News Journal: Good Government Starts with Good People

Last week, the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to revitalize the federal government, and Booz Allen Hamilton, the international consulting firm, released a report entitled “A New Civil Service Framework.”
I will quote from it at length, but this column’s headline is the premise on which all of this important report’s recommendations are built. (Full disclosure: I was a panelist at the event introducing the report.)
The charts from the report reproduced on this page may surprise you. When they think of typical federal employees, many people tend to picture hordes of clerical workers. There may once have been some truth to that, but 65 percent of federal employees are now involved in professional and administrative positions. The charts profile these 1.2 million civilian, full-time, permanent employees. It is not an exaggeration to say that our society is so heavily dependent on them for a range of basic services that it would collapse if they were not there.
Yet, the report concludes, “the American federal civil service system, the foundation for effective government, is in crisis. Designed more than 60 years ago, the personnel system governing more than 2 million workers is a relic of a bygone era, reflecting a time when most federal jobs were clerical and required few specialized skills, and when the government’s role in society was smaller and far less complicated.
“The world has changed dramatically, but the civil service system has remained stuck in the past, serving as a barrier rather than an aid to attracting, hiring and retaining highly skilled and educated employees needed to respond to today’s domestic and global challenges.
“The American public expects federal employees to competently handle a wide array of critical matters on a routine basis, from making Social Security payments, ensuring air safety and caring for veterans to maintaining a strong military, protecting the food supply and the air we breathe, and securing our borders – each one of these tasks requiring the work of skilled professionals and presenting complex organizational challenges.
“Americans also expect government employees to tackle long-term challenges, such as finding cures for diseases, ensuring energy security and providing the building blocks for economic growth, while guarding against and responding to the unthinkable, whether it’s a terrorist attack, a devastating hurricane or a financial collapse.
“We seldom consider the complexity of these tasks or the people who must handle these matters. We just take it for granted. While the vast majority of the government’s employees are dedicated professionals who seek to make a difference, the civil service system in which they operate is so out of touch with the complexities these employees face and places so many obstacles in their way that it puts at risk the government’s ability to accomplish all that we expect of it. And we only see the evidence when it’s too late, after something has broken or failed and there are dramatic consequences. It’s long past time for a change.”
The report makes specific recommendations that I hope will become the basis for a serious national debate about what must be done. But time is running out. Only 9 percent of the federal workforce is made up of people younger than 30 – compared to 23 percent of the total U.S. workforce. By 2017 nearly two-thirds of the Senior Executive Service, our nation’s career leadership corps, will be eligible for retirement and about 31 percent of the government’s permanent career employees will be able to head out the door. Given the state of the economy over the past several years, government has held on to its experienced employees for longer than anticipated, but retirements are back on the rise.”
Can you imagine a major corporation facing the loss of two-thirds of its senior management within three years? It would operate in full-crisis mode. But, perhaps intimidated by the “all government is bad and useless” extremists who have become louder in recent years, Congress has to date done nothing to address the problem.
The Partnership for Public Service-Booz Allen Hamilton report is an urgent wake-up call. Let’s hope it works.
(To read the full report and its recommendations, go to www.ourpublicservice.org/OPS/)
Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.