U.S.
Office of Personnel Management
Speech by Director James B. King
EPA Human Resources Council
September 18, 1996
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U.S.
Office of Personnel Management
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Good morning. It's truly a privilege to be with you today, and to congratulate all of you on the outstanding job that EPA's Human Resources Council has been doing for many years.
I have been asked to speak on the future of the civil service, and, if I may, I'd like to begin with a look at the recent past.
As you may have noticed, amid more urgent concerns, a Presidential campaign is now in progress, and I would like to suggest that our topic today -- the future of our civil service -- is not entirely unrelated to that campaign.
Leaving aside personalities, which of course interest very few voters, what are the issues in this year's campaign?
Clearly, the important issues include the economy, support or opposition to Roe v. Wade, the future of Social Security and Medicare, education, the environment, and concern about crime and drugs.
But I want to suggest that there is another, unspoken issue that underlies all of these, and that is how we Americans feel about our national government.
The answer, of course, is that most Americans tend to view it with greater ambiguity than you and I. Americans enjoy receiving services -- demand them -- but dislike paying taxes. Americans grumble about government but expect it to be there when we need it.
At least since 1976, every successful candidate for President has to some degree run against government -- even, in one case, when he happened to be the incumbent President.
During the 1980s we heard a lot of talk about reducing the size of government, but somehow it kept getting bigger.
However, by the 1992 campaign, a consensus existed that government had to become smaller. Whichever party won that year was likely to reduce its size -- although I believe they would have gone about it quite differently.
With the election of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, we obtained two national leaders who shared not only a philosophical belief that government can do good, but shared a practical understanding that our federal workforce could do better.
Soon after entering office, the President asked the Vice President to direct the National Performance Review, an intensive, six-month study that produced a blueprint for a government that would work better and cost less.
One of the NPR's many recommendations was for downsizing, and soon the President and Congress agreed on legislation to reduce the federal workforce by about 273,000 jobs, or 12%, in five years.
During the first two years of the Clinton administration, reinvention was very much underway. By the time of the mid-term elections, in November of 1994, about 140,000 jobs had been eliminated, and many reforms were being carried out.
I cannot tell you that the media was ablaze with stories about the glories of reinvention, but, with the Vice President's tireless leadership, work was going ahead -- a foundation was being laid.
But, starting with the 1994 mid-terms elections, events began to unfold which changed how Americans feel about their government and, as a result, changed the political realities we see this year.
A new majority came to power that was not impressed with the administration's plans for downsizing, and quickly proposed to nearly double it -- to half a million jobs eliminated -- and also to eliminate several Cabinet agencies -- although, in the end, those proposals failed. By one vote, in the Senate.
Then, in the spring of 1995, an unexpected and tragic event changed many people's attitude toward their government and its employees -- the senseless, brutal, and criminal bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, with the loss of 168 innocent lives.
In the aftermath of that tragedy, millions of Americans were reminded that federal employees are not the "faceless bureaucrats" of anti-government rhetoric, but are in fact real people with real lives and real families and real work to do. They are in fact our friends and neighbors.
After he went to Oklahoma City, and met with families of the victims, President Clinton told an audience that he would never use the word "bureaucrat" again.
Unfortunately, not everyone in the political world took that lesson from the tragedy.
Last winter, yet another development changed national thinking -- two partial shutdowns of government that lasted a total of 28 days.
I think those shutdowns were a great moment of truth. Before they happened, it was easy for some people to joke that, "Hey, we'll shut down the government -- and no one will notice!"
But the joke was on them, because people did notice -- those shutdowns reminded millions of Americans how much we depend on government for vital services every day of our lives.
It is one thing to criticize the government or to vote for cutbacks. But do we truly hold government in such contempt -- or are we so ignorant of the services it provides our people -- that we would simply shut it down?
I think the majority of Americans viewed those shutdowns as a radical act, one beyond the boundaries of acceptable political behavior, one that shocked the conscience of the nation.
I believe the fact that in those dark days President Clinton stood firm as the defender of government -- and its work -- is one reason he is ahead in the polls today, and is likely to be relected on November 5.
I think that millions of Americans remember, as I do, the dramatic scene on January 23 of this year, when the President declared in his State of the Union message:
"I challenge all of you in this Chamber: Never, ever shut the federal government down again!"
And while members of his own party stood and cheered, all but a handful of the members of the other party grimly stayed in their seats. It was, as I said, a moment of truth.
Now that I have suggested a context for the questions before us, let me return to our topic, the future of our civil service.
We can already see the outline of the government of the future. Among other things, it will be smaller, flatter, more market-driven, more family-friendly, more automated, more customer oriented, more performance oriented, better trained, more decentralized, and more concerned with labor-management cooperation.
Clearly, government will continue to grow smaller. From January 1993 until this past June, the last month for which we have figures, the workforce had seen a net reduction of 217,616 FTEs, or about 10 percent.
We will have downsized by over a quarter of a million by the end of this year and will meet the legislative goal of 273,000 next year, ahead of schedule.
As you know, those cuts have already included about 10% of HRM staffs, governmentwide.
We are downsizing by attrition as much as possible, but attrition alone cannot meet our goal, nor can it target the specific jobs that need to be eliminated.
We at OPM took the lead in passing buyout legislation that thus far has been used by more than 35,000 nondefense employees. Buyouts, as you know, are not only more humane than layoffs, they are more cost-effective and less disruptive. According to a GAO report, each time the government uses a buyout, rather than a RIF, it saves $60,000 in the first five years.
Let me just say there is a right way and a wrong way to downsize, and the right way is with concern and compassion for every employee involved. That is why we at OPM have carried out a career-transition program that has scored a 96% success rate -- and I urge every agency to do the same. You do not have to reinvent the wheel. We and others will be glad to help you.
Privatization offers another way to downsize with concern for our employees. We at OPM, working with the National Performance Review staff, determined late in 1994 that two of our units, investigations and training, were performing work that could as well be performed in the private sector.
We therefore helped seven hundred members of our investigations staff start an employee-owned company which will carry out investigations in the private sector. This Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, was the first such privatization of a government entity and I believe it will be the model for others.
As for our training staff, they chose not to pursue an ESOP, and we instead helped them negotiate a contract whereby 145 of them joined the staff of the highly-regarded, nongovernmental USDA graduate school at comparable pay and benefits. Others joined the equally distinguished Brookings Institution.
OPM's Employment Serivce was recently changed, by law, to an entreprenureal, pay-as-you-go system. It now must sell its staffing services to other agencies -- who have the option of doing the job themselves -- and thus far it has been doing very well.
I expect we will see more self-sustaining programs like this in the government of the future.
As chair of the National Partnership Council, I have seen a new wave of labor-management cooperation sweep across government, thanks to hundreds of workplace partnership units.
Last week, at a ceremony in the Old Executive Office Building, we presented awards to outstanding partnerships. One honoree, the Department of Education's Collections Service, has in three years increased overdue student loan collections from $174 million to $862 million, with the dollars collected by each employee increasing from $734,000 to $3.6 million.
I believe that such innovation will become the rule, not the exception, in the government of the future.
Unnecessary red tape is another target of reinvention. We at OPM are proud to have eliminated both the 10,000-page Federal Personnel Manual and the cumbersome Standard Form 171, which for decades served to discourage job applications.
Let's be honest. Complex, incomprehensible rules and regulations are the very opposite of customer service. They serve only the interest of timid, "knowledge is power" officials, who want to hide behind a wall of words rather than make decisions. But that is not what the American people want or deserve, and I know it is not what the vast majority of federal employees want either.
I might add that we at OPM, during this time of change, have renewed our focus on our primary mission, protection of the merit system. To that end, we have strengthened our Office of Merit Systems Oversight and effectiveness, and redirected its focus from process compliance to oversight of major issues, such as staffing, performance management, and the accountability systems they use to protect merit system principles.
There have been many achievements in the past three years that we can build upon. Family-friendly policies. Increased automation. Decentralized hiring. Pass/fail, at some agencies. Performance-based organizations.
One of our greatest challenges lies in performance management. Too often, a tiny minority of unsatisfactory performers cause problems out of all proportion to their numbers. Our government cannot afford these distractions, and we must find ways to minimize them. This is in the interest of all stakeholders, not just management.
Let me say in closing that this is an exciting and challenging time in government. We have built a solid foundation for better government and I believe the American people are going to give us the time needed to complete the job.
If so, our goal must be to give them back the best government this nation has ever seen. Working together, I think we can meet that goal.
Thank you very much.
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