White House: Feds deserve recognition this election season

Career federal employees have made possible all of the Biden administration’s accomplishments to date, top White House officials said on Wednesday, though they acknowledged they are still not receiving enough recognition for their work. 

The administration’s ideas could not have been put into practice without civil servants to carry them out, the officials said at a Washington event highlighting President Biden’s management agenda, and those workers deserve plaudits for their efforts. Particularly in this political climate, they added, federal employees deserve extra appreciation. 

“I want to acknowledge we're in 2024,” said Jason Miller, the deputy director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. “It's an election year, and too often in election years, federal employees, the workforce of the federal government, does not receive the recognition and the celebration that it deserves every single day. So I want to say thank you for what you do.”

In his President’s Management Agenda, Biden promised to empower the federal workforce, enhance government customer service and harness the federal buying power to advance the administration’s goals. Agency officials on Wednesday highlighted ways they are meeting goals within those categories, ranging from the Internal Revenue Service’s Direct File program to the National Science Foundation’s recruitment of high school students into internships. 

“The PMA is only as real as the people…who do this work every day,” said Loren DeJonge Schulman, OMB's associate director for performance and personnel management. “And we all know that this is the work that really matters in terms of delivering for the American people.” 

She added that agency staff focusing on implementing Biden’s management agenda have helped get funding out the door, move contracts more quickly, provide outreach to more communities, onboard new employees in priority areas and improve communication with stakeholders. 

Agencies must ensure that they praise employees for accomplishing those tasks, Miller said. 

“This is really about stepping back and both celebrating the work that's being done and recognizing those that are doing the work,” he said. “Those are things that the federal government, we don't do enough. I know I don't do that enough.”

Miller’s focus on the importance of providing the recognition during the election season provided a contrast to the change former President Trump is promising should he be reelected. Trump has vowed to "crush the deep state" and "squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy," including by ending civil service protections for much of the federal workforce. 

“The strength of any organization rests on its people, an area that we as a federal government need to prioritize, need to focus on,” Miller said. “It is not just the nitty gritty of the processes that we're managing. It is thinking about our people as the single most important asset to driving impact in the work that we do.”

One major focus of Biden's PMA is ensuring the federal government more effectively sends out the $2 trillion it disburses each year. Miller noted the Health and Human Services Department has led those efforts by piloting new ways to issues to offer notices of funding opportunities, such as by improving design, using clearer language and making the process more interactive. Those who receive federal dollars should not do so simply because they can best navigate complex processes, Miller said. 

“The winner should be the person or the organization that is best able to deliver the work, and that's what simplification actually results in,” he said. 

HHS has to date simplified more than 80 grant applications and OMB is now “pushing hard” to task senior leaders across government to take similar approaches.  

Speakers on Wednesday stressed that agency leaders should lean on their rank-and-file workers when brainstorming new ways to see their missions through. 

“Federal workers are the best source of innovative ideas about how we can improve what we do, and they are a critical part of every solution that's going to happen,” DeJonge Schulman said. 

Elicia Moran, a human resources official at NSF, highlighted her agency’s use of the Pathways Program, which the Biden administration has sought to expand as a means to getting young people and recent graduates into government service. 

“As agencies, we all have a responsibility to start training and developing new talent from the ground up and filling in those gaps that we're soon going to have,” Moran said, “or else we're going to have a really hard time bringing talent in general to the federal government and keeping our mission requirements.”

NSF is particularly making a push to bring high school students into General Schedule-One positions, with Moran noting it has been a challenging effort but one that could bear fruit as it looks for younger talent.