Smooth Operators
Seven cutting-edge federal programs are chosen as finalists in the 1996 Innovations in American Government Awards.
nnovation has no hard and fast rules. That's the story behind the seven federal finalists in the 1996 Innovations in American Government Awards program. The program, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, celebrates good government by awarding $100,000 to each of 15 federal, state or local government projects. Competition is stiff. This year, the judges received more than 1,550 nominations, 330 from federal agencies. Nominees submit applications of up to 10 pages and judges pick 30 finalists. Academics and other government affairs specialists evaluate the finalists' programs. A panel of judges chaired by William G. Milliken, former governor of Michigan, chooses the winners. Finalists who aren't winners receive $20,000.
This is only the second year federal programs have been eligible to participate in the 10-year-old awards program. Some innovations, such as the Labor Department's program to eradicate sweatshops, were guided by top management. Others, such as the Federal Aviation Administration's oral proposals project, were pushed through from below. Some innovations grew out of agency efforts to do more with less. But the Commerce Department's U.S. export assistance centers developed out of the agency's determination to do more with what they've got. And the Social Security Administration's Disability Services Team is a study in what a program can accomplish when money is no object.
Innovation is not necessarily welcome in the federal sector. But some program officials discovered that letting a valuable product or service speak for itself could win over skeptics. Innovators have to "be willing to lay out a vision," says Maria Echaveste, administrator of the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division. "Try to get buy-in. But move ahead even without total buy-in. Then come back and say, 'would you not admit that the program is working?' "
The 15 winners will be announced in December.
- Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Department of Commerce
- Department of Education
- Department of Housing and Urban Development
- Federal Aviation Administration
- Department of Labor
- Social Security Administration
Consequence Assessment Tool Set
he day before Hurricane Andrew slammed into South Florida, Federal Emergency Management Agency employee Paul Bryant tried to estimate how many households might qualify for disaster assistance after the storm. Following standard FEMA procedures, he telephoned local officials to discuss the National Weather Service's predictions for the hurricane. However, the phone lines were down, and he was unable to reach anyone. Then the idea hit him: Why not modify the computer model that FEMA used to project the consequences of nuclear bomb blasts to estimate the effect of the hurricane? Using the model, Bryant estimated 260,000 Floridians would need FEMA's services.
In the meantime, other FEMA personnel contacted local officials and come up with a different estimate: 20,000 people. The staff presented the two estimates to FEMA Director Wallace Stickney, who decided the agency would plan around the estimate done by the book. That turned out to be a mistake. In the end, the victim count was closer to Bryant's ad-hoc computer estimate, with 310,000 people requiring FEMA assistance. FEMA's underestimation of the disaster caused delays in delivering food, water and shelter to victims.
In separate audits of FEMA's performance during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, FEMA's inspector general, the National Association of Public Administration and the General Accounting Office urged the agency to develop computer models to improve its predictive powers. Following Paul Bryant's lead, FEMA's applications division formally adapted some Defense Nuclear Agency disaster models, mixed in geographic information systems technology and a handful of databases to come up with the Consequences Assessment Tool Set (CATS).
CATS is a computer-based disaster impact and geographic mapping system which predicts the number of households that may be affected by hurricanes, earthquakes, storm surges, fires, or chemical or nuclear accidents. It lists the characteristics of victims and the location of hospitals, airports and roads. Emergency managers at federal, state and local agencies have access to CATS.
While CATS is still under development (only its hurricane and earthquake models are fully operational), it has already improved FEMA's response to disasters. The system produced accurate damage estimates for 1993's Hurricane Emily (674 homes damaged; the actual number was 683) and 1995's Hurricane Marilyn (5,100 homes damaged; the actual number was 5,300), which helped FEMA direct an appropriate amount of aid to victims. When the Mississippi flooded in 1993, FEMA used CATS to capture images from meteorological satellites every few hours so that it could provide relief agencies with up-to-date information on the extent of the damage. During the 1994 Northridge, Calif., earthquake, CATS enabled FEMA employees to identify and assign the appropriate foreign language interpreters to disaster assistance centers.
llicott International, a Baltimore-based, 100-year-old manufacturer of dredging equipment, supplied dredges to South Vietnam before the Vietnam War. Five of the dredges are still being used by Hanoi's Ministry of Transportation. In 1994, Ellicott heard the Vietnamese government planned to invest in new dredging vessels, and competed for the contract. Unfortunately for the corporation, full diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam were not in place, and a Dutch firm was well-positioned to sell Hanoi the equipment.
Negotiations dragged on until it appeared likely the Vietnamese would buy dredges from the Dutch. Then a trade specialist from the U.S. export assistance center in Baltimore arranged for a variety of high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President Gore, to write letters urging Hanoi to do business with the American corporation. The letters tipped the scales in Ellicott's favor. Ellicott won the $12 million contract and became the first U.S. business to enter Vietnam since the end of the war.
The Ellicott win is exactly the type of export expansion the Commerce Department hoped to promote when it opened four pilot U.S. export assistance centers in January 1994. The Clinton Administration believes increasing exports will spur economic growth, and is looking to small- and medium-sized exporters in "emerging markets" to provide that boost.
The centers are one-stop shops offering export counseling, trade finance and export support services from federal and state agencies and private firms. Staffs of trade specialists respond to requests, maintain relationships with exporting firms and introduce the service to new clients. Export assistance centers provide information only the U.S. government can get-intelligence gathered by U.S. embassies-and custom services such as background checks of foreign sales agents at less thsn cost.
There are now 14 export assistance centers in major cities and 15 district export assistance centers located outside urban hubs. The Commerce Department estimates the program assists 27 percent of American firms active in foreign markets. The program measures its impact in terms of "export actions"-new or increased sales of goods or services abroad due to a center employee. Commerce officials anticipate 8,108 export actions in fiscal 1996, a 67 percent increase from the previous year.
The program is not without controversy. While the centers target small- and medium-sized export firms, giant corporations such as Northrop Grumman also benefit from their services. Some critics view the centers as competition for private companies that offer export assistance services. Others contend that a serious export expansion program requires more money.
Still, export assistance centers have convinced thousands of exporters to view the federal government as their ally in the international trade arena. For American companies considering expanding into unfamiliar territory, this is no small matter.
hat do you do with an unnecessarily expensive, complex and fraud-ridden federal program that's been a permanent fixture on the General Accounting Office's High Risk lists since 1990? Replace it with something better.
That's the solution the Education Department had in mind when it developed the Direct Loan Program (DLP). In 1957, the government established the Guaranteed Student Loan Program, later known as the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), to help students pay for higher education. The government guaranteed loans to students from financial institutions. Unfortunately, FFELP turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. Seven thousand banks, 50 secondary markets and 41 guaranty agencies are part of the FFELP, and the paperwork causes processing delays as well as administrative headaches for schools. Students cannot adjust their repayment schedules, which many Education officials believe is the reason for the program's high default rate-15 percent in 1995.
The Direct Loan Program attempts to head off these problems in several innovative ways: The government loans money to students directly, from its own coffers. The lending process is conducted electronically-applications and approval are transmitted and money is transferred to the schools by computer. The program gives students three repayment options which they can change at any time and as many times as they wish without penalty. One option is repayment based on a fixed percentage of income, which the government verifies through IRS records.
"We can report firsthand the benefits of direct lending for our students," several hundred university presidents wrote to Congress in November 1995. "The simplicity of application, the speed of delivery of funds, the disappearance of lines of students waiting to endorse their checks at registration time, the precipitous drop in the number of emergency loans issued to students waiting to hear about their loans from banks and guarantors, and fewer visits to financial aid offices. Students often borrow less under direct lending because they know they can adjust their loan amounts without repeating the entire application process, and therefore only borrow what they believe they need, not the maximum for which they are eligible. At the institutional level, direct lending has eliminated redundant paperwork, reduced staff time allocated to dealing with thousands of lenders, guarantors and intermediaries, and vastly improved our overall aid delivery process because it seamlessly integrates with other federal aid programs."
In 1994, auditors granted the Direct Loan Program the first "clean" audit for a federal student aid program in the history of the Education Department. In a 1995 Education Daily survey, 90 percent of participating colleges and universities rated the Direct Loan Program as "excellent" and 100 percent said they would recommend it to other schools.
However, the Direct Loan Program will have to win over Congress if it is to survive, let alone replace the monolithic FFELP. Lobbyists for the loan industry-which stands to lose millions of dollars in business forwarded to them each year by FFELP if it is replaced by the Direct Loan Program-have the ear of some lawmakers.
ccording to the National Election Studies Center at the University of Michigan, 76 percent of Americans think the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves rather than for the benefit of all the people. Fifty-five percent of Americans believe citizens don't have a say in what government does. Twenty-one percent of eligible voters are not registered to vote, and 20 percent who are registered didn't vote in state and local elections in 1994.
Government workers know that trust in their institution is at an all-time low; mostly, they do their best to ignore the catcalls and get on with the agency's mission. Not at HUD's Office of Community Planning and Development (CPD), however. The office has made the restoration of civic involvement part of their mission, and are pursuing it with a program called Community Connections.
Community Connections works to restructure the relationships between the government and citizens by improving their access to information. "Information is a form of power," assistant secretary for community planning and development Andrew Cuomo said in an interview earlier this year. "We want to get as much information as possible to the citizens so they have power to deal with the decision-makers."
In the past, information HUD provided to citizens was difficult to get and hard to digest. Community Connections disseminates information about community development in a language and style that draws citizens in. The program maintains a Web site (http://www.comcon.org) and a toll-free number (800-998-9999) and provides mapping software to public libraries and schools for free. The software, developed by CPD, enables users to pull up and manipulate community maps, viewing them according to race, income levels and unemployment rates. The mapping software prompts the kind of questions that spur citizen activism: "Why doesn't my neighborhood have a police station, while that neighborhood has two?" Individuals and organizations can purchase the software at a subsidized cost of $125.
Citizen understanding of community development has been obscured by the onerous applications that states and localities have been required to submit to obtain federal funding. CPD administers 12 programs that distribute more than $10 billion nationwide. Previously, each of these programs was run by a separate staff, required a separate application and operated according to its own set of regulations, grant cycles and reporting requirements. Connections between programs were difficult to discern or advocate. Assessing the impact of federal funding on a regional basis was a daunting task. So CPD folded the 12 sets of procedures into one consolidated plan. States and localities are required to submit their consolidated plans electronically, using CPD's mapping software to describe their intentions. In 1995, consolidated planning enabled CPD to administer 82 percent more in program funds with 20 percent fewer employees than in 1992.
The program's administrators expect local participants to develop uses for Community Connection's tools that they never dreamed of. To encourage leapfrogging innovations, CPD has formed a development team to support users developing new applications for the system.
t most agencies, complex procurements that take a year or so are tiresome. At the Federal Aviation Administration, such procurements can be life-threatening.
FAA air traffic controllers need working equipment if they are to keep airplanes from colliding. Unfortunately, the FAA's procurement procedures have prevented the agency from replacing its archaic, deteriorating air traffic control system. In 1983, the agency attempted to update the system by commissioning the Advanced Automation System. However, the agency scrapped the modernization effort in 1994, when the program had overrun its budget and fallen eight years behind schedule, and managers realized the system would be obsolete before it was completed.
The FAA began a new modernization program, but this time the agency did not have the luxury of conducting business at its usual snail's pace. Already, components of the air traffic control system were wearing out. Contractors hired to provide technical services had only six months left on their contracts. Procurements of hardware and technical assistance had to be speeded up.
Desperation spawned innovation at the Office of Air Traffic Systems Development. The office abandoned its normal procedures for procuring technical support. Instead of requiring paper proposals (which typically took months for vendors to prepare and months for evaluators to read), the agency gave vendors 30 days to submit videotaped oral proposals. It took less time to evaluate videotapes, which enabled the project team to recruit busy, senior FAA officials to participate in the evaluation.
The office took other steps to streamline procurement, including posting a draft request for proposal (RFP) on the Internet and prequalifying vendors.
The result: The FAA awarded its technical assistance contract five months after it released the RFP and three weeks ahead of the anticipated contract award date. In the past, procurements of similar size and complexity had taken 12 to 14 months to complete. The FAA estimates it saved $280,000 through the streamlined pro
curement process since employees spent less time on the project, no extra storage space was required for stacks of paper proposals and additional office space did not need to be leased for proposal evaluators. Vendors reported that the process cut their costs in half.
Federal agencies have used oral proposals to streamline small procurements, but the FAA's oral proposals project demonstrates the same techniques can be applied to procurements worth more than $300 million that are central to agency missions.
Department of Labor
Wage and Hour Division
Eradicating Sweatshops
n November 1995, the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division discovered that underpaid workers in a sweatshop in Massachusetts were sewing garments for Talbots, the upscale women's clothing retailer. The division informed Talbots, which, like most large clothing retailers, is several steps removed from the garment assembly process and was unaware of the origin of its goods. "They said, 'Thanks for the information,' and that was it," Maria Echaveste, the administrator of the division, recalls. Six months later, the Labor Department busted another sweatshop whose workers were manufacturing clothes for Talbots. This time, after notifying Talbots, the Wage and Hour Division issued a statement to the press stating that Talbots was receiving merchandise produced in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Talbots finally took action. In June, the company circulated a new policy to its suppliers, stipulating that "Talbots suppliers now will have to annually sign and notarize a certification form stating that they have a program of monitoring their contract sewing shops and other contractors."
Public humiliation is only one technique being used these days by employees of the Wage and Hour Division working to eradicate sweatshops.
The division is charged with ensuring industry complies with laws protecting American workers. Violations are rampant in the garment business, where the multi-tiered structure and the pressure to turn a profit encourage subcontractors to send piecework to sweatshops that abuse immigrant labor. Even though retailers manage to monitor their contractors for quality and on-time delivery, they have traditionally turned a blind eye to labor law violations in the manufacturing of their products. The eradication of sweatshops would increase retailers' costs.
Until recently, the Wage and Hour Division's impact on sweatshops was scattershot and fleeting. Acting on tips from sewing shop workers, investigators would visit sites of alleged abuse. When they found labor law violations, investigators would order shop owners to clean up their act. Usually, instead of improving working conditions or paying back wages, the shops would close down, then reopen down the street under a new name. "We were hitting brick walls," says Suzanne Seiden, director of special projects at the division. The scope of the division's mission is also an obstacle-the Labor Department only has 800 investigators to monitor the nation's entire civilian workforce of 110 million.
So, in 1993, Wage and Hour administrator Echaveste and Labor Secretary Robert Reich devised a new strategy: use a combination of recognition, education and enforcement to provide incentives for the retailers to police the industry themselves. Wage and Hour investigators were instructed to invoke the "Hot Goods Provision" of the Fair Standards Act, a law that declares it illegal to ship goods manufactured in violation of the law from one state to another. With regular use of the "Hot Goods Provision" by investigators, retailers risk losses if their manufacturers hire sweatshops.
In 1995, the Wage and Hour Division published the first edition of "The Fashion Trendsetters List," identifying retailers and manufacturers that monitor their contractors' labor practices. Retailers wishing to share in the favorable publicity have to improve their monitoring record. The list has grown since 1995, and now includes 35 retailers. The division has made it routine to let the public know when investigators discover the labels of a prominent retailer on a sweatshop floor. When the clothing line is endorsed by a celebrity like Kathie Lee Gifford, who then adopts eradicating sweatshops as a personal cause, the publicity generated far exceeds anything the Wage and Hour Division could accomplish with its shoestring budget.
Since it initiated new anti-sweatshop strategies in 1993, the Wage and Hour Division has recovered more than $7.3 million in back wages for more than 25,000 workers. But perhaps more significantly, the division's strategy has recruited fresh troops in the battle to curb labor abuses-retailers, manufacturers and the public.
Social Security Administration
Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity
Disability Services Team
he Social Security Administration dispenses disability benefits to more than 10 million Americans each year. Yet, until recently, the agency's commitment to the disabled was not reflected in its own workforce. In 1986, employees with disabilities made up less than 1.6 percent of the SSA's workforce. They were about half as likely to be promoted as their able-bodied counterparts.
The problem was logistics more than oversight. In order to perform SSA jobs, people with disabilities may
need adaptive equipment, communications devices or personal assistants. Managers were unaware of the resources available, and didn't have the expertise or the budgets to procure them.
In 1992, following the recommendation of an employee work group, the SSA created the Disability Services Team, a staff of eight whose full-time job is to ensure that no qualified individual is prevented from getting a job or advancing in the agency because of a disability. Team members accommodate needs on a case-by-case basis, in response to requests from employees or managers. Accommodation ranges from assigning sign-language interpreters to deaf employees to installing voice-activated computers, Braille output systems and optical scanners at employees' workstations and supplying employees with motor scooters. Team members hire trainers to instruct employees in using their adaptive devices, and they research and test new adaptive technology.
The Disability Services Team strives to integrate people with disabilities into the workplace. Initiatives have included installing closed-caption televisions and video recorders in conference rooms; creating an electronic bulletin board to notify employees with disabilities of workplace activities; providing transportation to meetings; and disseminating agency publications to blind employees in alternative media.
In the Disability Services Team's first three years, the number of employees with disabilities at the agency grew from 5,205 to 5,713. Disabled employees are now slightly more likely to advance than able-bodied employees. The team has decreased the time it takes for its staff to process requests for accommodation from an average of 8 months in 1992 to 31 days in 1995.
The Disability Services Team stands out from other government and private sector efforts to level the playing field for workers with disabilities. The SSA has increased the team's budget from $994,000 to $5.2 million over the last four years, even as it has reduced or eliminated funding for other programs.
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