During a hearing of the Senate subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management May 20, Heitkamp asked a group of students visiting the committee room what they thought of federal service.
“I am tempted to ask them how many of you want to be an IRS auditor,” she said, before looking across the hearing chamber. “Nope, none of them.”
She tried again.
“How many of you in the audience here want to be a federal employee?” she asked. “A couple I see.”
She said the lack of enthusiasm means that even if younger people join the federal workforce, they might leave after just a few years. The median term of service for millennial in the federal workforce is 3.8 years, according to the Government Accountability Office.
“And that’s our job here, to figure out how we put the best person in the job that fits them and will challenge them and will give them job satisfaction,” Heitkamp said. “We have to do a better job of recruiting training and retaining the young people of America or we are not going to be moving forward.”
Dan Blair, the president of the National Academy of Public Administration and a former official at the Office of Personnel Management, said at the hearing that federal work is meaningful and that can be a compelling draw, but agencies have to do a better job of recognizing individual achievement.
He said the current General Schedule system for paying and rewarding employees was designed to promote “internal equity” as an effort to achieve pay equality for equal work. But younger workers want to be recognized for their individual achievements, he said.
“I think that in today’s environment we need to be able to have tools to recognize outstanding service,” Blair said.
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., chairman of the subcommittee, said its time for Congress to think critical about federal workforce policies and how they affect federal employees, in order to recruit a talented pool of employees.
“The issues we will discuss, which may be critical of the way the federal workforce is operated today, are not indictments on those dedicated federal employees. In fact, I would wager that many of them share the same concerns that we do,” Lankford said.
