OMB: A Change in Tone

WFED’s Jason Miller reports that the Office of Management and Budget wants to change its stripes and “move away from command and control toward a focus on collaboration.”

The old National Performance Review tried do this and failed.  At the time, NPR’s recommendations to “Reinvent OMB’s Management Mission” and “Improve OMB’s Relationships with Other Agencies” were seen as so controversial, that the formal recommendations were never printed. But this time the effort is being led from the inside by Jeff Zients, OMB’s deputy director for management. 

Zients spoke today at a conference co-sponsored by George Mason University and the Government Accountability Office.  Zients said OMB will go “from oversight to partnership; from shipping reams of guidance to a two-way dialogue around how we achieve the desired outcome; from transparency not just for accountability but for idea flow and to find the best practices and share them broadly; from ad hoc engagement with stakeholders such as Congress to regular communication.”

He also said that OMB is developing a new set of management goals and is about 80 percent completed and it “may be a few more months until the methodology is final.”

He re-emphasized several points he made at a conference earlier this month, noting that “execution determines success or failure and it’s most challenging in government.”

Federal Jobs: A New Era

The Washington Post reports that the Partnership for Public Service released a study this morning describing the hiring needs of the federal government.  The study, “Where the Jobs Are 2009:  Mission Critical Opportunities for America,” says that the federal government needs to hire 273,000 new workers in the next three years. 

The Post’s Joe Davidson, in an interview with the Partnership’s president, Max Stier, learned that the government actually needs to hire about 600,000 people by 2012 (replacing nearly one-third of the existing workforce) to backfill expected retirements and some new positions.  But of these, 273,000 are “mission critical.”

Sixteen years ago this month, Vice President Gore’s National Performance Review released its initial report.  Its most controversial recommendation:  the federal government should cut its workforce by 252,000.  These cuts were targeted at the “structures of control and micromanagement” and intended to empower line employees to focus on their customers and get their work done with less red tape.

 What a difference 16 years has made!

Sixteen years ago, the concern was too much bureaucracy.  One-third of the civil service was seen as working in “overhead” jobs – personnel, budget, contracting, auditing, accounting, headquarters, middle managers – and cuts were made.  Part of the intent was to “reinvest” some of the staff cut from these positions into front-line service delivery, but that didn’t happen.

Interestingly, some of what was seen as “overhead” sixteen years ago is now seen as “mission critical.”  The government is seen to need more contracting officers, for example.  But the real staffing needs, according to the Partnership, are in three mission-critical areas:  (1) medical and public health, (2) security and protection, and (3) compliance and enforcement.  Here is a graph of other mission critical jobs.