decisions. It’s too easy for appointees to dismiss the advice of career execs simply because they think the latter are just trying to preserve the status quo, or worse, are acting on behalf of some “deep state” conspiracy.

Both have a duty to make it work—and to revisit it if necessary. In our system of government, career execs are ultimately beholden to appointees and the elected officials they represent—within the limits of the law and a clear conscience. Consequently, it is their duty to respect the decisions appointees make and do their very best to make them work.

But that doesn’t mean blind obedience. Both career officials and appointees have a continuing duty to monitor and gather data on the implementation of decisions. And if that data—not just anecdotes but hard data—shows that a decision isn’t having its intended effect (or worse), both share a duty to revisit and modify it as necessary.

I’m not so naïve as to suggest that these judgments are easy. After all, appointees and career execs are human. Both may make imperfect public policy judgements that may later prove off the mark. And in so doing, both must also guard against self-fulfilling prophecies fueled by unrealistic stubbornness, political biases, or just plain “I told you so” sour grapes.

A career executive is duty-bound to help the appointee make his or her decision work. But both officials are also duty-bound to gather data and revisit it as necessary.

A Case Study

The return-to-office memo recently issued by White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients provides a great example of these three duties in action. Many have taken exception to the memo, arguing it puts federal agencies at a competitive disadvantage in recruiting talent in today’s competitive labor market.

However, I know that Zients has always respected the views of career execs. So I’m betting he heard the concerns expressed by lots of good government experts (including me), and ultimately decided to do something different. Something that was neither illegal nor immoral. And I’m confident he did so for reasons he believes are defensible. He has that right. And whether career execs like it or not, they are obligated to implement that decision to the best of their ability.

But as I said, both appointees and career execs also have a duty to continue gathering unbiased data regarding the impact of the decision. Or they can always leave.

What about “going underground” and attempting to thwart, undermine, or just plain ignore the decision? That’s an option, but I believe it goes against what career officials have pledged to do. I also know that’s easier said than done, and there are lots of gray areas in these situations. I’ve been there myself—after all, I resigned from an appointed position over Schedule F. But that’s the system we have.

Career executives are public servants, with emphasis on the “servants” part. They are not granted any sort of independent, stand-alone authority to “do what’s best for the American people.” (Unless, of course, the law empowers them to do so.) To suggest otherwise merely stokes fears of a deep state among Americans and their elected representatives.

Ronald Sanders is a former career senior federal executive of more than 20 years. He has served as chair of the Federal Salary Council, associate director of the Office of Personnel Management, and director of civilian personnel policy at the Defense Department, among other positions.

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Fixing accountability first: Another look at the Restore VA Accountability Act

Ronald Sanders — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 06:00:00 -0400

Legislation pending in the GOP-controlled House would make it easier to fire Veterans Affairs Department employees, and that has stirred up lots of debate recently. That bill—cannily entitled the Restore VA Accountability Act (H.R. 4278)—would allow the VA secretary to remove or demote certain employees, and for some, all but eliminate appeals to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Proponents say that legislation is necessary to rid VA of poor performers, while critics argue that VA already has all the tools necessary to do so today. The Senate has said as much in its own version of the legislation, just introduced this week.

However, in my view, we should not be so quick to condemn what the House’s VA legislation is trying to do. Its purported goals are worthwhile—regardless of the motivation of some of its sponsors—but as in all things, the devil is in the details.

What’s driving the legislation?

There isn’t space enough here to catalog all those details. I will leave that to the lawyers, scholars and legislators involved. But suffice it to say that almost everyone in the civil service echo chamber (of which I’m a card-carrying member) is up in arms over what that bill seeks to do.

Contrary to most in that echo chamber, there are some of us who believe that we should not blithely condemn this effort. No matter how flawed its specific proposals (or the motivation of some of its sponsors) may be, on its face it is intended to improve the accountability of VA employees, and that’s a principle upon which we should all be able to agree. Moreover, as most career managers and executives know all too well (especially those in the vast VA hospital system), it is too hard to fire or demote a poorly performing or behaving federal employee.

It’s time to admit that publicly, and more importantly, to do something about it. If we don’t, other reforms that many (me included) want to see for the federal civil service system—reforms like simpler, speedier hiring and more competitive pay—will be dead on arrival on a hyper-partisan Capitol Hill.

Statistics, anecdotes and the truth on the ground

I know what the scholars and the statistics say: that thousands of federal employees (including hundreds in VA) are removed each year, at rates comparable to the private sector. Those statistics also tell us that agencies win almost all the cases that are appealed to the MSPB and the Federal Circuit.

But those managers and executives on the front line know there’s more to it than that. High win rates are a sure tell that only slam dunk cases are being pursued, with agencies only going after the most obvious and egregious instances of poor performance and behavior, the ones that third parties like the MSPB and/or the Federal Circuit cannot deny. That means they leave others—including those that still have an adverse mission impact—alone.

Moreover, while it’s anecdotal (not to mention politically incorrect) to reveal what is an open secret, I’ve talked to too many VA hospital executives and managers who say that those statistics notwithstanding, (a) they have lots of employees who are not performing up to anyone’s standards—least of all their patients—either in terms of performance and/or behavior, but (b) “it’s just not worth the time and trouble” to hold them accountable to those standards. So, they let them pass.

The other telling fact is that co-workers know this as well. As the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey shows year in and year out, almost one-third of all respondents see examples of poor workplace behavior or performance that are left alone, because it’s too hard to address them. And for their part, savvy managers and executives know how to cope with some of those by employing other informal tools—such as reassigning or even promoting a problem employee to another work unit, so that employee becomes someone else’s problem. None of that shows up in the statistics.

Don’t abandon the system, rationalize it

The evidence suggests that we need a far less legalistically arcane and procedurally protracted means of holding poor performers accountable, especially in ways that don’t subject the moving party to facetious counterclaims—like retaliation or discrimination—that may not only put them on the defensive but may even deter them from taking action in the first place. And this includes VA executives and managers who have sometimes found themselves the target of legislative ire, particularly for not taking their subordinates to task.

This is not an argument for making VA workers (or any federal employees) “at will” like their many non-union private sector counterparts. No, these career civil servants—both seniors and frontline employees alike—want and deserve protection against arbitrary actions that are not rooted in mission and merit. But not to the point where accountability for results becomes procedurally and practically unattainable, a “nice to have” but largely theoretical afterthought.

So, is the House’s VA legislation—which looks almost certain to pass that chamber, along with the even more problematic Public Service Reform Act—the answer? In my view, no. Both H.R. 4278 and the Public Service Reform Act—which would make all executive branch employees “at will”—go far too far and most likely won’t get past the Senate. So, where does that leave us? With the status quo, with all that that entails. Our nation’s veterans deserve better than that.

VA’s mission is just too important

Not all the ideas set forth in the new VA Accountability Act should be dissed or dismissed out of hand. And more importantly, the substantive (as opposed to the political) reasons behind them need to be more thoughtfully considered, perhaps by a bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission that examines accountability and other reforms necessary to support a truly professional, high-performing 21st century federal civil service—one that is responsive not to a particular political agenda but to the responsibilities and authorities given them by the Congress.

Such a system shouldn’t protect those who can’t (or won’t) meet legitimate standards of performance or conduct, and who use “the process” as a shield against accountability. But by the same token, hardworking VA (and other federal) civil servants should be afforded legitimate protections against arbitrary, vindictive managers who themselves may be poor performers. The answer is somewhere in between the two extremes—between status quo on one hand, and “at will” employment on the other—and serious policymakers need to find that sweet spot. It demands more than a “just say no” response.

Ronald Sanders is a former career senior federal executive of more than 20 years. He is also a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the American Society for Public Administration’s National Council. He has served as chair of the Federal Salary Council, associate director of OPM, director of civilian personnel policy at the Defense Department, chief human resources officer at the Internal Revenue Service, and the Intelligence Community’s first associate director of national intelligence for human capital.

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There’s something DHS can do to help civilian agencies fight cyberattacks

Ronald Sanders — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 10:52:05 -0400

When I read about the latest cyber breach affecting several domestic federal agencies, I was once again perturbed by the actions—and lack thereof—that the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency took in response. They were acting with the best of intentions, but I believe there’s more they can do under such circumstances.

CISA officials believe that they are limited to warning civilian agencies about a cyberattack, telling them to make responding to it a priority, and offering technical expertise if asked. What they don’t do is what U.S. Cyber Command would do if this were a breach of a national security system: Deploy one or more of its crack cyber mission teams, staffed by military, civilian and contractor cyber experts, to attack the problem (and hopefully the attacker), under CYBERCOM Commander Gen. Paul Nakasone’s “Defend Forward” doctrine.

CISA could develop the ability to do the same. In my view, it has had the statutory authority to do so since 2013. It could have established a cybersecurity service with hundreds of employees—all working for CISA and as a result, much better paid using the 2013 statutory authority. These could have been dispatched to domestic agencies that are under attack even before they knew an attack had occurred. Most if not all of those agencies would welcome the help.

That’s what the Defense Department does, under similar authority granted to it by Congress in 2014. But instead of waiting almost 10 years to exercise that authority, DOD created a Cybersecurity Excepted Service two years later and has been using it ever since to hire civilian cyber experts to support CYBERCOM’s military cyber mission teams today.

If the recent cybersecurity breach would have happened in the national security space, we might not have even heard about it, but whether we had or not, you can rest assured the CMTs would be on top of it.

Why can’t CISA do the same? The excepted service authority Congress gave the agency as part of the fiscal 2014 National Defense Authorization Act in late 2013 envisioned just this sort of employment and deployment of personnel as a way to combat domestic cyberattacks, from cyberterrorism to plain old criminal activity. I should know. I led a team of senior subject matter experts who recommended that DHS exercise such authority.

But that’s not what DHS eventually established. In its long-awaited Cyber Talent Management System, DHS chose to take a far narrower view, employing its excepted service authority primarily to protect internal DHS systems. And the agency has been slow to implement even that more modest approach.

Here’s the good news, at least going forward: CISA Director Jen Easterly and her team can change all this. They’ll need to be a bit risk-averse, because DHS lawyers may stand in the way. But with all due respect to them, this is a policy call.

Easterly has the advantage of coming from the National Security Agency, where they’ve been exercising similar excepted service authority for years, using the Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System that CYBERCOM easily imported when it came to hiring and deploying their mission teams.

Where is the Office of Personnel Management on all this? It’s been sitting on a multi-agency special salary rate package for federal domestic cyber experts for months, waiting on debt ceiling relief and resolution of the federal government’s fiscal 2024 budget. Meanwhile, NSA and CYBERCOM are busy raising their civilian cyber warrior salaries to respond to a hypercompetitive labor market. All they need is permission from a DOD undersecretary to make those adjustments. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Actions matter, and one place to start would be for CISA to say that it will staff and deploy its own cyber mission teams as soon as possible—not just in emergencies, but on a long-term, sustainable basis, using the authority Congress gave it 10 years ago. We don’t have the luxury of waiting any longer.

Ronald Sanders is the former staff director for the Florida Center for Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and a member of the Association for Public Administration’s National Council. He has also served as chair of the Federal Salary Council, Associate Director of OPM, IRS Chief Human Resources Officer, and Associate Director of National Intelligence for Human Capital.

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