Leaders in Government

Career officials lead the way to better government, today and tomorrow.

Back-to-back assignments as discussion leader on Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday gave me a chance in February to explore the sorry state of the federal budget and the ways senior people in the executive branch might usefully respond.

On Wednesday at the National Press Club, Comptroller General David M. Walker told an audience of 120 senior agency executives that President Bush's budget represents "a very small step and a very modest down payment" in meeting the government's fiscal challenge. He and I agreed that the budget proposes nothing to address long-term shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare.

But on the discretionary side of the budget, Walker praised the administration's effort to link funding decisions to reviews of program performance, seeing this as a step toward the comprehensive "baseline" re-examination of all federal programs he believes is needed. Bush has suggested cutting 150 programs the Office of Management and Budget deems substandard.

Senior civil servants and military officers must help sort out agency priorities at a time when many current activities may be judged unaffordable, Walker said. Such responsibilities will be shouldered by many in Government Executive's audience. A recent independent survey shows that nearly 90 percent of of our readers are managers and executives and that 79 percent manage programs or agency operations. More than half of you are involved in strategic planning and in shaping agency workforce planning or financial management. As leaders with deep institutional memory and experience, you will play an important role in shaping the government of the future.

Of course, the future is tomorrow, and there's work to be done today. That was the topic of the Fat Tuesday panel, convened by the Government Performance Coalition to celebrate its new book, Getting Results: A Guide for Federal Leaders and Managers. Programs may be deemed ineffective by OMB or others, but as long as the law demands them, they have to be run as effectively as possible. This book, published by Management Concepts of Vienna, Va., offers many useful ideas for getting it done.

Nowhere is the need for improvement and effectiveness more pressing than at the Homeland Security Department, the topic of this month's cover story. The new secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, has an immensely demanding job ahead of him. He must end the all-but-open warfare among branches of the Border and Transportation Security directorate, reclaim ceded responsibility for integrating threat information and creating a terrorist watch list, and set about securing sectors of the economy that are still highly vulnerable to attack. Senior correspondent Katherine McIntire Peters led a team of Government Executive staff writers and produced what I believe is the most comprehensive journalistic assessment of Homeland Security as it begins its third year of business. The enormity of the Department's challenge is outlined in a special four-page graphic presentation.

Finally, on page 11, you'll find a conversation-piece statistic: Federal spending on defense and homeland security has now accelerated to a rate of $1 million per minute. To help pay the freight, we're borrowing $800,000 a minute. Oh well, it's only money.