Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-First Century

James L. Perry, James L. Perry

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812296914
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Expert analysis of American governance challenges and recommendations for reform Two big ideas serve as the catalyst for the essays collected in this book. The first is the state of governance in the United States, which Americans variously perceive as broken, frustrating, and unresponsive. Editor James Perry observes in his Introduction that this perception is rooted in three simultaneous developments: government's failure to perform basic tasks that once were taken for granted, an accelerating pace of change that quickly makes past standards of performance antiquated, and a dearth of intellectual capital that generate the capacity to bridge the gulf between expectations and performance. The second idea hearkens back to the Progressive era, when Americans revealed themselves to be committed to better administration of their government at all levels—federal, state, and local.These two ideas—the diminishing capacity for effective governance and Americans' expectations for reform—are veering in opposite directions. Contributors to Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-First Century explore these central ideas by addressing such questions as: what is the state of government today? Can future disruptions of governance and public service be anticipated? What forms of government will emerge from the past and what institutions and structures will be needed to meet future challenges? And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, what knowledge, skills, and abilities will need to be fostered for tomorrow's civil servants to lead and execute effectively? Public Service and Good Governance for the Twenty-First Century offers recommendations for bending the trajectories of governance capacity and reform expectations toward convergence, including reversing the trend of administrative disinvestment, developing talent for public leadership through higher education, creating a federal civil service to meet future needs, and rebuilding bipartisanship so that the sweeping changes needed to restore good government become possible.Contributors: Sheila Bair, William W. Bradley, John J. DiIulio, Jr., Angela Evans, Francis Fukuyama, Donald F. Kettl, Ramayya Krishnan, Paul C. Light, Shelley Metzenbaum, Norman J. Ornstein, James L. Perry, Norma M. Riccucci, Paul R. Verkuil, Paul A. Volcker.

CHAPTER 1

Catch-22 Government

Federal Performance in Peril

Paul C. Light

The federal government is caught in a catch-22 that promises to frustrate faithful execution of the law far into the future. Asked to do more with less every year, many departments and agencies are caught in a cascade of highly visible breakdowns that increases public demand for major repairs in how government works even as the cascade undermines confidence that such repairs are worth the investment. Absent comprehensive action to improve performance, public anger will continue rising, while the odds of improvement will remain doubtful.

Federal employees still make miracles every day, but many do so against the odds created by poorly designed policy, antiquated administrative systems, uncertain funding, widening skill gaps, and uncertain political leadership. Although the federal government continues to make progress on long-standing endeavors such as establishing financial security for older Americans and combatting more recent threats such as terrorism, too many national priorities are only an accident away from a breakdown.

Along the way, many Americans have come to believe the worst about the federal government. Some of these doubts are rooted in partisan conflict and a drumbeat of antigovernment rhetoric, but some reflect the escalation of government failures. Americans pay close attention to federal performance in the news and can find plenty of cause for concern. Exaggerated though the stories about federal failure might be in this era of intense polarization and fake news, Americans may be quite right to believe that the federal government cannot be trusted to do the right thing. As this chapter suggests, the pressure to do more with less is unlikely to relent until Congress and presidents realize that it is impossible to deliver twenty-first-century performance in twentieth-century organizations that still use variations of nineteenth-century systems.

The federal government’s peril affects all elements of the intergovernmental system as states and localities struggle to absorb resource shortages and growing responsibilities. One level’s failures and frustration become another level’s challenge. Much as state and local governments have tried to fill the gaps created by federal neglect, the intergovernmental system relies on all levels to do their jobs well. Catch-22 government in Washington, DC, produces a wave of secondary and tertiary pressure that undermines performance in every corner of the nation, not to mention the international community.

Performance in Peril

The emergence of catch-22 government can be tracked with every data point I have been monitoring since I worked with the National Commission on the Public Service in 1989 (National Commission, 1989). Despite repeated calls for urgent action issued by dozens of blue-ribbon commissions, study groups, congressional hearings, and presidential promises over the decades, most of the trends I follow have worsened as government faces increased pressure to do more with less.

The pressure can be found at all three levels of the federal delivery process. At the workforce level, the personnel system undermines faithful execution with a sluggish hiring process, failure to address workforce aging, and lack of access to resources and training. At the production level, the federal bureaucracy weakens execution with skill gaps in hard-to-recruit occupations, an ever-thicker leadership hierarchy, and a blended workforce driven more by catch-22 pressure than by careful sorting. At the outcome level, the pressure to do more with less can be tracked by employee frustrations with their leaders and organizations, public demands for more of almost everything government delivers mixed with distrust toward the institutions in charge of the delivery, and a recent rise in the number of government breakdowns.

The three trends and their components amplify each other through constant feedback loops—for example, the sluggish hiring system amplifies the impact of employee aging, which widens government-wide skill gaps in hard-to-recruit occupations, which increases the dependence on contract and grant employees, which may lead to government breakdowns, which may increase public demands for smaller government, which may increase the catch-22 effect. Tempting though it might be to look for a single domino that might reverse decades of neglect and tinkering, the interactions suggest the need for comprehensive reforms that tackle the federal performance crisis more broadly. However, as this chapter will conclude, it is not at all clear that Congress and the president have the capacity to design and pursue comprehensive action given recent changes in the tides of federal management reform.

A Public Service Under Stress

The federal workforce is essential to the faithful execution of the law. Although often criticized as overpaid and underworked, the clear majority of federal employees work hard to deliver on the promises Congress and presidents make. At the same time, my trend lines show continued problems in the federal hiring process, an aging workforce, high promotion speeds, and an inflated performance appraisal process.

Waiting for Arrival

There are many ways to measure hiring effectiveness, not the least of which is the quality of the workforce it produces. Quality being infinitely subjective, however, the easiest way to track effectiveness is time to hire, shorter being generally better than longer. In theory, applicants should move from application to “onboarding” without delay. In reality, the federal government continues to impose time penalties at every step of the process. Hiring speed increased during the Obama administration, but its simplistic eighty-day post-to-process goal was more than twice as long as the goals of its private and nonprofit competitors in industries such as accounting, aerospace, biotechnology, energy, health, higher education, logistics, telecommunications, and transportation (Chamberlain, 2017).

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs focused on time to hire when it pressed the new Obama administration to fill most federal vacancies in eighty days or less: “Those seeking federal employment have long faced an opaque, lengthy, and unnecessarily complex process that serves the interests of neither federal agencies nor those seeking to work for them…. Weak recruiting, unintelligible job announcements, onerous application requirements, an overly long hiring process, and poor communications with applicants deter potential candidates from applying and cause many of those who do apply to abandon the effort before a hiring decision is made” (Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, 2010).

The Obama administration deflected the legislation by launching the first of three hiring reforms in May 2010. “I understand the frustration of every applicant who previously has had to wade through the arcane Federal hiring process,” the director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said of the president’s decision to create a plain-language application for most jobs and allow résumés and cover letters in lieu of essay questions. “If qualified applicants want to serve our country through the Federal service, then our application process should facilitate that” (Davidson, 2010). The commitment was strong enough to convince Congress to shelve the Senate’s bill, but not strong enough to move the federal hiring model from its “post and pray” motto to “post and pursue.”

Despite reports on recent congressional hearings with hopeful goals such as Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: Transforming Federal Hiring (2010) and Uncle Sam Wants You! Recruitment in the Federal Government (2009), comprehensive reform remains a distant goal. Even the federal government’s ongoing overhaul of its sluggish one-stop-shopping USAJobs hiring platform is unlikely to have an impact if its “human-centered design” does not lead to good jobs.

At least for now, USAJobs is more a disappointment than a source of pride. As one expert told a Senate roundtable in 2016, “USAJobs has become home to a seething group of confused and angry job seekers and fulfills a main purpose for a limited set of people desperately seeking any kind of employment or those who don’t really know what job they seek” (Davidson, 2016). Other witnesses at the roundtable showed more confidence in the job seekers, but all agreed on the need for significant reform.

Aging Upward

The federal workforce is aging ever closer to a demographic crisis created by a steady rise in its number of older employees. As of September 2017, there were about five federal employees over 50 years of age for every one employee under 30. Translated from ratios into headcounts, the number of federal employees under 30 held steady between 2001 and 2017 at about 115,000, the number over 55 also held steady at about 850,000, average age crept past 47.5, and eligibility for retirement across the workforce passed the 30 percent mark (Light, 2018a).

The aging confirms a potential “retirement tsunami” as federal employees move closer to exit. “The rapid shift of the workforce profile is significant and a bit shocking,” federal personnel expert Jeffrey Neal writes. “This rapid demographic shift is unlike what we have seen in the past and it is safe to say no one knows when current employees will retire. Societal trends are moving in the direction of longer careers, both for lifestyle and economic reasons. If this continues, we are likely to see a retirement bubble at some point in the future” (Neal, 2014).

The timing of the retirement wave may be uncertain, but its effects are predictable. First, it will create a “brain drain” as the government’s intellectual capital and institutional memory decline. These assets are not easily gained through the federal government’s weak career development systems. Moreover, much of the nation’s intellectual capital has been shaped by repeated budget and hiring freezes that teach younger employees how government does not work. The best way to secure these assets has been through contract and grant employees who acquired their skills inside the corridors of government.

Second, the retirement wave will create employee shortages at the middle levels of government, where so many contract and grant employees work. Service contract employees rarely reach the top of the federal hierarchy, but they often perform tasks that would have been reserved for federal employees in the past. Absent a steady pipeline of civil service employees, federal managers and supervisors have little choice but to c...