The Buzz

May 1, 2004

In the early 1980s, Drug Enforcement Agency Special Agent Michele Leonhart and an informant were in a Minneapolis hotel room, trying to get some well-armed Florida drug dealers to sell them cocaine. "You don't have a sense of time when you're in the middle of something like that," says Leonhart. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has launched the California Performance Review, aimed at making the state's government "work better and cost less." Does that sound familiar? It should. It's almost exactly the same name and tag line used by Vice President Al Gore for his reinventing government effort, launched in 1993. In November 1990, Richard Yancey, a 28-year-old writer struggling to hold down a steady job, found himself interviewing for what is likely one of the few government positions managers warn young, talented candidates against accepting. NASA is withholding hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress added to its 2004 budget for pet projects. When I first became chairman, I was faced with the opportunity-thanks to you all and the budget resources that were given us-to add 842 positions to a base of roughly 3,000. That's a huge increase in our people. It became obvious to me very quickly that if we were going to do that effectively and not just put people into our existing divisions and end up with two or three people doing what one person used to do, then we would have to take a look at the organizational structure.

A new drug warrior, a familiar face in California, NASA scrutiny and a tax collector tells all.

Michele the Lionhearted

Remembering the episode in Minneapolis, Leonhart, who was recently confirmed as the agency's deputy administrator, looks back on her 23-year DEA career and acknowledges her good fortune. "It always worked out. I am one of the lucky ones," she says. Seventy-one DEA agents and employees have been killed in action since 1921.

Leonhart and her boss, DEA Administrator Karen Tandy, are the first women to run the Justice Department agency, which boasts more than 9,000 employees. Before President Bush nominated her, Leonhart was special agent in charge of the DEA's San Francisco field division. As deputy administrator, Leonhart says she will do "anything" to make sure the agency's employees can "get the job done." She also wants the public to see the "human side" of the DEA: "I would like to open the door and have the public know more about what we do."

Terminator's Terminology

So where's the connection between the cost-cutting effort of a newly minted GOP governor and the organizational overhaul of a Democratic standard-bearer? The answer is Billy Hamilton, who designed and led the first-ever performance review in Texas in 1991. Hamilton then served as a deputy project director of Gore's National Performance Review before returning to his civil service career in the Lone Star State. Schwarzenegger has tapped him to serve as co-executive director of his review.

The similarities between the Gore and Schwarzenegger efforts are more than just skin deep: Both are driven by fiscal crises, assert that government needs to treat citizens as customers, and rely on government employees, rather than outsiders, to generate recommendations for change. Maybe in this case, the hype is true: management reform really is a bipartisan process.

Tax Collector Tells All

"You will hate this job," the chief of the Internal Revenue Service's Tampa, Fla., branch told Yancey during his final interview for a tax collector position. "You'll want to put your fist through a wall. You'll think you're having a nervous breakdown."

Yancey took the job anyway. And it resulted in a memoir, Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man's Tour of Duty Inside the IRS (Harper Collins, 2004), that reads like a work of fiction. But in telling stories of attending training courses with an eccentric womanizer, confronting a tax-evading dentist and seizing an insurance salesman's Corvette, Yancey also details the IRS' inner workings.

In describing his constant quest to produce results, or in his words "feed the beast," Yancey highlights his struggle with the realization that by seizing property, he could wipe out a family's life savings, or put a struggling entrepreneur out of business.

Yancey acknowledges that his experiences are not necessarily typical. "This is the story," he writes, "of one employee among the thousands who serve."

Peer Review for Pet Projects

Administrator Sean O'Keefe has put lawmakers on notice that NASA intends to subject their earmarks to the same scrutiny it gives its own research projects. "They have impressed on all of us that the fiscal challenges we face are pretty serious; therefore, we ought to be extremely diligent," says NASA's chief. Every one of the set-asides-there are 151 worth $388 million-will face a rigorous peer review. O'Keefe says the space agency does not intend to use the earmarks to fund budget shortfalls, but "we'll see where that goes."

In a March letter to Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., O'Keefe expressed concern over what he called the "exponential growth" of congressional interest items in NASA's annual appropriation. Earmarks have grown 25-fold in number and fivefold in cost since 1997, O'Keefe wrote.

This year, NASA has about $15.4 billion to spend, some $91 million less than the Bush administration requested. Pet NASA projects Congress has approved range in price from $150,000 for a planetarium in northern Alabama to $24 million for commercial aerospace technology transfer programs.

On the Record: William Donaldson

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman, told a House appropriations subcommittee in late March about challenges in adding staff at the agency.

On issues associated with a rapid staff increase:

On the state of recruitment efforts: We have received authorization for 842 new positions. We went into that authorization with 152 positions that were open. And you can think of that as sort of a natural state. In other words, we have people who are constantly leaving. By the way, the figures on that are going down as a result of the better pay and, I hope, some of the exciting things we're doing. But we have 152 of those kinds of positions. We had 213 people leave the SEC since 2002, so we have a total of nearly 1,265 positions to be filled, and, as I say, that's a combination of these new slots plus the replacement slots.

On the difficulty of hiring accountants, even at $70,000 entry-level salaries: Some of the competitive jobs in Washington pay a lot more than we do. Even with our increased salaries and so forth, they still pay more than we do. And the people get pretty involved in where they're living, and to pick up and come to Washington for a lesser salary is not an easy to thing to convince people to do unless they have the mission of what we're doing in mind. . . . A $70,000 starting salary for a CPA out of school is-I mean it seems like pretty good money to me, but it's not competitive [with] some institutions in this town that can pay a lot higher than that.

On minority outreach efforts: In 2004, we are planning to or have participated in 30 diversity-focused recruiting events around the country. We're actively recruiting the top 20 law schools for diversity, according to the National Association for Law Placement people. We're recruiting accountants through events sponsored by these societies like the American Women's Society of CPAs, the National Association of Black Accountants and the Association of Latino Professionals. We are doing everything we can do at normal job fairs and normal recruiting at a broad cross section of graduate schools.

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