Urgent Business for America: Revitalizing the Federal Government for the 21st Century

National Commission on the Public Service (January 2003)

Reviewed by Marissa Kuhn

The federal government is neither organized nor staffed nor adequately prepared to meet the demands of the 21st century,” states the second report of the National Commission on the Public Service, better known as the second Volcker Commission. This report is the latest work discussing the need for reorganizing the federal government and providing recommendations for how. While the report promises the commission “has not shied away from proposing radical change” and warns that its “analysis and recommendations may discomfort parts of our audience,” many I suspect will be, as I was, neither shocked nor awed by this report.

To be fair to readers who haven’t looked over the report, there are three sets of core findings and recommendations which are briefly outlined below.

The Organization of Government

Fundamental reorganization of the federal government is urgently needed to improve its capacity for coherent design and efficient implementation of public policy.

The first group of Volcker II’s recommendations includes how the government structures, manages, and oversees itself. While not suggesting four super departments like the 1969-1970 Ash Council, Volcker II does suggest reorganizing the government into mission-related departments. The current government structure has evolved over time with overlapping responsibilities and missions. Managing duplicative programs can lead to contradictory goals and weakened results.

By combining like programs and giving managers the authority to develop management and personnel systems for these new departments, Volcker II believes management will better be able to achieve its missions. However, the flexibility to change the status quo must ultimately be provided by the president and Congress. Volcker II believes the president should be granted stronger authority to recommend organizational changes and Congress should restructure its own committee oversight to match any changes.

Leadership for Government

Effective government leadership requires immediate changes in the entry process for top leaders and the long-term development of a highly skilled federal management corps.

The second group of Volcker II’s recommendations focuses on how the government structures, recruits, and retains its leaders. Improvements in the organization of an entity are useless if the entity does not have effective leaders to carry out its goals. Volcker II recommends reducing the number of executive branch political positions, which has grown more than tenfold since the Kennedy administration, and dividing the Senior Executive Service into an Executive Management Corps and a Professional and Technical Corps. In recruiting leaders, the commission recommends speeding up and streamlining the presidential appointments process, as well as modifying ethics regulations for federal employees that are of little public benefit. A careful balance must be maintained between finding the right talent and not imposing undue requirements on individuals. Finally, the commission supports competitive salaries for federal leaders, which will require breaking the statutory link with congressional salaries.

Operational Effectiveness in Government

The federal workforce must be reshaped, and the systems that support it must be rooted in new personnel management principles that ensure much higher levels of government performance.

The final group of Volcker II’s recommendations center around human capital management. The commission supports more flexible personnel management systems and compensation policies that would allow agencies to better customize their systems to the individual needs of their agencies. Specific recommended changes include abolishing the General Schedule classification system and implementing broadband pay systems. Simplification and acceleration of the federal employee recruitment processes is advocated by the commission. Finally, the commission recommends that all competitive outsourcing decisions should have clear standards and goals that will strengthen the government’s missions instead of undermining them.

The report from the second Volcker Commission includes many excellent recommendations for revitalizing the federal government. However, after setting an expectation of radical reform, what’s presented is neither radical nor original. The commission states that “fifty years have passed
since the last comprehensive reorganization of the federal government.” That may be because it’s so hard politically to make innovative change happen. The other possibility however is that the ideas behind the proposed change are so limited and uninspiring, that they don’t seem worth the effort.

Marissa Kuhn is a senior financial analyst in the Office of Budget and Planning for the District of Columbia.