Agency review team member recounts collaborative process

After more than 35 years in government -- as a career official at the Office of Management and Budget and director of the White House Office of Administration under President Clinton -- Frank Reeder built on his information security and public management expertise by founding a consulting company, The Reeder Group.

He's continued to share his knowledge as a fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration and as a principal of the nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government. But this past fall, he took on a new challenge -- serving as a member of Barack Obama's agency review team for OMB.

Reeder spoke with Government Executive staff correspondent Alyssa Rosenberg on Wednesday. Edited excerpts follow.

GE: What made this transition different from others you've experienced?

Reeder: My sense is this was a dramatically different transition for I think three reasons. Number one, these are extraordinary times. The administration had to be ready go, not simply take the honeymoon period to look around and see what needed to be done.

The second reason was the incoming administration was an order of magnitude better prepared in two ways. One was a very clearly articulated agenda throughout the campaign. The only thing remotely comparable to that I experienced was the Reagan transition. There was a clear understanding of what the transition team wanted. The principals understood key things like who are the key appointments to make [and] the talent bank was well under way, which allowed them to do things in November that normally don't happen until December.

The third factor -- and the last time I can remember anything approximating this might have been in 1960-61 -- was a set of public expectations and good feelings that [Obama] was a candidate who said he wanted to make government cool again, as opposed to [Ronald Reagan] who said in his inaugural that government isn't the solution, it's the problem.

[In addition, President] Bush said to his administration on Nov. 5, "I want you to cooperate." He said it like he meant it. It's one advantage of having a well-disciplined administration. By golly, they cooperated. The agencies I worked with were, with minor exceptions, extraordinarily cooperative. The appointees got out of the way [and] made it possible for the transition team to interact directly with the career staff.

GE: What kinds of questions did you ask career staffers?

Reeder: Clearly, what you want to hear from the career staff is what are the burning issues? What are the things that the appointees are going to have to deal with immediately? What do you perceive to be the opportunities? What are the threats, what are our stakeholders saying? What has GAO written about? All the stuff that you want to know so new appointees aren't blindsided.

We knew what [Obama] had said on the campaign. We knew what his priorities would likely be, so we began to explore with the career staff: If the president wants to do X, how would you do that?

Transitions are where campaigns and governance converge. If they're bad transitions, they collide. The candidate may have said I want to do X, and perhaps the way to accomplish X is different from the way you said on the campaign trail. It can be true to the commitments and values the candidate articulated in ways that make sense. The experts on that are the career staff who are running the existing machinery.

GE: Were there recurring themes during your discussions?

Reeder: The candidate was concerned very much about performance. And certainly, the matter of how one does that in ways that meet the administration's commitment to a government that delivers and produces results without it becoming an intensely bureaucratic process that's more process than substance [was discussed]. The [Program Assessment Rating Tool] process, while sound in principle, needed to be fixed. That's hardly a revelation. There's certainly consensus about that.

People [also] said as a first order of business, there's a human capital crisis. We have to have the best people properly trained in the right circumstances. If they're contractors, there's a particular responsibility to make sure you're contracting the right thing, and that you have program officers.

GE: Did anyone suggest anything that really surprised you?

Reeder: I don't think so. I don't recall any aha moments in that sense, and that sounds awfully arrogant. It was really at the second level of helping us understand the implications [of Obama's proposals].

GE: Was there anything anyone told you would have to be done differently than Obama initially planned?

Reeder: Not that I'm in a position to talk about now, because those are things that the incoming appointees are having to struggle with. The reason they're paying the appointees the big bucks -- I'm being facetious -- is they've now got to figure that out. Almost everything falls in that category. I'm deliberately being evasive because it would be premature to go into that level of detail.

GE: What was it like to work with Peter Orszag, then the nominee to lead OMB? (Orszag has since been confirmed as OMB director.)

Reeder: In some cases, what we did in effect was interview him and draft language [for his responses to nomination questionnaires]. In other cases, where we were pretty sure what his answer would be, we drafted answers, and then he critiqued them.

He is very bright. He takes in information very quickly, and doesn't necessarily always get into the details but likes to be able to. His instructions to us were don't spare me the details. Don't send me watered-down stuff. OMB staff is going to love him because they love OMB directors who are intellectually curious.

We talked about the management of the agency, which is a challenge, because OMB is always overworked, always getting new responsibilities without appropriate resources. He was not a blank slate in any sense of the word, and he asked a lot of hard questions, because suddenly he's faced with the prospect of a role with substantially broader [responsibilities] than his role as director of the [Congressional Budget Office]. He came in with a very robust sense of what an effective management agenda needed to look like. I wasn't in the room when the choices were made, but when you look at the choices for his deputies, his choices there affirm his understanding of what he needs to do.

GE: Was your job reviewing OMB easier because Clay Johnson, who handled the transition for the Bush team, was OMB's deputy director for management?

Reeder: I was speculating on that with a couple of colleagues. No doubt, that was an important part of it, and from everything I've seen, Clay was extraordinarily supportive. But it was that, plus … I was talking with several of my former OMB colleagues over lunch today. We were talking about why this thing worked so well, and they immediately said it was Josh Bolten. It started first with what the president said, but his principle adviser was the chief of staff.

From what I've heard from the current career staff, it was emphasized not only by Clay, but also by Jim Nussle. He came out with a deep respect for the institution and a desire to make sure it functioned effectively in support of the next administration. The career staff shared with us that they were getting nothing but positive signals from Jim Nussle.

I'm sure there's a continuum, there may not be a bell-shaped curve, and we were probably at the high end of the cooperation scale. I'm sure there were appointees who said the president doesn't really mean what he says. The thing I keep reminding career staff is we're dealing with staffers who are going to be unemployed on Jan. 20. They're dealing with mortgages, kids in school, stuff that is very important to them. It doesn't come as a great shock to me that sure, I heard anecdotes that in isolated cases, folks weren't being as cooperative.