Career officials called key to management reform initiatives

The long-term success of reform initiatives such as those included in the Bush administration's President's Management Agenda depends on whether career managers and executives support those initiatives over the long haul, participants at a conference in Washington said on Monday.

The administration's greatest achievements in management have more to do with leadership than with the particular success of a program or initiative, said Jonathan Breul, executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, at the Government Performance Summit, sponsored by the Performance Institute of Arlington, Va.

"What we have seen in this administration over the last seven years is the most sustained high-level management reform effort in history," said Breul, who also is a former high-ranking official at the Office of Management and Budget. That effort, he said, has "remained focused surrounding a set of five coherent, interconnected initiatives."

Several other participants agreed that the personal investment of the president in pushing management improvements has made a big difference. But over the long haul, it's critical, they said, that career civil servants get on board and take ownership of the programs.

Mike Hettinger, a director at Grant Thornton Public Sector and former staff director of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Management, Finance and Accountability, said most of the work on the management agenda takes place at high levels, with a political appointee at OMB working directly with other appointees at agencies. "While I think the administration has been successful to some extent in pushing it down beyond the political leadership of the agencies, we need to make sure there is more … of a role for career agency personnel to play in these management initiatives," he said.

That, said participants, is the only way for initiatives to survive from one administration to the next.

"Unfortunately, major change efforts, and I'll include the PMA in that, don't happen to fit nicely into presidential transition cycles," said Ron Sanders, the Office of National Intelligence's chief human capital officer. "To sustain these kinds of transformations over the course of presidential transitions … takes some courage on the part of the career folks who are left with the responsibility to carry the ball forward."

Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at OMB, said he hoped career employees, as well as members of Congress, interest groups and other stakeholders, would keep the pressure on the next administration to improve agencies' financial management and make sure "everyone in our programs gets better every year."

Hettinger said it is also important that those that are named to appointed positions in the next administration be familiar with the federal landscape and the problems they will be taking on. During the presidential campaign he said, "You get all these ideas and some may sound good on the stump, but we need to have people in place who have a fundamental understanding of what they're trying to accomplish."

While management challenges certainly will continue into the next administration, they are not the type of high-profile public concerns that will translate into political support. "You will never get a vote for spending your time on this stuff," Breul said. "It needs to be done because it needs to be done. No president has won an election because of this and no president will get reelected because of this."