I am a frontline soldier in the government’s war for talent. As a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, I take seriously my own responsibility to help our institution’s mission to train public leaders. By "public leaders," we don’t mean only people who work in government agencies, but we do see government service as an important way to exercise public leadership. We are disturbed – and everybody should be disturbed – by some dramatic numbers. Twenty years ago, about three-quarters of the graduates of our two-year master’s program took their first job in government. Now that figure is down to about one-third. These figures are similar to those at other major graduate programs in public policy around the country. If government is having trouble attracting our students, who choose to attend an institution dedicated to public service, this should be a warning sign of the seriousness of the problems government faces today. Our Dean, Joseph Nye, is concerned enough about this issue that he has made refocusing our institution on its public service mission one of his core priorities. And as part of that, he will personally be chairing a series of high-level meetings at Harvard, beginning in September, involving senior people from government and the private sector, to help suggest strategies and to build awareness of this problem.

In my testimony today, I wish to address four ideas about ways to deal with the government’s human capital crisis. There can be no magic bullet that will solve this crisis. We need to act along many fronts. I focus on these four areas because some are especially relevant to technology workers, and others involve broader issues within the jurisdiction of this committee. These four issues are: (l) using mid-level, shorter-term jobs as a way to deal with the human capital crisis, (2) ways to address the human capital crisis outside the narrow areas of "human resources" or "personnel" management, (3) designing federal workplaces to be attractive to young people, and (4) the political and media context of public-sector employment.

Recruiting people from the outside for middle-level jobs

Government has traditionally recruited people from the outside at two levels – the entry level and the senior political level. And, with the exception of some agencies, government has also tended to assume that, once having entered government, entry-level hires will spend their entire careers there.

However, for many of my students, the idea of starting at an entry level in any job, private-sector or government, and staying in the same organization for 30 years, is inconceivable. Many young people assume that they will work in many organizations during their careers.

Government is missing one big potential source of talent if it is not willing to make much greater use of people hired from the outside into jobs in the career workforce in the middle levels of government--GS-ll’s through GS-l4’s-– who have gotten great experience and great training in the private sector, and who are interested, not to come into government for a permanent job, but for a few years of public service. I am thinking predominantly of young people in their late twenties, with perhaps 5-7 years of private-sector experience.

Getting people into government at these middle levels is particularly relevant in IT. There is a large pool of talent in the IT industry, who have been well-trained in their private-sector jobs, and it is an industry with high mobility. There are a number of complementary strategies for gaining access to mid-level talent. One strategy, that is the subject of the initiative Accenture announced this morning with Congressman Davis, is for IT contractors to lend a number of promising mid-level employees for a period of public service, working as government employees and then returning to their firms. I have had the privilege to work with Steve Rohleder at Accenture to develop the idea of the Digital Tech Corps to a stage where Accenture has announced its willingness to commit some of their young employees to this program and where you, Chairman Davis, are introducing legislation to allow this creative, innovative idea to become a reality.

Some common-sense precautions should be taken in connection with this program to keep the involvement of the young people industry lends to government to fairly high-level strategy and design issues, and away from specific agency procurements, along with applying reasonable post-employment limitations that would prevent people from representing their firm upon return regarding a specific procurement that grew out of their specific efforts while in government.

From conversations with senior government officials, I know they are very eager to get the Digital Tech Corps underway--and soon. Let’s see if we can make this a reality at a speed more reminiscent of the Internet Age than traditional government time! And let’s see how many other high tech firms in the community are willing to join this commitment to public service a reality.

There are, of course, other ways to attract mid-level talent other than through having industry make available some of its own employees for a period of time. Government can directly hire people at middle levels who have left jobs in industry, whether because they’ve been laid off or because they’d like to try a different kind of career for a few years, be it because of an interest in public service, a desire for less travel or a more family-friendly workplace while they have young children, or whatever. Some of these people might end up choosing to stay in government for an extended period.

The challenge here is to examine what practices and/or rules are inhibiting a change in agency hiring approaches to hiring more people from outside government for middle-level jobs, and to hiring people who might plan to stay for a few years. According to a recent article in Federal Times, the Peace Corps has a policy of limiting career officials to two stints of 30 months each, in order consciously to promote the entry of new ideas into the organization. As the government starts making use of more shorter-term middle level employment, we should probably be looking at the Peace Corps for lessons learned.

I would urge you to ask OPM to prepare a report to the Committee on these barriers – and to work with OPM to designate one or two pilot agencies to experiment with such hiring practices for IT employees, so we can see if this new model can be made an important part of our toolkit for dealing with the government’s problems in this area.

Ways to Address Human Capital Problems Through Non-"HR" Policies

Too much of the focus in discussions of the government’s talent crisis is on specifically human resources management (HR) issues – improving and deregulating the hiring process, dealing with salary issues, and so forth. These issues are indeed very important. But we need to understand that, more fundamentally, we need to worry about the content and context of government jobs. Smart young people considering government employment want – and the American public rightly demands – government workplaces that are high-performance workplaces, that engage their workforce in exciting work to produce mission results for the American people. One of the most depressing of the findings we see when we talk with our students at Harvard about their impressions of government is that many see government jobs as mired in bureaucracy and insufficiently results-oriented to satisfy their own strong desires to "make a difference."

These issues are already in the domain of this Subcommittee, though they don’t appear before you packaged as "human capital crisis" issues. Take procurement reform, which as you know is a special interest of mine and where this Subcommittee has been engaged in such a positive way. Among the important side benefits of procurement reform are to make government a more attractive workplace for government customers of the procurement system, by reducing procurement delays and hassles, and to make working in acquisition careers in government more attractive to young people by changing these jobs from bureaucratic rule-monitoring into what Deidre Lee, Director of Defense Procurement, and the Procurement Executives Council have called acting as "business advisors." Any time somebody comes before you and asks you to make the procurement system more bureaucratic again, ask them what effect this will have on our ability to attract talented young people into government. Similarly, this Subcommittee has responsibilities under the Clinger-Cohen Act and the Government Performance and Results Act for creating a results-oriented government in the area of information technology. Nothing could more contribute to a feeling on the part of young people that they can make a difference in government than encountering agencies that are results-driven. I would therefore urge the Subcommittee to continue its oversight efforts to drive creation of results-driven government in the IT arena as part of its contribution to dealing with the IT human capital crisis.

Young People and Public Service

Agencies should be undertaking steps to understand young people better and to improve the fit between what young employees seek from employment and the design of government jobs. One quick step agencies could and should take is to establish so-called "Reverse Mentoring" programs for information technology, which have become quite common in the private sector. In such programs, young IT-savvy employees (not necessarily even employees whose fulltime job involves IT) are paired with senior organization managers, in order to teach older executives about how to use technology tools more effectively. Such reverse mentoring provides senior executives with valuable information that will help them do their jobs more effectively, while providing young employees an opportunity to interact with top management. I would urge the Subcommittee to send a letter to the President’s Management Council urging development of such programs. I also believe that agencies need to learn more about what young employees want from their work. The President’s Management Council should take the initiative to establish a governmentwide Young Employees Advisory Council, which would meet on a regular basis with PMC members to discuss issues of workplace design and ways for agencies better to meet the desires of young employees. Since I believe that many young people seek jobs where they can feel they are participating in delivering meaningful results, meeting the demands of young people for what they seek from employment dovetails with taxpayer demands for a well-performing government.

The Political and Media Contexts of Public Employment

Little is more demoralizing to current and prospective federal employees than the way people in authority in our society – including elected officials– use attacks on so-called "bureaucrats" as a source of cheap political points. A political scientist conducting research on how members of Congress campaigned for office noted a number of years ago the ironic fact that "members of Congress run for Congress by running against Congress." What he meant was that, in speeches and other activities back in the district, members attacked Congress as an institution, and even most of their colleagues, while presenting themselves as virtuous exceptions to the rule. Such a tactic, the political scientist argued, might have brought electoral success, but at high cost to Congress as an institution and to public confidence in our democracy.

Attacks on public servants in government agencies are equally tempting, and equally short-sighted. They reduce the attractiveness of public service, both because they make these jobs appear to be less appealing and because they tell people considering public service what they have to look forward to should they decide to choose this career path.

This Subcommittee has within its power to make at least a small contribution towards turning this counterproductive situation around. Members can promise themselves to hold their tongues whenever they were considering cheap shots and verbal abuse directed in a general way at the government’s career workforce. And, while certainly this Subcommittee does not want to abandon its legitimate oversight role in examining, hopefully in a constructive way, agency problems and shortcomings, it should also commit to hold several hearings a year where career public servants are asked to showcase examples of successful, or improved, government performance through the use of technology in which those employees have personally been involved. It would be wonderful if, at least sometimes, career people brought before Congress were invited to be honored, not hectored.

Mr. Chairman, Congressman Turner, there are, as I mentioned earlier, many other ideas for dealing with the government’s human capital crisis. We’re going to need to attack this from many angles. So none of my suggestions should be considered as precluding or substituting for other measures.

Steven Kelman is Albert J. Weatherhead III and Richard W. Weatherhead Professor of Public Management. From 1993-1997, he was the Administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, where he was a leading figure in "reinventing government" efforts. He is the author of Procurement and Public Management: The Fear of Discretion and the Quality of Government Performance and of Making Public Policy: A Hopeful View of American Government. His earlier books include Regulating America, Regulating Sweden: A Comparative Study of Occupational Safety and Health Policies; What Price Incentives?: Economists and the Environment; Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest; and Behind the Berlin Wall: An Encounter in East Germany. Kelman's research focuses on public-sector operations management, with a focus on organizational design and change. He is currently researching the spread of procurement reform innovations at the working levels of government organizations