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SES Reform: Some facts
Could the Office of Personnel Management be made better? Jeff Neal, the former chief human capital officer at the Department of Homeland Security, says yes, bu...
Commentary by Jeff Neal
Founder of ChiefHRO.com
& Senior Vice President, ICF International
This column was originally published on Jeff Neal’s blog, ChiefHRO.com, and was republished here with permission from the author.
In the article, Mr. Astrue said, “It makes it much more difficult to get outstanding talent from the outside, and I lost a couple of really terrific people that way. And it also means that they [OPM] under-value skill sets that are important. And it’s particularly true for information technology.” He continued to say “And yet, OPM doesn’t recognize that, and it’s not any coincidence that they can’t run their own IT systems. If you’re filing for retirement as a civil servant — as I am, I’m filing for retirement now, I’m going through the process — it’s horrible. You can’t file electronically, the system’s a mess. Often it takes six months to 12 months to have it happen. Sometimes longer, I’ve heard those horror stories. And it comes in part because it’s an agency that doesn’t value expertise in information technology.”
He continues to say “You’d try and talk to them and they’d say, ‘Well, this person hasn’t managed 50 people,’ or something like that. And we’d say it’s an IT person, it’s a lawyer coming out of one of the very best law firms in Washington. They typically don’t get those types of experiences, that’s not the way their worlds are. But they’re outstanding because they have this accomplishment, this accomplishment and this accomplishment, and these are needs that the agency has. And they basically said, ‘We don’t care.’ There should be a timeline for OPM decisions. And if they can’t make a timeline, make a decision within 30 days or 45 days or by default the agency decision should stand,” Astrue said.
“They need to write guidelines — because if things aren’t down on paper, they’re not going to check the box at OPM — that stresses to a greater degree than now that the importance of accomplishment and expertise. Federal government runs with an outstanding civil service that should be politically neutral, and when OPM allows the process to become political, it really does diminish the excellence of the civil service, and it discourages people from applying and from staying,” he said. “I know from my experience that’s a real issue that’s increasing in severity and it’s something that this administration is not paying attention to.”
No. No. No.
First, the screening process for SES positions is administered by OPM, but OPM uses Qualifications Review Boards comprising SES members from agencies other than OPM. The system was designed to keep agencies from hiring people for SES positions who are not qualified, and to protect the competitive SES from being loaded with political hires. It is part of the checks and balances government requires to avoid the Civil Service reverting to a spoils system. QRBs make the call on qualifications and when they reject a selectee it is usually because they do not have experience that satisfies the Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs). There is nothing in the ECQs that is unusual or overly burdensome. Expecting someone to have experience as a manager before becoming a senior executive is not excessive. The government has positions that are suitable for people with no management experience — they are called Senior Level (SL) or Senior Technical/Professional (ST). Agencies can also use political appointments to reach people who cannot go through a competitive process successfully. The career Senior Executive Service is not a place for people who have never managed anything.
Second, retirement applications do not typically take six to 12 months for approval. The process is certainly not as efficient as anyone (including OPM) would like, but there are a lot of reasons for that. Chief among them is the lack of consistency in agency HR record-keeping systems and the fact that many records that are required to process a retirement claim are not automated themselves. Even if OPM had a modern retirement processing system, it would still have to deal with agency systems and paper records.
Finally, OPM’s SES program team certainly does care about the SES and the ability of the federal government to recruit and retain good executives. I know those folks (they are career employees) and have complete confidence in their ability and integrity. They are not rejecting applicants for SES positions for political reasons. In more than 30 years in government I have seen people hired into career SES positions where I thought they were hired because of their connections. I have never seen an OPM QRB reject someone for those reasons. In fact, the most notable case I saw when I was in government was where the political leaders of the agency wanted to hire someone who was not qualified for a career SES job. An OPM QRB rejected the applicant because he was not qualified. They did their job and the system worked as designed.
Could OPM be made better? Yes, but we can discuss reforms while relying on facts and not impugning the integrity of the career workforce at OPM.
Jeff Neal is a senior vice president for ICF International and founder of the blog, ChiefHRO.com. Before coming to ICF, Neal was the chief human capital officer at the Department of Homeland Security and the chief human resources officer at the Defense Logistics Agency.
MORE COMMENTARY FROM JEFF NEAL:
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