Sixteen years ago, the National Commission on the Public Service (known as the “Second Volcker Commission”), reported that the federal government was not adequately staffed to meet the demands of the 21st century. Instead of attracting talent, the federal government too often drives it away. “Those who enter the civil service,” the commission reported, “often find themselves trapped in a maze of rules and regulations that thwart their personal development and stifle their creativity. The best are underpaid, the worst, overpaid. Too many of the most talented leave the public service too early, too many of the least talented stay too long.”
In 2017, the National Academy of Public Administration reached a similar conclusion, finding “serious gaps between the skills agencies needed and the skills they had on board.” The academy’s report identified human capital shortfalls in areas like cybersecurity, acquisition, and science and technology, adding that there are “undoubtedly other areas where agencies face special challenges.” Nobody knows how large the competency gaps are, the report concluded: “The country is flying blind into wicked problems, without enough pilots who know how to direct its programs onto the right routes.”
That was from Peter Levine, “Building a 21st Century Defense Acquisition Workforce,” over at War on the Rocks. He makes some good points — read the whole thing. However, I would note that Levine doesn’t address the budget process, which is an important consideration in the quality of the environment for the workforce.
Program-oriented budgets require 2 or 3 year lead times on justifying program objectives before funding can be made available. All in-house staff that would perform R&D or other work must first sell their services to the departmental- and OSD-level staffs. Whenever someone wants to start a new project, they must brief (i.e., market) it to numerous layers of staff. “It is either do this,” Packard said of staff approvals, “or that is the end of the new idea.”
In order to attract and retain highly skilled scientists and engineers, the government must create an atmosphere conducive to their creativity. This is often provided by “level of effort” programs, where program objectives can be decided upon at the operational level later on. Allen Schick discussed the perverse incentives that the program budget puts on managers:
It is the fate of PB that when performance indicators are ignored in budget work, managers can be truthful about shortfalls or problems, but when they influence budget allocations, line managers have incentive to mislead and deceive. Agent-principal dissonance and the problem of information asymmetry diminish significantly when the drive for performance is redirected from budgeting to management, that is, from information that might be used against an administrative entity’s interests to information whose use is largely controlled by the entity.
In other words, the program budget information is used to criticize and redirect staff activities. In-house managers are not really in control of their destiny, and will often move onto another position in short time anyway. Another observer wrote how:
Young people see that project and procurement officers live in a fishbowl environment, are subject to outside intervention, and become targets for criticism.
Highly skilled individuals want to be trusted and recognized for their capabilities by their superiors. However, as Aaron Wildavsky noted, the program budget is in effect a contract between the operational levels and the policy-making levels. The programming in effect is the approved list of directives which must be executed. Schick argued that the program budget really isn’t a contract, because it can’t be enforced. That may be true in some legal sense, but to the people who have to operate under it, the program budget forms the fishbowl around them from which they cannot escape.
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