Linda Bilmes on the Future of the Federal Workforce

The question of how to attract a new generation to public service is challenging the government as the U.S. faces unprecedented problems and a looming wave of retirement among federal workers. In order for the government to meet the complex and daunting demands it now faces, a focused investment in its own public servants will be required.

Linda Bilmes, lecturer in public policy, argues that the Obama administration needs to make reinvigorating the public sector a top priority. Bilmes is co-author of the books “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict” and “The People Factor: Strengthening America by Investing in Public Service.”

Q: Why do you see such an urgent need to reform U.S. government personnel systems in particular?

Bilmes: There are several reasons why we need to reinvigorate public service, and why it’s urgent to do so now.

First of all, it’s clearly the case that the country is in trouble, and we need top-quality people to help right the country again. We need thousands upon thousands of well-trained and highly motivated professionals to meet the many great challenges currently facing our country. We’ll need accountability experts to track billions of dollars of infrastructure contracts and financial wizards to determine where the money goes. We’ll need competent and experienced regulators to restructure Wall Street and fix the banks.

These are the public servants – the 1.9 million people who work for the U.S. government. And although they are pivotal in every aspect of economic life, they have not been sufficiently invested in or sufficiently rewarded for over half a century. So we need to make a renewed commitment to strengthening the public sector as an entity, and to train and strengthen the skills of those who work in the public sector.

Secondly, we already have a problem in the public sector, because there’s a so-called “retirement tsunami.” A whole generation of public servants who came into the government in the 1960s and 70s is now retiring. If all those in the senior executive service who are eligible to retire do so tomorrow, 6,000 of the nation’s top 7,000 managers could walk out the door. People are aging, and it’s time to think about how we actually attract and retain the best and the brightest into these government jobs.

A third reason why it’s so critical to make this investment now is that the problems that government is facing are becoming ever more complex and global. And so the skills that we need in mid-level and upper-level government positions are even more sophisticated than they have been in the past.

This complexity carries on in department after department after department, and we need to have a really talented and well-trained and invigorated public service in order to be able to accomplish these sophisticated goals. In addition, the government now relies to a large extent upon the private sector: on contractors, and on the nonprofit work force. So the typical government manager needs a variety of skills. They need to be able to cooperate, to collaborate, to motivate people, and to manage a wide network of government, nonprofit and for-profit partners. Unless we train people how to manage these networks, the networks will be running us instead of the government running the networks.

Q: What specific steps need to be taken to achieve the necessary gains?

Bilmes: The government needs to invest $10 billion over the next five years in the federal workforce. This investment would primarily be devoted to training – that’s managerial training, supervisory training, leadership training and training a whole cadre of management and supervisors in the federal government in a variety of skills. This would lead to significant return on investment. A $10 billion investment would lead to productivity gains in the government in the order of $300 to $600 billion over the next decade. These gains come from a combination of improved productivity, reduced waste, reduced duplication, improved collaboration, more innovation, better management of contracts, better attention to the costing and budgeting of programs, and practices and services. And I think the investment is relatively modest for a very, very significant gain.

We need to essentially revamp the way we recruit both young people and mid-career talent, the way we hire people, train them when they’re hired, the kind of retention practices that we use, mentoring, development plans, lateral experiences throughout government. Essentially, we have to create a new kind of career in public service, in the federal government, that is very robust in terms of developing the individual skills and continuing to train workers throughout their career.

We envision training a public servant more along the lines of what we do for military personnel. In the military we don’t actually hire someone to be a colonel. We expect to train them over a period of years, in a variety of circumstances, in many aspects of specific skills and in leadership skills, in order for them to earn the right and the privilege to become a colonel. In the civilian service, you might say that it’s the opposite. We hire someone expecting them to grow into a senior civil servant, but we give them almost no training or encouragement along the way. We want to make the whole experience of being in the public service a much more developed career, with a variety of benchmarks and credentials that are put in place along the way.

Q: What do you see as the largest obstacles to the new administration to enacting reform?

Bilmes: Certainly a significant obstacle to enacting reform is public perception. For decades now there has been a negative impression of the civil service that has been cultivated in the media and has unfortunately taken hold amongst the general public. As a result, the dedication to mission that the vast majority of public servants give to their work is really not rewarded. It’s gotten to the point where people in the federal workforce have become discouraged from innovating and trying anything new. Morale has been affected.

Reversing this mindset – creating an entrepreneurial, go-getting, innovative, energetic, high-powered, enthusiastic work force – that’s the biggest challenge.

Q: What will be the cost of inaction?

Bilmes: The “people factor” is a fundamental value system; it’s a philosophy that says that investing in every person and every individual and getting the best out of them creates the greatest good. And I think that we have long known in high-performing organizations that investing in people yields high productivity and high performance, but we have essentially forgotten that in government. And the result has been for several decades a continued stress on the federal workforce. Now that has manifested itself in a number of ways: in the morale of those who are working for the government, in the performance of a very wide variety of government agencies which have performed below what the American public deserves. And we can see that in areas ranging from the inspections of salmonella in peanut butter, to the failure to regulate Wall Street, to the faulty intelligence that led us into Iraq, to the core oversight of contractors during the Iraqi reconstruction, to some of the failures after Katrina. All of these problems stem back from a lack of investment, a lack of attention, to the “people factor.”

If we don’t take this issue seriously, we will see a continued devolution of the federal work force to an oversight role over an increasingly large and unwieldy group of private contractors and others who – although they may be good workers and certainly have a role to play – don’t have the same mission focus and priorities as the federal work force. And I think that takes us farther and farther away from the ideal of government public service and the ideal set of rules, regulations and high moral standards that the government should set. If we don’t come to grips with this problem affecting the federal workforce, we will continue to witness a steady decline in the way America is governed.

Q: Do you think there is a unique opportunity in the current moment?

Bilmes: We have a really unprecedented opportunity to re-shape the federal workforce. First of all we have a president who embodies the “yes we can” philosophy, which is really at the heart of what we’re trying to say about the federal workforce. It is within our power to restructure the federal workforce, restructure the way we hire people, the way we recruit people, the way we manage, and train, and supervise people. This should not be a problem that is as difficult to fix as Gaza.

It’s a unique opportunity, both because there is a general feeling in the country that public service is important, and that government is important, and also because we have so many great challenges facing our nation right now. There is a recognition that the government is important, that the country cannot prosper without a strong public sector, and that none of us will be as good as we can be, or as free as we can be, without a very strong, highly-functioning federal work force to run the government.

Interviewed by Molly Lanzarotta on February 24, 2009.

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Linda Bilmes

Linda Bilmes