Government Executive - Authors - Tom Shoop

Why the next president must rebuild, not just restore, the administrative state

Tom Shoop — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently addressed the issue of what happens after the Trump administration’s assault on America’s administrative state is over. The work needed to restore the country’s governing capacity, he argued, involves more than just putting the bureaucratic Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The next president can’t “go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say: ‘Here you go. I give you the world as it looked in 2023,’” Buttigieg said.

The Trump team is “destroying a lot of good, important things,” he added. “They’re destroying some useless things, too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.”

The list of “good, important things” destroyed by Elon Musk’s chainsaw-wielding attack on government is long:

More than 200,000 federal jobs were eliminated. That includes 7,000 employees at the Social Security Administration, another 7,000 at the IRS, 3,500 at the Food and Drug Administration, 1,200 at the National Institutes of Health, and 1,300 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. No federal departments escaped the slashing, and some agencies saw virtually all of their positions eliminated.
The U.S. Agency for International Development was dismantled, bringing an abrupt halt to food aid and disease prevention efforts all over the world.
Employees at other agencies, such as the National Nuclear Security Administration, were fired without an understanding of exactly what they did, necessitating a panicked rehiring effort.
Contracts and grants were summarily canceled, sometimes after using rudimentary artificial intelligence programs to identify programs affiliated with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

When DOGE burst onto the scene, chaos ensued. Yet the crusade failed to come close to Musk’s promise to cut up to $2 trillion from the federal budget. DOGE’s claim to have saved taxpayers more than $200 billion is suspect due to accounting errors. And even if that figure is accurate, it represents a small percentage of the federal budget. DOGE was a thoroughly haphazard operation, lacking any significant degree of planning or strategy. It operated according to the whims of Musk—then one of Trump’s strongest allies—and of Trump himself.

In that sense, DOGE was a key part of the president’s shift to what scholar Jonathan Rauch has argued is a form of government new to the United States: patrimonialism. This type of regime is based on personal loyalty to a country’s leader, driven by the leader’s ability to dole out rewards and punishments. This explains why Trump has moved so aggressively to expand his own power via executive orders and to politicize the career civil service, especially at the senior executive level.

The enemy of patrimonialism is bureaucracy, a well-functioning administrative state that is not driven by personal fealty to a ruler. A highly functioning country of the size and influence of the United States needs bureaucracy. It requires rules and regulations, not just norms, to provide guardrails against ill-advised policymaking and public administration—or worse, corruption and illegality. It needs a large cadre of nonpartisan experts to administer complex programs and provide support to policymakers.

It’s easy to take for granted what the federal government, and its attendant bureaucracy, have accomplished. In just the last two decades, federal agencies have:

Facilitated the development of a covid vaccine
Averted financial catastrophe in 2008
Expanded access to health insurance
Improved children’s health
Increased infrastructure investment
Significantly improved highway safety

That’s just a short list of achievements at the federal level. The first step toward ensuring government can take on these kinds of challenges again is restoration. That doesn’t mean trying to piece things together exactly as they were before, but it does involve reopening shuttered agencies like USAID and rehiring the workers necessary for agencies like the IRS to do their jobs.

In their popular and influential book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson offer a critique of bureaucracy from the left. Government at all levels, they argue, has prized procedure over results. Layer upon layer of regulations have made it too easy for opponents of initiatives to manipulate systems so that action is all but impossible.

It’s not just conservatives who feel this way. None other than Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., said last year, “If the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy—absolutely correct. It is terrible. … That is common sense.”

The solution to that problem is not dramatically fewer bureaucrats and more constraints on their actions. It’s redesigning systems so they don’t overemphasize laudable goals such as fairness and diversity at the expense of efficient operations and real-world results.

For example, it has long been too hard to hire federal employees, and to fire those that aren’t measuring up. That’s a result of risk aversion baked into a system encrusted with restrictions on managers’ ability to manage. The solution is more trust in them to do their jobs and to help elected leaders implement their agendas while following the rule of law.

This kind of recalibration of government is essential. And it can’t be accomplished with a chainsaw.

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That time one agency shut down for one day and changed government forever

Tom Shoop — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 13:25:00 -0400

The latest in an intermittent series looking back at groundbreaking, newsmaking, appalling and amusing events in government history.

The Federal Trade Commission, like other federal agencies, posted a simple notice on its website at the start of fiscal 2026: “The FTC is closed as of midnight Wednesday, October 1, 2025, due to the lapse in government funding.”

What the notice did not say was that the announcement came during the year of a grim anniversary for the FTC: Forty-five years ago, it became the first government agency ever to shut down due to a lack of appropriations. The closure, affecting only the FTC, lasted just one day, but would, sadly, become a common occurrence in government. And future shutdowns frequently wouldn’t be resolved so quickly.

Before 1980, shutdowns simply never happened. The operating assumption in government was that Congress would never have intended for agency operations to grind to a halt because of its failure to resolve funding disputes in a timely fashion. Such scenarios had in fact unfolded on several occasions in history, and all were expeditiously resolved. When agencies technically ran out of money, they simply continued normal operations until lawmakers provided new funds.

Then, on April 25, 1980, along came then-Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti with a landmark opinion: Continuing to operate an agency without official appropriations, he ruled in response to a lawmaker’s query, constituted a violation of an obscure law called the 1884 Antideficiency Act.

It was all downhill from there.

Just five days later, the Civiletti opinion got its first test, when the FTC ran out of funds. At the time, the agency received its appropriations independent of and on a different cycle than other federal agencies.

Members of Congress had delayed extending appropriations for the FTC, because they were mired in a battle over the agency’s enforcement powers. That battle was poised for a resolution, with the House Appropriations Committee taking up a measure providing $55 million in funding for the agency. But some representatives dug in their heels, insisting on withholding funds until President Jimmy Carter signed a measure sharply limiting the FTC’s authority to regulate businesses.

Ordinarily, that would have meant business as usual until the dispute was resolved. But not in the wake of Civiletti’s decree. "We are in the absurd situation of having to follow the attorney general's opinion," an FTC official told the Washington Post. "We intend to follow it. People who come to work will have the obligation of shutting down the FTC."

Very few of the agency’s 1,600 employees fell into that category, so almost all of them were furloughed. Eventually, a laundry list of employees excepted from furloughs would evolve, including those whose work involves the protection of life and property. (These are not, as is commonly assumed, “essential” workers.)

Today, the FTC’s shutdown guidance document runs to 14 pages, detailing which agency operations will continue during a shutdown. More than 400 of the agency’s 1,200 employees are excepted from furloughs. They are defined as those who “meet the demands of law enforcement actions to protect against immediate harm to life or government property interests or protect the commission’s excepted personnel, property and IT infrastructure.” That includes 200 employees at the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, which oversees major company mergers, and 77 at its Bureau of Consumer Protection.

In 1980, by contrast, very few exceptions were made to the rule that employees had to stop doing the FTC’s business.

Federal marshals showed up at FTC offices on April 30 to ensure that nobody was working. The General Services Administration’s Federal Protective Service, which provides security at government buildings, sent a message to its field offices that the FTC had been “terminated,” and that it would secure FTC sites. A series of hearings, a major court appearance and all agency travel plans were canceled.

The self-defeating nature of shutdowns became apparent immediately. "It's basically idiotic," then-FTC Chairman Michael Perschuk told reporters. "It's a waste of taxpayers' dollars."

Lawmakers quickly recognized the absurdity of shuttering even a single federal agency. They quickly passed an authorization bill for the FTC, and then provided emergency funding so it could continue operations. The whole process unfolded in the course of a single day.

But that day would mark the creation of a political tool that would be weaponized to bedevil government and traumatize its employees for decades to come.

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For DOGE, it was all in the name

Tom Shoop — Fri, 30 May 2025 07:00:00 -0400

In retrospect, it was all right there from the beginning, in the name.

The official moniker for Elon Musk’s assault on government—the U.S. DOGE Service—proved to be perfectly fitting for what looks like an already sputtering crusade. It’s a play on an ancient meme that’s more corny than clever, a dad joke masquerading as edgy humor. But what’s really telling is the name of the organization with its acronyms spelled out:

The United States Department of Government Efficiency Service.

That’s what you get when you hijack an existing agency (the U.S. Digital Service) and repurpose it as an inside joke: A name that ironically telegraphs redundancy and is an exercise in self-mockery. It’s altogether fitting that this operation was run by a man who publicly wielded a chainsaw to tout his effort, and in case anyone didn’t get the metaphor, yelled, “This is the chainsaw of the bureaucracy! Chainsaw!”

Musk announced Wednesday that his days leading DOGE were over. But the effort, he said, “will only increase over time.” That’s unlikely. Without a high-profile leader like Musk, DOGE will probably go the way of the many reform efforts that have preceded it, achieving small victories in the background while agencies and White House officials make their own decisions about how to structure their operations and workforces.

In his brief tenure, though, Musk and company wreaked havoc with the federal government and the people who work in it. Some of the DOGE team’s efforts were deliberately terrifying: mass layoffs of federal employees, attempts to unilaterally roll back government spending, and the shutdown of organizations that aren’t even part of the executive branch.

Other DOGE initiatives were simply silly, such as a requirement that all federal employees send a weekly email listing what they had done that week. (That directive, and its empty threat to treat noncompliance as a form of resignation, was so preposterous that many federal entities simply ignored it.)

Musk promised that his effort would deliver unprecedented savings: $2 trillion. That goal was almost immediately slashed in half, and reclassified as more of an aspiration. Then it was rounded down even more drastically, to a mere $150 billion. By mid-May, DOGE claimed to have hit that target, although its math has been dubious.

It was to be expected that the DOGE team didn’t understand, much less respect, the basic principles of American governance. But the group of tech whiz kids Musk assembled didn’t even understand relatively simple technological issues like the Social Security Administration’s database structure, causing them to see hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud that simply wasn’t there.

That’s sad, because there are significant issues with waste, fraud and abuse in federal programs. Musk’s team could have sat down with the folks at the Government Accountability Office to talk about that. Then, working with Cabinet secretaries to wield, in Trump’s terms, a scalpel rather than a hatchet, they could have come up with specific plans to cut waste and fraud, and begun implementing them.

But they didn’t do that. Instead, operating under the assumption that not only waste and fraud, but incompetence, were rampant, the Musketeers descended on agencies and hacked away at spending and staffing. When they hunted for genuine abuse, they rarely found it. When one DOGE staffer assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs concluded that “the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest,” he was fired.

So far, DOGE has only been successful in one of its objectives: decimating and traumatizing the federal workforce. For that, all of us will pay in both the short and long term.

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That time when calling a president ‘old’ was a compliment

Tom Shoop — Fri, 09 May 2025 09:55:30 -0400

In last year’s presidential election, the issue of age played a prominent role. Joe Biden was 81 at the time he dropped out of the race, a fact that Donald Trump never missed an opportunity to highlight. Trump himself was 78 at the time of his second inauguration in January, the oldest person ever to take the oath of office as the nation’s chief executive.

“Old” was an epithet in the race, and in American politics generally. But believe it or not, there was a time–and a rather lengthy one, at that–when a colloquial honorific bestowed upon a president that began with “old” was a high honor. Its connotation (most of the time) was wisdom, experience, resolve and trusted leadership.

Thus, for example, we have Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson, so designated for being as tough in battle as that type of hardwood.

One of his predecessors, John Adams, was sometimes called Old Oak. His son, John Quincy was referred to as Old Man Eloquent, a nod to his speaking skill–which also led to another moniker, Old Sink or Swim, taken from a turn of phrase in one of his addresses. Military hero Zachary Taylor earned the nickname Old Rough and Ready.

By the 20th century, the tradition had all but died out. Herbert Hoover was sometimes known as the Grand Old Man, but that had more to do with his being a member of the Grand Old Party than for his own checkered record.

While the “old” appendage was frequently a badge of honor, in some cases, it was used with tongue firmly in cheek. Consider the case of James Buchanan, widely viewed as one of the most ineffectual presidents ever to hold the office. His nickname?

Old Public Functionary.

The sad part is that Buchanan gave the moniker to himself. In his 1859 State of the Union message to Congress, with the country sliding inexorably toward civil war, Buchanan had this to say:

Let me implore my countrymen, North and South, to cultivate the ancient feelings of mutual forbearance and good will toward each other and strive to allay the demon spirit of sectional hatred and strife now alive in the land. This advice proceeds from the heart of an old public functionary whose service commenced in the last generation, among the wise and conservative statesmen of that day, now nearly all passed away, and whose first and dearest earthly wish is to leave his country tranquil, prosperous, united, and powerful.

Buchanan’s effort to place himself among the “wise and conservative statesman” of his time was in vain.

In a precursor to the modern era, some presidents were referred to as “old” simply because they were long in the tooth, at least by the standards of their times. William Henry Harrison was sometimes called Old Granny because he was the ripe old age of 68 when he took office in 1841.

As if to validate concerns about his ability to hold up to the rigors of the highest office in the land, Harrison fell ill and died after only a month in office.

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In Defense of Bureaucracy

Tom Shoop — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 10:00:00 -0400

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, recently criticized the Trump administration’s effort to shut down the Education Department, saying it “sends a message that the president doesn’t care about opportunity for all kids.” The better approach, she said, would be for all sides to work together to improve efficiency at the department.

“No one likes bureaucracy,” Weingarten said.

Not so: I like bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is what gave us the interstate highway system and the moon landing. (Private companies are still trying to put an unmanned lander on the moon, something the federal government did nearly 60 years ago—with a computing system based on reams of paper and slide rules.) More recently, bureaucracy gave us a COVID vaccine at—to coin a phrase—warp speed.

America’s political system is ossified, polarized and gridlocked. It’s bureaucratic structure is not. Neither, of course, is it particularly efficient. That’s because it’s not at all like a business. It is a sector of the economy unto itself. By its very nature, American government is not structured to be efficient. Rather, the system of checks and balances the founders laid as the foundation of the Constitution is designed to make sure a diversity of voices are heard, that government’s actions are equitable, and that all Americans are included in the opportunity to fulfill the promises of the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Bureaucracy makes the federal government a model employer, a dedicated administrator of programs, and a guardian of freedom and justice. It does this in spite of the fact that most of the tasks government takes on are thankless.

This comes at a price. Bureaucracy is inefficient. But chaos is much more inefficient. Allowing the president unfettered latitude to ignore the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives in Congress creates mass confusion both inside and outside of government. It also guarantees that the administrative state will have to be thoroughly restructured every few years as policy imperatives change with changes in presidential administrations.

Despite its inefficiencies, the list of government’s accomplishments in recent years alone is long and impressive. The bureaucratic apparatus not only developed the COVID vaccine, but expanded access to health insurance and averted a catastrophe in the country’s financial sector.

“Despite endless cartoons, jokes, editorials, soundbites and other rantings to the contrary, American bureaucracy does work, in fact quite well,” wrote public administration professor Charles Goodsell a few decades ago. “It is something like your five-year-old car. As an immensely complex mechanism made up of tens of thousands of parts, this possession is by no means perfect or totally reliable. But it starts more often than it stalls and completes the vast majority of trips you take.”

Goodsell’s words are still true today. Meanwhile, private corporations are rapidly adding layers of bureaucratic inefficiency. Anyone who has ever dealt with an insurance company, cable TV provider or airline can attest to that. Actions as simple as getting a prescription refilled can lead to harrowing, hours-long nightmares. Inexplicable and capricious decisions are routine.

None of this should be taken to suggest that governmental bureaucracy is perfect. The individuals who run the executive branch are sometimes incompetent or corrupt. There are serious ongoing issues with the country’s administrative systems, ranging from an antiquated job classification structure to a pervasive inability to deal effectively with poor performers. Nevertheless, waste, fraud and abuse make up a fraction of the cost of the bureaucratic system, which itself consumes a small portion of the federal budget.

To hijack the slogan favored by the movie character who epitomized unfettered capitalism: Bureaucracy, for lack of a better word, is good.

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Trump’s plan to slash the federal workforce isn’t the first, it’s just the worst

Tom Shoop — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 12:20:36 -0500

This president summarily fired tens of thousands of federal employees. This one cut more than 400,000 federal jobs, implementing a hiring freeze and dangling buyout offers to a vast swath of employees. This one opened thousands of government jobs to competition from the private sector. This one went so far as to issue an executive order requiring that all applicants for government jobs pass a loyalty test.

Now, in just a few weeks on the job, President Trump—via Elon Musk and his team of federal raiders—has found a way to outdo all of them. (Them being, in order: Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Truman.)

Musk and his squad at the United States Department of Government Efficiency Service—a name that even the most talented satirist couldn’t make up—have found a way to do what was once thought impossible, or illegal, or at least irrational: unload federal employees en masse. They have done so with a triple-meat-cleaver approach: a near-total hiring freeze, a buyout (sorry, “deferred resignation”) offer that may or may not be legal or affordable, and mass firings of workers without regard to their individual job performance or the importance of the work they do.

Most recent presidents have taken office having made promises to cut the fat out of the bureaucracy. But none have begun to do so in the absence of a rational plan, or even any consideration of the implications of what they were doing. That is, until now.

Musk has gone so far as to declare the federal workforce “unconstitutional,” so it’s no surprise that he and his team are taking a “fire first and ask questions later” approach to workforce reductions.

Their effort is radically different from the one taken by the previous Republican president: Trump himself. Back in 2017, federal management wonks were actually excited by a Trump initiative requiring agencies to develop restructuring plans aimed at reducing redundancy and improving efficiency in federal operations. Now that Trump has outsourced government reform to Musk and company, the emphasis is on simply slashing jobs, regardless of the consequences. The result is chaos.

Agencies have had to scramble to try to rehire employees in critical roles who were summarily fired. Other employees were let go after they accepted the deferred resignation offer, and are now left wondering if the promise of full pay through September still stands.

Very few of the jobs Musk and Trump are eliminating are filled by poor performers, or disloyal deep-staters, or involve operations that have been identified as unnecessary. And the monetary savings involved are trivial. After all, you could eliminate the entire federal workforce, and the reduction in spending would barely register in the federal budget.

As a percentage of American jobs, the federal workforce has been moving in one direction for decades—downward. It now stands at less than 2%. At the same time, we’ve asked federal agencies to take on more responsibilities—from airport security to combating deadly new diseases. And many of government’s already existing challenges have become more complex over time. Disaster response is just one example.

Mindlessly hacking away at the federal workforce is reckless, cruel and wasteful. Undoing the damage already done will take years. And Musk is just getting started.

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Jimmy Carter, architect of the last major civil service reform, dies at 100

Tom Shoop — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 16:57:00 -0500

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and arguably the most dedicated to reforming the operations of the government, died on Dec. 29 at his home in Plains, Georgia. He was 100.

Carter notched several signature policy achievements during his presidency, such as the Camp David Middle East peace accords and the Panama Canal treaty. But he was plagued by setbacks such as the Iran hostage crisis that limited him to a single term in office. Among the people who worked for the federal government during his administration, Carter is best remembered for his sweeping effort to reorganize agencies, update civil service rules and increase managerial accountability.

Carter as a Navy ensign. PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Carter’s service to the nation began when he was commissioned as a Navy ensign after his graduation from the United States Naval Academy in 1946. He later worked for noted naval officer Hyman Rickover at the beginning of the service’s nuclear submarine program. The death of Carter’s father in 1953 cut short his naval career, and he returned to his hometown of Plains, Georgia, to manage the family peanut farm.

In 1962, after service on the local school board, Carter won a seat in the Georgia senate. Eight years later, he was elected governor. Carter pledged to reduce the influence of lobbyists, improve the efficiency of state agencies and streamline government. He combined nearly 300 agencies, boards and commissions in Georgia into 22 entities, and introduced the concept of “zero-based budgeting”—in which agency funding is determined from scratch every year—to the state’s government.

Term-limited in the governorship, Carter turned his eye to national politics. In December 1974, he announced his candidacy for president. Running in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Carter’s positioning as an outsider who could fix government resonated with the public.

“I was his policy adviser for his long two-year race for president,” Stuart Eizenstat wrote in 2019, “and realized up close as we shaped the dimensions of his message and policies his deep commitment to government reform. Unlike his more liberal Democratic opponents for his party’s nomination, from his announcement speech…he focused less on promises for higher government spending after eight lean Republican years under presidents Nixon and Ford than on honesty in government, delivering government services more efficiently, and empowering government civil [servants] to do their jobs with less political interference.”

Carter made his efficiency and effectiveness crusade a centerpiece of his 1976 campaign, and rode his status as a fresh-faced reformer to an early lead in the Democratic primaries that he never relinquished. He went on to defeat Gerald Ford in the general election.

It had been decades since a president had taken government management reform seriously, and it wouldn’t happen again until the Clinton administration in 1992. But Carter ended up having more to show for his efforts in the form of legislative and organizational changes than any president before or since.

As soon as he took office, Carter began pushing for authority to reorganize agencies. He won it in 1977, partly by agreeing to lawmakers’ demand for a cadre of inspectors general to audit and investigate agency operations. The Reorganization Act was the vehicle for the creation of the Energy Department in 1977 and the Education Department in 1979.

Carter’s efforts sometimes put him at odds with federal workers and the labor unions who represented them. He pledged to “hold down the number of federal employees, reduce paperwork, and consolidate or eliminate as many of the small agencies and advisory groups as possible.” He also declared that the civil service system was “too often a bureaucratic maze which stifles the initiative of our dedicated government employees while inadequately protecting their rights.”

Carter delivers the State of the Union address in 1978.
Hum Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In 1978, Carter launched a push for congressional approval of the centerpiece of his government management agenda, civil service reform. In his State of the Union address in January, Carter said that “even the best organized government will only be as effective as the people who carry out its policies. For this reason, I consider civil service reform to be absolutely vital.” Vowing to “restore the merit principle” to government, he promised “better rewards for better performance without compromising job security.”

The Civil Service Reform Act was introduced in March 1978 and by October Carter had signed it into law. “I do not recall any other governmentwide management reforms so broad…being enacted at one time or in so short a time,” wrote Dwight Ink, a longtime high-ranking federal executive who helped lead the reform effort, in 2018.

In 1977, Carter had launched his Personnel Management Project, which came to involve 120 people, many of them experienced federal managers like Ink and experts in government management such as Alan “Scotty” Campbell, head of the Civil Service Commission.

They came up with reform legislation whose provisions included:

Creating the Senior Executive Service, a governmentwide corps of more than 8,000 top executives.
Basing the compensation of career executives and managers on individual and organizational performance.
Creating a new employee performance appraisal system.
Giving managers more authority over hiring, rewarding and disciplining employees.
Providing employees with what Carter called “fairer protection of their legitimate rights.”

After the law went into effect, Carter made it clear that its implementation was one of his top priorities. “As you know, I gave a great deal of personal attention to developing the reform legislation and supporting it in Congress,” he wrote in a memo to agency heads after it passed. “When I signed the bill at the White House, I publicly pledged ‘to implement the civil service reforms with efficiency and dispatch.’ I intend to give the same close personal attention to implementing the Reform Act as I did to its development and passage.”

The record of implementation of the Civil Service Reform Act by the Carter administration and subsequent administrations has been mixed. The SES hasn’t realized the vision of creating a cadre of expert managers who move freely among government’s siloed organizations. The attempt to strengthen the link between pay and performance also fell short, and agencies continue to struggle to establish fair and effective performance management systems. Now there’s a general consensus among public administration scholars that the civil service system is overdue for another overhaul.

For a fuller exploration of Jimmy Carter’s government reform initiatives, see “After 40 Years, A Look Back at the Unlikely Passage of Civil Service Reform,” by Charles S. Clark, July 2018.

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Good luck, Department of Government Efficiency

Tom Shoop — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0500

What did Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy do to deserve this?

They campaigned diligently for Donald Trump, defended his most controversial ideas, and even, in Musk’s case, tried to promote Trump-supported policies via a $1 million voter sweepstakes.

Their reward? Being put in charge of the new Department of Government Efficiency. It only sounds like a Cabinet department. In reality, it’s a fancy name for yet another blue-ribbon commission to examine how to make government smaller, better and less expensive. Presumably unintentionally, it also calls to mind the fake government agencies like the United States Business Regulations Department that scammers invoke to try to fleece consumers and businesses.

Ramaswamy does not think small when it comes to cutting government. During his brief run for the Republican nomination, he vowed to slash 75% of the federal workforce, relying on a novel interpretation of personnel laws and regulations that he says enables the president to act swiftly and with minimal oversight to lay off employees by the thousands.

“We expect certain agencies to be deleted outright,” said Ramaswamy after DOGE was unveiled. “We expect mass reductions-in-force in areas of the federal government that are bloated.”

Musk is no stranger to such an approach, having slashed three-quarters of the workforce at Twitter after he bought the company. But when it comes to cutting government spending, Musk has a rather large conflict of interest. Two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla, are major government contractors.

Now Musk and Ramaswamy are supposed to turn their attention to improving a government whose sheer size and diverse missions makes it difficult to change. Also, its legal and regulatory framework is organized around the principles of fairness and effectiveness, not efficiency.

Nevertheless, Trump has promised DOGE will complete a thorough overhaul of the federal colossus by July 4, 2026, as a 250th birthday present to the country. The effort could be the “Manhattan Project of our time,” Trump says—but he rather pointedly doesn’t promise that it will be. And the irony, of course, is that the Manhattan Project was an effort to spend money in pursuit of a governmental goal, not cut it.

At its inception, DOGE seems an awful lot like myriad other efforts over the years to highlight allegedly wasteful government spending—almost all of which ends up being in the category of domestic discretionary funding that doesn’t add up to much in the broader scheme of things. Musk says DOGE will “have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining.” (He also added, cheerily, “Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know!”)

A list of wasteful programs sounds less like a revolution and more like the latest in a long line of government efficiency commissions and reports. Musk and Ramaswamy could save themselves some time and just compile the studies of the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government crusade, George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda, and dozens of Government Accountability Office reports. (They could even simply cut, paste and change the fonts on the report of cost savings generated by Joe Biden’s Campaign to Cut Waste during the Obama administration, and see if anyone noticed.)

True government reform efforts require hard, sustained effort and commitment from the top. And second presidential terms is where they go to die. Lame duck presidents—and Trump will be one the day he takes his second oath of office—usually lose interest in management improvement and reorganization initiatives. There’s little political payoff from them in the short term, and they require expending substantial political capital.

Musk and Ramaswamy may be in for this for the long haul, and Trump may be willing to push the envelope on unilaterally slashing government. But what’s more likely to emerge is a strongly worded report and reliance on tried-and-true methods—attrition-based workforce reductions, employee buyouts and limited budget freezes—to bolster the claim of reducing government.

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What happens to government when a president bows out

Tom Shoop — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0400

President Biden is under increasing pressure to drop out of his reelection campaign amid growing concerns about his ability to beat Donald Trump and ultimately to do the job if he were to earn a second term in office.

It’s rare for a president eligible to run for a second full term to opt out of doing so, and unprecedented for it to happen this close to an election. But several sitting presidents have made the choice not to run when they could have (not counting those who had already been elected twice and observed the tradition established by George Washington of limiting themselves to two terms). The list includes:

James Polk (elected 1844)
James Buchanan (elected 1856)
Rutherford B. Hayes (elected 1876)
Theodore Roosevelt (elected 1904)
Calvin Coolidge (elected 1924)
Harry Truman (elected 1948)
Lyndon Johnson (elected 1964)

Of those, Polk and Hayes had pledged to serve only one term in office (the latter because he said it would better serve his announced intention to promote civil service reform). During the 2020 presidential race, Biden declared he was a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders and a “transition candidate,” but did not specifically promise to serve only one term.

Roosevelt had already served almost two full terms after taking office following the death of William McKinley. Buchanan, Coolidge, Truman and Johnson simply saw the handwriting on the wall when it came to their election prospects.

Several other presidents, of course, had their one-term fate decided by the voters. And arguably, Biden would fall into a different category altogether if he ended his campaign before he officially was nominated by his party at the Democratic National Convention. John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and Chester Arthur didn’t run for a second term (or a first full term, if they took office after the death of a sitting president) because they failed to win their party’s nomination. Of those, Pierce was the only one who had, like Biden, already been elected in his own right.

A president’s decision to bow out of a reelection effort at this stage would not only throw a wrench into the electoral process, it would complicate presidential transition efforts. Under deadlines established in the 1963 Presidential Transition Act and its amendments, that process is already supposed to be underway. By now, agencies should have designated career employees to serve as transition directors, and the General Services Administration is supposed to have reported to Congress on transition activities. After the party conventions, GSA provides office space to the major party candidates for transition planning.

The transition process has come under criticism in recent elections, and Congress has passed several laws to update and improve it. These include efforts to improve congressional oversight and to allow more than one candidate to receive transition resources if the outcome of an election remains in doubt for an extended period.

If Biden were to drop out, the process would face an unusual test. Usually, in a race with an incumbent, transition planning is heavily focused on the challenger, whose team typically has less experience in setting up an administration and may include staffers with limited knowledge of laws and regulations governing the executive branch. If Biden drops out of this election, his replacement would be the candidate with less experience in the top job. Trump would be the known—if unpredictable—quantity. That means that career federal employees will have some familiarity with his approach to staffing his administration and running the executive branch, but will again be serving under a president whose allies have plotted to politicize the civil service.

For that scenario to unfold, Trump must first join an exclusive club. Four former presidents have mounted efforts to win back the presidency after losing elections: Martin Van Buren (in 1844 and 1848), Grover Cleveland (1892), Theodore Roosevelt (1912) and Herbert Hoover (1940). Only Cleveland was successful.

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The continuing irresolution to fund the federal government

Tom Shoop — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 06:00:00 -0400

Remember 1997? The internet was still in its gee-whiz infancy. Titanic ruled the box office. IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. And Congress passed annual appropriations for federal agencies on time.

For the last time.

According to the Congressional Research Service, in all but three of the 48 years since the start of the fiscal year was moved to Oct. 1, the House and Senate have failed to pass all federal spending bills in a timely manner, requiring one or more continuing resolutions to keep agencies operating. (Sometimes they can’t even accomplish that, and government shuts down for some period of time.) The last time the process worked like it’s supposed to, Bill Clinton was in the White House, Joe Biden was a scandal-plagued former presidential aspirant and Donald Trump was basking in bachelorhood after his divorce from Marla Maples.

From fiscal 1998 to fiscal 2023, temporary funding for at least some federal agencies via CRs was provided for an average of 137 days. And the appropriations process only continues to get longer and more convoluted.

This year, Congress really outdid itself. Between the beginning of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2023, and March 23, 2024, lawmakers passed no fewer than four CRs. Not only that, the measures were bifurcated, with spending bills divided into two groups with different expiration dates.

This all occurred in a year when it should have been relatively easy to approve appropriations measures. Congressional leaders and the White House had long since agreed on top-line spending levels. Then some of them decided to go to war over policy riders. It’s clear at this point that certain lawmakers see sabotaging the appropriations process as a worthy goal unto itself.

But there are real-world consequences to this budgetary dysfunction. Congress has now left itself only six months to finish next year’s spending bills—in an election year, when members will want to be away from Washington campaigning for as much time as possible. President Biden didn’t even issue his proposed fiscal 2025 budget until March 11, well after it ordinarily appears.

This leaves little room for proper oversight of agency operations and rational debate over spending priorities. It also leaves agencies in funding limbo for half of the fiscal year. This, in turn, makes managing government operations and executing federal programs to ensure maximum impact for taxpayers extraordinarily difficult. Where funding levels are unstable, waste and abuse are likely to follow.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Budgeting is not that difficult. It’s not one of those intractable problems, like border control and climate change, for which no political solution seems immediately within sight. The wound in the process is entirely self-inflicted. All that needs to happen to fix it is for elected officials to do their most important of jobs: deciding on government’s priorities and how much should be spent on them.

There was a time when that was the norm. It could be again. And it wouldn’t take heroic levels of bipartisanship or legislative creativity to make it happen—just a little simple math and an acknowledgement that when it comes to budget issues, nobody gets everything they want all of the time.

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That Time Abraham Lincoln went to a war zone to escape office-seekers

Tom Shoop — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 06:00:00 -0500

The latest in an intermittent series looking back at groundbreaking, newsmaking, appalling and amusing events in government history.

In early April 1865, President Abraham Lincoln made a bold decision: He would travel to the front lines of the Civil War in Virginia to see for himself the Union Army’s effort to win the surrender of the Confederacy.

With victory near, the war-weary president wanted a close-up view of the conflict. To some of his advisers, that sounded like a terrible idea—especially when he proposed to tour the city of Richmond the day after it fell into Union hands. “Allow me respectfully to ask you to consider whether you ought to expose the nation to the consequences of any disaster to yourself in the pursuit of a treacherous and dangerous enemy like the rebel army,” Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote in a telegram to Lincoln.

The president was undeterred. “I will take care of myself,” he told Stanton.

In fact, Lincoln viewed the trip as a vacation, or at least a respite from a debilitating existence in Washington. In February 1865, Lincoln was “more depressed than I have seen him since he became president,” a visitor to the White House. At one point, the exhausted president had to hold a Cabinet meeting from his bed.

It wasn’t just being a wartime president that wore Lincoln down. The more immediate reason, writes Noah Andre Trudeau in Lincoln’s Greatest Journey, a chronicle of the last weeks of his life, was that “Lincoln’s reelection once more opened the floodgates for job seekers eager to be rewarded for their efforts on his behalf.” Lincoln tried in vain to convince his supporters that he would make very few changes in government positions, enlisting the aid of members of Congress in driving home the point.

“The Saturday evening before he left Washington to go to the front, just previous to the capture of Richmond, I was with him from seven o’clock till nearly twelve,” wrote Henry J. Raymond, founder of the Republican Party and The New York Times. “It had been one of his most trying days. The pressure of office-seekers was greater at this juncture than I ever knew it to be, and he was almost worn out.”

The pressure was personal. “As in 1861, Lincoln himself was not left unmolested,” wrote historians Harry J. Carman and Reinhard H. Luthin in 1943. “From the time of his reelection to the eve of his assassination, Washington was filled with seekers of federal jobs who literally lay in wait for him.”

When Lincoln took in an opera performance in March 1865, Trudeau writes, he explained that he wasn’t there for the music, but for a break. “I am being hounded to death by office seekers, who pursue me early and late, and it is simply to get two or three hours relief that I am here,” he told his companion for the evening.

At times, Lincoln was able to muster a sense of humor about the situation. “A fellow…once came to me to ask for an appointment as minister abroad,” he said at one point during his journey to the front. “Finding he could not get that, he came down to some more modest position. Finally, he asked to be made a [customs officer]. When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers.”

Advisers to Donald Trump’s campaign for a return to the presidency are licking their chops at the prospect of reinstating some version of a class of jobs known as Schedule F, which they could fill with thousands of loyalists, removing federal employees deemed insufficiently supportive of the president’s agenda. Indeed, James Sherk, a former special assistant to Trump and the architect of Schedule F, thinks the entire federal workforce should serve at the pleasure of the president.

That would do more than destroy the concept of an independent, professional, nonpartisan civil service that has served the nation well for more than a century. It would create an enormous headache for the Trump team—and potentially the president himself. It’s one thing to envision a workforce full of ardent supporters of the president, it’s another to sift through the hordes of would-be federal employees.

A return to the spoils system might seem very attractive to a president who makes no secret of disdaining federal employees and seeks to impose his will on the country. But it comes at a very high price. Trump advisers should think twice about the law of unintended consequences before they tear down the civil service system as we know it.

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Saying goodbye to a giant in government journalism: Charlie Clark, 1953-2023

Tom Shoop — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 06:00:00 -0500

At GovExec, we lost one of the literal and figurative giants of our world this week. And so did the world of journalism focused on the federal government.

Charlie Clark died Wednesday at the age of 70 after a brief illness.

Charlie was a reporter of the old school. He worked sources relentlessly, uncovered angles that others missed, and paid attention to what was happening even at what were considered backwaters of the federal bureaucracy. I vividly remember the animated newsroom discussions we had about his insistence that goings-on at the Chemical Safety Board were worthy of ongoing coverage.

Charlie also had a special fondness for and belief in whistleblowers, patiently listening to them make their cases, and then painstakingly seeking to verify their claims. His professionalism and dogged pursuit of stories made him an exemplar in our newsroom of journalism done well. And if he usually lost his battles in defense of the use of passive voice in his writing, it wasn’t for lack of energetic effort.

I met Charlie when he was working as an editor at National Journal in the late 1980s. He had already been a researcher at Time-Life Books and would go on to stints at The Washington Post, Congressional Quarterly, Tax Analysts, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges and the National Center on Education and the Economy.

When we needed a fill-in editor at GovExec in 2009, Charlie brought much-needed experience and stability to our operation at a time when it was characterized by youthful exuberance. I quickly moved to bring him on full-time.

Later, I asked Charlie to serve as senior correspondent, heading up our reporting corps. He was cagey about the offer, and finally allowed as to how he didn’t think he could keep pace with the up-and-coming generation. “I can’t crank out a story every day like these young ones do,” he told me.

He was wrong. He attacked the job with gusto, writing not only a story per day, but often two or three. By the end of his tenure in June 2019, he had produced more than 5,000 articles for us, ranging from Office of Management and Budget reports on federal contracting to a thorough history of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. His profile of Hilary Clinton, prepared in 2016 in the event she was elected president, remains one of the best pieces we never published.

On tight deadlines, Charlie produced fully reported, detailed analyses—sometimes a little too detailed. Among the things he was legendary for was the length of his stories. “Cut 500 words, please,” read the inscription on the cake we presented to him on his retirement.

Charlie also was legendary for his struggles with technology, and at-times-credulous encounters with scammers offering help with his computer issues. “What do you need my Social Security number for?” he was once overheard to say over the phone. “No, no, no!” rang out voices in the newsroom. “Charlie, hang up the phone!”

He loved covering federal agencies almost as much as writing about his beloved hometown of Arlington, Va. In addition to his day job, he served as “Our Man in Arlington” columnist for the Falls Church News-Press for years, and wrote several books on the history of the suburb. He even managed to craft a compelling biography of George Washington’s step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis, whose accomplishments were, shall we say, a bit scant. (“He was not a great man,” Charlie acknowledged in the book’s introduction.)

Charlie himself delighted in meeting great men and women. His tales of celebrity encounters were always related with the wide-eyed wonder of a kid meeting one of his heroes.

In both physical stature and his work, Charlie stood tall and proud.

“Nothing’s gonna change my world,” John Lennon of Charlie’s beloved Beatles sang in “Across the Universe.” With respect, that’s just not true when someone like Charlie leaves us. I prefer a lyric by Bruce Springsteen, another of Charlie’s favorites: “They say you can’t take it with you, but I think that they’re wrong. Because all I know is I woke up this morning and something big was gone.”

Godspeed, Charlie.

Tom Shoop is the former editor in chief at GovExec.

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What I learned covering government for 34 years

Tom Shoop — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -0400

In the fall of 1989, having somehow managed to talk my way into an assistant editor’s job at a monthly magazine called Government Executive, I journeyed to the National Press Club in Washington for a meeting of the Classification and Compensation Society. (Remember that organization?) As its members grappled with issues like how to wedge modern jobs into the archaic federal job classification system, my head spun. And my stomach growled. On ethical principle, I refused to eat the free lunch they offered.

Still, there I was: a bona fide Washington reporter.

Later I came to realize I’d had the good fortune to be covering the most important part of Washington, and the entire country—federal agencies and the people who run them. The work was never glamorous, sometimes frustrating, but always rewarding. Helping the people who do the behind-the-scenes work of government by sharing some of the best practices and exposing some of the worst is more than I could’ve hoped for.

In the end, it was an extended exercise in trying to describe something by feel in pitch darkness. We in the media cover (and uncover) news of government operations, but rarely get to see the whole picture. Only insiders have that perspective. Still, as an observer and chronicler of the federal establishment for more than three decades as a writer and later an editor, I believe I’ve picked up a few insights. Such as:

The federal government does a much better job than people give it credit for. In just the past two decades, federal employees have developed a COVID vaccine at breakneck speed, averted financial catastrophe, expanded access to health insurance, vastly improved children’s health, boosted infrastructure investments and made highways much safer. There ought to be a hall of fame for the people who make these kinds of things happen. Oh, wait…

No federal employees are non-essential. That label is cruel and wrong.

The federal government is an insurance company with an army. This is a characterization I only recently came across, and if more Americans understood it, we’d be a lot better off. It perfectly describes how once you take entitlement and defense spending off the table—and they’re always taken off the table—what’s left in terms of discretionary spending doesn’t add up to much.

There are hundreds of people who have sustained an effort to improve the management of government for decades. I won’t begin to try to name them. They know who they are. These folks deeply understand the nature of incremental change in the public sector, and have patiently made painstaking progress, with the acronymic legislation to prove it.

Government shutdowns don’t need to happen. For almost two centuries, they didn’t exist.

Every election cycle, a longshot outsider presidential candidate will peddle the snake oil that slashing government spending and reorganizing the bureaucracy is easy. See Ramaswamy, Vivek; Yang, Andrew; Perot, Ross. And who’s to blame them? Every once in a while, one of them wins.

There has never been a federal retirement wave. And there never will be.

There is no President’s Day. Happy Washington’s Birthday in advance, everybody!

Finally, and apropos of almost nothing, Willie Mays was the greatest baseball player of all time, and one time he threw out my dad at third base by a lot.

Thanks to all the terrific reporters and editors I’ve been privileged to work with over the last three decades. They are a stunningly talented and driven bunch. I know this because I’ve spent many hours in conversations about how to pursue key stories, and many late nights covering shutdowns and near-shutdowns, State of the Union addresses and election results. Every minute of that part of the job was highly gratifying.

Most of all, thanks to the loyal readers of this publication for your ongoing service to the nation. I hope I and the people I've worked with have done your efforts justice. If not, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

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6 places where federal employees actually work in swamps

Tom Shoop — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 06:00:00 -0400

It is one of the most enduring metaphors and epithets for Washington, D.C. and the federal bureaucracy: The Swamp. As in, a boggy, messy place that must be drained to expose its slimy inhabitants.

The phrase’s modern usage dates back to Ronald Reagan in 1983, in reference to his ongoing (and not exactly successful) effort to slash the size of government. Given that Washington was built on an actual swamp, the reference has since then proved irresistible to politicians, especially Donald Trump, who literally turned it into a rallying cry.

Of course, D.C. is no longer a real swamp, and most federal employees don’t work there anyway. But some toil in bona fide swamps. Here are six examples:

Everglades National Park

It’s the granddaddy of U.S. swamps—the largest subtropical wilderness in the country. In fact, it’s world-renowned. Everglades, like several swamps on this list, is officially designated a Wetlands of International Importance. Rangers lead tours of the vast wilderness year-round, but contractors handle much of the load in the slower summer months. The park also employs General Schedule workers to handle such chores as fee collection (a GS-303 position). The park also offers a wide array of internship opportunities.

If you’re planning a visit, rangers warn that this non-metaphorical swamp comes with real-life dangers. Stay at least 15 feet from alligators and crocodiles, they say, and in seemingly related advice, “leave the fur babies at home.”

Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge

This refuge in Georgia, which encompasses the famed Okefenokee Swamp, is more than 350,000 acres in size, and is home to more than 600 plant species. It is, according to refuge officials, also “world renowned for its amphibian populations,” which include about 15,000 alligators.

As for the humans who work in the swamp, many are volunteers. They handle tasks ranging from visitor services to rebuilding boardwalks and platforms. Some actually reside in the refuge—but for that, you have to supply your own trailer or recreational vehicle.

Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge

Once covering more than a million acres in what is now Virginia, the swamp under the protection of the refuge is 113,000 acres in size. It was named by William Byrd II, who was apparently unimpressed with its environs, in 1728. Today, its swamp-working employees are experts in conservation, deploying tools ranging from prescribed fires to wildlife monitoring. Staff also offer a variety of educational programs for visitors.

The Great Dismal Swamp served as a stop on the Underground Railroad, where an estimated 50,000 enslaved people seeking freedom found sanctuary from their pursuers. Some even permanently joined a small community that was established in the swamp.

Congaree National Park

“Home of Champions” blares the headline atop Congaree’s website. Champion trees, that is, straight from the biggest old growth bottomland hardwood forest in the southeastern United States. The park, in South Carolina’s Midlands region, is a place of great biodiversity. But human employees are apparently at a premium.

“Park rangers and volunteers conduct guided programs throughout the year,” the park notes, “as staffing permits.”

In what may be a long-term solution to that problem, the park appears to be facilitating the development of future federal swampworkers. It encourages young people to join its junior ranger program.

Klamath Marsh National Wildlife Refuge

Metaphorically, this remote Oregon swamp is home to few of the human species known as federal employees. “The visitor center is staffed on a limited basis throughout the year,” refuge officials note, “and during specific field seasons is closed regularly.”

The refuge’s website doesn’t exactly put on the hard sell for visitors. The area is described simply as “primarily wet meadows with some open water wetlands.” But it provides a nice view of the Cascade Mountains. The area suits the Oregon spotted frog just fine. Klamath Marsh is one of the last remaining homes of the endangered species.

Death Valley National Park

Death Valley boasts that it’s the “hottest, driest and lowest” national park. So why does it make this list? Because, as Treehugger notes, it is also home to several swampy areas, including Saratoga Springs, a “marshy, spring-fed wetland [that] is an important home to multiple endemic marine species.”

Death Valley is also the workplace of National Park Service scientists, specifically those of the Mojave Desert Network, which monitors springs at five different parks. Working in the park’s extreme conditions might not sound that appealing, but Death Valley is fully staffed. “No jobs open to the general public are available at this time,” declares the “Work With Us” section of Death Valley’s website.

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That time the vast majority of federal employees worked outside Washington

Tom Shoop — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 09:30:32 -0400

The latest in an intermittent series looking back at groundbreaking, newsmaking, appalling and amusing events in government history.

Once upon a time, vast portions of the federal workforce lived and worked outside of the Washington, D.C., area. In many cases, they toiled far away from the nerve center of government—or the swamp, depending on your point of view.

That time is now.

There’s a persistent misperception that federal employees are concentrated in the D.C. metro area. But from the moment of its creation, the government has been highly decentralized. Many of the earliest federal workers, including postmasters, customs officers and lighthouse supervisors, lived and worked in far-flung regions, because they had to be near the citizens they served.

“They were geographically distributed but administratively decentralized,” writes Peter Kastor, professor of history at Washington University. In 1824, the State Department had operations scattered around the globe, but had only 13 employees in Washington. The Treasury Department, with the largest central office, had 152 employees.

Since then, times haven’t changed as much as a lot of people think. As of 2017, about 280,000 federal employees worked at agencies in the Washington metro area. That may sound like a big number, but not when you consider the size of the total federal workforce: about 2 million. (And lest you think that figure is a sign of an out-of-control bureaucracy, it hasn’t changed significantly in more than 50 years.)

So about 85% of federal employees already work in swamp-free conditions. (Except, presumably, those whose work requires them to toil in actual swamps.) That does not stop politicians from promising to move feds and the offices they work in away from the stench of Washington—even as they campaign to occupy political posts in the city themselves.

Donald Trump has promised to move 100,000 federal jobs out of Washington in his quest to become the next Grover Cleveland. It’s part of a broader plan to “to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption.”

You might ask how Trump did with his first shot at swamp-draining. In 2019, he moved the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters from Washington to Grand Junction, Colo. The shift involved forcing 328 employees out of the nation’s capital. Just 41 agreed to make the cross-country move. President Biden moved the BLM headquarters back to D.C. in 2021.

Trump also shifted the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture from Washington to Kansas City, Mo. In that chaotic process, both organizations lost about half of their staff. That, it turned out, was not viewed within the administration as a problem, but rather a benefit.

In 2019, then-White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said, “simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven, and move you out into the real part of the country,’ and they quit. What a wonderful way to streamline government.”

This time around, Trump is placing more emphasis on taking direct control of federal agencies and firing “rogue bureaucrats.“ If that’s the case, he may end up wanting to leave employees in Washington where he can keep an eye on them. Other Republicans, picking up on Trump’s corruption theme, are targeting agency headquarters as a means of retribution for perceived swampiness. When Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, introduced a relocation bill last year, he called it the Strategic Withdrawal of Agencies for Meaningful Placement Act. (Get it?) House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., recently floated the idea of doing away with the FBI headquarters entirely, leaving it with decentralized offices spread across the country.

Others on both the right and the left now defend the idea of shifting headquarters operations to new locales as a form of economic development. Indeed, relocation has become a new brand of pork-barrel politics. When Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., introduced their Helping Infrastructure Restore the Economy Act last year, it turned out that two of the states eligible for agency relocations were Missouri and Tennessee.

GOP lawmakers make a forceful case for dispersing the federal workforce—and as the word “infrastructure” in Hawley and Blackburn’s bill indicates, constructing new office buildings for them. But ironically, they’re dead-set against one thing that could lead some federal employees to voluntarily vacate the Washington bubble for the hinterlands: expanded telework.

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Tom Hanks thinks he would be the best ever at this federal job

Tom Shoop — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 06:00:00 -0400

He is one of America’s all-time favorite actors, with enough awards and honors to fill a warehouse. His star power is nearly unmatched, and he has banked more hit films than just about anyone in show business.

Yet Tom Hanks says the job he would be best suited for is in the federal bureaucracy. In a May interview with the Atlantic, Hanks said the late writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron “said something that was really true: I would have made the greatest park ranger in the history of the national parks. I would have loved the uniform. I would have run the campfire talks. I would have known the history of it all, and I would have weaved the perfect story … I would have loved going to work.”

Hanks may have a somewhat romanticized view of a ranger’s job. Josh Scheffler, a ranger at Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area in Montana and Wyoming, told USA Today last year that in his line of work, "you could be doing plumbing one day and working with horses the next, building a structure the next." Important stuff, but not entirely a job of telling stories around the campfire.

The Park Service says its rangers must “have a visible and tangible desire to protect and promote our national parks and our natural and cultural history.” Hanks would seem to fit that bill ncely. But the agency also notes that “some positions may require firearms proficiency, motor vehicle licensing, or the ability to operate watercraft.”

Park ranger isn’t the first federal position that Hanks dreamed of holding. As a child, he imagined himself as an astronaut. “I would put a brick in the bottom of my pants and sit at the bottom of the pool breathing through a garden hose and kind of, like, float,” he said on ABC’s Good Morning America in 2002. “And I would have these little plastic tools. [I’d] take apart the pool ladder and put it back together again, because I wanted to be doing a service in zero gravity of outer space.”

The closest Hanks would come to that would be playing astronaut and mission commander Jim Lovell in 1995’s Apollo 13, one of his best-known roles. But that’s not the only character Hanks has played who drew a paycheck from the taxpayers. He’s portrayed plenty of other government employees on the silver screen:

Peace Corps member, Volunteers (1985)
Los Angeles Police Department officer, Dragnet (1987)
Police investigator, Turner and Hooch (1989)
Army soldier, Forrest Gump (1994)
Army officer, Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Prison guard, The Green Mile (1999)
FBI agent Carl Hanratty, Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Congressman, Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
Sheriff, Toy Story 1-4 (1995-2019)
Navy Commander Ernest Krause, Greyhound (2020)

And that doesn’t count characters who were veterans but weren’t on active duty in the time frame of the movie, or “Colonel” Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager.

Hanks seems to enjoy playing characters in and around government operations. But despite all his fictional experience, and his fascination with certain federal jobs, politics doesn’t interest him—even though he’s a direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln’s mother. So don’t expect him to join the ranks of celebrities who contemplate a run for elected office. In 2018, he said president of the United States is “one of the crappiest jobs you could possibly have in the world.”

The actor even wisecracked about his wholesome reputation in comparison to that of the federal government in 2007’s The Simpsons Movie. “Hello. I’m Tom Hanks. The U.S. government has lost its credibility, so it’s borrowing some of mine,” intones the actor, playing an animated version of himself. “This is Tom Hanks saying, if you’re going to pick a government to trust, why not this one?”

That earned Hanks a bit of mockery in 2022, when he actually lent his voice and credibility to a video touting the Biden administration’s early accomplishments.

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That Time acronymic management fads were all the rage

Tom Shoop — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 07:00:00 -0400

The latest in an intermittent series looking back at groundbreaking, newsmaking, appalling and amusing events in government history.

Government lives by its acronyms. From the simple names of agencies to designations of programs, policies and projects, thousands of these little pieces of alphabetic shorthand bounce around federal offices every day. The Defense Department has an official Terminology Program to keep track of its myriad array of abbreviations. An overview document describing the program contains no fewer than five acronyms in its first paragraph alone.

There’s one particular kind of federal alphabet soup, though, that’s different: the management fads that had their heyday in the latter part of the 20th century. In those days, it seemed like every week there was a new brand of elixir aimed at revitalizing the bureaucracy—usually borrowed from the latest private-sector trends.

To a greater or lesser extent, all of these efforts were aimed at making federal programs run more efficiently and ultimately, save taxpayer dollars. But none of them fully succeeded, in part because it’s very difficult to forge a link between a program’s performance and its budget.

Nevertheless, federal agencies have spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to do just that. The modern era of management by fad started with the Hoover Commission in 1949, which advocated for the idea of performance budgeting. That remained a relatively amorphous concept until the launch of the acronymic revolution in 1965 with President Lyndon Johnson’s mandate that agencies adopt the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System, or PPBS. Under PPBS, agencies were supposed to set up sophisticated systems to analyze budget options associated with long-term policy objectives.

Management by Objectives (MBO), followed in 1973, with President Nixon explicitly requiring that agencies link their goals to budget requests. On the heels of MBO came the Carter administration’s ZBB, for Zero-Based Budgeting. It forced agencies to craft their budgets from scratch every fiscal year—including providing an option for spending below current levels.

After Ronald Reagan directed his focus to simply cutting the size of government, the acronymic trend picked up again in the George H.W. Bush administration, when Total Quality Management was all the rage. TQM, as its name suggests, was aimed at getting federal employees and managers to relentlessly focus on improving the quality of their work and its outputs. The zero-defect initiative had mixed success because it frequently lacked either the carrot of monetary incentives for employees who achieved success or the stick of budgetary consequences for failure to do so.

The acronymic heyday of management improvement ended in the early 1990s. But the focus on improving government didn’t end. It just became less about short-term fads and more about long-term efforts. So came reinventing government (and later reengineering government) during the Clinton administration, and George W. Bush’s Program Assessment Rating Tool.

Since then, presidents and the management officials they appoint haven’t made much of an effort to attach acronymically catchy names to their government improvement initiatives. In fact, the past three administrations have used the catch-all term President’s Management Agenda to label their administrative reform packages. But that’s just a generic term for a list of age-old ideas, from overhauling the federal hiring process to updating government’s procurement systems, that everyone seems to agree on but can’t seem to find the will to implement.

Maybe the PMA just needs a new acronym.

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Meet the long-shot presidential candidate who wants term limits for federal employees

Tom Shoop — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 11:55:59 -0400

There’s at least one in each presidential campaign cycle: the long-shot outsider who vows to shake up government and its workforce. This year’s model is Republican contender Vivek Ramaswamy, the 37-year old founder of a biotech company and an asset management firm who wants to out-Trump Donald Trump.

On his campaign website, Ramaswamy promises to “take America First further than Trump.” Much of the site is filled with aphorisms: “God is real.” “There are two genders.” “Reverse racism is racism.” “Courage is contagious.” “Excellence over politics.” And simply: “Truth.”

But the site also contains a series of specific policy proposals which would radically alter government and its workforce. Most are listed under the heading “Dismantle Managerial Bureaucracy,” and it’s worth looking at each of them:

“Shut down toxic government agencies: Dept of Education, FBI, IRS, and more (and rebuild from scratch when required)”

The Education proposal is a Republican perennial. But Ramaswamy’s’ animus toward the agency is unusually strong. “I’m going to shut down a lot of federal agencies,” he said in a video posted to Twitter in February. “But the first one that I’ve already identified is, in the first few weeks on the job, I will shut down the federal Department of Education. Because it has no reason to exist.” The department’s “thousands of people working in a bureaucracy,” he went on, “don’t actually have a purpose to serve.”

The FBI and the IRS would presumably be candidates for the teardown and rebuild process, however inefficient and disruptive that might be. But not Education, says Ramaswamy. And how would he dismantle it? Apparently by firing every single employee at once.

“End civil service protections for bureaucrats: 8-year term limits instead”

This would go far beyond Schedule F-type proposals that would turn a bunch of federal positions into at-will jobs. It would mark a full return to the spoils system, only with millions more employees subject to removal for political reasons.

“Eliminate federal employee unions: repeal JFK’s executive order 10988”

It would likely take more than repealing one executive order to get rid of federal unions entirely. But again, Ramaswamy isn’t interested in half-measures like scaling back collective bargaining. He wants no unions at all.

“Move >75% of federal employees out of Washington D.C. & end pro-lazy “remote work” option”

Congratulations, Mr. Would-Be President! You’ve already kept this promise—exceeded it, in fact. Give or take 85% of federal employees already work outside the Washington area. The “pro-lazy” jibe at telework is a nice rhetorical flourish, though.

“Cut wasteful expenditures: White House, not individual agencies, will submit budget requests to Congress”

It will certainly come as news to federal agencies that they can submit their budget requests to Congress without the approval of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

In virtually every one of his proposals, Ramaswamy seeks to one-up other GOP reformers. “I think a lot of well-intentioned folks focusing on bureaucratic reform will say that we need to be incremental about this,” Ramaswamy said in his February Twitter post. “I think the time and place for that has passed.”

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Trump: I’ll Make Feds Pass Test on Constitution to Keep Their Jobs

Tom Shoop — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 13:05:45 -0400

In March 2017, shortly after taking office, Donald Trump took part in filming a documentary in which he, along with all of the living ex-presidents and other public figures, read aloud parts of the U.S. Constitution. Trump chose to recite the beginning of Article II, on executive power. But he struggled with the task.

“It’s very hard to do because of the language here,” Trump told the film crew, according to Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig in their book A Very Stable Genius. “It’s very hard to get through that whole thing without a stumble.” He added, “It’s like a foreign language.”

Now the former president, running to win his job back in 2024, has pledged to require federal workers to bone up on their constitutional knowledge to keep their jobs.

“I will require every federal employee to pass a new civil service test demonstrating an understanding of our Constitution,” Trump said in a speech before the North Carolina Republican convention Saturday. Members of the audience stood and roared their approval. Trump seemed genuinely surprised.

“Oh wow, look at that! Wow!,” he said. “That’s nice. Nice that you believe in the Constitution.”

Trump’s own faith in the Constitution has appeared at times to be conditional. “We believe in the Constitution more than anybody,” he said in 2015. “But we can’t let people use and abuse our rights.” In 2021, he urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to bypass constitutional provisions on counting the votes of presidential electors to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In late 2022, Trump argued that the Constitution could be ignored under certain circumstances. The “massive fraud” in the 2020 election, he said, “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Trump’s knowledge of the specific provisions of the Constitution has at times been shaky. In a 2016 meeting with Republican lawmakers, he praised “Article 12” of the document, seemingly unaware that it contains only seven articles. In 2019, he declared that Article 2 of the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Actually implementing a constitutional test for federal employees would present several challenges. Civil service examinations, created under the 1883 Pendleton Act, became a condition for hiring for certain federal jobs. They were a routine part of the hiring process until 1981, when they fell victim to legal challenges that they discriminated against minorities. Now agencies rely on a complex set of evaluation tools and hiring authorities to determine who gets federal jobs.

Trump’s proposal, though, sounds less like a hiring requirement and more like a quiz that every federal employee would have to pass in order to keep their job. That would make it more like the test administered to those seeking to become U.S. citizens, which includes several questions on the Constitution.

Some federal employees might struggle to pass such an examination, but it’s unclear whether it could be used as a condition for government employment.

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That Time the Federal Retirement Wave Never Happened

Tom Shoop — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 12:30:00 -0400

The latest in an intermittent series looking back at groundbreaking, newsmaking, appalling and amusing events in government history.

There’s a subculture of surfers who are interested only in massive waves. They travel the globe in pursuit of huge “swells” and “barrels” at places with names like Jaws, Killers and Dungeons—all for the thrill of riding a gigantic wall of water and (ideally) coming out unscathed.

But sometimes, the big waves just don’t appear as predicted. The same is sometimes true of metaphorical waves, too, such as the massive swell of federal employee retirements that has been predicted to be just around the corner for almost a quarter-century now. But that hasn’t shaken the faith of doomsayers, who say a big wave with the power to radically shake up federal recruitment and retention efforts is lurking out there and could arrive at any moment.

This all started around the turn of the millennium, at the same time that for some reason it became fashionable to refer to the living, breathing individuals who serve the country as “human capital.” In May 2000, Stephen Barr reported in the first of a series of articles in the Washington Post that “the federal government is facing a people crisis. Within five years, about 30 percent of the government's 1.6 million full-time employees will be eligible to retire.”

Personnel experts told Barr that a “human-capital time-bomb” was ticking and a “tremendous exodus of institutional experience and leadership” was imminent. That did not materialize.

In a May 2003 article in Government Executive, Brian Friel undertook to explain why the exodus hadn’t happened, and probably wouldn’t. The numbers showing high levels of impending turnover, he wrote, generally included both people eligible for regular retirement and those who could exercise the option to retire early. But few federal workers take advantage of retiring early, because it results in a hefty reduction in retirement benefits. Also, the projections failed to take into account that federal employees typically wait for several years after eligibility to actually retire.

Actual retirement rates governmentwide were expected to be around 2% to 4% per year. That, said Jeffrey Neal, then-personnel chief at the Defense Logistics Agency, “is not a crisis.”

None of this deterred the Cassandras. In fact, in May 2006, then-Office of Personnel Management Director Linda Springer upped the ante. “When we look ahead and talk to our actuaries,” she said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, “they say over the next decade, 60% of federal workers will be eligible to retire. That’s a fact. It’s not a projection. It’s not looking into a crystal ball. That is a fact.” As a result, said Springer, not just a wave, but a “retirement tsunami” was around the corner. “We’re not being overly dramatic,” she insisted.

They were being overly dramatic.

The issue is that prognosticators would have been better off looking into a crystal ball and estimating how many people would actually retire. “Here is the problem,” Neal wrote in 2019. “Most projections look at the number of federal workers eligible for retirement today, then look five years or so down the road and count the number of folks eligible for retirement. That would be fine if the workforce were static, but it is not. Many of the people who are eligible to retire do just that—they leave. So the number of people eligible to retire never reaches the massive percentage that is projected.”

That helps explain why there hasn’t been a tsunami or even a wave yet. So what has been going on? People have been retiring from government at a fairly steady and slowly increasing pace. Nearly 1 million federal employees have taken voluntary retirement since 2005, according to OPM data, without a discernible wave:

Voluntary Retirements

2005: 47,155
2006: 47,103
2007: 51,017
2008: 49,053
2009: 38,983
2010: 45,758
2011: 54,900
2012: 59,812
2013: 58,295
2014: 61,017
2015: 58,294
2016: 58,671
2017: 58,009
2018: 60,257
2019: 60,513
2020: 56,873
2021: 62,079
2022: 67,180

The number of annual retirements has gradually increased over time, with some ups and downs. There’s a distinct dip in 2008-2009 amidst the global financial crisis. And the last two years have shown an upward trend, presumably as an effect of the pandemic. But whether this will continue is an open question. Overall, it looks more like a slow-moving current than a massive wave.

Some, like Neal, argue that an external shock to the system could still trigger a tsunami. But if over the past 23 years a massive terrorist attack, two overseas wars, a financial crisis, a pandemic that took millions of lives and the Jan. 6 insurrection didn’t trigger a wave, then it’s hard to imagine what would.

Still, the warnings of impending doom continue. “Given the number of candles that keep increasing on Uncle Sam’s workforce birthday cake, it’s got to happen sooner or later,” Federal News Network’s Mike Causey wrote in 2021. “It statistically has to happen. Even Nostradamus made a few bad calls.”

Whether or not a retirement tsunami is imminent, it remains a very useful tool for spurring action on a wide variety of fronts, from hiring reform to pay raises. Earlier this year, for example, William Shackelford, national president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, said a large federal pay increase was necessary in 2024 to “counteract a tightening labor market and increasing private-sector pay, rising costs of living and an impending federal retirement wave.”

Even if a rogue retirement wave never materializes, the outlook for federal agencies is hardly smooth sailing.

First, agencies will experience retirements at different rates. So just because there isn’t a governmentwide retirement wave doesn’t mean that there couldn't be mini-waves that crash into individual federal organizations.

Second, regardless of the retirement rate, the federal government clearly has an aging workforce. More than 325,000 federal employees are 60 or older, wrote Fedsmith’s Ralph Smith last year. There were only 162,000 in that demographic when Springer made her dire prediction in 2006.

A manageable retirement wave might actually have the positive effect of opening up opportunities for younger federal employees to move up the ranks. In a recent Reddit post, a federal employee noted that their government organization had announced an upcoming celebration of employees with up to 55 years of service.

“Holy crap, please retire,” the poster wrote. “I want your job.”

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That Time Even Minimum Telework Was Viewed With Wonder and Fear

Tom Shoop — Fri, 12 May 2023 10:00:00 -0400

The latest in an intermittent series looking back at groundbreaking, newsmaking, appalling and amusing events in government history.

In 1995, Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and famed hacker hunter, wrote an essay for Newsweek in which he argued that the Internet was destined for failure. Among his many hilariously inaccurate predictions was that “no computer network will change the way government works.”

Eventually, of course, exactly that occurred. But even before the Internet revolutionized the world of work, the idea of ending the daily trudge to the office was catching on in the federal workforce. By 1997, about 10,000 federal employees were “telecommuting,” the term of art at the time for the practice, along with “flexiplace.” In early 1996, a presidential council had approved the National Telecommuting Initiative, which set a goal of having 160,000 federal employees working remotely at least part of the time by 2002.

These early teleworkers weren’t working exclusively or even mostly from home offices. The General Services Administration reported that 95% of government telecommuters divided their time between a federal office and home. The other 5% worked out of their agency’s quarters and a GSA-run telecommuting center. The idea of the GSA centers was to create satellite offices near big cities as an alternative for long-distance commuters. There were 11 in the Washington area at the beginning of 1997.

By today’s standards, late 20th century telework was almost comically primitive. Computers weren’t even deemed essential for remote workers. "The most fundamental equipment a telecommuter needs is a telephone," Jack Nilles, president of JALA International, a telework consulting group in Los Angeles, told Government Executive in 1997. "And for about a quarter of telecommuters, that's it.” (He wasn’t talking about a cellphone, either.)

Telework wasn’t for everybody, the Office of Personnel Management insisted. Employees who work remotely even part of the time should be "well organized, highly disciplined self-starters who require little supervision and who have received at least fully successful ratings," the agency said. Nevertheless, even these employees often faced skepticism from their bosses. "Some managers and supervisors resisted allowing staff to participate in flexiplace because they did not believe that employees were working unless they could see them," the Government Accountability Office (then known as the General Accounting Office) reported. That attitude would persist to a greater or lesser degree to this day.

At the turn of the 21st century, only about 25,000 federal workers were telecommuting, despite the fact that agencies were being urged to develop “virtual teams” of employees. In such teams, said James Buckner, then the chief information officer at Army Materiel Command, "workers should focus on product delivery versus hour delivery.”

That concept apparently didn’t appeal to managers and executives, because telework remained very slow to catch on. By 2003, just 4% of the federal workforce was teleworking, far below targets set by executive branch agencies and Congress. That amounted to a little more than 100,000 workers, out of more than 750,000 who were deemed eligible for remote work. Policies were all over the map. At one point, OPM deemed workers who had a child at home ineligible for telework. Before the ubiquity of home computers and high-speed Internet, other agencies balked at providing equipment for teleworkers to use.

So what caused telework to catch on? A combination of advances in information technology, fear of terrorist attacks and repeated natural disasters. By 2010, the year that President Obama signed the Telework Enhancement Act, remote work was starting to be viewed as vital to agencies’ continuity of operations plans.

"There's a lot of talk about the trouble of commuting to work, but to me the real national security issue is if we had something that disrupted the ability of the federal workforce to get to the office,” said John Streufert, deputy chief information officer for information security at the State Department, at a Government Executive event that year. “Could we continue to provide the services of government? I think you'd find that many departments and agencies would have problems."

Just as these arguments started to win the day, the backlash set in. In 2014, the Patent and Trademark Office, which had won praise for its massive telework program, came under fire when allegations of employee abuse of the practice came to light. Remote workers were accused of submitting time cards overstating the hours they worked, delaying work until the end of a reporting quarter and submitting time cards for work that hadn’t yet been performed. Suddenly, all telework programs were viewed with suspicion.

And it wasn’t just in government that the bloom was off the rose. In 2013, Internet pioneer Yahoo abolished its telework program, ordering all employees to return to the office. Bank of America, Aetna and IBM scaled back or eliminated remote work arrangements as well. “Why are big companies calling their remote workers back to the office?” asked NBC News in 2017.

The same question could’ve been asked of federal agencies. In 2018, the Agriculture Department dramatically altered its telework policy, reducing the number of days per week employees could work remotely from four to one. Other Cabinet departments, including Commerce and Education, tried to cut back on working from home as well.

Just when it looked like the world had reached peak telework, the pandemic hit. In short order, federal agencies shifted to a posture of “maximum telework.” Many stayed that way until the COVID-19 state of emergency ended on May 11, 2023.

To many Democrats, the forced experiment in large-scale telework was a roaring success. Remote work “saves money, helps recruit top talent, makes environmental sense, and ensures a continuity of operations at agencies,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. House Republicans, on the other hand, voted to roll back telework flexibility in a measure they called the Stopping Home Office Work’s Unproductive Problems Act. (Get it?)

It looks like federal employees’ ride on the telework rollercoaster is destined to continue.

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That Time NASA Blew Up a Rocket and People Called it a Success (No, They Didn’t)

Tom Shoop — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 14:51:02 -0400

The latest in an intermittent series looking back at groundbreaking, newsmaking, appalling and amusing events in government history.

On April 25, 1961, NASA launched Mercury-Atlas 3, one in a series of tests of the rocket that would carry the first American into space. Inside the capsule at the top of the rocket sat a “robot astronaut,” an electronic mannequin that could inhale and exhale gas, heat and water vapor, simulating in key ways what an astronaut would experience.

At 11:15 a.m ET, the spacecraft lifted off, engines blasting. Straight up, and up and up, it went.

This was bad.

In MA-3, as the mission was known, the rocket was supposed to roll and pitch, then head out over the horizon. Instead, it was just going higher and higher, and if it came straight back down into the launch area, the outcome could be deadly. So, 43 seconds into the mission, the range safety officer pulled the plug, giving the order to blow up the rocket.

That wasn’t the outcome NASA had hoped for, but it had a silver lining. The spacecraft’s emergency systems kicked into gear, separating the robot-carrying capsule from the rocket booster, deploying its parachute and depositing it gently in the Atlantic Ocean a few miles away. The capsule suffered so little damage it was reused in the next test launch.

“This was the very first Mercury test with a live escape tower and it worked flawlessly,” reads one account of the day’s events written decades later. By any reasonable standard of space exploration—especially in those wild early days, when NASA was desperately trying to catch up to the Soviet Union—the launch was at least a partial success. But you wouldn’t know that from the reaction to the day’s events.

“Man-in-Space Project Snags as Atlas Fails,” read the headline on an Associated Press story on the launch. “The spectacular failure certainly will deal a blow to United States scientific prestige,” AP reported.

“There is no excuse for failures of this kind in a vehicle as well-developed as the Atlas,” said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.

Even the exemplary execution of the capsule separation process was viewed as a negative. “In the light of recent Soviet space successes, nothing could be more ignominious…than to have the first manned space flight end—however safely for the astronaut—on the beach at Cape Canaveral a minute after lift-off,” wrote William Hines in The Washington Star.

Sixty-two years after the MA-3 launch, at 9:30 a.m. ET on April 20, 2023, a massive SpaceX Starship rocket blasted into the sky from the company’s launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. About four minutes later, several of its engines failed, it spun out of control, and company officials gave the order to destroy it.

The reaction in the news coverage and among the public was very different than after the MA-3 failure (or virtually any of NASA’s other launch failures). “Why SpaceX’s Starship Explosion is a Low-Key Success,” read the headline on the day’s events in The Washington Post. “Why SpaceX’s Starship Explosion Is No Big Deal,” reported Time.

"The whole job of the test is to find out what goes wrong, to let things fail," said Chris Hadfield, former commander of the International Space Station. "They were so successful today.”

SpaceX employees, who burst into cheers and applause as Starship exploded, even found wry humor in the day’s events. “As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,” the company tweeted.

As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 20, 2023

It’s far from the first time a SpaceX rocket has exploded. And it’s not as if Elon Musk is just risking his own money blowing up rockets. SpaceX has a contract worth nearly $3 billion from NASA for use of Starship in ferrying astronauts to the moon. But private companies, especially those run by high-profile, self-promoting entrepreneurs like Musk, are held to a different standard than government agencies.

For NASA, the die was cast years before the MA-3 launch, when the agency was testing Vanguard rockets for potential space flights. In December 1957, one of them spectacularly exploded on the launch pad. This and other early launch misfires “made the entire program a symbol for failure in the public mind,” according to an official NASA history. “The lesson of Vanguard was plain. NASA could not afford to regard failure as acceptable under any guise. Success had to be sought on the first try, and every reasonable effort bent toward achieving that outcome.”

Given that the currently trendy doctrine of failing fast has never been applied at NASA, it’s a wonder the agency managed to land astronauts on the moon, fly space shuttle missions, play a leading role in the construction and operation of a space station, deploy an incredibly powerful space telescope and send multiple rovers to Mars, among many other accomplishments.

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That Time Federal Bank Examiners Were Told to Play Nice

Tom Shoop — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 11:47:10 -0400

The latest in an intermittent series looking back at groundbreaking, newsmaking, appalling and amusing events in government history.

Today we’re going to turn the clock back a whole five years, to 2018. It was the second year of the Trump administration, and 10 years after the financial crisis that devastated the U.S. economy. That meant a decade of stricter enforcement of financial regulations and stepped-up oversight of banks.

The time had come, Trump administration officials and GOP lawmakers decided, to ease up on financial institutions. That meant a series of policy changes, starting with overhauling the Dodd-Frank Act, which had boosted banking oversight in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Regulatory measures to ease the burden on banks followed.

But the effort didn’t end there. Randal Quarles, then the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve for supervision of banks, wanted an overhaul of the Fed’s process of supervising bank operations, which he called “inherently more judgmental, nuanced, discretionary, variable and opaque than the practice of regulation.”

Quarles backed systemic changes to reduce the space for judgment and discretion that Fed supervisors had exercised in the course of doing their jobs. That involved nothing less than a thorough culture change in the banking oversight system. It boiled down to one key principle: Be nicer. Apparently, not only did bankers chafe under the post-2008 regulatory apparatus, their feelings were hurt by toiling under the watchful eye of federal bank examiners.

“You would meet with the bank regulators and it felt like it was us versus them,” an American Bankers Associations executive told The Wall Street Journal in late 2018.

Quarles made a priority of changing that culture. It “will be the least visible thing I do and it will be the most consequential thing I do,” he told the Journal. “The banks should feel that their supervisor is going to be firm but fair.” He told examiners that their reports shouldn’t just focus on banks’ weaknesses, but give them positive feedback as well.

"The coach is demanding as much as ever from the sidelines—it’s just that every now and then he’s throwing some ‘Good job!’s and ‘Way to go!,’” said a former bank supervisor after Quarles announced the new approach.

The culture change was more than a surface-level effort. It involved redefining how overseers’ viewed their jobs. The challenge of achieving that goal is illustrated by a 2014 exchange at a Senate hearing between Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley. In her view, Warren said, federal regulators were “the cop on the beat. That is, they are out there to look for illegal and unsafe conduct.” Dudley begged to differ, saying a regulator should play the role of “fire warden,” making sure that each bank “is run well so that it is not going to catch on fire and burn on.”

Cop and fire warden are two very different visions of what regulators should be. But they’re both a far cry from coach.

Quarles knew demanding a change in culture would require a personal touch. So he and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairman Jelena McWilliams spent months in the latter half of 2018 crisscrossing the country, visiting regional offices of their organizations to describe their vision of a kinder, gentler bank supervision system. In a world ruled by facts, figures, and metrics, Quarles and McWilliams had stepped into the murky world of traditions, habits and values. “All of this will be difficult to quantify except by air miles,” Quarles told the Journal.

Did he ultimately succeed in changing the culture of bank supervision? And did that contribute to the fall of Silicon Valley Bank and the overall current shakiness of the banking system? Since those questions can’t be answered quantitatively, it’s hard to judge. Even if Quarles did achieve his goal, he argues that period is ancient history. “I gave up the reins as vice chair for supervision a year and a half ago,” Quarles told The New York Times this week.

It’s often said that culture change is extremely difficult in the federal context, and it does require determination and sustained commitment. But in one sense, it’s easier than in other sectors of the economy. Career federal employees, including bank supervisors, are accustomed to seeing political overseers come and go, and they are expected to change their approaches, techniques and actions to suit the new team’s agenda. The best of them are very good at it. So if a new leader demands culture change, he or she just might get it. And it just might stick until someone else comes along and makes changing it again a priority.

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When Collecting Your Retirement Benefit Means Proving You’re Not Dead

Tom Shoop and Tammy Flanagan — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 15:00:00 -0400

When you retire from federal service and begin collecting your hard-earned annuity benefit, the Office of Personnel Management takes responsibility for making sure you get what you’re owed. That includes the unenviable task of also verifying that benefits don’t get paid to people who have died.

This, in turn, sometimes leads OPM to question whether a person listed as living is actually deceased. In these cases, it may surprise you to learn, the burden is on the annuitant to prove they aren’t among the dearly departed.

OPM’s Retirement Services office distributes annuity payments each month to retirees. That includes a process of verifying that an annuitant meets all of the requirements to receive benefits. One of the requirements, understandably, is that they be among the living.

Part of the verification process involves using the Treasury Department’s Improper Payments Do Not Pay Initiative, known as the DNP, to detect and prevent unauthorized disbursements of benefits. The problem, according to a recent inspector general audit of OPM’s payment process, is that sometimes a DNP match may be “erroneous, have the wrong date of death, or refer to a person with the same name as a retirement annuitant, but who is not the annuitant.” So OPM checks DNP matches against various websites (such as Google) and online services to try to determine if the annuitant in question has actually passed away.

If Retirement Services does not turn up a death record in this process, they send the annuitant a letter asking them to send a proof of life. If they don’t get a response, they suspend annuity payments until they can verify the “living status” of the retiree, as the IG report puts it.

As you might imagine, receiving a letter putting the burden of proof on you to show you’re not dead can be, to say the least, an unsettling experience, as William Shackleford, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, wrote in a recent letter to OPM.

“We have heard from multiple living federal annuitants that they have received letters from OPM RS asking them to return a notarized form confirming their current information—in essence providing a notarized form to prove they are still alive,” Shackleford wrote. As a result, annuity payments to some retirees have been interrupted because they don’t understand or trust the process—or, in the case of older annuitants, because the notarization requirement presents a burden for them. The problem is compounded by the fact that it’s frequently difficult to reach Retirement Services by phone.

“While we do not object to OPM RS’ use of Treasury’s DNP Portal to help reduce improper payments to deceased annuitants, we do not believe it is appropriate for OPM RS to shift the burden to annuitants to prove they are still alive…,” Shackleford wrote.

NARFE wants OPM to reconsider the notarization requirement, and to evaluate whether the costs of ensuring that the dead aren’t getting benefit checks outweigh the benefits. Above all, the organization wants OPM to bear the responsibility for proving that someone has passed on before stopping their benefits.

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Fifth Class of Inductees To Be Enshrined in Government Hall of Fame

Tom Shoop — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 10:00:00 -0500

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Government Hall of Fame, created by Government Executive to recognize those who have made historic achievements in service to the federal government and the American people. Since 2019, a distinguished group of 52 individuals, ranging from Clara Barton to Anthony Fauci, have been inducted into the hall.

This year, nine new inductees join that select club. Some of them are household names, and others made amazing achievements out of the limelight. They’ll all be honored at a gala “Evening of Honors” on April 20 at the Washington National Cathedral. The annual Fed 100 winners also will be recognized at the gala.

Here are the members of the Government Hall of Fame Class of 2023:

Thad Allen

Pool/Getty

Best known as the federal leader who salvaged the Hurricane Katrina response effort in 2005-2006, Allen served for four decades in the United States Coast Guard. His first assignment as a flag officer was as director of resources at Coast Guard headquarters. He went on to head several Coast Guard commands and eventually became the service’s chief of staff. After leading the Katrina response, Allen was appointed commandant of the Coast Guard, serving a four-year term. In 2010, he was named as the incident response commander for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

David Chu

Shaun Heasley/Getty

From 1968 to 1971, Chu served in the Army, including a tour of duty in Vietnam, and rose to the rank of captain. From 1978 to 1981, he was the assistant director of national security and international affairs at the Congressional Budget Office. He then joined the Defense Department as director of program analysis and evaluation. After a stint at RAND Corporation, Chu returned to the Pentagon to serve as undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, where he oversaw military recruitment, career development, pay and benefits and military readiness.

MPI/Stringer/Getty

Ada Deer

A member of the Menominee Tribe, Deer became the first woman to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs after she was appointed an assistant secretary of the Interior by President Clinton. There, she oversaw policy for more than 550 federally recognized tribes. Before Deer’s service in the executive branch, she worked to restore federal recognition of the Menominee and was the first woman to chair the tribe in Wisconsin. In 1997, she served as chair of the National Indian Gaming Commission.

Elizabeth Duke

University of Maryland School of Public Policy

During her lengthy and illustrious federal career, Duke served 10 years at the Office of Personnel Management and worked in senior positions under five different secretaries of the Health and Human Services Department. She spent 12 years in the Office of the Secretary before holding high-ranking posts at the Food and Drug Administration, the Health Resources and Services Administration and the Administration for Children and Families. Duke received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive in 2006. She is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, teaching management and leadership.

Barbara Hackman Franklin

Even before serving as Commerce secretary under President George H.W. Bush, Franklin had a distinguished career in government. In 1971, President Nixon tapped her to head an initiative aimed at increasing the appointments of women to high-ranking federal government posts, resulting in nearly quadrupling the number who served in such positions. Franklin was then appointed to head the newly created Consumer Product Safety Commision. There, from 1973 to 1978, she focused on ensuring the safety of products for children. Franklin then served four terms on the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. As Commerce secretary, she was instrumental in normalizing trade relations with China, securing $1 billion in contracts for American companies.

Carla Hayden

Shannon Finney/Getty

Hayden is both the first African American and first woman to serve as the Librarian of Congress. She has devoted her career to modernizing libraries, making research collections accessible onsite and online. From 1991 to 1993 she was deputy commissioner and chief librarian of the Chicago Public Library. After that, Hayden was CEO of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, where she created an after-school center for teens offering homework assistance and college and career counseling. During the 2015 protests of the death of Freddie Gray, Hayden courageously kept Baltimore’s libraries open. She was nominated as Librarian of Congress by President Obama in 2016 and became the first professional librarian in the post since 1974.

Thurgood Marshall

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A towering figure in civil rights law, Marshall was an attorney for the NAACP when he successfully argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. After serving four years as a federal judge in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, Marshall was named solicitor general of the United States by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Two years later, he was appointed as the first African American Supreme Court justice. Marshall served with distinction on the high court until his retirement in 1991.

Sean O’Keefe

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A member of the first class of presidential management interns in 1978, O’Keefe went on to serve on the Senate Appropriations Committee staff, followed by a series of high-ranking federal positions, as NASA administrator, deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, secretary of the Navy and chief financial officer of the Defense Department. O’Keefe also has worked in the aerospace industry and currently is a university professor and endowed chair at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Douglas Owsley

Smithsonian Institution

Owsley, the curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonia’s National Museum of Natural History, has achieved fame through handling numerous high-profile cases of forensic anthropology over the years. These include identifying Jeffrey Dahmer's first victim, excavating the Jamestown Colony, analyzing victims of the siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Texas, and processing remains of U.S. servicemen killed during Operation Desert Storm. His life story served as the basis for a Discovery Channel documentary.

PREVIOUS INDUCTEES

The members of the class of 2023 join those who have already been inducted into the Government Hall of Fame:

Madeleine Albright
Apollo 11 Astronauts: Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins
Clara Barton
Hubert T. Bell
Lonnie Bunch III
Ralph Bunche
George H.W. Bush
Rachel Carson
Francis Collins
David O. “Doc” Cooke
Frederick Douglass
Tammy Duckworth
Anthony Fauci
Robert Gates
John Glenn
Virginia Hall
Alexander Hamilton
Patricia Roberts Harris
Oveta Culp Hobby
Walter Hollis
Grace Hopper
Dwight Ink
Shirley Ann Jackson
Howard Jenkins Jr.
Katherine Johnson
Frank Kameny
John Koskinen
John Lewis
Charles Lyman
Charles McGee
Norman Mineta
Patsy Mink
Constance Berry Newman
Ellen Ochoa
Ely S. Parker
Frances Perkins
Colin Powell
Condoleezza Rice
Elliot Richardson
Alice Rivlin
Theodore Roosevelt
Donna Shalala
Susan Solomon
Elmer Staats
Kathryn D. Sullivan
Linda Thomas-Greenfield
Harriet Tubman
Paul Volcker
James Webb
Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsop

SELECTION COMMITTEE

This year’s inductees into the Government Hall of Fame were chosen by a panel made up of former federal officials and government management experts:

Anne Armstrong, vice president of strategic alliances at GovExec
Tanya Ballard Brown, executive editor, Government Executive
Jason Briefel, partner at the law firm Shaw, Bransford & Roth and director of policy and outreach of the Senior Executives Association
Timothy B. Clark, editor at large, Government Executive
Calvin Byrd, former senior level advisor for physical security at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Teresa Gerton, president and CEO of the National Academy of Public Administration
Robert Tobias, former president of the National Treasury Employees Union and distinguished practitioner in residence in Key Executive Leadership Programs at American University

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