Former GSA chief lauds reforms, laments politics

GovExec.com David J. Barram served as head of the General Services Administration from 1996 to 2000. During his tenure, he led the agency through the reinventing government movement, the controversial closing of several Federal Supply Service warehouses, an effort to change the agency into a performance-based organization and the transition to a new administration. : "We really took the President's and the Vice President's charge to heart and tried to make our organization work better and cost less. We had some goals--we knew we would be in a constant change mode so we had change as a vision, we had excellence as a vision, we had a vision to thrill our customers. Honest conversations were another goal. I'm very proud that every [GSA] service looked at their offices and made important changes to be more efficient and, even better, they keep looking at it and they are in a constant reinvention mode. I think that a combination of having an overall administration desire to reinvent and our particular willingness, maybe because of my own experience in industry, to manage well through people and to do it in pretty modern ways, helped us to be a pretty good model of reinventing." : "We spent a fair amount of time working on executive movement. It struck me when I got to Washington that almost every [Senior Executive Service] person that I spoke to had been in the same narrow area for years and years. At GSA, in the first two or three years, I would say 70 or 80 percent changed jobs--and it wasn't because they weren't good that we moved them, but because they were good. I came to Washington with the idea that government employees weren't as committed maybe as employees in the private sector. But it was clear to me after I was there awhile that people come into the government to do service--and they do. The people that I served with were as good as private sector [employees], they cared and they were smart and they were dedicated. I don't think America appreciates that government people are as committed as they are." : "We were successful at developing good measurable practices in our Public Buildings Service. In the old days, you would go out to a regional office and say 'Cecilia Smith, how are you doing?' She'd say 'Oh great.' Now she'll tell you how well her region is doing on nine [specific] measures, what the overall customer satisfaction is--it's real concrete business stuff. : "Politics in Washington is truly mean and way too partisan. Now that I'm back in the private sector, I think the American people, as disgusted as they are with politics, would be shattered to see it up close. I came to Washington as deputy secretary of (the Department of Commerce), and then, when I was appointed to head GSA, the Republicans were in charge of the Senate and it took 15 months to get confirmed. I was boring, I wasn't interesting, there were no headlines about me, and it still took 15 months. I was already confirmed as deputy secretary of Commerce so I had all the power I needed to serve as head of GSA, and maybe that was a factor, but 15 months is ridiculous. Then there are some silly requests that you get from Congress for information that everyone knows is just a fishing expedition, but you waste time, you waste taxpayer money responding to them. That's the kind of stuff that gets in the way of good work. I learned that you could do the right thing in government. Too often people think that it's all politics and my idea was that I always wanted--and I was very clear about this--I wanted to analyze the decision, to make the best decision, and then at the very end if the politics demanded, then we might have to make a decision that was political." : "We didn't close the warehouses when we should have. Frankly, I was not able to convince the unions the result would be better for them and that the government would be more efficient. I wish that situation could have been better. Lots of people said 'You'll never get anywhere Dave, why are you doing this?' Inside and outside GSA they would look at me as if to say, 'This guy is nuts, nobody has been able to fight the union on this.' I was actually trying to be very cooperative and I wanted to make this work for the union and for us. I learned how hard that is. I would say things that I thought were pretty straight and direct, and the union would take it as an inflammatory statement. It was sort of fighting in the press, but we also had straight fighting. It was a fascinating experience. I think it's really hard for the union to agree when it means a loss of jobs. In a Democratic administration, we had lots of internal orientation toward having good working relationships with the union, that's one reason I felt more free to fight it, because I trusted that the union knew I was not anti-union. They probably thought that if I didn't do what they wanted they could go tell [President Clinton] and he'd do it, which he never did. I did talk with the White House staff at times about what we were doing. I didn't want to surprise them. We were in touch, but they didn't tell me what to do. Maybe if they had I would have done it better. I don't feel bad about it. I put a lot of career folks through a lot of hell and the best I can tell, they don't hate me for it. I still have a good relationship with the local union presidents. I respect them, and I think they respect me. I fear that most people in the government will look at our experience and say 'Boy, I want to avoid that at all costs.'" : "The management people are trying to lead change, and the union folks, it's hard for them to get on the same track because they have this responsibility to the people that elected them to protect jobs and to protect their interests, so the natural thing is to fight change. In today's business practices, GSA operates like a business in many ways and that requires very agile organizational readjustments, and it means a lot of trust between the people at the front lines and the people who have management responsibility. For a labor-management partnership to work, the subject of those discussions has to be one step deeper or one step higher than the stuff we talk about today, like 'how do people get the skills to go to the next step on their career?' That, almost by definition, says you need to imagine a world in which your job goes away every three years. It's very difficult to deal with union people on those kinds of subjects." : "The only pressure I got was from the Republicans, who said, 'How can you possibly not see an apparent winner here?' I never had any doubt that there was no apparent winner. We did a lot of work with both camps after the election to make sure that the moment there was an apparent winner they could jump in and hit the ground running and when that actually happened we were ready to give them the keys. I have a very good relationship with [Rep.] Steve Horn [R-Calif.], and he knew me well enough to know that I wasn't going to buckle under this pressure. I got about 150 vitriolic e-mails from across the country, but I never worried about anybody doing anything besides screaming at me. The White House was very hands-off, they wanted to know what I was thinking and I told them: the whole country will know the minute I do. I believe that in six months that it will be pretty obvious that [Vice President Al] Gore was the winner in Florida too, but that doesn't matter--it had nothing to do with my decision. Our country is strong and I hope George Bush wakes up every morning and has the same desire to do good for our country that Bill Clinton said he had." : "We certainly ended up on a high note with . It was a collaborative effort with other agencies, and other people led by the [President's Management Council], but GSA organized it and made it all happen. FirstGov was a really good thing that we did quickly, we didn't get ourselves get bogged down in vetting everything. By the time the people who love to ask questions . . . asked those questions, we had answered them already and the ones that we hadn't, we were quickly able to answer." : "If you want to have an impact in GSA, I think you have to believe the organization is a good one. The people are good, the mission is good and the fundamental driver here is to thrill the customer. Start off liking the people and what GSA does, be warmhearted, but cold-eyed and hardheaded about certain things. Insist that the services continue to reinvent themselves, to be focused on their customers, to keep the movement of executives going, there's a lot of really good executives. Evolve as an organization. Be sure to get people in the key spots to help lead the agency where it ought to go. I hope the next GSA chief will take the organization very seriously; I believe that it is an organization that will be very disappointed if the President-elect doesn't give them a good leader. I would love to talk to the next administrator. What I would tell the new administrator is, if there is any way he can imagine himself keeping Bob Peck [commissioner of the Public Buildings Service] around, he would be very glad he did. I feel very good about the four executives who are leading the three services and the Office of Governmentwide Policy, so, to my successor, I have left you a good team in place."