Glenn Beck Has Odd Ideas About Federal Leadership Qualifications

Welcome Fedblog readers, and thanks to Alyssa for having me back. As she mentioned, I work at the "National Academy of Public Administration":http://www.napawash.org, a half-consultancy-half-think-tank-half-Academy (yep, that's three halves!) that tries to solve government's most complex management challenges. My particular beat is the new and exciting area known as "government 2.0" -- the use of collaborative and social media technologies in public governance -- but I'm also a government generalist (read: "huge nerd") and it's my honor to populate this space in Alyssa's absence.

I wanted to kick things off by calling your attention to a kind of bizarre story with a kind of important lesson. Apparently, some enterprising J.P. Morgan analyst went and put together a report comparing the aggregate private sector experience of the Obama cabinet to that of cabinets past. The resulting finding was -- drum roll -- that "they have _way less_ private sector experience than past cabinets":http://blog.american.com/?p=7572. There's even a startling graph. Look at that tiny little Obama bar!

To me, the obvious conclusion to draw from this graph is that level of private sector experience of cabinet-level officials is not really correlated with successful presidential administrations. As you may have guessed, however, the graph just isn't true. Politifact's "helpful takedown of the study":http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/02/glenn-beck/beck-says-less-10-percent-obama-cabinet-members-ha/ includes an amusing fact I had not known before:

bq. And Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in addition to serving as Colorado attorney general and a U.S. senator, has been a partner in his family's farm for decades and, with his wife, **owned and operated a Dairy Queen and radio stations in his home state of Colorado.**

The really interesting part of this, though, is the attitude it reveals about the nature of federal service. Think about your own workplace. If your chief human capital officer walked up to you one day and said, "Hey, I think we need to start hiring a bunch of people who have never done this kind of work before," that would probably call into question that person's understanding of what their job is supposed to be. So it's a little baffling to see experience in federal government, which is a pretty unique environment, held up by implication as a negative or disqualifying factor. Particularly in a time when the competent administration of government is pretty important, the idea that what government really needs is people with less experience in government is a really odd way to think about what skill sets you want in your public servants.