Phyllis F. Scheinberg

Transportation
Phyllis F. Scheinberg
Assistant Secretary for Budget and Programs,
Chief Financial Officer

"It's actually somewhat of an accident," says Phyllis F. Scheinberg, of the 26 years she has spent working on federal transportation issues. She quickly notes that "accident" is a very bad word in transportation. "It was serendipitous," she says.

Scheinberg, the Transportation Department's chief financial officer, entered graduate school at the University of California at Irvine with the intention of studying education administration. Instead she discovered an interest in public administration. Upon graduation in 1979, she became a Presidential Management Intern. Again her career took an unexpected turn. She accepted a position as a budget examiner at the Office of Management and Budget.

In 1990, Scheinberg went to work at the former General Accounting Office. Her analytical nature was well-suited to assessing programs, and eventually she became director for transportation issues. Her GAO tenure trained her to ask a lot of questions and examine things closely, even outside her domain.

Still, moving from GAO to Transportation in 2001 was an eye-opening experience. "When you audit and review from afar, you just wonder why they can't get things done," Scheinberg says. The regulations, budget process and number of stakeholders make running an agency "much harder than it looks from the outside."

Transportation has its only red on the presidential management score card in financial management. "I can't tell you how hard we're working to change that," Scheinberg says. "My job is to get support from above and from my peers and then to push away the obstacles so my staff can push forward."

Because it manages grant and loan programs, trust funds and staffed agencies, the department has an especially complex budget, Scheinberg says. She notes that Transportation was the first to have a single accounting system for all its agencies.