Staying the Course

Gale Norton's long march toward better results at Interior

In the mind's eye, the Interior Department conjures up images of vast open spaces, of scenery as spectacular as the nation can offer.

What fun, one thinks, to be at the head of such an enterprise, in charge of such beautiful national parks as Acadia in Maine, Zion in Utah, and Yosemite in California.

Gale Norton, gracing our cover in the setting of Great Falls National Park, a few miles north of the White House, has that job. As secretary of Interior, she is the guardian of many of the nation's greatest places.

She is also the steward of $11 billion in public money this year, and of the working lives of 70,000 federal employees. The duties here probably are not as inspiring as a Colorado River trip through the Grand Canyon, but they are essential assignments for Norton and for Lynn Scarlett, Interior's assistant secretary for policy, management and budget.

Norton and Scarlett talked with our Amelia Gruber about the management challenges faced by Interior. It is a department whose varied and sometimes conflicting missions make smooth management difficult. Dam-builders and fish conservationists co-exist uneasily, for example. Long-standing difficulties reconciling trust accounts held by the Bureau of Indian Affairs have earned departmental leaders contempt-of-court citations, a court-ordered shutdown of agency computer networks, blacked-out e-mail for a time, and a "red" in the administration's grading system for financial management.

Interior's management story is one of steady progress against these long-ingrained difficulties. Norton is commendably staying the course.

But improving management is not the ambition of most people who drop into government at the tops of departments and agencies. Thus the President's Management Agenda, now in its fifth year, will appear on many a fresh appointee's desk as one of myriad new topics he or she must master.

Getting these newcomers with the program, as well as sustaining interest among incumbents, is what Clay Johnson, President Bush's friend and top management official, will be trying to do. He's considering training courses for new people, and hopes that the president's decision to have Cabinet members spend time in space allotted to them in the Old Executive Office will help him spread the message.

First-class financial, human resources, procurement and technology systems-the bedrock of good management-are important in behind-the-scenes support of federal programs, though they do seem a bit mundane when stacked up against dramatic missions government undertakes. An example of the latter is found in Katherine McIntire Peters' story this issue about the remarkable progress American troops have made in forging a viable army in Afghanistan, the key to the country's political and economic progress. In a volatile land with 850 militias, an American National Guard contingent is on track to beat the goal for creating the Afghan National Army by four years.

Also in this issue, Shawn Zeller reports on the latest tactics in the battle to combat attrition in important parts of the workforce, and Shane Harris colorfully describes the perilous status of cybersecurity.