A new ‘activist’ OPM is incrementally reforming the civil service, Part 2

As I noted in my first installment, there’s a lot going on in the federal civil service world these days—that includes most of “what” the Trump Administration is trying to accomplish in that regard, as well as “how” the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management and the rest of that administration are going about its implementation—so much so that it all can’t fit in one commentary. 

So, what follows is a continuation of my first iteration; that is, some more unsolicited thoughts on some of those civil service goings-on. And of course, in the interim, OMB has issued quite controversial guidance regarding a possible government shutdown, RIFs and furloughs, adding even more fuel to the fire!

But in this case, I think things like OPM’s recent decision to cancel this year’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, as well as its actions with respect to probationary employees and periods in the federal hiring process are, like the applicant essays and new SES performance standards I spoke to in Part 1, mostly spot on, and as I’ve previously opined, they represent a welcome (and courageous) activism from OPM. So, taken together, they all make the civil service decidedly better off than not. 

Here again, there are some exceptions. Some cross the partisan line, and that must stop. But many are also the product of a one-size-fits-all mentality that OPM needs to revisit. And that’s Part 2 of my rant!

Another example of ‘one size fits all’ thinking 

OPM’s recent changes regarding probationary employees and probationary periods offer an example of a “glass half full” approach to reform. My colleagues and I generally support those changes, but for me, I don’t think OPM has gone far enough. After all, OPM’s own rules label probationary periods as “an extension” of the examination process, so I believe a much more tailored approach is in order.

Thus, while my colleagues and I have applauded anything that makes it less automatic to grant probationary employees protected career status, the new rules — in my view, mistakenly — endorse a common, one-year period for that determination (or two if you’re in an excepted service position), no matter the agency’s mission, occupation, situation or circumstance, thereby embracing that same, far-too-traditional governmentwide one-size-fits-all myth that has gone the way of the Dodo bird.  

The State Department’s recently hired class of newbie Foreign Service Officers is a perfect example of this. Without getting into the controversy over whether their more senior colleagues should have ever been let go in the first place, how can the State Department tell if their newest class of FSOs is capable of representing our country in embassies overseas after just one year, especially if they spend much of that year in a classroom in the department’s Foreign Service Institute in Virginia? Yet the new rules assume that a single year is sufficient to determine whether these and ALL other new federal employees deserve to be granted career civil service status. 

As another example, our Defense Department and Intelligence Community have many occupations that have no counterparts elsewhere in the world, and no academic institution offers pre-civil service education and training to prepare students to perform those duties successfully. 

Instead, it often has to occur on the job; that is, after an employee has entered federal civil service. And in many of those cases, one (or even two) years is just not enough. The same is true for mainline occupations in IRS, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies too numerous to name.

So, OPM ought to make an employee’s probationary period up to the employing agency, based on reasonably objective occupational criteria—like how long it takes to trust that the employee is sufficiently trained and developed to be “protected” as a career civil servant.

The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey’s cancellation

The cancellation of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey is yet another case in point. Albeit with altogether too much external handwringing, it’s a move that many of us support, albeit for a variety of reasons. Mine is simple: The survey was never intended to serve as a measure of governmentwide morale and organizational climate, and thus, as a “best of breed” indicator of those things, the FEVS is not.  

I should know, as I was associate director of OPM when that survey was first developed, and it was only intended to assess the progress agencies made in implementing President George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda. That was revolutionary in and of itself, and it should have been enough to sustain it, but over the ensuing years, that survey has morphed, inadvertently and otherwise, into something much bigger, and it is yet another aspect of the “one size fits all” mythology that needs to be undone.

So, while the FEVS could use a lot of retooling, OPM must also take into account the heterogeneity of federal missions and managers. 

To be sure, the Partnership for Public Service, as the survey’s adopted parent, has managed to successfully correlate a few FEVS questions with the government’s “Best Places to Work” each year, and as a result, the survey enjoys considerable credence and media attention in that regard. But the FEVS is still not nearly as actionable as it needs to be, especially at and below the agency level, something most experts say is necessary if you want agencies and employees to pay any attention to it. 

In that regard, FEVS results have been parsed by agency and subcomponent, so that they can be viewed and hopefully acted upon below a governmentwide level. But in my view, that implicitly recognizes that there are just too many differences in agency missions and cultures to jam them altogether into a single set of statistics, or worse yet, a single ranking! Simply out, the FEVS does not, and cannot, serve as a single governmentwide measure, at least not without something much more agency-specific to supplement it. 

So, OPM (NOT someone else!) needs to replace the FEVS with something state-of-the-art, as promised, but in so doing, it and the Congress must also recognize that the federal government is a collection of employers, not just one-size-fits-all, and act accordingly.

The myth is that the federal government is a single, monolithic employer

Note that I am not advocating a federal government that has no interagency glue — that is, no common set of principles and rules that cover every federal civil servant. Quite the contrary. It needs that glue. But at the same time, I am not advocating a single, “one size fits all” set of rules either. Rather, OPM, in consultation with its clients, should set policies like the length of one’s probationary period by occupation and/or agency. 

But those things can still be subject to a common core of rules and policies. 

Readers should re-examine the Working for America Act in that regard. WoFA, introduced in the George W. Bush administration back in the mid-2000’s, would have followed the model proffered by the then-fledgling Department of Homeland Security, declaring that certain parts of existing civil service law, like its merit principles, were inviolable — thus providing a common, governmentwide framework — but many others, today etched in governmentwide stone, would be subject to agency discretion That would have permitted far more agency-specific variability (and even collective bargaining), all subject to OPM oversight of course. 

In other words, WoFA proposed a both/and approach to civil service reform — a common, centralized governmentwide framework coupled with far more decentralized, agency-level personnel policies tailored to their individual missions — rather than a “one size fits all” monolith. 

That more decentralized model reflects today’s reality. Indeed, the fact is that many agencies have gone to their respective congressional committees and have asked to be taken out from under Title 5 and centralized OPM control for that very reason. Indeed, so much so that according to the Government Accountability Office, hundreds of thousands of federal employees have “seceded” from that governmentwide monolith. All with congressional sanction. 

Unfortunately, that secession has been random. There has never been a deliberate strategy behind it, and thus no governmentwide glue to bind those agencies together. The Bush legislation would have changed that. And that approach was later endorsed by none other than two successive panels of the National Academy of Public Administration. OPM needs to look at those NAPA reports as a possible way ahead. 

OPM’s new activism is welcome but it still needs to be careful

But in the meantime, kudos to OPM Director Scott Kupor and team for their courage, missteps and mistakes (some by them, some by others) notwithstanding.

Bottom line: As a general matter, and perhaps contrary to much popular opinion, I generally like what OPM is doing with respect to its series of incremental civil service reforms. To be sure, some of those changes (to include the recent issuance of its “rule of many” regulation) were mandated by Congress, but OPM’s various other efforts — such as the cancellation of the FEVS and its new accountability and probationary period rules —are, with some exception, long overdue. 

Thus, I think this version of OPM is batting over .750 when it comes to pushing through civil service reforms.

That’s right, I think they’re getting it right over 75% of the time, and I’m NOT sucking up in that regard. Indeed, as someone who’s played in this arena for decades, this longtime civil servant must ask, without any partisan bias whatsoever, “Where were previous OPMs when it came to making such changes?” Especially since few apparently require any sort of congressional blessing.

But those reforms aside, OPM’s “one size fits all” approach is just no longer our reality. In fact, our national government is made up of dozens of different departments and agencies, each with a different mission, and literally hundreds of occupations that are supposed to support those missions.

So, while OPM’s incremental changes are generally good, the myth of the federal government as a single, monolithic employer is obsolete and needs to be rethought. That too requires some courage, but this OPM seems to have it.