Panel: Transition presents opportunities for civil service reforms

The upcoming presidential transition and the current economic crisis present major challenges, but they also provide an opportunity for much-needed reforms to the rules governing federal workers, panelists said during a forum on Tuesday.

Those changes could include strengthening performance management, creating a mechanism for senior executives to move around more and rebranding federal service for a new generation of employees, the panelists said. The discussion was sponsored by the Coalition for Effective Change, a nonpartisan group of current and retired federal employees and executives.

"Is this the worst transition ever? Could it be? I don't think so," said Paul Light, a professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service. Nothing could be more difficult than the Southern states' secession between President Lincoln's election and inauguration, he noted. But, he said, "This is going to be harder than the Roosevelt transition in 1932 and 1933, because we weren't fighting two wars."

From the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the regulatory lapses that contributed to the recent financial meltdown, the United States is in a period of government failures, said Bob Tobias, director of the public sector executive programs at the American University School of Public Affairs.

"We are in a crisis, and we are learning that crises are coming at an ever-faster rate," he said. "As a government, we have to do better. Do we want to keep doing in the future what has failed in the past?"

Tobias said the adversarial relationship between management and labor unions in the federal sector has drawn attention away from improving agencies' performance.

But John Palguta, vice president for policy at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, said the financial crisis has reminded the public of government's relevance.

"This has at least exhibited the value of government and the value of having really good people in government," Palguta said. "It's like Ghostbusters. At some point, you look around and [ask,] 'Who you gonna call?' It's government."

The panelists, who gathered to reflect on and commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, said they had garnered a number of lessons about effective management.

Nancy Kingsbury, managing director for applied research and methods at the Government Accountability Office, said she thought legally mandating the merit system principles had been an error because the original language focused on finding minimum standards for achievement rather than creating a performance culture. Doris Hausser, former senior policy adviser to the director of the Office of Personnel Management, agreed, adding the performance appraisal system focused on identifying and firing underperforming employees rather than promoting management best practices and improving the quality of work.

Kingsbury pointed to weaknesses built into the Senior Executive Service, including the failure to provide a mechanism to rotate senior officials among agencies. The assumption, she said, was "it was just going to work."

In addition to beefing up performance management, government needs to do a much better job of advertising the many exciting public service jobs, and giving young employees the flexibility to pursue those opportunities without treating the desire to move between agencies and assignments as a sign of disloyalty, said Steve Ressler, founder of Young Government Leaders.

"The state of the civil service for younger employees right now is OK," Ressler said. "We have an opportunity to make it great."

But Palguta cautioned against change for change's sake. One example, he said, was the attempt to curtail the scope of labor rights as part of the Defense Department's new personnel system, which produced backlashes against wider reforms.

Naomi Earp, chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said the next president would have to recognize that the federal workforce is suffering from change fatigue.

"Before we have a radical change, we need to have a period of steady state," she said. "We need to have about a year. It gives the administration time to figure out what they want to do, and for us to figure out what we need to say to bring them on board."