Letters

LETTERS

PEAKING PERFORMANCE

In "Lost Youth" (January) the author stresses the importance of performance appraisal as a key to not only good management, but in keeping younger professionals rather than letting them slip away to the private sector.

Some government reformers have taken this continued appeal for performance-oriented management to mean that there is a need for new laws. This is not the case. The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act is an excellent law to provide performance management under the sections pertaining to performance appraisal. Unfortunately the law, as is, is unenforceable since there is no provision for sanctions against those who refuse to follow the law. With effective enforcement of the CSRA there would be performance management in the civil service and many fine young employees would stay, rather than move into the private sector.

But perhaps there is an even more economical way to bring performance management into the federal government, as a hybrid system between public and private management. The government employs many professionals in law, accounting, personnel, training, computer science and other fields. Look at the savings that could be accomplished if each department employed only a small cadre of expert professionals to advise top management, and farmed out the major portions of the work in these professions to private entrepreneurs on a fee-for-services contract. This would amount to a large portion of the government's routine work being done by part-time contractor/entrepreneurs with no cost to the government for retirement contributions, hospitalization or life insurance. The entrepreneurs would be able to take advantage of the tax breaks for private business. Everybody would win and the bureaucracy would be greatly reduced. This is real performance management.

R.E. Rieck
Meteorologist
National Weather Service Forecast Office
Sterling, Va.

AGEISM IN DoD?

The empowerment of federal employees to control their own careers is aimed at getting rid of displaced people too old for the concept of a standard age for employees ("The Drawdown Drags On," March). In 1991, I was 57 and my job with the Army inspector general was about to be cut. I sent out more than three dozen 171s, all for jobs I am qualified to do. I had one reply. That came from the DoD inspector general's office, which canceled the position I had applied for. A month later the job was reopened and filled. I obtained my current job through the Army stopper list. Had it not been for the list I would have been forced to retire without enough years to earn a full annuity. I'm glad I didn't have to contend with the cutthroats who call themselves managers.

Clyde Williams
U.S. Army
Washington

YEAR 2000 DILEMMA

When I read the first three paragraphs of the article "The Year 2000 Problem" (March) I began to be concerned that there really was a BIG problem here. However, the first sentence of paragraph four set my mind at ease and I read no further.

In that sentence you quote Kathleen Adams as saying "you cannot underestimate the seriousness of the problem." Whew! What a relief! I had estimated that it was a $3.85 problem, but now that I know it is not possible to UNDERESTIMATE the magnitude of it, I have revised my estimate to $1.22. However, since I can't UNDERESTIMATE it, it must be even smaller! At this rate I'll soon be at zero!

Certainly she meant "you cannot OVERESTIMATE," meaning no matter how big you think the problem is, it's really bigger! Don't you guys edit this stuff?

C. N. Calvano
Naval Postgraduate School
Mechanical Engineering Dept.
Monterey, Calif.

WRONG FOR THE WEB

The Executive Memo article in the April issue regarding recommendations of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIIAC) was interesting, not for the content of the recommendations but as an illustration of the weakness of our current style of government.

In the two years that elapsed while NIIAC was pondering its commission and recommendations, the "information superhighway" has grown several-fold without benefit of a blueprint. The driving forces for this growth have been commerce, community and challenge.

Business has found that a large market of educated customers with control over a large amount of personal income can be reached readily over the "net." These same educated people have found that they can reach each other and exchange ideas and access valuable information online.

The very concept of applying a blueprint to something that has already grown so large that it has taken on a life of its own is folly. The recommendations seem to fall into two categories: descriptions of fait accompli and palliative platitudes.

Advocacy of the constitutional precepts of the United States, diverse cultural values and a de facto atmosphere of equity are already found throughout the Internet. The Internet is building a strong sense of international community, and often reveals the actions of local and national communities to be motivated by narrow, selfish considerations. Americans have developed many of the vehicles used to cruise the fast lanes, but anybody in the world who wants on can and should be able to get on.

Only the recommendation of facilitating access to all Americans seems to have anything new to say, and reduces it to an unfunded mandate to state and local governments to provide the hardware and software in public places that allow democratic access.

The metaphor "information superhighway" is a poor choice. The World Wide Web is too new and too different from our past 10 millennia of civilized experience for the old concepts and tools to be of much use. The very idea of "directing the construction of the information superhighway" is too rooted in irrelevant physical ad managerial concepts to yield success.

Thomas A. Davidson
Interior Department
Amarillo, Texas

DIVIDE DEEPENS

Your article titled "The Great Divide" in the April issue is well done and addresses a topic that is real and very troubling.

I am a white male and have worked for the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management for 33 years, starting as a GS-7 and rising through the ranks as a GS-14 district manager. I am not a prejudiced person. I value people for what they are, for their abilities and how well they carry out the mission of this agency for the American public.

I am experiencing the effects of affirmative action firsthand and have seen how it has affected my co-workers over the years. As a manager and supervisor, I have actively pursued diversifying the workforce and have hired and promoted numerous women and minorities. I firmly believe that a diversified workforce is a more productive workforce. But affirmative action has been taken to the extreme in this agency by putting some women and minorities on a fast track so that our agency can look diversified. By selecting and promoting these generally underqualified and inexperienced people, employee morale, career paths and productivity have suffered a great deal. And the worst part, in this time of downsizing, we now have many of these people at executive levels who will be encumbering these positions for years.

To refute what some may tend to dismiss as "white male sour grapes and self-pity," let me offer some specifics that involved me personally. In the last five years I have been a candidate for nine executive level positions. I was rated as "best qualified" for all nine as were, I suppose, all the other candidates for final consideration. Of those nine positions, four went to European-American males, three to European-American females, one to an African-American female, and one to a Spanish-American male. While women and minorities comprise 19 percent of the professional BLM workforce, and the majority of them have come to BLM in the last 10 years, 5 out of 9 of those jobs were filled with women and minorities. Am I surprised? No. Am I optimistic about my future career with BLM? Absolutely not. Am I happy with affirmative action? What a joke. Do I feel discriminated against? Absolutely!

In my opinion, the bottom line is this: Affirmative action and preferential hiring of women and minorities has had some positive effect on this agency. We do a better job as a whole when there is a diversity of cultures and values within our team. While we more than likely didn't realize it, our agency has been at a disadvantage for many years because of a lack of women and minorities. But slam-dunking underqualified women and minorities (and political appointees) into critical, executive level positions is proving to be a disaster for this agency. Because these people are short on experience, political sensitivity and credibility, more of our customers and elected officials are increasingly unhappy. The worst part is a tremendous downward spiral of morale and productivity because, like it or not, most of us in BLM (who are white males) see a very grim future ahead with poor leadership, lower budgets, reverse discrimination and few opportunities for advancement. The agency we have served so well for so long has abandoned us, and we are not a happy bunch.

Yes, affirmative action is succeeding in federal government, if you define "success" by increased percentages of women and minorities in the workforce. But affirmative action is more a failure, at least in this agency, because the majority of the workforce (including most women) resents how that success is being achieved. That resentment and the lack of leadership/management ability of many of those recipients of affirmative action selections are wasting a lot of taxpayers' money.

Deane H. Zeller
District Manager
Salt Lake District
Bureau of Land Management
Interior Department

STUCK IN REVERSE

I am writing just for the record. I am a white male with 10 years of service with the USDA Cotton Division. I have been passed over on 30 occasions. The affirmative action plan is reverse discrimination. You do not need to put down your qualifications; just your race and sex.

Don Williams
Agriculture Department