Senate champion of federal employees to retire in 2010

Federal employees will lose one of their chief advocates on Capitol Hill next year, as Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, announced on Monday that he would not seek reelection in 2010.

Since taking office in 1999, Voinovich has been the architect of many significant federal reform bills and has served as a watchdog for the interests of government employees during both Democratic and Republican administrations.

As chairman and now ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia, Voinovich has been involved in virtually every major civil service issue on Capitol Hill during the past decade.

The Ohio Republican has called for quick action to address a "human capital crisis" across government and to expedite the hiring and training of new federal employees. He's negotiated deals involving controversial management issues such as pay for performance and competitive sourcing. And, in recent years, he broke ranks with the Bush administration for scrapping labor-management partnerships.

"Sen. Voinovich was unique because in an otherwise highly partisan political environment, he did not politicize the issues involving management or people inside government," said Steven Katz, who served as counsel to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee under former Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio. "And he had plenty of opportunity to do so, by either criticizing Democratic initiatives such as the unstrategic way that President Clinton and the Congress downsized government, or cheerleading for President George W. Bush in his President's Management Agenda. Instead, Voinovich was a compass for integrity and good government."

Voinovich has been one of the most outspoken Senate advocates for major civil service reform in light of a possible federal retirement wave.

"I've never seen an organization as screwed up as the federal government," he said in 2001. "The civil service has been ignored."

The senator pushed for a complete overhaul of the government's human resources management infrastructure. He suggested replacing outdated personnel management systems and streamlining the hiring process so agencies could better compete with the private sector for top candidates.

Voinovich also championed legislation that created chief human capital officers at all major federal agencies. The bill formed a council to serve as an interagency advisory and coordinating body.

For years, Voinovich repeatedly called for the creation of a chief management officer position at the Defense Department to push through fiscal and managerial reforms.

While the Pentagon never adopted a separate CMO position as the senator and others suggested, the 2008 Defense authorization bill mandated that the deputy secretary of Defense serve as the agency's CMO. The bill also required the appointment of a Senate-confirmed deputy chief management officer to oversee the department's Business Transformation Agency, which implements Pentagon management reforms.

"I think it's unusual for any politician outside of the D.C. metropolitan area to focus so much energy and attention on the functions of government, and that's why he's going to be sorely missed," said Max Stier, president of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. "We need more people like him, whether Democrats or Republicans, who are going to see their role as holding accountable and helping our government do what it's designed to do. He comes to these issues very much from a nonideological perspective; from a management perspective."

In 2000, Voinovich's subcommittee issued a report to the incoming Bush administration offering several recommendations on how to improve federal human capital management, including providing agencies with limited direct or on-the-spot hiring authority for information technology positions and outstanding applicants for other jobs.

The report, which faulted poor planning during the downsizing of the 1990s and a lack of leadership from the executive branch, also suggested that agency training budgets be centralized and given their own line item.

Voinovich -- known as a political moderate -- also took shots at the Bush administration.

In 2006, he offered an alternative to the administration's proposed Working for America Act, which would have introduced pay for performance at every federal agency. Voinovich's bill, which died in committee, required rigorous performance appraisals for every federal employee but stopped short of linking pay raises to performance appraisals.

Voinovich also reached political compromises on controversial aspects of the Bush administration's competitive sourcing initiatives. In 2003, he wrote an appropriations bill amendment that scrapped a requirement that in-house teams winning job competitions re-compete for work every five years.

In recent years, Voinovich and subcommittee chairman Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, have held a series of hearings calling for the State Department to increase the size of its workforce.

In a statement, Voinovich said his final two years in the Senate will be the most important of his political career. Voinovich said he would focus on jump-starting the economy, energy and environmental policy and "continuing to improve the personnel and management of the federal government."

Alyssa Rosenberg contributed to this report.