Even though FEBs have been in operation since 1961, inconsistent funding and a lack of structure have hindered their ability to scale up support of the nationwide federal workforce.

But with the FEB program now housed under the Office of Personnel Management, Deputy Associate Director for FEBs Kelly DeGraff is hoping to change that.

“The centralized oversight makes us more accountable and transparent, which really then improves our overall responsiveness to both government agencies and to the public,” DeGraff said in an exclusive interview.

Federal Executive Boards already have a clear set of goals: Help federal employees make decisions about their health benefits and retirement; organize charity events and support the Combined Federal Campaign; make local office closure announcements; coordinate disaster response efforts; offer various training and career development opportunities; and highlight the exceptional work of local federal employees through awards programs.

But after OPM became the overseer of FEBs, the agency created a new initiative, called “FEB forward,” to try to take the program up another notch. The initiative, paired with a new strategic plan for FEBs, relies on three main pillars:

• Building a cohesive organization with inclusive governance
• Ensuring excellence in operational impact
• Elevating the profile of FEBs

The possibility of change for FEBs also comes from now more consistent funding. In the past, FEBs relied only on voluntary funding from regional agencies. But now that agencies have authorization to contribute more funding in support of the FEB program, more options are opening up.

“Where the rubber meets the road”

Many Federal Executive Boards’ leaders across the country see their programs as providing a “hands-on” approach to understanding the problems of the federal workforce. For Zuleika Morales-Romero, co-chairwoman of The Alamo FEB in San Antonio, Texas, it’s about policy in D.C., versus action in the field.

“The field is all about where the rubber meets the road,” Morales-Romero said. “We don’t primarily deal in theory down here — we are federal programs in action.”

Even now with a largely hybrid work model in government, it can still be difficult for FEB leaders to elevate the voices of feds thousands of miles away, and bring their input and ideas back to D.C. — even though that is, in essence, the purpose of the FEB program.

“Sometimes information doesn’t flow down as fast to those outside of D.C.,” Christal Murray, the Los Angeles FEB’s former executive director, said. “And sometimes, our voices or input does not seem to be carried back to decision-makers in D.C.”

But headquarters officials in the nation’s capital are trying to turn that around. Leaders at the General Services Administration and the Office of Management and Budget — both of which still play a role in managing the FEB program — said they view FEBs’ insights as critical to the decisions they make back in D.C.

“Federal Executive Boards provide valuable insights from agency leaders all over the country that are closest to the communities we serve,” GSA Deputy Administrator Katy Kale said in a statement. “For GSA, these ground-level insights are particularly important when it comes to federal space and acquisition decisions to help make government work better.”

“FEBs are uniquely situated to serve as the front door of the federal government in American communities,” added Loren DeJonge Schulman, OMB’s associate director for performance and personnel management. “FEBs are critical in building relationships with key regional stakeholders, including state and local governments, colleges and universities, civic institutions, and community organizations, that can help advance key federal priorities and help serve the American people.”

And soon, even more federal voices may be coming into the picture. As part of the FEB forward initiative, OPM plans to connect more federal employees across the country. The expansion of the FEB program could mean a lot of different things. There’s a possibility of adding more FEBs in different cities, or expanding the reach of existing ones.

FEBs’ future is not prescriptive

Before solidifying the expansion plan, OPM is trying to learn as much as it can directly from the source: the senior leaders who currently manage the 28 different FEBs’ locations nationwide.

For months, OPM’s DeGraff has been traveling around the country to meet firsthand with local FEB leaders and senior executives in government. DeGraff, along with other OPM officials, are gathering input from local FEB leadership to try to make the most informed decisions possible about how to improve FEBs’ impact for the foreseeable future.

In some areas, expansion of the FEBs’ reach is already underway. The FEBs in South Florida and Detroit, Michigan, for instance, are already looking to spread out geographically.

“2024 will be a transitional year for our FEB as we increase our territory from South Florida to covering all of Florida,” Agnes Winokur, the South Florida FEB’s vice chairwoman, told Federal News Network.

“In the past, we have been very oriented toward serving the metropolitan Detroit area, but we will now be looking to extend our reach to the four corners of our state,” Michael Polsinelli, chairman of the Detroit FEB, added.

DeGraff said she thinks of the FEB forward initiative as a “realignment” of the program. But how exactly FEBs will change in the future depends on what works well in practice, and then pivoting the plan based on what doesn’t work.

“We don’t have a prescriptive roadmap,” DeGraff said. “In 2024 and 2025, we’re going to pilot various ways of what this can look like. And when we pilot, we have to not be afraid to fail — not all pilots work. I believe that there is a very positive element that can come from ‘failing forward.’ So, we’re going to see what happens, and we’re going to see how we can fill these gaps. There will be some trial and error there, but I think that the opportunities are really exciting to uncover.”

Especially now with OPM taking the reins, FEBs might see a larger focus on the workforce aspect of FEBs. And DeGraff said that’s becoming all the more important as agencies press for more diverse talent and compete against the private sector.

“We are starting to work on strategies of what an FEB strategic initiative could look like to really do targeted recruitment and increase our partnerships with different academic institutions, community colleges, universities and trade schools,” DeGraff said. “How do we formalize some of these partnerships and really create that pipeline to help reduce some of that uncertainty in what the next legacy of the public service workforce looks like?”

The post The 85 percent: FEBs’ future is open-ended, but not uncertain first appeared on Federal News Network.

It’s the oldest challenge in government and business: How to make things easier for customers. In the digital age, customer service has evolved into something more ambitious: customer experience (CX). CX asks, among other things, how you get the idea of better service or experience down to the individual employee. To get some ideas, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin  spoke with Office of Personnel Management digital services expert Beth Martin.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin What is the latest thinking? What is OPM doing these days? There’s an executive order about a year ago on customer experience. It’s in the president’s management agenda. It’s in all of their management agendas, pretty much what’s going on these days.

Beth Martin We have two flagship activities that are undergoing. We have the OPM modernization. That’s OPM.gov, that’s also our intranet. And we even have a strategic goal speaking to that. So we are taking this very seriously, obviously. We also have another effort underway dealing with the Postal Service’s health benefits program, and that will be a really exciting development that we’ll finish up later this fall for the postal services workers and their annuity and some family members.

Tom Temin And just review for us what the goals of the OPM CX modernization are. That would be, presumably for federal employees writ large.

Beth Martin Yes. For federal employees who want to choose their health benefits, to choose their retirement benefits, for people who are considering coming into federal service, who want to see what’s available to them. All federal employees are our customers, and our federal retirees are our customers. And anyone who’s looking to have a federal job or do business with OPM or our customers.

Tom Temin And you mentioned intranet. It was the second phase in agencies and organizations putting their stuff out on the public internet. They said, well, we could do this internally also. But since all of this, there’s another development called artificial intelligence. Is that coming into this idea of understanding what a person is looking for and therefore revving up the intranet such that it can give more detailed information to that person, even though it may not be on a formal website. Does that make sense?

Beth Martin Yes. Are you thinking on the public side or on the intranet side?

Tom Temin Well, intranet side?

Beth Martin Well, there is an effort underway right now. It’s a pilot project and another colleague is heading that up. It’s a joint effort with the Air Force. So that is very exciting because that will be helping HR personnel. And so I think when we have more to share about that, that will be really exciting that we can talk more about that and how it can help streamline efforts.

Tom Temin Because if you look at the OPM website, it is extensive. Even just it’s coming in from the public as I do, just to see what do they exactly say about this day or that day type of thing. And there’s always documents linked and they in turn linked to other documents. Eventually you get to the statutes. It’s pretty deep what you offer, but it’s not all that easy to navigate or it might take a lot of time. I guess, is one of the gambits you’re thinking of, such that a natural language query could find all of those documents, assemble them for a person, and then maybe provide an answer that’s generated. It would be just for that question, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a page on an intranet.

Beth Martin Can we steal that idea? Tom? That’s a great idea.

Tom Temin It’s not original. I just heard it from somebody else. But well, tell us what you do plan right now. What’s the status of your own modernization?

Beth Martin I think in terms of modernizing it, going to the cloud, obviously we’re working hard on that to modernize legacy systems. And I don’t want to go too deep into that because that is not my area of expertise. I am just sharing what I am aware of. We want to do better by our customers, and so we’re working hard to understand what customers need so that we can provide that in a more streamlined manner. As AI matures and access to it becomes more commonplace, we obviously need to wait for those guardrails for AI. And what you mentioned would be very interesting. And there’s a long term impact which came about with search engines, not too recently where they talked about, I need everything on this topic and the AI scrapes from those websites and then you lose traffic on those websites. So I think those are down the road kinds of concerns. Who is the authoritative source of that information? Because the search engines can get it wrong.

Tom Temin Yes, indeed they can. We’ve all been down those rabbit holes. We’re speaking with Beth Martin. She’s digital services expert and customer experience designer at OPM. And tell us about the ways that you are making sure you understand what it is. It’s hard to say the customer because with a workforce of a couple of million, everybody’s unique, literally. And has unique situations. So what’s your best strategy for determining what the journey map should look like and all of these things. When you have 2 million people or if you’re a large business, you might have 20 million or 200 million.

Beth Martin That’s a really good question. The first thing we need to do is to understand what our agency mission is. Going back to basics and making sure that we are delivering on what we’re supposed to be doing. Government’s mandate is to serve. So we need to serve. And in order to do that, we need to know what our mission is. And everything that we do needs to be tied to that mission. And we have strategic plans with strategic goals and objectives, and we need to be aware of those so that we are delivering on those. In the case of OPM, as with any other agency, once we understand that perspective, that will be the North Star to help orient who do we serve? Who are the primary people who need these services? And we need to do some research. We need to do user research. We need to do user interviews and really get a very good understanding of the target audience that we are trying to reach out to and make sure that we are delivering what they need. We are delivering the top services. There are many things that agencies do, but we need to do the things that we are charged to do well and stay in our lane.

Tom Temin So the idea then behind this is CX has to be very specific to the agency, in the case of federal agencies, and there’s no one way to do it that fits everybody.

Beth Martin Right. Because we’re all serving different audiences and they will have different needs. You might have one agency who is serving people who have English language barrier, so that customer service need will be different than somebody who is providing internal services. So we really need to understand who our users are and their needs.

Tom Temin And you mentioned something else too. You serve individual federal employees. But really OPM also serves other agencies in official capacity, not individual capacity. And how does that complicate the CX  journey?

Beth Martin Well, agencies are people too. There are people who have those needs. So again, we need to make sure that we are serving up what that agency is connecting with us for what we deliver.

Tom Temin And tell us more about the Postal Service effort. It’s in their health care area. Is that something that could maybe translate later on to government wide for OPM? Because everybody does health care and everybody obtains it one way or another?

Beth Martin Yes. It’s a very complex process. When I first joined the OPM about 18 months ago, I was involved in a discovery effort where we were just looking at one aspect of several different processes for this larger effort of delivering service, and I really grew to appreciate it. I have family members who are involved in different aspects of the health care system, and I’ve worked at Health and Human Services and FDA, so I had some appreciation of what’s involved, but I had no clear understanding of the complexity of just this one aspect of it. So in this one particular case, the effort was for insurance carriers to offer up the three different health plans that they wanted to do that. And that is a contract, a bid process, and getting that information into a portal. And then OPM takes that and works that communicates with the health insurance company about negotiating, and then they award the contract. One I learned how that process went. And two, there were so many people involved in so many decisions. It really gives you an appreciation for how complex it is. And just mapping that whole journey was an astounding process. And doing that again for 5 or 6 more other major processes and getting all of those steps mapped and then looking at how can we streamline this? How could we make it easy for us? How can we make it easy for the insurance companies to come in and offer this? And by extension, how can we make this a better process for everybody involved? Because our customers in this case, are the insurance companies wanting to do business with us, which will ultimately help us give better service to the people who want the insurance plans.

Tom Temin Sure. So in trying to get to a better CX, you can also get to a better process.

Beth Martin Exactly.

The post What individual federal employees can do, to improve customer experience first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Department of Homeland Security is setting up potential reassignments for employees in its Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction unit if Congress fails to reauthorize the office later this year.

The authority for the CWMD office terminates Dec. 21. While bipartisan legislation to reauthorize CWMD exists in both chambers of Congress, time is running short as lawmakers face another looming government shutdown scenario in mid-November, while House Republicans have yet to appoint a new speaker.

“It’s a complicated congressional environment right now,” Mary Ellen Callahan, the assistance secretary of DHS’s CWMD Office, said in an interview.

The CWMD office is responsible for working with state and local governments as well as international partners to guard against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats to the United States.

“We’re explaining the value proposition that is the CWMD office,” Callahan said regarding DHS’s conversations on Capitol Hill. “How integrated we are with our DHS components, how we support our components, providing them equipment, training, technical assistance, and expertise. And how we also are working with our state and local stakeholders that comprise almost 40% of the U.S. population.”

With the CWMD office facing termination, however, DHS leaders are considering contingency reassignments for the 234 employees who work there. Callahan said DHS leaders have agreed to keep open some jobs in the coming months to prioritize the reassignment of CWMD employees should Congress fail to act.

CWMD employees have until Nov. 17 to select a reassignment offer. They would then be officially reassigned to those new positions on Dec. 17, which is the start of the first pay period before CWMD’s authority expires.

After Dec. 17, Callahan said CWMD would not be able to pull them back if Congress makes a last-ditch reauthorization attempt. She said it would be the “largest management directed reassignment” in DHS’s history.

“The contingent reassignment is to give a lifeboat to folks, to make sure that they continue as a fed, they don’t have a break in service, and that they can find a job that is at least within their series and grade,” Callahan said.

The office includes employees ranging from nuclear physicists and chemical engineers to veterinarians who work on bio-surveillance programs.

“These are unusual positions that we’re really leaning forward to make sure we can find a place where they can be productive federal employees, if indeed CWMD goes away,” Callahan said.

But she said the office is starting to see some “slight attrition” due to the uncertainty about the office’s future.

“We’ve had a couple of people who have left and I know other people are looking at it, or considering retirement or other exit options,” Callahan said. “I have encouraged them to stay around, because I feel very passionate about this mission. And I feel that it’s an incredibly important time for this office to continue. With that said, I understand that people have to make choices on their own. I think the closer we get to December, particularly the latter part of the month, the more we’re going to see people exiting the office at their own will.”

The CWMD office was formally established in 2018 and has struggled with morale challenges for much of its existence. Its employee engagement score of 39.4 in 2022 ranked 430th out of 432 subcomponents across the entire federal government.

The office has struggled with turnover among its senior leadership ranks, according to the Government Accountability Office. Callahan is now the fourth different assistant secretary to take the helm since 2018.

Callahan was previously chief of staff to former DHS Deputy Secretary John Tien, who led a DHS-wide morale improvement initiative.

“I’m taking what I learned and applying it here at CWMD,” she said. “I am an engaged leader that likes to inspire teams to get the best out of them, and also have individuals feel seen and heard. And I’m leading the office this way. I’m trying to be very candid about where we are. But I’m also trying to inspire the team to let them know that not only do I believe in them, but I think I can get more out of them.”

If the office is reauthorized, she said her longer term goal is to make CWMD’s operations more integrated into the processes and policymaking happening across other DHS components.

“We can help be subject matter experts for them, as we face this weapons of mass destruction issue,” Callahan said. “And that’s, I think, how to help the morale here. These people are experts, and they want to be seen as an expert, and they want to be engaged in the mission.”

The post DHS to offer ‘lifeboat’ reassignments to employees in expiring CWMD office first appeared on Federal News Network.

Over the last 18 months, the General Services Administration has been asking some hard questions, mostly about itself.

What does the Federal Acquisition Service need to look like? Does the current regional structure make sense anymore? A group of leaders and employees delved into a host of other questions in an attempt to design the future of FAS.

Sonny Hashmi, the commissioner of FAS, said the new path the working group has charted for the organization is entirely focused on serving agency and industry customers much differently than ever before.

“In a few weeks’ time, we’re going to be transitioning into a new organizational structure where major organizations within FAS, including the Assisted Acquisition Service (AAS) and the Office of Customer and Stakeholder Engagement (CASE) are going to be aligned to customer segments. Now we’re going to have teams that are fully aligned to a customer’s mission. That team and the customer will be working closely together and are going to be purely focused on achieving mission outcomes that our customer cares about,” Hashmi said in an exclusive interview with Federal News Network. “I’m confident that over time this is going to lead to better service delivery and access to talent and opportunities within the organization for people who are looking for the next step in their careers.”

The new FAS will no longer be separated by regions and will now be organized by teams serving their customers, whether it’s one team working with the Army, its largest one, or one team working with several smaller customers.

Hashmi said FAS employees will not change their work locations nor will they change what they do day in, day out.

“By bringing all these teams together, they’re supporting the Army as one unit. Now they can do more capacity management. They can support the mission in a broader way. And the Army will have one team that they can continue to work with for all of their mission requirements across the globe,” he said. “That’s just one example on how by bringing these teams together we’re going to be able to deliver better outcomes for our customers, but also develop better internal expertise to really understand the customer’s mission and actually do much more flexible staffing and capacity planning.”

GSA reorg plan receives good initial reviews

GSA announced the initial version of the FAS reorganization in late August and posted a blog about it on Sept. 7. Hashmi said the reorganization will officially start taking effect in October.

“We are going to have five divisions within the organization. We call them Apexes, and these five divisions will be led by executives, and I’m philosophically aligned to allowing these executives to make the best decisions in resource allocation as needed. Everybody in the organization, everybody in FAS, their performance plans, are aligned to the three North Stars and should be focused on customer mission delivery, creating a thriving marketplace and making it easy to do business with us,” he said. “These executives will be held accountable for making sure that we’re delivering for our customers, and will have the flexibility to align resources, as needed, to do so. Now, having said that, we want some stability too. Contracting officers require some long-term stability, and we can’t move contracts back and forth between different contracting officers because it requires long-term understanding of the work that is being done. All of those are tensions that have to be balanced out as you think about aligning resources to most pressing tasks.”

Reaction to the reorganization from current and former GSA executives has been overall positive.

One GSA official, who requested anonymity because they didn’t get permission to speak to the press, said the reorganization is a recognition that the current business model was outdated, inefficient and not giving customers a consistent experience.

“Each region was its own fiefdom with different procedures and processes. This is intended to standard and normalize efforts across all regions,” the official said. “Change always causes stress so there probably is a certain amount of stress when something like this gets rolled out, but FAS leadership is working hard to have listening sessions and all hands meetings so talking about how this will help relieve some stress.”

Mary Davie, a former FAS deputy commissioner and now president of Mary Davie Consulting, said the organization has been through big changes in the past and this one is no different. She said FAS must make it clear “why” the change is happening.

“Big change like this is usually hard and sometimes not always popular with people in an organization. This one is big for many people as the GSA regions have a lot of pride in their affiliation with the region, are very close knit groups, and have their own individual cultures and ways of doing things, as you would expect,” Davie said. “I’ve talked with a few regional leaders recently, and while they were initially ‘sad’ about the change to the regional structure, they all believe it is the right thing to do to best serve their federal agency customers and they are committed to making it successful.”

Davie added it’s key for FAS leadership to make sure their employees know where they will fit in the new organizational structure, who they will be working with and how their roles and responsibilities might change.

This is why FAS leadership will fine tune the changes brought on by the reorganization over the coming months or year based on employee, agency customer and industry feedback.

GSA employee communication is key

Hashmi said his team has been briefing lawmakers, union officials and other stakeholders about the changes.

“We’ve been doing a lot of internal conversations with employees at all levels, making sure that they understand the changes that are going to be affecting them, and how they’re going to be implemented. The subsequent step is continuing to increase our engagement with the industry on these changes,” he said. “Oftentimes when change like this happens, this is the outcome of some sort of a bad thing that happened. I believe that smart managers and leaders could come together and make important structural changes that are needed for the long-term viability of their organization. That’s a key business reason why we’re doing this.”

Davie said there is no doubt how important this communication will be to the success of this effort.

“What will actually change? What won’t? And over what period of time? Can industry and/or agencies expect a change the way in which they engage with FAS or how they receive services? They and will want to know if the FAS representative they’ve been working with will change — and how GSA will manage the relationship transition,” she said. “A significant strength of FAS is the relationships they create with their industry partners and agency customers. I have no doubt that FAS will be successful in this change and will be stronger and better positioned to serve their customers.”

Hashmi said he expects FAS’ new structure to help address the expected continue growth in business volume. FAS’ current business volume is approaching $90 billion a year, up $15 billion over the last two years.

“When you look at that growth and ultimately that growth ties to the mission impact that we create for our agencies, the value that we create for them and the work that we do for them. We were increasingly getting to a ceiling in the work that we could deliver. And that ceiling was in many cases determined by who we could recruit, where they had to live, what grades we could offer, what limitations in terms of the number of slots and headcounts that are assigned to different regions versus others,” he said. “So at this point, all employees at FAS have access to an organizational chart. They know exactly where they are, where they fit into that organizational chart, and all that information has been provided. We’ve held an all-FAS summit for two straight days where every employee could engage and hear directly from their chains of command executives all the way down in their management chain on how those roles are going to be changing. Those folks who are in the management and executive ranks have already been working together over the last several months to make sure that the new processes are in place. However, this is not just a documentation exercise. A lot of this is hearts and minds and so we built toolkits for supervisors where they can have access to all the information they need. They have been asked to have a one-on-one conversations with every single employee. Many of those conversations are already occurred. But again, these are not just one-time conversations. We have many opportunities between now and continuing into the next year to continue to work with our employees, which is one of the things that I’m very proud of.”

FAS started this reorganization planning about 18 months ago bringing together a team of about 50 people from across the country to “imagine the future of the organization.”

Hashmi said moving away from the geographical limiting model will be better for FAS employees, customers and industry partners.

Hashmi’s 3 metrics of success

He said there are three measures FAS will be looking at over the next year to make sure the reorganization is heading in the right direction.

“Number one, my promise is that we’re doing this for the long-term benefit of our customers, so that needs to be reflected through both in surveys in terms of the work that our CASE organization does day-to-day with our customers, we need to make sure that they’re getting better value out of this, they’re getting less friction, less confusion, more answers, more real time support that they need. We’re going to be closely monitoring that area and we’re going to be actively measuring metrics in that space,” Hashmi said. “Number two, it needs to reduce the burden for our employees and create new opportunities. One of the things that I’ve said from the very beginning is that the goal is that by going away from this geographically limiting model that we had operated under, more employees will have access to more opportunities that open up across the organization. I’m going to be looking at that, for example, in the next month alone as we’re going to be announcing hundreds of new leadership management and frontline supervisor opportunities that are going to be published. Now that everybody in GSA can participate in them, a good metric for me instead of essentially looking at who’s eligible to apply for the jobs that number has to increase tenfold. I’m certain that it will, because historically, if you’re a GS-13 and aspire to be a GS-14, you’re limited in the opportunities that might open up in your region. They may happen once in a while. Now you can apply to any GS-14 position opening up across FAS, which is going to be great.”

The third metric will be around recruitment. Hashmi said every agency, particularly in the acquisition field, faces challenges in hiring and retaining employees. While FAS has made steady progress in the last few years, Hashmi would like to see the number of acquisition workers FAS recruits increase even further.

“If you actually look at FAS within GSA, we’re the highest performing organization from a Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) perspective, from a customer service perspective one of the highest ones ranked in the entire federal government. That doesn’t happen automatically. That happens by design. We have great trust and relationships across the board between employees and their supervisors at all levels. In fact, that is one of the highest ranked metrics in EVS score for FAS, over 90% of the people say that they trust their supervisor and they have open communication with them. So now again, there’s exceptions here and there, but I do trust our incredible cadre of supervisors and leaders to continue to have those conversations with their teams to make sure that people are heard they’re protected,” he said. “They have clear mission outcomes. They’re doing important work, and wherever there is any exception to that I have made sure that everybody knows my personal cell phone and my email address and they contact me directly. I encourage anybody listening who may have any concerns about this reach out to me directly. I want to do it right and we want to make sure that this is something that is done on behalf of the American people and for the benefit of our customers.”

The post Federal Acquisition Service’s new structure seeks to break down long-held fiefdoms first appeared on Federal News Network.

Six months into its mission as the think tank for Pentagon management, the Defense Management Institute (DMI) is kicking off its public-facing image. Its new website offers a look at the institute’s eight main priorities including human resources, healthcare and acquisition.

At the top of its dance card is a study of the Defense Department’s chief management officer, a position that no longer exists, but the question of whether to reinstate it is the subject of debate between the Senate and the White House.

Congress established the chief management officer position in 2018 as the third highest-ranking member on the Pentagon staff. After a critical study of the position by the Defense Business Board, Congress eliminated the job in 2021. The Senate version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has an amendment to bring it back. A White House statement of administration policy published July 27 “strongly opposes” reinstatement of the position.

“I think the problem is understanding how that office fits into the rest of the bureaucracy — how it relates to the rest of the department is a challenge. And it’s just not the way the Department of Defense works. Giving an office nominal authority in law is not the same as actual authority and practice,” Peter Levine, director of DMI, told Federal News Network.

Levine, a former undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, also held the position of deputy chief management officer. He said whatever Congress decides to do about the position, it should exercise caution. Starting and stopping top-level positions can be both a distraction and an energy drain.

“Reorganization is difficult in the Department of Defense. It takes time and it distracts from the mission. The department has just gone through a lengthy period of getting rid of that chief management officer. I think Congress should consider the impact of reconstituting a new office. If you do that too quickly, you create another wave of disruption,” Levine said.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) introduced the NDAA amendment to reinstate the chief management officer. He said the position need to have more authority and it was never given a chance to succeed. The White House SAP said the position was never effective.

Since its inception last January, the institute developed its organization around eight pillars of defense management and started building its program, including a document library as a reference source for studying defense management.

“We’ve got a lot of resources I think will be useful for the defense management community. We have a curated list of key resources in each of the eight defense management pillars we’ve identified. We’ve got a list of experts with bios and contact information,” Levine said. “We’ve got links to other organizations and libraries that are key to defense management issues. We’re starting up some other features like links to breaking news on defense issues and interviews with defense management leaders.”

Among other top priority issues for DMI is defense healthcare management. Levine said the institute has about 20 experts from government and academia in the field working on a review of DoD’s healthcare management systems.

“There was a significant reform of the defense healthcare system that was enacted by Congress about five or six years ago. Our experts are looking at that and taking a status check on where we’ve gone, what we’ve changed, how successful we’ve been and what remains to be done,” he said.

The institute is also working with the Pentagon on an annual review of defense agencies and field activities.

DMI is a private, non-profit organization funded in part through DoD. It is managed by the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) and housed in IDA headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. The Defense Department established DMI in January to help guide its management efforts.

The institute opened its doors with a management symposium. Moving forward, Levine said he will continue planning symposium-type events to bring together management experts and create educational opportunities.

“We’re just getting to the point where we’re starting to plan a second annual symposium. We have to make this an annual event. And we’re starting to think about how we’ll structure that and what kinds of topics we’ll cover,” Levine said. “This is something that will be an ongoing initiative over a period of years and it’s something we can help the Department of Defense in its own efforts to build a community of practice around defense management.”

The post The Defense Management Institute jumps into one of DoD’s thorniest management issues first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Personnel Management is asking agency leaders to take it up a notch to support federal employees’ mental health and wellness.

Every agency’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP) has a set of traditional offerings to help feds through personal and work-related issues — including mental health counseling, substance abuse treatment and financial and legal services. EAPs are voluntary programs that feds can opt into, when or if they’re looking for those services.

But now OPM is calling on agencies to revamp their EAPs and start including even more resources for feds, to create what the agency called Employee Wellness Programs (EWPs). New employee wellness guidance, which the agency published in May, expands on OPM’s EAP revitalization efforts.

Although OPM oversees the wellness programs governmentwide, each agency runs its own wellness program for internal employees.

“We noticed that some agencies are being leaders in this area and have adapted new programs that are creating a more comprehensive approach, which is what OPM is seeking to do with this guidance,” Jorday Taswell, a personnel research psychologist at OPM, said in an interview with Federal News Network. “We want to look at the mental, emotional and physical aspects of an employee’s health and wellness to really provide them with the most comprehensive arena of supports that are available.”

To design the new guidance and program, OPM considered what agencies that had successful programs were doing, then tried to replicate those strategies more broadly. OPM took examples from agencies that were adding more wellness services, beyond the scope of the traditional EAP model.

Some agencies, especially those already focused on health and wellness as part of their mission, such as the National Institutes of Health, offer even more services to their employees about specific challenges — relocation stress, peer-supervisor relations and work-life balance, just to name a few.

“They are trying to create a workplace culture that really values employee wellness and well-being,” Taswell said. “By speaking with their coordinators, we were able to highlight a couple of key components that we could adapt in this guidance to really make it comprehensive guidance for all federal employees.”

Following a series of focus groups and meetings with agency EAP coordinators, OPM developed its new guidance and program, building off of those additional services, to include more health and wellness options. For example, beyond the required options in the program, OPM said agencies should consider adding more resources wherever possible, including fitness classes, phone apps for wellness, health and wellness seminars, suicide prevention trainings and peer support programs.

Along with encouraging agencies to make more wellness resources available, one challenge is making sure employees know the resources are out there in the first place. Improving awareness, Taswell said, comes down to the work of agency managers and supervisors.

“Agency leaders are gifted with a unique opportunity to inspire inclusive work cultures, which prioritize employee wellness, and can really help set the standard for creating and maintaining an environment that normalizes conversations surrounding topics that may have historically had a bit of a negative stigma attached to them, such as mental health and mental health treatment,” Taswell said.

And beyond the actual services of the program, OPM said agencies should also focus on reducing negative stigmas around traditional EAPs.

“A lot of people tend to have an outdated understanding of EAPs, since they did traditionally originate as substance use treatment services with mental health counseling,” Taswell said. “However, today, they’ve really grown and evolved to encompass many more services and resources and sometimes employees are just not aware of these tools that are available to them.”

Again, much of the work to dispel myths about EAPs comes from the role of agency leaders. Many areas of the program, such as mental health wellness, have a traditionally negative stigma, so it’s up to agency leaders to set the stage, encourage a positive workplace culture and suggest employees take advantage of the resources when or if they need them.

The broadened EAP options OPM is pushing in its new guidance stem from a goal of the President’s Management Agenda, which includes the plan that “agencies will promote awareness of employee well-being and support initiatives that extend beyond the workplace.”

And it’s not just about mental health wellness — there’s a ripple effect, too. At the end of the day, employees with better mental health and wellness often feel more engaged and productive in their work, Taswell said.

“These employee wellness services can really help an employee to hone in on those areas and provide them with additional support, which can in turn lead to greater productivity, and help agency employees meet the mission of their agency,” Taswell said. “We encourage our agency leaders to promote these resources on a proactive rather than a reactive basis, so that employees can maintain their mental health on a consistent basis.”

The post OPM’s new employee wellness guidance focuses on being proactive first appeared on Federal News Network.

DHS has consistently ranked near the bottom of the 17 “large” agencies in the “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” rankings compiled by the Partnership for Public Service. Those low scores are largely driven by challenges at large DHS components like Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration.

But the component with the lowest employee engagement score in all of DHS is the little known Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction office. Its employee engagement score of 39.4 in 2022 ranked 430th out of 432 subcomponents across the entire federal government.

With approximately 230 employees, the CWMD office is responsible for working with state and local governments as well as international partners to guard against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats to the United States.

“CWMD really has as a sweet spot in its role as a convener and as the outreach arm to first responders to provide equipment, to provide training,” Allison Bawden, director of the Government Accountability Office’s natural resources and environment team. “That’s a really important role for the office and can be very empowering, when that mission is clear.”

Formally established in 2018, the CWMD office has had a turbulent short history, with multiple changes in organizational direction, structure, leadership and even office locations in less than five years. The office’s employee engagement scores had steadily risen in 2020 and 2021, but the latest scores represent a significant backtrack on that progress.

Congress is now considering further updates to DHS’s CWMD mission as it looks to reauthorize the office by the end of this year.

But Gary Rasicot, who has led the office as the acting assistant secretary for CWMD since January 2021, is “optimistic” that the organization will improve on its morale metrics.

“I think we’re through the worst of it,” Rasicot said in an interview.

‘A lot of unknowns’

The CWMD office was created when DHS leadership in 2017 decided to merge the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the Office of Health Affairs. Congress codified the office into law in 2018.

From the start, the merged organization faced challenges with employee engagement. It ranked the lowest out of all federal agency subcomponents in the Partnership’s 2019 rankings.

One of the root causes of the low scores was a clash of different cultures between the two legacy offices, according to a GAO report from April 2022. While DNDO worked with physicists and law enforcement officials to detect and prevent threats, OHA was more focused on working with public health officials to coordinate preparedness and response, GAO reported.

Additionally, a 2019 Los Angeles Times investigation found the Trump administration quietly dismantled or scaled back multiple counter-WMD programs around the time of the merger, leading to widespread employee dissatisfaction and uncertainty. The official leading those efforts at the head of the CWMD office resigned in 2019, just a year after the office was formally stood up.

The young office has been challenged by turnover within the senior leadership ranks, according to GAO, as it’s had three different assistant secretaries at the helm since its formal establishment in 2018.

“We all can agree that leadership matters when we’re carrying out the work that we’re expected to carry out and just having that turnover over time, I think has been challenging for that office,” Tina Won Sherman, director of GAO’s homeland security and justice team, said in an interview.

In the Partnership’s 2022 employee engagement rankings, the two categories in the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) where the CWMD performed the lowest are in “effective leadership: empowerment” and “senior leaders,” respectively.

Rasicot said CWMD leadership closely tracks the FEVS responses and acknowledged they show a “disconnection” between staff and senior leadership.

He said the shift to remote work and telework severed previous connections that the office is now looking to rebuild by putting out a weekly notice of what CWMD’s front office is doing; re-starting the “CWMD bulletin” that provided a biweekly update to staff on issues ranging from pay to IT issues; and pushing out more training opportunities to employees.

He also pointed to two specific challenges that may have upset morale at the CWMD office in 2022. The first was a change in location. Last April, the organization began shifting headquarters from downtown Washington, D.C., to the new St. Elizabeth’s campus in Southeast D.C.

The move to a new location, Rasicot said, coincided with uncertainty around whether employees would lose their workplace flexibilities and be required to report to the office more frequently. But he said CWMD has been a “champion” of remote work and telework among DHS components, and added that those flexibilities didn’t change after the move to St. Elizabeth’s.

“I firmly believe we’re in the third industrial revolution,” Rasicot said. “We won’t work, play or go to school again the same way we did in 2019. And I think if you try to go back to 2019, you’re not going to be competitive in recruiting and retention. So we’ve maintained the workplace flexibilities, but there was a lot of uncertainty between the move and the ending of COVID in ‘22, which I think led to some senior leader issues that we’ve addressed as well.”

The second major challenge last year was the decision to elevate a new Office of Health Security out of CWMD.

Rasicot called the reorganization a “very good move” allowing CWMD and the new Office of Health Security to focus on their respective missions, but said it was “another source of angst” within the organization in 2022.

“I think it’s been a hugely positive change,” he said. “And I think it’s playing out that way now for the staff as well. But in ‘22, there were a lot of unknowns. And so those are all those things combined to sort of just create a sense of unease a little bit.”

One of the keys moving forward, Rasicot said, will be communicating with staff across CWMD.

“We lost maybe a step on connecting with people and communicating, so we really reinvigorated that in the latter part of ‘22, once we had settled into the new building,” Rasicot said.

Sunset on the horizon

Meanwhile, the authorization for the CWMD office’s activities expires at the end of 2023. The pending sunset represents yet another potential source of uncertainty for CWMD employees, but Congress has taken some preliminary steps to address the office’s future.

In May, the House Homeland Security Committee advanced a bill that would permanently authorize the CWMD office and also codify the new Office of Health Security into law. Last week, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved a similar bill.

Both the House and Senate versions of the legislation would require DHS to present lawmakers with an “action plan and strategy to continuously improve morale” within the CWMD office.

While the office’s future is ultimately in congressional hands, Rasicot said it looks like the legislation is on the right track.

“Do I ultimately think it’s all going to work out? Sure, I honestly do,” Rasicot said. “But it also creates that angst and uncertainty, that we want to keep our workforce focused on the important work they do. This workforce is DHS’s best and brightest. I’ve never worked with a group this dedicated, energetic, or just to put it plainly, this smart ever in my life.”

The post Facing low morale and expiring authorities, can DHS’s CWMD office turn a corner? first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Management and Budget defined “meaningful” work as “purposeful, well-planned and optimized for in-person collaboration,” but what that actually looks like depends on the agency.

For the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), an agency housed within the Department of Agriculture, the approach to defining meaningful in-person work, and responding to OMB’s memo on organizational health and performance, has focused on balance. Jody McDaniel, NASS’ director of eastern field operations, said much of the work in his office, such as data collection and editing, can be done remotely, but occasional in-person training is still beneficial for the staff.

“What we’ve done is a balance of about two in-person workshops over the course of the year, but most of our training is actually done on a virtual platform,” McDaniel said during a GovLoop event Thursday. “We’ve taken a really deliberate approach on when we need to come together. It’s about assessing what items require us to meet the needs of our customers. We’re always going to be available, but there’s a lot of our activity that staff can do from anywhere in the country.”

To measure workforce productivity and then align that measurement with meaningful in-person work, NASS looks at the delivery of on-time statistics from staff. That delivery was on time more than 99% before the COVID-19 pandemic, and has remained consistently above 99% ever since, which shows that hybrid work has been largely successful, McDaniel said. Attrition rates are also declining at NASS, usually hovering around 8-10%.

“People are able to start having that work-life balance that allows them that flexibility to work where they choose to work and how they choose to work, but also do it in a meaningful way. It is nice to see attrition coming down, as well as the engagement scores going up,” McDaniel said.

At the National Science Foundation’s Inspector General Office, composed of just 76 employees, the picture looks a little different. Still, any meeting in person should be intentional, said Javier Inclán, the office’s assistant inspector general for management and chief information officer.

“It’s not a check the box. It’s not that every Tuesday, you’re going to come in. It’s as needed,” Inclán said at the event. “I think people understand what their responsibilities are and they enjoy the autonomy and the flexibility to conduct their work.”

The office staff is mostly teleworking, but there are instances where in-person work makes sense for NSF’s OIG. Some employees, for example, recently came into the headquarters office for training.

“Our Office of Investigations came into the building to conduct in-service training on law enforcement equipment … and did CPR training,” Inclán said. “Those are the things that, to me, really mean something. And then there’s the added benefit of bringing people together and having that socialization, because a lot of these folks were hired during the pandemic.”

Inclán said the success of hybrid work in his office shows through in the results of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), an annual survey that the Office of Personnel Management conducts on federal employees’ engagement and satisfaction. For the 2022 FEVS, NSF’s OIG received a 90% response rate, and 82% on the employee engagement index.

At the same time agencies are thinking about how to add more meaningful in-person work, operating in a hybrid work environment means it’s also crucial for managers and supervisors to learn how to engage teleworking employees. Communication among employees has to be more deliberate, said Robin Kilgore, deputy assistant director in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Diversity and Civil Rights.

“Managing a virtual work environment is very different than managing an in-person one, but a lot of the competencies are similar,” Kilgore said during the event. “If your managers weren’t great pre-pandemic, they’re not going to be great in a virtual environment. You really need to be looking at the competencies that you want your leaders to have, regardless of where they’re leading, and really help them build that if those skills don’t exist.”

In an effort to help feds build those skills, the Office of Personnel Management is offering free training sessions for managers, supervisors and other employees on how to succeed in a hybrid environment. Being in a virtual environment requires a different set of skills, for both managers and employees, to be productive and remain engaged with their work.

“You have to constantly be checking in with employees, with your stakeholders, with managers,” Kilgore said. “Is this working for you? If it’s not, what do we need to do to change it? Pre-pandemic, I don’t know how often we were looking back into our programs and deciding, does this make sense for us? This [OMB memo] forces us to do it.”

Agency leaders should measure productivity over time, track changes and adjust telework levels where needed, OMB said in its April memo.

“Where agencies are successful, we will scale and replicate best practices,” Jason Miller, OMB’s deputy director for management, said in an April blog post. “Where agencies fall short, including if their workplace policies negatively impact results, they must be held accountable and work to make responsible changes, improve their operations and tackle challenges wherever they arise.”

The White House gave agencies 30 days to create initial work environment plans, detailing what the future of work will look like for their employees. OMB is now in the process of reviewing agencies’ plans. For some, adding meaningful in-person work might not mean much difference at all — if the agency is performing well, it can keep employees on a similar work schedule.

“We’re very happy with hybrid work right now,” said LaKeya Jones Smith, a supervisory workforce management analyst at NASS. “Overall, our engagement has increased, people are more willing to reach out to us, where they probably wouldn’t have before, because we actually have more flexibility.”

The post How a few agency leaders are defining, measuring ‘meaningful’ in-person work first appeared on Federal News Network.

But Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said USPS isn’t the same organization he started leading nearly three years ago, which was on the verge of running out of cash.

DeJoy said USPS, when he took office in 2020, was on track to lose $20 billion that year and was going to run out of cash in 50 days.

“It was obvious that the Postal Service faced a clear and present danger, that its existence as a viable agency was nearly over,” DeJoy said. “This was at a time in history when it was needed most, in the beginning of a pandemic. Yet there were no meaningful solutions offered either inside or outside the organization.”

USPS is falling short of some of its financial goals, as part of a broader vision for the agency to “break even” by 2030, as outlined in its 10-year Delivering for America Plan.

But DeJoy, speaking Monday at the National Postal Forum in Charlotte, North Carolina, said USPS has cut projected losses for the decade by more than half, and is no longer the “haphazard, bureaucratic organization” he saw on his first few days on the job.

“The Delivering for America Plan is not a plan for the unachievable. It is a plan for dramatic change in how we perform our service, that if executed in time and with care, will lead to long-term success for the organization,” DeJoy said.

DeJoy said USPS, to keep its reform goals within reach, must implement dramatic changes to correct for years of inaction on postal issues from its regulator, the Postal Regulatory Commission, and Congress.

He said this inaction has “made it difficult, if not impossible, for our employees to serve effectively.”

“We must implement dramatic change, because the time for more subtle or incremental change has long ago passed, necessitating the transformational changes we need today,” DeJoy said.

“These dramatic changes must be done at a pace, and with a tenacity that is rarely seen, and rarely necessary, in government or private industry,” he added.

USPS doesn’t expect to break even this year, as it previously expected in its 10-year reform plan, but has cut its projected losses for the decade by more than half — from $160 billion to $70 billion.

USPS told the PRC in a recent filing it saw a $641 million net loss in April, and a more than $4 billion net loss so far in fiscal 2023. That’s more than double what USPS projected it would lose at this point in the year.

USPS in April saw more than a 9% decrease in first-class mail volume and a nearly 5% decrease in package volume, compared to the same period last year.

To cut transportation and operating costs, USPS is bringing mail processing and delivery operations under one roof by creating Sorting and Delivery Centers across the country. DeJoy plans to deploy over 400 Sorting and Delivery Centers over the next three years.

USPS expects to have 30 S&DCs running by the end of this year, and about 100 S&DCs running by the end of 2024.

DeJoy said USPS will create 300 S&DCs by repurposing previously vacated mail processing plants, and retrofitting them for package processing, mail transfer operations, electric vehicle charging and delivery operations.

USPS will co-locate another 100 S&DCs within existing Local Processing Centers.

In addition to S&DCs, DeJoy also plans to eliminate 200 “small and wasteful” annexes and absorb those operations into 60 Regional Processing and Distribution Centers.

USPS will establish 45 of these centers in existing postal plants, and will build 15 new centers in areas experiencing growth.

DeJoy called this network configuration “the Great Unwind,” and said eliminating these “half-implemented” temporary annexes would put an end to poor working conditions for employees, as well as cut costs and delays.

“This is not a consolidation. It is an aggregation of randomly deployed functionality spread out across a local area because of ill-planned deployments,” DeJoy said.

USPS said it won’t lay off employees as part of its S&DC plans, and won’t result in post office closures, even at post offices that will no longer serve as outposts for letter carrier operations.

DeJoy is also looking to cut costs across the USPS delivery network, which consists of 250,000 carrier routes, reaching 165 million delivery points six days a week. He said the USPS delivery network makes up more than half of its annual operating budget.

“While this delivery system is spectacular, it is also the costliest part of our business,” he said. “We have carrier routes that have not been adjusted in years, even though significant changes in mail volume, mail profile and residential development have been incessant.”

The PRC launched a public-inquiry proceeding in April on USPS’s S&DC plans, after it rejected a broader proposal to review the agency’s 10-year reform plan in its entirety.

DeJoy, however, told lawmakers earlier this month the PRC has “overstepped their authority” by calling for a review of USPS plans to consolidate facilities across its delivery network. He added that USPS “could move a lot faster, without the PRC scrutinizing its plans, and blamed the commission for the agency’s financial predicament.

“We have made a lot of change, and there has been a lot of noise. However, the changes that we have made so far have not caused the Earth to collide with the sun,” DeJoy said at the National Postal Forum. “Market dominant mail and packages are moving more reliably together and as fast as ever.”

The regulator in 2020 gave USPS the authority to set mail prices higher than the rate of inflation. USPS is making full use of this authority, and has settled into a rhythm of raising rates each January and July. USPS will start charging 66 cents for a first-class stamp this July.

DeJoy, however, said the regulator should have granted this pricing flexibility years ago, and said the PRC’s inaction has been at the root of the agency’s problems for more than a decade.

Postal regulator considers more ‘proactive’ role  

Several postal experts — including the PRC’s chairman —agree the commission needs to be more “proactive” on USPS oversight, and propose expanding its capacity to oversee rapidly evolving postal issues.

PRC Chairman Michael Kubayanda, in a white paper published Monday by the Consumer Postal Council, said DeJoy’s dissatisfaction with the postal regulatory system “presents challenges as well as opportunities for improvement.”

Kubayanda co-authored the white paper along with David Williams, a former USPS inspector general and a former member of the USPS Board of Governors, as well as former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who chaired the Oversight and Government Reform Committee from 2003 to 2007.

“The commission is working to be more agile in responding to these developments and there is an interest in becoming more proactive,” the authors wrote.

The commission, in its 2023-2028 strategic plan, is looking to “anticipate and adapt to an evolving postal system.”

But the white paper’s authors said the PRC needs to upgrade its IT systems and its data analytics capabilities, as well as grow its workforce to stay ahead of postal oversight issues.

“The current infrastructure is reflective of a legacy commission overseeing a relatively static postal network and industry,” they wrote.

The PRC has a workforce of 82 employees to oversee USPS and its more than 600,000-employee workforce.

Among its duties, the PRC approves USPS rate hikes and reviews negotiated service agreements USPS makes with other businesses.

The commission, in response to rapid changes in the postal industry, is looking to increase its capacity for oversight.  It added several lawyers and economists over the past few months, as well as IT, cybersecurity, and program management staff.

But the paper’s authors said the PRC also needs to modernize its IT systems to centralize data and conduct analyses of postal issues more quickly.

“The lengthy, detailed reports that the commission issues rely on the professionalism and herculean efforts of small teams of lawyers, analysts, and paralegals. These efforts are laudable, but based on manual processing of data, and they are not scalable without better use of technology.”

The PRC is working on a pilot program to enable centralized information management for its staff who produce analyses of USPS operations, and is planning to release a new public-facing docket system and updated website later this year, after receiving money from the Technology Modernization Fund. 

The white paper’s authors, however, question whether efforts to modernize the regulatory commission would temper DeJoy’s criticisms.

“The postmaster general, for his part, wondered aloud whether the Postal Regulatory Commission is necessary,” they wrote. “The comment may have been made in jest and to prod the Commission to act expeditiously, although he followed it up with scathing criticism of regulatory oversight during a congressional hearing.”

The authors are also adamant that, despite USPS objections, the commission is well within its jurisdiction to probe the agency’s network consolidation efforts.

“Throughout the postal community, including at the commission, there is renewed concern about the impact of massive, proposed changes to the network, which have the potential to affect services,” they wrote.

DeJoy has repeatedly touted his 10-year reform plan to grow the agency and cut costs amid a continued decline in mail volume.

While DeJoy said the plan has its share of critics, he said those critics have yet to provide their own counterproposal.

“All the powers that be, with all their wisdom and authorities, could never put together enough thoughtfulness and amass enough forcefulness or put aside their special interests to create a successful strategy and implement it,” DeJoy said.

DeJoy said USPS currently faces upheaval the agency hasn’t seen since 1970 — a year in which postal workers went on strike, and the Nixon administration signed the Postal Reorganization Act into law.

That legislation transformed the Post Office, then a Cabinet-level agency, into the Postal Service, an independent agency.

“Much like in 1970, we are at a crossroads. In the past, we have made only marginal changes and refused to confront the realities that face us,” DeJoy said. “The fate of the Postal Service will be decided by the decisions we make now and whether we are successful in implementing the Delivering for America plan.”

The post DeJoy rebuffs USPS regulator considering more ‘proactive’ role in postal oversight first appeared on Federal News Network.

With many agencies’ return-to-office plans still uncertain, Republicans on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee want to take matters into their own hands.

GOP committee leaders changed their strategy for trying to get more federal telework data, now reaching out directly to agency heads. In a series of 25 letters, the lawmakers asked for up-to-date  numbers of teleworking federal employees, after saying the Biden administration was “not adequately tracking the specific levels of telework.”

The Biden administration “has not provided current data about the specific amount of telework occurring within federal agencies or across the entire federal workforce. Furthermore, it has provided no objective evidence concerning the impact of elevated telework on agency performance — including any deleterious impacts,” lawmakers said in the letters, published May 18.

The push for more data comes in a long line of frustrations from GOP lawmakers over federal telework. Earlier this year, Republican-led legislation called the SHOW UP Act urged the return of federal employees to pre-pandemic telework levels. The bill cleared the House in February, along party lines. Senate Republicans introduced companion legislation last week.

Republicans have said increased telework during and after the COVID-19 pandemic caused delays and backlogs in agencies’ public-facing services. But Democrats, advocacy groups and federal unions have said those challenges are largely due to understaffing and underfunding, and emphasized that telework remains a critical tool for federal recruitment and retention.

In preparation for the planned end of the national public health emergency, the Biden administration pushed agencies to start increasing “meaningful” in-person work. The Office of Management and Budget, in an April memo to agency leaders, told agencies to measure productivity and strike a balance between adding in-person work where necessary, particularly at agency headquarters, while still maintaining telework flexibilities.

But even with the administration’s call to increase in-office work, Republicans maintained that OMB’s memo did not go far enough.

“Even though the pandemic is over, the Biden administration is allowing telework levels far above those that existed pre-pandemic. This is occurring in an apparently indiscriminate, unaccountable manner, without oversight from the White House or the Office of Personnel Management,” Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a press statement. “Federal workers must show up to work in-person and the Oversight Committee will hold agencies accountable when their employees do not show up to work for the American people.”

OMB declined to comment on the Oversight Committee’s letters to agencies.

What telework data is out there?

For more than a decade, OPM has collected telework data annually from federal agencies. Each year, OPM asks agencies to share how many employees are teleworking, how their telework program operates and the outcomes of implementing it. The information eventually goes into an annual report to Congress from OPM.

The most recent report publicly available, published in December 2022, covers telework data from fiscal 2021. In the report, OPM said 47% of the federal workforce overall teleworked during that year.

The report, a requirement under the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010, includes annual data that agencies submit to OPM on telework eligibility, participation and frequency, as well as their goal setting, cost savings and management efforts to promote telework and promising practices. The 2021 telework data call went to 91 agencies and OPM received responses from 84 of them.

There are some gaps in the report data, though — for instance, some agencies did not, or could not, provide details to OPM on their exact numbers of teleworking employees.

“Agencies that did not have values for employee population, eligibility, participation or frequency were asked to provide this information,” OPM said in the report. “In most cases, they were able to do so, but a few agencies were unable to provide information due to the classified nature of their work or because accurate records were not available.”

Getting a completely accurate portrait of telework is also complicated by the variability in how many days federal employees report to the office. Even one individual may go into the office a different number of days each week, depending on the week.

Federal News Network, in a survey of about 4,700 federal employees, found that in May, about 30% of feds were working entirely remotely, 62% were working in a hybrid environment and 8% were working entirely in person. For employees working on a hybrid schedule, most were working remotely four out of five days a week.

More details on federal telework are on the horizon, too. The 2022 Consolidated Appropriations Act, passed last March, required OPM to additionally include “telework successes, best practices and lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as recommendations and guidance for remote work post-pandemic, within its annual telework report.”

Due to the timeline, OPM said the information was not included in the fiscal 2021 report, but that the agency plans to include it in the fiscal 2022 report, which will be published later this calendar year. OPM plans to ask agencies for details on lessons learned and best practices for employee re-entry into the workplace, as well as analysis of telework and remote work’s impact on productivity and performance.

The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), which OPM administers to individual federal employees, also details teleworking figures. The survey typically receives a response rate around 35%. For the 2022 FEVS, 42% of federal employees said they teleworked between one and three days per week. About 14% were working remotely.

But in the letters to agency heads, Republican committee members said OPM’s report data, outdated by the time OPM publishes it, and the self-reported nature of the information from FEVS, does not provide enough clarity or a real-time picture of telework at agencies.

The Oversight Committee’s letters build on a March hearing about OPM’s programs and operations, which partly focused on questions around telework data.

“The OPM director failed to provide up-to-date information on federal agency telework at the committee’s hearing in March, and an OMB workforce policy memo issued last month failed to ask agencies for the data,” an Oversight Committee spokesperson said in an email to Federal News Network. “That means the Oversight Committee needs to do the asking, so the American people can see what is going on with the federal workforce that ultimately reports to them.”

What’s next for federal telework?

More telework changes are still trickling in after OPM removed the COVID-19 operating status on May 15, as part of the Biden administration’s planned end to the national public health emergency. Agencies’ initial work environment plans, an ask from OMB in its memo, were due last week. OMB is still in the process of reviewing agencies’ submissions.

Some agencies have already started announcing changes to their telework policies, with plans to increase in-person work in the coming months. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for one, announced an upcoming increase in its in-person requirements. Starting this fall, telework-eligible VA employees will have to come into the office five days, or half of the time, per pay period.

OPM has also said it is planning to collect more data from agencies about telework and remote work programs. OPM plans to soon add new requirements for agencies’ reporting of participation in telework and remote work.

“These new data elements will provide deeper and improved granularity into understanding the workforce characteristics,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said in a March 7 memo. “Once implemented, they have the potential to improve governmentwide reporting of federal employee participation in remote work, telework and mobile work, as well as allow OPM to evaluate trends and determine how such work arrangements might advance the accomplishment of mission-critical requirements and organizational effectiveness.”

So far, OPM does not have a set implementation date for these plans.

Beyond OPM’s data collection, keycard data can offer another view into how often employees go to the office. Kastle Systems, a building security company, publishes weekly data on the number of employees nationwide who are using keycards to swipe into buildings. As of May 22, the average office occupancy of the top 10 U.S. cities was 49.5%.

But for the federal government, keycards do not provide a wholly accurate portrait. Not all government buildings use keycards for access, and some may operate through different security companies. Many agencies, for instance, instead use Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards.

GOP lawmakers said they want up-to-date details from individual agencies on how many employees are telework-eligible, how many of those employees are currently teleworking and how many days each employee teleworks in a week, as well as the occupancy rates of federal government offices in the Washington, D.C. area. The committee members also brought up questions around locality pay, federal office holdings, cybersecurity, collective bargaining agreements and the use of annual and sick leave, as they relate to the role of telework for federal employees.

The Oversight Committee gave agencies until June 1 to respond to the questions.

The post Dissatisfied with OPM’s data, Republicans ask individual agencies for telework details first appeared on Federal News Network.

The third leg of the Office of Personnel Management’s strategy stool is about to drop.

OPM already issued an overall strategic plan that focused heavily on technology modernization. The second leg was the data strategy the agency released last month.

Guy Cavallo, the chief information officer for OPM, said the soon-to-be released IT strategy for fiscal 2023-2026 will complete the 18-month effort to remake the agency’s overall modernization plans.

“It’s not surprising that it’s going to focus on moving to the cloud, improving user experiences and complying with the cybersecurity directives,” Cavallo said in an interview with Federal News Network after speaking at the Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference sponsored by ACT-IAC. “To me, a lot of the executive orders that have been issued on cyber and customer experience are basically telling IT people to breathe. These are things that should be part of our DNA. We shouldn’t need an executive order to get people to totally change what they did, but it actually reinforces these things if they run into any resistance on why they’re doing it.”

Cavallo said he will post the IT strategy to OPM’s website when it’s finalized.

This will not be a typical IT strategy with goals to move to the cloud or rationalize applications. Rather, Cavallo said, it will build on the agency’s strategic plan released in 2022 and the data strategy released in March.

“We’ve listed out all of our IT strategies and directly tied them to what parts of the agency is reinventing itself. We really wanted to reinforce the business value that a particular modernization effort is bringing into a single application” he said. “It’s not just we’re going to the cloud because Guy wants us to get there. But this is the impact on retirees or this is the impact on citizens who want to get a federal job for the first time and don’t know where to start. I think when people see our IT strategy.”

As Cavallo highlighted, a key section of that IT strategy is fixing retirement services. This goal has been an albatross hanging around every OPM CIO and director’s neck over the past two decades.

OPM has tried time and again to improve the technology and processes around the retirement system, only to fall well short of expectations time and again.

Congress now is pressing OPM to address this long-standing problem.

Not fixing everything at once

Cavallo said he understands that past efforts have struggled, in part, because the agency tried a “big bang” approach to modernization. He said his strategy will be different.

“What I’m focused on is let’s get new retirees into a digital form so that we’re not trying to fix the entire past at the same time. Then, for the people that are already entered into the system, let’s bring that data into that same common customer experience so that our agents can find the status of a retiree in one place. Right now, they have to look in multiple places,” he said. “That’s not fixing everything at once. It’s starting to move toward a centralized common case management solution so that everyone has a case that can be looked up by the agent. Ideally, I’m hoping when we get to that point we’d be able to do is allow you to with the right, multi-factor authentication, have a bot look up your particular status.”

Cavallo added part of the initial goal is for current and future retirees to be able to look up their status easily, including how much money they will receive when the first check should be deposited after they retire and similar questions. Today, he said, those questions are too difficult to answer.

“The way I’ve been successful in my career is when you do something that’s a totally new process, you draw the line in the sand and say, ‘from this day forward, the next retiree is going to be in the new system.’ Because you’re still maintaining the legacy system, I’m trying to avoid the big bang of having to wait until all these various moving parts line up, and then throw a switch and hope it works,” he said. “I want to peel the onion and get the pieces to work separately. Then we’re not pulling the master switch at that point. We’re throwing a bunch of little switches in time, in order so that we can see the progress and make sure that we’re not jeopardizing anything. I think that’s what’s going to be different to my approach than what’s been done in the past.”

Part of the struggles of the past has been the technology wasn’t ready to handle the file sizes needed to process retirement claims. Cavallo said both the cloud and other advances in technology give OPM a new opportunity.

“If we’re going to build something new, I like to know if the product can handle if we have x million cases on it? Or is this going to break it?” he said. “The other thing I find that sometimes we don’t do well in government, is if you’re buying software-as a-service and you need licenses for each person, when the system is operational, you’re going to have X files and users using it, you better be figuring out what that cost is and planning for it in the future. I’ve seen too many people get sticker shock after an application has been built, and now they can’t afford the number of users.”

Chatbot, call center updates

In the short term, OPM has launched a chatbot and increased the number of call center agents to address the retirement backlog.

Cavallo said OPM is trying to improve the retiree experience sooner than how long it takes to launch new technology. He also moved the call center technology into the cloud to address too much downtime and frustrated retirees.

“What that has done is made it technology not be our point of contention, but how many agents do we have available to be able to answer a call in a decent period of time? One of the things I knew that we could do to help it is that we didn’t have a really good way to help retirees with questions and answers. Our website was difficult to follow. You had to read through a lot. So this is something that a chatbot should be able to answer when you type in a question. It could potentially relieve some amount of calls going into the call center,” he said. “We are working with the director to expand the number of call takers, but there’s a limit to how many times can you just keep increasing. We’re using the chatbot to see what type of questions are being asked that we don’t currently have an answer in the chatbot so that we can prioritize answering those questions.”

OPM will continue to add questions and answers to the chatbot over the course of the next few months as it better understands what questions users need answered.

“The most difficult part for us was you have people that have been at OPM 20-30-40 years that have great experiences, and sometimes we weren’t capturing the right person’s experience in the answer. If you talk to an agent, you might get a little different answer than the next one over. So something that I think has been very helpful out of this process as consolidating and giving everybody the single best answer to this question,” he said. “Then from there, we’re able to replicate that back to the call agents and in any of our training materials. It’s helping us retrain our call takers on better ways to answer questions than we’ve been answering it in the past.”

The post OPM’s new approach to modernizing retirement services is all about small bites first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Coast Guard has long worked to boost its capabilities of operating in the Arctic, an area of increasing importance to national security. Now the Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate will fund research aimed at helping other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) components operate in the Arctic. For details,  Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Rebecca Medina, science and technology director of the DHS Office of University Programs.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And what’s at issue here? We know the Coast Guard is plowing its way through and there’s new icebreakers being built and so forth. But what about the rest of DHS?

Rebecca Medina Well, the rest of DHS, as you noted in your introduction, the security posture is changing in the Arctic. As waterways open up, as the landscape changes, their challenges to others besides the Coast Guard. As the waterways open up, you have new law enforcement mission. So bigger waterways means more fishing, so more illegal fishing comes with that. There becomes a larger mission to monitor those waterways. As communications equipment that is in the Arctic, that is important to security, not only for DHS components, but also for the far flung communities and indigenous populations in the Arctic who rely on them for safety. As the climate and the environment changes, we need to make sure that those kinds of systems are resilient not only to the geographic environment, but also to the changes in temperature that we’re seeing, which are vacillating at much greater rates than we’ve seen in the past. So all of that equipment needs to be hardened and more resilient to protect all of the U.S. citizens living in the Arctic. And really, those are the types of things that we’d like this new center of excellence to look at.

Tom Temin And which components specifically do you think need this capability the most urgently? I can imagine, say, FEMA, if they need to help one of those indigenous populations that are still U.S. citizens in Alaska, but who else?

Rebecca Medina So when we put together this notice for funding opportunity that people can apply to, we worked with components across the agency to develop it. So we brought, as you mentioned, FEMA and the Coast Guard to the table. We also brought Customs and Border Protection. We brought CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. We brought headquarters policy to the table, because they have been very active in working across the department to create the department’s Arctic strategy. So these are all the types of players that we’re working with. Keeping in mind as the security posture changes, there may also be others that we’re interested in working with.

Tom Temin And just one detail of the Arctic, because of some melting or warming that has happened. It’s a waterway now, as well as an ice way, which means that all sorts of vessels can kind of get through there that maybe 50 years ago could not have.

Rebecca Medina Absolutely. And because of that, not only are components like the Coast Guard having to deal with getting their own ships used to a new waterway, but you see more recreational traffic, you see more commercial traffic. And that means that their mission expands, because more people there means more people who can get into trouble.

Tom Temin Got it. And you mentioned a Center of Excellence, which I guess, I should have mentioned in the beginning. This is the locus of all of this work and from which these, and we’ll get to the funding in a moment. The source of the funding will be the Center of Excellence. Tell us more about that.

Rebecca Medina Yes. So my office runs a group of centers of excellence for the department. Each of the centers is a consortium of schools who does work in a particular thematic area, in this case, Homeland Security in the Arctic. It’s led by an individual school, and that’s what this competition is looking to identify. But that lead school is responsible for building a group of universities who will conduct research, in addition to bringing industry, state, local and community partners to the table, and especially important in the Arctic. The indigenous and tribal representatives, because they have a unique set of challenges that research should be brought to bear to help them with.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Rebecca Medina. She’s director of the Office of University Programs, part of the Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate. And this funding then, is it grants? But it’s not really a grant program precisely, is it?

Rebecca Medina It is a financial assistance program. It’s a cooperative agreement. It’s a little different than a grant. But what we do is, we pose a set of research questions. So we’re not asking for specific widgets or tools or telling them what to do. We’re posing research questions under which this university consortium can conduct research. So we’re the guide, but they are setting the road map for the research program.

Tom Temin And this is open to any academic research center that might have knowledge or skill in this area.

Rebecca Medina Correct. It’s open to any U.S. based accredited university.

Tom Temin Be interesting to see if someone near like Florida or the Gulf Coast might want to go up to the Arctic to do some research. But what are some of the questions from homeland security standpoint that need to be answered? What are the research topics for the Arctic?

Rebecca Medina So you mentioned could someone from another region propose? I think that there are lessons we’ve learned from some of our challenges on the Eastern seaboard and hurricanes and flooding, that the Arctic communities are soon to be facing. So you’re very correct that there may be knowledge from other parts of our country that can be applied to the new challenges in the Arctic. And that’s one of the questions we’ve asked. Are there tools that are currently in place for other situations or other scenarios that can be applied to the new challenges in the Arctic as they see flooding in ways they’ve never seen before? Are there tools that communities and corporations and states on our Eastern seaboard use that they could apply? That’s one set of questions. We’re looking, as I mentioned, are there hardening tools for communication systems that can be applied? And if these tools don’t exist, we are asking the schools to look into what may need to be created, or are there things that we can do to modify things that currently exist to make them easier or make them more substantial for use in the Arctic? Another set of questions that we’re asking, and that’s very important to my office’s mission, is how do you educate not only the current operators on what’s happening in the Arctic and how those changes may affect their operations, but how do you start training the next generation of operators to work in that area? We like bringing new voices and new thought leaders to the table. And so this center of excellence will also have a set of education programs to bring some of those new people to the table, and hopefully excite them enough that they want to continue working on homeland security mission space.

Tom Temin So it’s not just technology, but also the people factors of working in that environment. Not everyone is Nanook of the North, and there are human factors that really come into play here when you’re in that cold environment.

Rebecca Medina Absolutely.

Tom Temin And what are the timelines here? This is a notice of funding opportunity that is now open. What’s going on next?

Rebecca Medina So the funding opportunity opened about a week ago, and schools that are interested in applying will have a set period of time to apply. They are able to apply until June 19. During that time we will also have a webinar, so if anyone has questions about what goes into applying or has questions about what they’re doing, we’ll do a webinar on May 9. And then after the 19 of June, we’ll start reviewing the applications that come in. And hopefully, in the early autumn, have a new center of excellence lead to announce.

 

The post It might be frozen, but the Arctic is not locked down first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Office of Management and Budget, in a memo last month, called on deputy secretaries to develop Work Environment Plans that take a closer look at agency satisfaction scores for both employees and customers.

The 19-page memo outlines, in more detail than any other federal workforce policy since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the interplay between federal employee satisfaction, customer experience and the level of in-office work occurring within federal buildings.

“When risks or indications of underperformance are identified, timely actions … must be taken to ensure organizations are meeting their performance objectives and customer expectations,” OMB Director Shalanda Young wrote in the memo.

The memo’s goal of optimizing all three of these metrics, however, leaves many federal employees and executives with more questions than answers.

Labor Department Chief Information Security Officer Paul Blahusch said Tuesday that the memo is creating some concern among the federal workforce.

“Some of this talk right now about [how] there’s going to be a return to work, I think that causes some concern with employees, and I hope that gets ironed out quick, as to what that means,” Blahusch said at ATARC’s GITEC Summit in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Labor Department, like many agencies since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, is offering remote work to prospective hires in an effort to recruit nationwide.

“It really helped us with our recruitment and retention. We didn’t have to say, ‘Well, you have to work within 50 miles of Washington, D.C. to work for the Department of Labor.’ Now we’ve got people in Colorado, we’ve got people in Kansas that work for the OCIO,” Blahusch said.

Blahusch said he sees the value of bringing federal employees together in the same workspace, “if there’s a meaningful reason to do that.”

However, he added that some staff members, including a vulnerability assessor within his office living in Puerto Rico, aren’t going to be a regular presence in the office, but should still feel part of the team.

“They’re not going to drop into the office for an after-work party,” Blahusch said. “That being said, we need to find ways, though, in this new environment to make them feel like part of the team, when they can’t be there in person.”

The OMB memo tells agencies that workplace flexibility policies remain “an important tool in talent recruitment and retention.” But it also calls on agencies to “substantially increase meaningful in-person work at federal offices,” particularly at the headquarters levels.

Many of the 4,700 federal employees who responded to a recent Federal News Network survey said it remains unclear whether the OMB memo will bring them into the office more days a week.

About two-thirds of respondents said they’d look for a new job if their agency decided to increase in-office work.

The Biden administration is asking agencies to investigate the linkage between customer service and in-person work, but some agency leaders are defending the productivity of the hybrid federal workforce.

IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel told members of the House Ways and Means Committee last week that the agency’s hybrid workforce is meeting performance targets, and that he isn’t pushing for more in-office work, as long as employees remain productive.

“It is a mix, like all other federal agencies. I would emphasize that everyone’s working. I will say that in my first few weeks at the IRS, the question that I focused on with the IRS right now is are we getting the job done? Are we answering the phones? Are we fighting off cyberattacks? Are we processing the backlog? As long as the answer to that question is yes, then that’s going to be my priority,” Werfel said. “Now if the answer is no, then I want to go deeper into the issue and figure out what the issue is, and if the issue happens to be the telework policy is negatively impacting our ability to get the job done for the American people, then we will make a change.”

The IRS, meanwhile, is looking to hire 20,000 employees by the end of fiscal 2024, and is looking to compete with employers that can offer higher pay or more flexibility.

Meanwhile, the Department of Veterans Affairs is figuring out what the OMB memo means for its benefits workforce.

Under Secretary for Benefits Joshua Jacobs told reporters last week that Veterans Benefits Administration employees are generally complying with the Office of Personnel Management’s requirement of being in the office at least two days a pay period.

“What we’ve demonstrated as an organization over the last two years is we’ve been able to increase production and increase productivity, notwithstanding the challenges associated with the very quick pivot to this largely virtual operation. And so I’m confident that the team will continue to produce, no matter what happens in the future,” Jacobs said.

VBA is looking to once again process a record-breaking volume of claims this year, and is looking at aggressive hiring and automation tools to help optimize the performance of VBA employees.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said he is working with supervisors in the National Capital Region to make sure the VA is meeting the goals of a recent Office of Management and Budget memo calling for more in-person work.

“Our personnel [at] VHA, VBA, NCA are so productive, we are going to make sure that they can continue to operate the way they’re operating now,” McDonough said.

Martha Dorris, a former General Services Administration executive who led customer experience programs, now founder and CEO of Dorris Consulting International, said the OMB memo gives agencies an opportunity to set long-term expectations for the federal workforce.

Dorris said that level-setting is important for agencies that have spent the past few years working under ad-hoc, pandemic-era workplace policies.

“There needs to be a reset of performance and service delivery, without having COVID and the pandemic as a crutch,” Dorris said. “We were thrilled that people could continue with the mission and issue checks. But how fast are they getting them? Are they answering the phones? All those things we cut a lot of slack because it was a tough time.”

Lee Becker, a former chief of staff for VA’s Veteran Experience Office, now vice president and executive advisor for public sector and health care at Medallia, said the OMB memo forces agencies to understand they can’t improve customer experience without first ensuring employees are having their needs met.

“I think this memo is calling out to agencies that, as they’re evolving their understanding of how to address their mission sets, they should be considering the customer experience and employee experience aspects,” Becker said. “That will help them drive what are the people, the process and the technology capabilities that they will need to actually accomplish it.”

Becker said the OMB memo also promotes the Biden administration’s goals of using data and evidence to shape policy decisions.

“I think every agency is literally put on notice, in a good way, to say that you can’t just look at the data that you think matters. You have to look at the data that matters to the people you’re serving,” Becker said. “If you have an agency leader that does just look at what the levels of employees are coming into the office, it’s missing the aspects around what is the employee experience.”

Becker, however, said he’s wary that some agency supervisors may choose only to focus on certain elements of the memo, such as bringing more employees back to the office.

“I could see people falling into that trap of, ‘We only have 20% of our workforce in the office.’ That is a very myopic view of it. We have to look at it holistically,” Becker said.

The post OMB’s return-to-office memo offers ‘reset’ for federal employees and their customers first appeared on Federal News Network.

The U.S. Marine Corps is currently embarking on a restructuring plan know as Force Design 2030. It looks to reshape its combat power for future conflicts with near-peer adversaries, i.e. China. It also looks to put a bit more reliance on technological advances by divesting in the sorts of protective measures it used to rely on for maintaining operational readiness. Some though feel the plan goes too with these updates could potentially lead to the U.S. losing the upper hand on the international stage. One of them is retired Marine general and former Commandant of the Marine Corps Charles Krulak, who spoke with  Federal Drive with Tom Temin about his concerns.

Interview transcript:

Charles Krulak Let me start by saying this is not just me, I represent a group. Our group is made up of every living retired four star general in the Marine Corps. This includes every living commandant, assistant commandant and combatant commander. It includes two former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former secretary of the Navy, and a former Secretary of Defense. So let me tell you what the concerns are, which will lay out the force design 2030. Our concerns are simply put. We’re concerned about the divestment of combat capability within the Marine Corps that our nation has always counted on. In the past three years, the Marine Corps has divested 21% of its infantry, 100% of its tanks, 100% of its bridging capability, nearly 100% of its mine clearing and mine breaching capability. 67% of its Canon artillery, 100% of its law enforcement battalions, and some 29% of its fixed wing fighter attack aircraft and rear wing helicopter aircraft. And that doesn’t count the significant amount of logistics capability that was also divested.

Charles Krulak Now, what was the rationale for these draconian cuts, which only gets to your question. It’s to build a force, force design 2030, that’s going to sit on islands within the first island chain off of China and wait for the Chinese navy ships to sortie, and then take them under missile fire if and when they come into range. I’m sure your listeners will understand that these forces, which are named standing forces, will be targeted immediately by the Chinese as they move to their island positions and as they remain on their island positions. They have a lot of electronics gear with them that’s going to put out an electrical electronic signature. They have heat signatures are going to be produced. So the Chinese intelligence gathering capability is equal to ours. And I will tell you, as soon as the first round is fired, the standard force will be taken themselves under heavy and extremely accurate enemy missile fire. Equally disturbing to all of the people that I mentioned earlier, is that divestment of current capability has occurred while still experimenting with new capability. As an example, the missiles that we’re trying to get, the command, control and communications capability, all of those are being experimented with and they will not be available in the quality, but more importantly, the quantity necessary. Think of the ammunition, the missiles, the quantity necessary for another seven to 10 years. That gap in time is a risk to our national security.  As budget increases, the capability of all the forces decrease. And in the case of the Marine Corps, it’s a self-inflicted wound.

Eric White So it sounds like an oversimplification of your argument. And I stress the oversimplification part, is that you seem to take the stance that the best defense is a good offense, or at least the threat of a good offense. And that may be where the change in the in the philosophy of, hey, the future of warfare is long range weapons and a more defensive posture. But you are saying that the Marine Corps should go with what has worked in the past rather than move forward and evolve into this new realm? Or are you saying that they’re just modernizing in a way that is forgetting what the lessons learned of the past.

Charles Krulak Well, you’ve hit a really key point. The fact of the matter is, we the Corps now are more focused on a defensive posture. That’s pretty obvious, and I don’t think anybody would disagree with that. We’ve been painted with the brush, that we’re just a bunch of old fogies who want to return to the good old days that we don’t understand the impact of new technology on warfare, that we don’t recognize that the character of war has changed, that we don’t know the latest intelligence. They’re averse to innovation and new thinking. All of that is pure nonsense, and to many of us it’s insulting. We’ve seen the impact of drones, lawyer munitions, improved CQ capabilities. We understand, as we did when we were on active duty, that the character of war changes, absolutely. At the same time, we know from experience that the nature of war does not change. It is brutal, it’s bloody, it’s cruel to the extreme and unforgiving and mistakes. And it’s now being played out in living color in Ukraine. To think that all of a sudden warfare is going to be fought a 150 kilometer distance, if there’s not going to be any close in fighting that we’re going to be able to cyber our way across a river crossing, or use deceptive means to cross a minefield. It’s just crazy. We understand we are all for capitalizing on technology. What we’re not in favor of is divesting of capability before the new capability gets here. And the thought that somehow war is going to be antiseptic. This is not Ender’s Game. We’re not playing Ender’s Game. We’re playing real world and it is tough. And to think that is going to be solve, I mean, how does a drone work in the jungle? How does a loitering munition work in the jungle? How does drones work in a sandstorm out in the desert? I mean, there are just so many improbable thoughts that you can fight, that the actual care to war is going to change.

Eric White And so my other question is, in this age where mostly, we’re in sort of a new era that’s not like the Cold War, but where the posturing really is the name of the game nowadays. And it’s just about sending messages. Could that be factoring into the military decisions that are being made from above, saying, if we show that we’re ready for a theoretical war with China, somebody who we have differences with, but hasn’t escalated to that level yet, is there a fear of escalation to the point where they’re trying to match us and we’re just kind of butting heads against each other?

Charles Krulak That’s a very good point. And let me address that. First off, we don’t even have the authorization to go on to some of these islands. And the Philippines has made it perfectly clear that they don’t want us there if we’re going to war. The Japanese now are buying missiles and getting ready to help in the defense. If you’re, well, let me back up. If you’re going to look at capability and you’ve got great capability, the Navy with their submarines, they’re out there. The Air Force, with their long range missiles on long range bombers, are out there. The Army with their multidomain task force, which does the same thing as the Marine Corps, is out there. If you are the president of the United States and you get indications of warning, what are you going to do? Well, I’ll tell you, the first thing that will really reinforce that you’re serious, is to take the Marines that are out there and capable, not the ones that are sitting on islands and show the Chinese that you’re reinforcing the Korean Peninsula, you’re reinforcing Japan with the troops that can do what needs to be done. But if you take away their capability, which they’ve done and you heard what they’re taken away. If you take away that capability, the threats not there. Thinking that the Marine Corps sitting on these islands so designated by the Chinese intel capability are going to threaten the Chinese enough to stop them in their tracks, that’s just wishful thinking.

Eric White Got it. And so let’s talk, what is probably been the major hang up nowadays is budgetary concerns, which I’m sure you’ve dealt with in your day and also with your current push for Congress to fund these sorts of measures that you’re suggesting. So how do you maintain a budget that makes way for innovation and research, but also keeps these baseline things that you and your group are concerned about?

Charles Krulak Well, first and foremost, the way the current Marine Corps went about it gained a lot of attention. It was like a shiny new penny that sounded great, that looked like it solved a strategic problem, and by the way, it costs nothing, because he was divesting before he got the capability. So the Congress is sitting there saying, well, we don’t have to fund anything, because he’s divested of this. And so when it comes time and when it’s fully developed, we can buy in the quantity that’s necessary. That all sounds great, except that there’s a time frame that places the nation at risk in doing that. What do you do with the decreasing budget that we see decreasing? Even though the budget increases, we all know that the dollar doesn’t get as much now. You have to understand that you pick and choose, you prioritize within your defense budget, which I did as a  commandant. Here’s the priority, I know I’m not going to get it all, but here’s my priority. And you set it up there. You don’t, you do not divest until you have that capability. Best example I can give you, is what you now know is the V-22, the World War aircraft. The Marine Corps had something called the CH-46 helicopter, I was the commandant. That bird was ancient. We kept every one of them until the first squadron of the V-22 came into the inventory, I then got rid of a squadron of CH-46. You do the like for like, if you wanted to get missiles or you wanted to do something with artillery, you wait till you get the new artillery in, whether it’s [Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS)] or whatever, before you get rid of your cannon artillery. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense. So the bottom line is that’s going to give the Congress of the United States a plan that they can either accept or veto. In this instance, they didn’t really understand the plan, because the commandant is saying, I’m going to pay for this all myself. I’m going to do it by divesting. The problem is he divested before he had the capability to get the new equipment in. That’s a threat to this nation.

The post Does the Marines new modernization plan go too far? One of its former commandants thinks so first appeared on Federal News Network.

Throughout the pandemic, citizens might have suspected that components of the Health and Human Services Department weren’t quite coordinated. Now the Government Accountability Office has put HHS leadership and coordination of public health emergencies on the list of at-risk federal programs. To find out why, Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Mary Denigan-Macauley, GAO’s Director of Health Care Issues.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin All right. So why did HHS’ coordination and leadership here in public health emergencies make the high risk list?

Mary Denigan-Macauley Yeah, well, it’s not something that we take lightly, and it certainly isn’t something that just came about in light of the pandemic. We looked at over a decade worth of work and we really have seen some persistent deficiencies in HHS’ ability to perform its role, leading the nation’s preparedness for response to and recovery from a pandemic.

Tom Temin HHS is a department, but it’s many components, and you’ve got a lot of subcomponents that impinge on this. [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)], for one, different pieces of [National Institutes of Health (NIH)] as we learned in the pandemic, the infectious disease group. And then there’s [Food and Drug Administration (FDA)] has a role. Is this what you’re talking about? Is it the coordination and the story getting out in some cogent fashion of what’s going on within HHS? Or does it also involve other departments?

Mary Denigan-Macauley Well, for the high risk designation, we are talking about HHS and those components that you spoke with.  In particular, ASPR, which is now known as the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, has that lead medical and preparedness and response and recovery role that it needs to carry out. But it doesn’t do this alone, public health isn’t done just at the federal level. It takes a whole of government approach. And so they have to work with their key stakeholders, including other federal agencies, as well as state, local, tribal and territorial partners. It’s a pretty big endeavor that they have to do.

Tom Temin And what happened specifically during the COVID pandemic that gave rise or that showed in relief what their issues are, with respect to leadership and coordination?

Mary Denigan-Macauley Well, unfortunately, we found quite a few different areas, and we’re able to lump them into a few buckets. So if you take one of our first buckets is really looking at roles and responsibilities. You can’t have confusion during the middle of a crisis. You have to be able to act immediately, because every second counts. And you’re not just talking about a hypothetical here, You’re talking about lives. You’re talking about work. You’re talking about children being able to be in school when you’re looking at a pandemic. It affected absolutely every aspect of our life. So being able to understand the roles and responsibilities, and not bickering over them and trying to figure out who’s in charge is really critical. And one particular area that we saw that happened with was the repatriation. Bringing our Americans home that were over in China or stuck on cruise ships is a great example where there was no clear leadership, and CDC was looking at ASPR, and ASPR was looking at CDC and pointing like who has responsibilities that really puts not only the responders at risk, but then the community. I mean, some people that should have been quarantined started to walk out into the community.

Mary Denigan-Macauley So in addition to roles and responsibilities, you also need complete and consistent data. If you look at how our data is collected, it’s very disparate. It takes all of those layers of the U.S. government and it needs to be rolled up to get a national picture, and we just don’t have that capability right now. So that’s another area, and communication. We all saw the communication problems that were occurring. Wear a mask, don’t wear a mask. Make sure that you get the vaccine, don’t worry you are going to be 100% protected. Well, it’s not really 100% protection, it stops you from going into the hospital. So you have to have clear communication in order to build trust. Transparency and accountability. If you look at the arguments that are going on or just the origins of the COVID, and is there enough oversight of this risky type of research and being transparent about that oversight instead of keeping it in a black box, absolutely paramount. And then last but not least, understanding your key partners capabilities and limitations. Making sure that you know, for example, if the Department of Defense is going to come and help, what resources are they going to bring? During the hurricanes, Irma and Maria, we saw this is really a problem. They bought resources that HHS didn’t need at that particular time. So that’s key too, understanding your partners capabilities.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Mary Denigan-Macauley. She’s director of health care issues at the Government Accountability Office. And what about the idea of doctrine? If you look at the Defense Department, they have detailed plans and detailed operational, well, it’s called doctrine for if this happens, here’s what we do and here’s who does it. I’ve read over the years, as far back as the George W. Bush administration, there was a substantial, I guess the word nowadays they use as playbook, for what happens in a pandemic. And nobody could find that book or nobody paid any attention to it. It seems like that’s a missing element also, is a master plan.

Mary Denigan-Macauley Yeah. So, Tom, I’m laughing because it’s the big question. What happened to the plans? Why didn’t we follow the plans? Because we certainly have a lot of plans. And I’ve been at GAO long enough to have looked at those plans. We started those plans when we saw bird flu coming about and worried that that was going to become a human pandemic. And plans are only as good as they are tested. And the testing then reveals gaps and you have to close the gap, so that’s first and foremost. But also, plans are full of assumptions. And one of the assumptions was that it was going to be an influenza, that you would have test kits available and ready to go for an influenza pandemic. This was not an influenza pandemic. And so our hope is that HHS, and we’re going to continue to follow up on this, is look at some of the assumptions and look at the testing and look at the exercising and how they’re going to revise those plans so that we’re better prepared for next time and fill those gaps.

Tom Temin And I guess, GAO can’t address this directly. But it seems that when there is this vacuum of leadership coordination and nobody knows who’s supposed to do what, that leaves a lot of running room for politicians to come in and weigh in. And we saw that a lot during the pandemic, too. Is that part of the report or is that kind of just implied to the people you deliver the report to?

Mary Denigan-Macauley I think that if you look at communication and you look at leadership commitment, those two come hand in hand with the work that we’ve done. You do need clear communication. You certainly don’t want an administration or a head of an agency saying something different than another head of an agency. And so that’s all part of what we feel is needed going forward, is to make sure that you do have consistent communication that is clear. And you don’t have mixed signals, because the public is not going to trust the science, they’re not going to trust the politicians if there’s mixed signals.

Tom Temin Right. Because large public health emergencies brew that kind of conflict that is always inherent in some of these things, and that is liberty versus individual choice versus what you need to do, because you are part of a community. And there’s no single dead right answer on that. But those are the kind of issues that get swirled up when these happen.

Mary Denigan-Macauley That’s right, absolutely. And it’s particularly challenging, too, because we’re not like some countries where you can just say, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to lockdown. You’re not going to be able to move. We have states, they have independent rights. And so that communication becomes even more important when you have a constitutional set up like we have here in the United States.

Tom Temin All right, then, what’s the prescription here? How did HHS take the report, being on the high risk list and the documentation of that? And what is your best recommendations for them to get off the list?

Mary Denigan-Macauley Well, it certainly is not going to happen overnight. And I think HHS recognizes that. First and foremost, you don’t have just one agency within HHS that needs to resolve this problem. And the agencies have taken this very seriously. You may have heard that ASPR is undergoing a realignment where they want to become a standalone agency to be able to be more nimble and to be able to respond more effectively. We’re watching that transformation there. CDC has also said that they’re going to undergo some reform, as is FDA. So we’re watching all of these reform efforts very carefully. And as a part of reform effort, you also need to make sure that you have the workforce, and that’s what we call building the capacity to make sure you have the right experts with the right understanding resources at your helm to be able to implement the changes that you want to do as well. And of course, you have to have a leadership commitment. Without leadership commitment, it’s all for naught. And we need to have sustained attention, because as we’ve seen with changes in administration, come changes with the plans that are put on paper. And so really we need sustained attention, which is what we’re hoping that this will bring. Finally, we need to have action plans. And while there are some broad plans out there, we need real root cause action plans to be able to get at solutions and milestones and the resources that are needed. And then, of course, very GAO-ish, you have to monitor it and you have to track your progress.

 

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