The Buzz

Let's See That Smile

In January, Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., introduced legislation (H.R. 3751) ordering the Office of Personnel Management to study how to improve vision, dental and hearing benefits for federal employees. The House passed the measure in June.

In early July, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, was putting the finishing touches on her own bill, described by a committee spokeswoman as "actual benefit legislation that would provide supplemental, voluntary coverage." It would provide vision and dental benefits based on the model used in the long-term care program currently available to federal employees.

The long-term care program is voluntary and stands outside the standard Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. OPM negotiates prices under the program, but the government does not pay for any part of the benefit. "Until the long-term care program, no one thought of [insurance] in terms of an employee pay-all," says Abby Block, OPM's deputy associate director for employee and family support policy. "It was groundbreaking."

Lawmakers are pushing the issue of expanded health benefits as a way to boost recruitment and retention. Dental and vision benefits are more widely available in the private sector and in state and local governments than at the federal level. Employees of 48 state governments have access to voluntary dental benefits, says Andrea Hofelich, communications director for the Governmental Affairs Committee. She says 95 percent of companies with 500 or more employees provide dental coverage.

Pentagon's Skills Gaps

Specifically, GAO faulted the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the military services' headquarters, and the Defense Logistics Agency for not analyzing the gaps between the skills Defense employees have and those they will need in the future. The report (GAO-04-753) also criticized the Pentagon for not adopting goals that could be used to measure the success of personnel management efforts.

"During its downsizing in the early 1990s, DoD did not focus on reshaping the civilian workforce in a strategic manner," GAO auditors said in a letter to Rep. Solomon Ortiz of Texas, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, who requested the report. "With more than 50 percent of its civilian personnel becoming eligible to retire in the next five years, DoD may find it difficult to fill certain mission-critical jobs with qualified personnel."

Pentagon officials told GAO they have begun analyzing skills gaps.

Tracking Trusted Travelers

Under the program, "trusted travelers" can provide personal information to TSA and have records of their fingerprints and iris patterns recorded in TSA databases for identification at airport screening checkpoints. After being accepted, the travelers can take advantage of an expedited security process.

Testing of the program began at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where 2,400 passengers were accepted. Amy Von Walter, a spokeswoman for the program, would not disclose how many people applied or how many applications were rejected.

The other airports slated to offer the service this summer are Los Angeles International, with United Airlines, in mid-July; George Bush Intercontinental in Houston, with Continental Airlines, in early August; and Boston Logan International and Ronald Reagan Washington National, both with American Airlines, by the end of August.

The test will last 90 days at each airport, and Von Walter says TSA then will halt the program to evaluate it. The agency will keep the travelers' information in its databases so they will not have to re-enroll when the program is relaunched.

TSA published a privacy impact assessment of the program on June 24, outlining the process for collecting, using and securing the passenger information. The assessment disclosed that a new record-keeping system was created under the 1974 Privacy Act.

But in a letter to TSA on the system, lawyers for the Electronic Privacy Information Center charged that "TSA will be under no legal obligation to inform the public of the categories of information contained in the system or provide the ability to access and correct records that are irrelevant, untimely or incomplete."

On the Record: Gordon England...

On the challenge ahead: We do not have a personnel system today in the DoD. We have, I believe, nine different personnel systems that all operate within this enterprise. So we've had different demonstration projects in these different personnel systems. Frankly, I was surprised. I would have thought there's sort of one system across a whole department. But it turns out, there's not.

On the workforce: What has happened over the years is that we have migrated a lot of military people to civilian jobs. We have also hired a lot of contractors. We have outsourced a lot of work. So we've been doing things, frankly, it appears to me, to work around what has been a cumbersome system that we have in terms of our own personnel. We should be able to return those military personnel to military jobs and replace them with our civilian workforce. We shouldn't be doing all the outsourcing we're doing. But we need a flexible system so we get the same benefits.

On the structure of the reform effort: We put together teams of people in about four or five different areas to better understand how to go about this process. [We] brought in employees from all over the country to be part of teams-some teams 20 people, some teams 100 people, some teams 50 people-to get an understanding. We went to the Congress and we said . . . "Here's how we're going about this," to make sure they were comfortable with the process. So we brought this as much into the open as we could. . . . And then over the teams, we've put an OIPT-Overarching Integrated Product Team-to integrate the work going on in all the individual teams. . . . We want this to be a collaborative process. It's not negotiating to an answer.

On pay banding: Pay banding essentially takes the GS scale and collapses it into fewer categories. So instead of there being GS-1 through 15, you might have four or five bands. We have not decided what those bands are going to be. That's part of what the working groups will be doing. We'll be making recommendations for the OIPT to discuss and to bring forward to the senior leadership of the Department of Defense and OPM. There's a lot of different ways that have been suggested and a lot of different experiments that have been tried for different types of work environments. And frankly, I can't tell you today which ones are the best.

Action Hero

Glickman, who headed the Agriculture Department and its nearly 100,000 employees during the Clinton administration, told Entertainment Weekly magazine that his government experience would come in very handy-and not just because of the political skills he gained.

"When I was in the Department of Agriculture, I was the most assaulted member of the Cabinet," Glickman told the magazine. "They threw genetically modified foods at me, I had nude protesters, I had all kinds of things."

Glickman, who also served as a Kansas congressman from 1977 to 1995, isn't kidding. In 1997, an animal rights activist angry at the killing of more than 1,000 bison near Yellowstone National Park splashed him and other top officials with rotting bison entrails.