EPA's Main Manager

At the Government Executive Leadership Breakfast this morning, Marcus Peacock, deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, talked not only about his pioneering blog, but about how the agency managed to win the President's Quality Award for overall management. Some of the interesting things he noted:

• When Peacock took his current job, he learned there already were "tons of metrics" available about EPA operations. In fact, he said, the agency has cut the number of metrics it follows from about 500 to 100, which he said is "still too many."
• The agency has developed a quarterly management report on progress toward meeting its goals. Most of the metrics that figure into the report still measure outputs -- such as the number of farmers trained in practices that are designed to reduce the flow of nutrients from farms into the water supply -- rather than outcomes. But the agency is working on "logic models" that will provide better reporting on how its efforts translate into actual environmental improvements.
• Peacock considers his blog to be a valuable tool for communicating with the agency's 17,000 employees -- even though he said that since he started accepting comments on posts he's been called a "weasel" and a "Bush crony."
• One of government's singular problems, he acknowledged, was that career employees are rarely rewarded for taking risks, but often punished when something goes wrong.
• EPA, he said, is still "far too conservative" in setting goals for itself. Peacock carries a laminated card in his pocket listing his personal "stretch goals" for the year.