A new ‘activist’ OPM is incrementally reforming the civil service, Part 1

There’s a lot going on in the federal civil service world these days, with much of the “what” (like the goal of many of the Office of Personnel Management’s reforms) long overdue. However, far too much of the “how” has been either unnecessarily painful and/or just plain inept — one must ask if the Trump team just doesn’t know any better — so, I thought I’d offer the smart folks in the current administration a few unsolicited thoughts on some of those goings-on.

And there’s too much for a single article, so with the indulgence of Government Executive’s Managing Editor (and sometime reporter) Carten Cordell, readers get two installments from me, with Part 1 below. 

In that regard, I think things like OPM’s actions on requiring essay questions in the hiring process, and more controls on inflated Senior Executive Service performance ratings, are for the most part, spot on. More importantly, they represent a newfound (and decidedly welcome) activism from OPM. That’s the good news. And while each of those actions must stand on its own merits, I believe that, on balance, they all make the civil service better off than not. That’s Part 1. 

But there are some exceptions. For example, some of OPM’s reforms are wrongheaded and need to be rethought. And even more importantly, taken together, these and other OPM actions seem to rely on an obsolete “one size fits all” model that needs to be revisited. And that’s Part 2 of my rant!

A competent, politically impartial career federal service

First, for the record, there’s a lot that this OPM and this administration have gotten fundamentally wrong, not the least of which has been the denigration and dismantling of the federal civil service. One can reduce it (and its authorities) without all the drama. I’ve said this before, and one must wonder whether, despite all the positive changes made by OPM, young Americans will ignore the call to public service? 

Or worse, when this bunch leaves office (and they will, eventually), will all/most of their changes just be undone or repealed by their successors? 

I hope not. But that said, much of what has been done has been unnecessary and unnecessarily provocative. One can achieve the very same end-state — in this case, a sharp reduction in the federal payroll or at least its growth — without all the hyperbolic headlines OR the pain and confusion that has been inflicted on those who have had to be let go. Or more importantly, the frustration of those citizens who may have to avail themselves of an agency’s services in time of need. Think the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Social Security Administration or the IRS.

Why not use a scalpel and not a hatchet, as President Trump has himself said? In so doing, the Office of Management and Budget, OPM and a compliant Congress can cut wasteful agency costs just as dramatically and just as quickly, but far more benignly. 

And with dignity. 

OPM’s hiring reforms are spot-on, but with some exceptions

But even with that, the glass is more than half full. Take OPM’s efforts to reform the awful federal hiring process. While a lot of us have applauded its efforts in that regard, just as many (including me) have strongly and publicly come out against one of the four essay questions — the one about Trump’s executive orders that is so blatantly partisan — that OPM now requires of every applicant for a federal job. And even though OPM, in response to that virtually unanimous pushback, has subsequently said that agencies are not obliged to give that too-partisan question any weight, it’s still required. 

Huh? That’s confusing. Especially since only some (but only some!) federal civil servants occupy a unique and potentially powerful position in our democratic system, and as a consequence, our fellow citizens must be able to rely on their competence and non-partisan impartiality under the law. That too-partisan third essay question violates those principles. Worse, it doesn’t even apply to the vast majority of civil servants or government jobs, and to me, it is probative evidence of a dysfunctional “one size fits all” myth.

That said, there’s some good news here, especially if you are a glass-half-full person like me, but at the risk of mixing too many metaphors, I worry about “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” For example, by requiring essay questions, even if one of them is politically problematic (albeit potentially weightless), OPM has made it much, much harder for too-casual candidates for federal jobs to apply with little or no effort, that is, with just the click of a button. And making that harder is a good thing! 

In my view, if applicants (again, for some but not all jobs) really want to be civil servants, having them do a little work to apply is not a bad thing! I’m old school in that regard, and as the career civilian personnel director for the Defense Department and the chief human capital officer for the Intelligence Community, I’ve seen too many candidates casually apply for jobs in DOD, the CIA, the FBI or the National Security Agency because they were attracted to an agency’s glamourous (often media-fueled) mission, and we made it just too easy for them to do so.

So, requiring applicants for those jobs to expend a little effort — even with the help of artificial intelligence — is a good thing. However, in so doing, OPM needs to junk the partisan politics and get over its bias towards the “one size” model once and for all, in favor of a far more tailored approach. And in this case, that means NOT requiring every applicant for every federal job to complete three (much less four!) essays. But more on that below. 

New SES performance rating controls are also a step forward

This is another example of an otherwise good idea wrapped in a dysfunctional one-size-fits-all package: OPM recently issued final rules that, among other things, would require agencies to expressly limit “top” SES performance ratings (that is, fours and fives on a five-point rating scale) in any given year. That constraint is designed to control SES performance ratings inflation, a problem that has plagued the federal government for years, and at its root, it is a problem worth addressing. Thus, here again OPM deserves an “A” for effort. 

In that regard, let’s start with something that most senior career executives (and “good government” organizations) know but will not publicly admit to: That is that SES and equivalent performance ratings ARE inflated. They are simply too high. That is not especially unique to the federal government, but it is a fact, nevertheless. If every career executive (and political appointee) performed as rated, departments and agencies would be delivering public services at a much higher level, and more importantly, American voters would see the difference. But they have not.  

So, we should all be able to agree that SES ratings inflation is a problem, and that OPM’s efforts to control them are laudable, but Director Kupor’s well-intentioned solution is just not workable.

In that regard, let us also stipulate that SES members are all by and large, wonderful people. One has to be wonderful just to be selected for the SES. Like general/flag officers in the U.S. military, career executives go through years of testing and performing as they progress up through their ranks to attain their lofty positions. So, by definition, they are all wonderful people.

The problem is that as career SES members and their political superiors are not paid by taxpayers to be wonderful people. Rather, they are paid to perform, and in some cases they just do not. 

Just as some of our military’s generals and admirals—all selected on their qualifications and experience and thus all “wonderful” in their own right—may fail when they suddenly find themselves in charge of things. That does not mean they are any less individually wonderful. But it does mean that the departments and agencies they lead (along with the political appointees they report to) are not meeting or exceeding their organization’s performance measures. 

Thus, there is a significant difference between individual “wonderfulness” and agency performance. And so long as the ratings of career executives are constrained based on government-wide controls, all those controls will get you is a an informal “just wait your turn” rotation system in each individual agency. That sort of backdoor system gives a career executive a high performance rating every third year or so, when it’s their “turn” to be wonderful, but it doesn’t get to what really matters: Agency (and leadership) performance.  

Worse, those inflated ratings—and the financial rewards that come with them—have been used as an informal way of increasing the otherwise-arbitrarily capped pay of career executives. Those arbitrarily limited salaries are a problem too, but inflated ratings (or forced distribution thereof) are not the way to solve it.  Instead, there are much better ways to control SES performance ratings inflation and thus better serve the American people. 

For example, one way is to focus on agency performance first. That agency performance is exactly what we tried to evaluate when I was associate director of OPM, under the tutelage of then-OPM Director Kay Coles James, and she—with the help of career executives like my colleagues and me—led the effort to make SES performance ratings more realistic. NOT by imposing arbitrary limits on them, but by clearly linking those individual ratings to the actual performance of the departments and agencies those executives led.  

Thus, while laudable on the surface, impersonal, arbitrary government-wide performance rating controls have historically failed. That was the experience in the U.S. military, which experimented several decades ago with forced ratings quotas by literally placing an arbitrary limit on the number of “top block” Officer Effectiveness Reports that could be given in any given rating cycle. But what happens when everyone in the military unit, like test pilots or astronauts or SEALs or Green Berets, already “walks on water?”  

After all, an agency’s overall performance is a team effort, the result of political appointees and career executives working together, so that means that both need to be evaluated on agency performance, just as it should be!  Having said that, OPM gets kudos for trying! But along the way, OPM must abandon a one-size-fits-all model. 

For more on what OPM has gotten right...and wrong, stay tuned for my second installment!

Ronald Sanders is a former career senior federal executive of more than 20 years. He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the American Society for Public Administration’s National Council. He has served as chair of the Federal Salary Council, associate director of OPM, DOD Director of Civilian Personnel Policy, IRS Chief HR Officer, and the Intelligence Community’s first Associate Director of National Intelligence for Human Capital.