It’s no secret that I’m an unabashed advocate of the ‘big bang’ approach to civil service reform…sweeping, wholesale change to the federal government’s antiquated personnel rules. Unfortunately, the last time that happened was in 1978, when Jimmy Carter (anyone remember him?) was president, so I’ve stopped holding my breath.
No, civil service reform is more likely to come incrementally, piece by agency piece, like dominoes falling one after another. Some of us are old enough to remember the now-discredited ‘domino theory’ (it’s what got us into Southeast Asia in the 1960s), but if my fellow Vietnam-era feds permit a positive spin on the stretched analogy, we may be seeing another very large domino begin to fall on the bumpy road to civil service reform…and in my humble opinion, that’s a good thing!
That large domino is VA. The congressionally-chartered Commission on Care recently issued a comprehensive, well-reasoned report on how to fix VA (a colleague of mine, former USMC Lieutenant General Marty Steele was a commissioner), and among other things they recommended that the administration and the Congress let the department ‘secede’ from the federal civil service system and give it the authority to set up its own in title 38 of the US Code…where VA already has some extraordinary statutory personnel flexibilities.
We should applaud such a move, and although the devil’s in the details, I’m confident that the commission has VA’s best interests at heart. However, the skeptics—and there are plenty—will argue vehemently against it, alleging all sorts of dire consequences. Among other things, they will assert that it’s all unnecessary, that the venerable old General Schedule works just fine, but there’s just too much evidence to the contrary—indeed, why else is part of VA’s healthcare workforce already exempt from it?
The critics will also argue that other similar efforts have failed miserably. However, having seen (and been part of) most of those other efforts—largely successful ones like the 1998 reform of the Internal Revenue Service and the post-9/11 integration of the Intelligence Community, as well as ill-fated ones like DOD’s National Security Personnel System and Homeland Security’s Max HR—I would contend that there some significant differences that give VA a better chance…if it takes into account some of the sometimes-painful lessons learned from those who’ve been down this road before.
Lessons learned at the IRS
First, the reason for optimism: Like IRS, VA has a bipartisan, bicameral case for change…indeed, if there ever was a ‘burning platform’ for personnel reform, it’s there. And like IRS and the IC, that case for change is made by a respected, blue ribbon panel of experts with no agenda other than to see the care of our veterans improved. A similar commission drove sweeping IRS and Intelligence Community reforms, which like VA, included a number related to personnel. However, more importantly in my view, they were—and in VA’s case, are—part of a much larger package, one of several means to an end-state that has the benefit of broad political agreement.
In contrast, neither DOD’s NSPS nor DHS’s Max HR enjoyed the same strong, bipartisan support, and while I will always argue that both efforts were based on a strong case for reform, others on the Hill and elsewhere saw it differently, and that ultimately weakened support for them…especially when their implementation hit severe turbulence.
That turbulence is unavoidable, but it can be weathered with enough bipartisan political top-cover. In IRS, we had it, first in the form of supportive congressional committees and administration leaders, and later from the permanently-authorized bipartisan IRS Oversight Board. The board provided day-to-day top cover for us, especially when the going really got tough (and it most certainly did), a buffer between the most strident critics and those of us who had to make some very difficult and unpopular decisions to get the job done.
To me, that was one of the most important lessons of the IRS transformation, one that may have been forgotten in subsequent DOD and DHS efforts. But the good news is that the Commission on Care learned that lesson, recommending an independent board of directors to oversee VA operations…and thereby provide a buffer from the day-to-day turbulence of politics, bureaucratic and otherwise. To be sure, that’s not a panacea, nor should it ever insulate the agency from its ultimate accountability, but I would still argue that it helped immeasurably in the early, sometimes-dark days of IRS reform.
Whether it’s a new personnel system, a new organizational structure, or a whole new ‘veterans first’ mindset, there will be implementation turbulence in the extreme, and knowing this in advance, an independent board of directors can help ensure that VA’s leaders have the support (and the spine!) to see it through. Our Oversight Board did just at IRS—when our employee satisfaction survey scores plummeted two years in a row during our reform effort, it ran interference for us until they turned around—and a new, independent governance structure for VA can do the same when the going gets tough…and it most assuredly will!
The turbulence of transformation can also be mitigated by early and deep union engagement. That’s another of the lessons of the 1998 IRS transformation…among other things, it featured an unprecedented degree of pre-decisional involvement on the part of the National Treasury Employees Union, and I would argue that that was one of the principal reasons for our relative success. Of course, NTEU had to accept the idea that the IRS’s future was at stake, and its leaders had to have the courage to work with us to implement reforms that many of their constituents opposed. One would hope that the leaders of VA’s unions have as much courage as their brethren.
There’s one additional ‘personnel reform’ in the commission’s report that is worth underscoring: creating a new leadership culture of accountability and care. That sounds simple, but it’s far easier said than done. You literally have to change the DNA of your leaders, starting with the SES.
All managers recompete
In IRS, we did just that. We actually made every senior executive and every GS-15 senior manager re-compete for a position in the newly-restructured IRS…every single one. There were no guarantees—no one was ‘entitled’ to one of those positions—and the competition was conducted using a whole new set of promotion criteria specifically designed to queue the leadership behaviors that were to be part of our target culture. All told, the process engendered over 25 percent turnover in our senior ranks, but the deputy commissioner, a 40-year IRS employee, said at the time that that was the “single most painful thing the Service had ever done…and the most important.”
A shock to the system? Most certainly, and it took some months for the new leaders to settle in and get traction. But they did—after all, they were hand-picked for their leadership abilities—and the result reverberated throughout the agency…suddenly employees knew we were serious, deadly serious about the transformation. Is something like that right for VA? Only the secretary and deputy secretary know for sure, but it may take that kind of bold action to overcome the inertia that comes naturally to a department with over 300,000 employees.
Bottom line: The domino that is VA can be successful, in part if the personnel reforms recommended by the commission come to pass (literally!). But it will also need a new governance structure to drive the reforms, the unions on VA’s side of the table, and the right leaders in place…along with the rest of the commission’s package. That won’t guarantee success, but it will certainly improve the odds.
Ron Sanders is a vice president and fellow at Booz Allen Hamilton and former chief human capital officer for the intelligence community.
