Customs' Canine Corps

EXECUTIVE MEMO

Customs' Canine Corps
The Lessons Of Tailhook
And That's The Way It Is
Help in Hiring the Disabled
Raines' Rules
Book Smarts
In Brief
'Tis the Season for Plums and Prunes
Fallout From the Fighter Fight

Customs' Canine Corps

t's one of the most selective training academies in the country. Only one in 100 qualified applicants enters its program and only 60 percent of those who enter graduate. At a recent recruiting event, 80 prospects tried out. None were accepted.

It's not West Point. It's not the FBI Academy. It's the U.S. Customs Service's Canine Enforcement Training Center in Front Royal, Va.-the elite academy for law enforcement's top dogs.

The center's 12-week training program prepares canine cops to sniff out illegal drugs. After graduating, each dog is issued a gold badge to wear on its collar. There are 450 badge-wearing dogs working for the Customs Service .

If you think the center is looking only for well-bred, well-behaved dogs, think again. What the Customs Service wants is aggressive, rough-and-tumble dogs with good jumping skills (to get up into the backs of suspicious tractor-trailers). Recruits must weigh at least 45 pounds. Faint-hearted dogs need not apply. Customs canines must be able to stay focused when sniffing and not be distracted by horns honking and suspects shouting.

Puppies can be inspired to one day become Customs Service drug sniffers with the service's baseball-style trading cards, featuring the all-star dogs of law enforcement. The cards are given out at schools throughout the country.

So start training now. Someday, your mutt could be pictured on his own rookie card.

The Lessons Of Tailhook

t's too soon to tell where allegations of sexual misconduct, including rape, assault, harassment and fraternization, primarily among drill instructors and new recruits, will leave the Army, but early indications are the service has learned a few lessons from the Navy's Tailhook scandal, where dozens of women were groped and assaulted at a Las Vegas hotel during a Navy flier convention in 1992.

Perhaps most notable has been the seriousness with which the Army has taken the complaints of misconduct at its training facilities. For starters, when senior service officials realized they had a serious problem on their hands, they went to the press to explain what they were going to do about it. They then established and publicized a toll-free hot line for victims at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. And Army Secretary Togo West called for an outside investigation into the role of senior leaders at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command in handling the matter.

All that is well and good and is a welcome about-face from the Navy's attempts to close ranks, downplay and even cover up wrongdoing, particularly among senior officials, in the Tailhook incident. But the real test for the Army will be in the conclusions of the myriad investigations springing from the allegations. For example, what will the Army do to prevent the abuse of power among noncommissioned officers and officers in future training? And most importantly, why did it take so long for senior leaders to discover that serious crimes apparently were being committed at training facilities throughout the Army? The answers will show how much the Army has really learned.

And That's The Way It Is

rom John Glenn's first solo circuit of the earth through the joy of Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon and Apollo 13's near demise, the space program and Walter Cronkite's comforting and authoritative voice seemed as one. Once again NASA has turned to the nation's grandfather of news to explain a complicated and dangerous mission-but this time it's the agency's strategic planning process.

Cronkite is the narrator of a 20-minute video production, "Strategic Planning: Charting a Course for the Future," designed to explain and sell strategic planning to government managers and employees. Searching for a model of strategic planning, the first step in meeting the requirements of the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management settled on NASA. The Office of Personnel Management is distributing the video.

NASA crafted its first strategic plan in 1994 and hasn't looked back, revising the 25-year blueprint annually ever since. Its most recent plan sets three key missions with 25-year goals for four lines of business encompassing 10 field centers.

The video charts the plan's history and intent. The newly published "NASA Strategic Management Handbook" explains the plan's philosophy and tells managers how to use it. For the video, call OPM's Communications Office at (202) 606-1800. The management plan is on the World Wide Web at www.hq.nasa. gov/office/nsp/NSPTOC.html.

Help in Hiring the Disabled

new GSA program rolling out nationwide this month promises to streamline the hiring of temporary administrative support personnel at agencies while creating jobs for blind and severely disabled workers.

The program, called The Road Ahead, got its start at the General Services Administration's General Products Center in Fort Worth, Texas, where price/cost analyst Sherry Rogers was happy with the disabled temps the center had hired, but frustrated by the 45-day purchase orders needed to bring the workers in. "If you need someone to come type, you need them today," says Rogers.

So Rogers created a program that streamlines hiring of blind and disabled temporary workers and provides incentives for agencies to do so.

Here's how it works: The Road Ahead supplies a list of nonprofits, usually branches of Goodwill or the Lighthouse for the Blind, that act as placement organizations for the program. Agencies contact participating nonprofits in their area, tell them what kind of temporary help they need and the nonprofits work to fill their requests.

The incentives include:

• Money. On average, the hourly wages of temporary workers hired through The Road Ahead are 17 percent to 27 percent lower than wages paid to temps hired through private sector companies. While the worker is paid commensurate with federal employee wages, Goodwill and the Lighthouse for the Blind charge a commission for placement services that is below market rate. In fact, the 10 percent commission the nonprofits charge often doesn't even cover their overhead. (FSS earns a 1 percent commission to administer the program.)

• Time. Nonprofit organizations are designated "directed sources," so agencies can hire through them without a lengthy procurement.
• Choice. When agencies hire temps through The Road Ahead, they get to select workers themselves.

Raines' Rules

irst the Office of Management and Budget came up with three pesky questions to guide agencies pondering big information technology purchases: "Does government need to do it? If so, can some other agency do it better than we can? If not, have we reengineered our process so we can spend less and use the technology most efficiently?" Now, in an Oct. 25 memorandum to agencies, come "Raines' Rules," the IT gospel according to new OMB Director Franklin Raines.

Under the rules, major IT investments should:

• Support core or priority federal government missions.
• Be impossible for another agency, company or government to efficiently perform.
• Support work already redesigned to cut costs, improve efficiency and use off-the-shelf technology.
• Show a return on investment equal to or better than other uses of available resources.
• Be consistent with agency and governmentwide architectures that integrate work and information flows with strategic plans; comply with year 2000 standards; incorporate standards allowing information exchange and resource sharing; and retain flexibility in the choice of suppliers.
• Reduce risk by avoiding custom design, using pilot projects and prototypes, establishing clear measures of success, securing buy-in from users.
• Be put into effect in phased, successive chunks that are short-term and narrow in scope and independently solve part of an overall mission problem.
• Appropriately allocate risk between government and contractor, tie payments to accomplishments and use commercial technology.

All eight rules are to guide agencies in proposing information technology spending in fiscal 1998 and will be the measures OMB uses to accept or reject such proposals, Raines warns.

Book Smarts

In Brief

Say What? "We are now transitioning from an air force into an air and space force on an evolutionary path to a space and air force," says the Air Force in a new study, "Global Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force."

President's Pay Plan. As expected, President Clinton announced in late November that he would implement a pay plan that would raise locality pay rates around the country 0.7 percent in 1997. That makes the average raise this year 3 percent.

Rule-Bending Guides. Psst, wanna get around the personnel rules? The Office of Personnel Management will show you some fancy staffing tricks via its new Template of Personnel Flexibilities on the World Wide Web at www.opm.gov/wkfcperf/html/pbo.htm. Originally designed to help performance-based organizations innovate, the template is available to all, as is its sister, the Template of Senior Executive Service Personnel Flexibilities, at www.opm. gov/wkfcperf/html/sestmplt.htm.

'Tis the Season for Plums and Prunes

ast fall, the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee released the 1996 edition of the "Plum Book," listing the most sought-after jobs in the upper ranks of the federal government. The book, whose actual title is United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions, lists over 8,000 jobs.

Not to be outdone, the Council for Excellence in Government, in its latest Prune Book, examines 39 pivotal jobs in defense and foreign policy; health care; the environment; civil rights; law enforcement; national infrastructure; the economy and trade; and federal management.

The book's author, former longtime foreign service officer John H. Trattner, interviewed dozens of former occupants of the jobs in the course of his research.

The new book takes a detailed look at the presidential appointments process, and, in another special section, offers advice on surviving and succeeding as a federal executive. The book aims principally at Senate-confirmed positions, but it notes that the spread of political office-holders in agencies has gone far beyond the 700-plus people who hold these jobs (up from 100 in Franklin Roosevelt's day). That's too bad for high-ranking civil servants, as the following passage notes:

"How deep into the Cabinet agencies should political appointments go? Over the last 25 years, the tendency has been to go deeper and deeper. The reasons vary: more campaign/political supporters and party factions that must be rewarded or placated with jobs in government; the felt need, sometimes driven by ideology, for more political control of the governing apparatus. A former senior political appointee recalls suggesting to an incoming administration that 'this is your only opportunity to put career people into some of these key jobs; if you put advance people from the campaign in them, they're going to screw it up. Well, they didn't want to hear it.' But the issue remains, this veteran says: 'There are certain decisions that can only be made at the front end of an administration, when positions aren't encumbered and when agencies aren't encumbered.'

"He laments the shouldering aside of valuable career people that results from the excessive layering of political appointees. Not many presidencies ago, people at the top of the career service 'could expect to actually interact with the president or certainly with people who interacted with the president,' he points out. Having worked their way to the top, they assumed there was a way to get their experience and advice to the top political decision-maker. 'Now that's gone,' says this former high-ranking appointee. 'And what we've got is the secretary, deputy secretary, and bunches of under secretaries, all with special assistants and assistants to special assistants-who are all political.'

It is this 'giant tier' of political appointees, not the president or other White House executives, who now do the interacting with the most senior career officials. 'The people at the top of the career service can't get even to the secretary of the department and may not even be able to get to the assistant secretary,' he says. 'It's profoundly demoralizing.' "

FINDING THE BOOKS

The Plum Book is available in print from the Government Printing Office at (202) 512-1800. It's also on the Web sites of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee (www.house.gov/reform) and the Office of Personnel Management (www.opm.gov), which calls it FederaLIST. The Prune Book is on www.excelgov.org. Hard copies can be ordered there as well.

Fallout From the Fighter Fight

he Pentagon's decision in November to eliminate McDonnell Douglas Corp. from the Joint Strike Fighter competition may serve as a catalyst to further consolidate the shrinking defense industry.

McDonnell Douglas' failure in what Harry Stonecipher, the company's chief executive officer, had called a "must-win" contract decision, may have a big effect on the defense industry. Some analysts predict McDonnell Douglas will combine talents with Boeing or Northrop Grumman Corp. to create a new aerospace firm that will rival the colossal Lockheed Martin.

Many industry experts expected McDonnell Douglas, the world's largest contractor of military aircraft, to fare well in the bid for the largest ever military jet fighter contract. The contract to build the next-generation fighter for the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force could be worth as much as $750 billion over the life of the contract. It is viewed as a make-or-break deal for the bidders, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing Co., which remain in the competition.

The loss was especially keen for McDonnell Douglas, which focused on military aircraft at the expense of commercial aircraft.