"Want Effective Government? Then You Have to Pay Decent Salaries"

[applegrove]

Want Effective Government? Then You Have to Pay Decent Salaries

by Norm Ornstein at the Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/want-effective-government-then-you-have-to-pay-decent-salaries/360072/

"SNIP................

Of late, the old coalitions have disappeared, and new schisms have developed. One of the most significant is the sharp rise of radical, antigovernment sentiment on the right. This is not “leaner and meaner” government conservatism, but a more visceral attitude of hostility to all government—government as an overweening evil. It is an attitude that rejoiced in the shutdown, that shut out any evidence that closing any part of government could actually hurt people or damage the economy. And it is deep-seated enough among activists that harsher antigovernment rhetoric, and policies designed to make the lives of government employees more difficult, have emerged in full force. Pay freezes, cuts in benefits, attempts to take away any small perks or rewards, fueled in many cases by hyped outrage over real and exaggerated scandals, have taken their toll. It also fuels a push toward more privatization, even where such a move is more costly and more prone to corruption.

But this approach is not the only challenge facing governance in the 21st century; the structure of the career civil-service system is not up to the tasks facing the country in a global economy and in a technology-driven age, with its attendant challenges at home and abroad. The excellent core of professional managers created by the 1978 reforms is nearing a major gap: By 2017, nearly two-thirds of the Senior Executive Service will be eligible for retirement, and it is not clear that another generation of talented managers is waiting in the wings to replace them.

More broadly, the recruitment process for federal professionals and managers is out of sync with the broader labor market, making it difficult to provide the incentives to recruit from among the best and brightest. As I wrote in an earlier column, how can a government fighting the danger of cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism compete with Intel, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft for topflight electrical engineers and computer scientists when it offers pay freezes and stripped-down benefits packages?

What to do? A penetrating new report by the Partnership for Public Service offers a passel of ideas as it calls for sweeping reforms. They include building a more market-sensitive labor system; merging many disparate personnel systems into one to level the playing field across government in the competition for talent; creating more flexibility for agencies to hire the best qualified people; creating pay-raise-for-performance incentives (and no raises for slackers) to improve performance management; creating a four-tier senior executive service to train managers better for the complex jobs they will have; and reducing the number of political-appointment positions to enable talented career managers to have more opportunities to advance.

...............SNIP"

[pipoman]

1. government jobs have always been lower paying than secular

jobs. The allure of long term employment, benefits, and retirement is what drives those career government types. It takes a special kind of complacency to endure 20 or 30 in most government jobs.