In Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike frequently sponsor bills to invest more in STEM education and fill gaps in the cyber workforce. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is also implementing a widely supported national cyber workforce and education strategy.

But while everyone agrees there’s a gap, data on the U.S. cyber workforce is severely lacking compared to many other occupations. And as a new report shows, it’s often because official labor and education sources don’t yet reflect the changing landscape of cybersecurity work.

The Cybersecurity Workforce Data Initiative, authorized as part of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, aims to “assess the feasibility of producing national estimates and statistical information on the cybersecurity workforce.” The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, housed within the National Science Foundation, is leading the initiative.

In May, the CWDI released a report on “cybersecurity workforce supply and demand” led by RTI International, a nonprofit research institute.

The report lays out many of the challenges in obtaining granular, ground-truth data on the cybersecurity workforce, as well as some recommendations for addressing those problems.

For instance, one of the most commonly used guides for explaining cybersecurity work is the “NICE Framework,” maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Widely regarded as essential to understanding different cyber roles, the NICE Framework has not been translated to align with traditional federal labor data used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Census Bureau.

“The NICE framework is not intended to be a prescriptive taxonomy. By our definition, and that within the NICE framework, cybersecurity does not fit easily into a single occupation code or title, and this presents a challenge to using existing labor market data,” Michael Hogan, one of the lead authors on the new repot, said during a June 10 workshop hosted by CWDI.

“In the absence of traditional data, administrative data providers have filled that gap,” Hogan added.

Those administrative providers include CyberSeek, a public-private partnership, that serves as one of the most commonly cited sources for cyber workforce data. CyberSeek currently estimates that there are nearly 470,000 open cybersecurity jobs across the country.

Another commonly referenced resource is ISC2’s cyber workforce study, which recently estimated there are 5.5 million cybersecurity workers and nearly 4 million job opening across the globe.

“These data and surveys are very valuable for capturing a subset of the workforce, but we believe that this data does not yet encompass the entire state of supply and demand for cybersecurity workers,” Hogan explained.

While many new pieces of legislation focus on increasing STEM education and expanding the pipeline of STEM graduates, the CWDI report notes that only 46% of college graduates in core cybersecurity positions had a degree that was closely related to their work.

“There is a lack of information about the knowledge, skills, and credentials required for cybersecurity work, the on-ramps into cybersecurity jobs, and the source of a potential mismatch between the work experience sought by employers versus the experience held by new graduates,” the report explains.

Part of the challenge is that cybersecurity is still a relatively new and evolving field. But yet another wrinkle is that while there are jobs that are clearly cybersecurity positions – information security analyst, for example – many other jobs could be considered cybersecurity-adjacent, as the CWDI report notes.

“We know that nearly every occupation today touches digital technology, and there are cybersecurity components to go along with it,” Hogan said. “This presents a challenge for us in putting a boundary around the cybersecurity workforce.”

The report offers a range of initial recommendations to better understand the cybersecurity workforce. It recommends, for instance, merging NIST’s NICE Framework with the Occupational Information Network, a public database sponsored by the Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration.

It also recommends improving the Standard Occupational Classification to better reflect cybersecurity workers. The SOC is maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is used by federal agencies to classify workers into occupational categories.

Similar, the report recommends improving the Education Department’s Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) to better capture cybersecurity schooling data.

Meanwhile, Hogan said CWDI will continue to collect data and feedback as it prepares to potentially launch a pilot survey of the U.S. cybersecurity workforce later this year.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michele Sandiford

The first known computer virus (worm) to replicate over a computer network (The Creeper worm) was created by BBN engineer Robert Thomas in 1971.

Source: Computer Timeline

The post NSF initiative aims to bring better data to the cyber workforce challenge first appeared on Federal News Network.

It may be employees at the LaClare Family Creamery, a goat cheese manufacturer in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, that Republican Congressman Glenn Grothman passes by on his way home.

Or it may be the folks at the Old World Creamery, a family-owned food manufacturer located in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which has been around since 1912.

No matter which of the many cheese factories in his home district of which Rep. Grothman was referring to, he seems to believe federal employees and employees who manufacture cheese have a lot in common.

“When I go home at night, [and this] is kind of a stereotype, but I got Wisconsin, I got all these cheese factories [that] I drive by depending upon which way I go home. They were all packed, even at one o’clock in the morning. So I just want to emphasize that I think, in many private sector jobs, they were showing up at work in the teeth of the [pandemic]. It’s time that we should be back to where we want to be,” Grothman said at the April 30 Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing.

Not sure if you knew this, but the cheese industry has been very important to Sheboygan County since the 1870s.

The same can’t be said for federal agencies. In fact, the Office of Personnel Management doesn’t list cheese or any specific food manufacturer in their list of job series. There is 7401 – General Food Preparation and Serving that includes cooking, bartending and even meat cutting, but sadly nothing about cheese.

Grothman was trying to make a point about federal employees needing to return to the office, but his analogy, like most from lawmakers, fell flat.

Just like Sen. Joni Ernst’s (R-Iowa) jab at federal employees back in April.

“Every day is ‘Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day’ when tens of thousands of bureaucrats are working from home,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), posted on X on April 16, which happened to be National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day.

Did Ernst know about some sort of “off the books” celebration at the Neal Smith Federal Building in Des Moines, Iowa, which includes 800 federal employees from more than 40 agencies, who were all wearing their pajamas to work?

By the way, did you know National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day started in 2004, by Pajamagram as a reward for the late nights working on taxes. If you are keeping score, the 2025 National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day is April 6.

But I digress, the return-to-office debate continues to boil over. Republicans continue to criticize federal employees and the Biden administration for what they see as waste and abuse.

No one size fits all for return to office policy

Democrats and the Office of Management and Budget are defending agency leadership to make decisions for how often federal employees need to come into the office based on what’s best for their agency’s mission.

Brian Elliott, executive advisor around the future of work and an expert on workplace culture, said both sides are missing the point and talking past each other.

“I think a big part of this is what you’re getting, is there’s no one size fits all for this because different jobs and different roles have different requirements. They always have and they always will,” Elliott said in an interview with Federal News Network. “The private sector has been grappling with this for a while too, and I work with companies that have a wide range of practices. But they figured out the moments that matter for a sales team are different than those for an engineering team or a finance team. But you would never apply one uniform set of rules to everybody and expect it’s actually going to work the same.”

Exactly why Grothman’s cheese manufacturer analogy or Ernst’s comments on what federal employees are wearing are the type of comments that rankle so many people and stops the real discussion from happening.

First off, as Jason Miller, the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, told lawmakers at the April 30 hearing four different times, over half of the federal workforce can’t telework because of their job responsibilities. That means more than a million federal employees — those who protect the border, secure the airports, inspect food and provide medical care to veterans at hospitals — are commuting, most likely are wearing business clothes — though hospital scrubs could be considered pajama-like — and working outside of their homes.

Miller said of the remaining 40% to 49% of employees working in everything from technology to human resources to processing tax returns or disability forms, about 80% of them are in the office at least half the time, which equates roughly to two-to-three times a week.

But just like before the pandemic, just being in the office doesn’t necessarily mean work is getting done.

Gauging productivity remains difficult

Elliott said it’s this reason and the concept of work being what you do, not where you do it, is why public and private sector employers have to change how they gauge productivity. He said this new view is a struggle no matter what sector you are in.

“We have to stop trying to measure activity, stop trying to measure the number of days a week somebody shows up, or the number of keystrokes they hit, and start figuring out what outcomes you’re trying to drive,” he said. “With most organizations, when we get deeper into this, you realize that you might be able to define productivity for a subset of the jobs, like customer service, which is one that you can usually put a yardstick against. You can measure quantity of output and quality of output. But you can do that regardless of where the human being is doing that customer support. It literally does not matter. But other work is much more complex. The important stuff is interdisciplinary, cross functional in nature, complicated problem solving and really hard to put a yardstick on.”

Elliott pointed to a story from an executive at the National Science Foundation who said the number of grant applications that came in peaked during the pandemic, but they were able to serve them just as well during that time period.

The focus, he said, is what is driving mission outcomes, not “sweating telework classifications” or other meaningless proof points.

“We’re very used to communicating, collaborating, doing work and even building relationships online. I have talked with senior agency leaders who will talk about the fact that the people above them, in the appointment suites as well, aren’t in the tools that their teams are using on a day in, day out basis. If your only familiarity with the digital tools your teams use is the occasional Teams call or Zoom call, and you’re not in Teams or Slack itself, watching the work happen, then it’s not surprising that when you come back into an office space and you don’t see a lot of activity, you’re then worried, are they really working?” Elliott said. “The same thing has happened in the private sector. The thing that I’ve done with a number of executives is literally show them how these tools work. We get into it enough so that they feel comfortable, so they can actually see the work that’s happening, that otherwise they’re missing out on. There’s definitely a transition here that has to do with generational differences in how we communicate.”

Elliott said it’s more than just using communication and collaboration tools. It’s the transformation across many sectors and in many offices that occurred over the last four years.

Fairness doctrine, not really fair

He said this entire discussion comes back to this core issue of how do agencies or companies know if their employees are really working if they’re not physically in an environment where they can monitor them and put my eyeballs on them?

“That is the least effective way of measuring productivity and outcome that exists. It’s an input-driven mechanism. The equivalent would be if I’m going to put keystroke monitors on people’s laptops because the way that they actually produce something is through typing. So once you measure the number of keystrokes, you can go on Amazon.com and buy a mouse jiggler for $25, stick it into the side of your laptop and it will keep your mouse active for eight hours a day or however many hours you want to. And you can actually program in the number of pauses you want it to have. These systems can easily be gamed. You’re much better off instrumenting outcome driven metrics on top of this,” Elliott said.

Elliott added the other side of the argument is often referred to as the “fairness doctrine.” He said what’s fair to office workers should be what’s fair to frontline employees. But Elliott said that so-called doctrine is faulty.

“Frontline workers have to show up on the front line, and office workers don’t have to, and some will say that is unfair. There is an equality versus equity set of things that’s happening within this though. We already pay office workers more than we do frontline workers. That’s been true for eons,” he said. “What it’s really about is how do I attract workers for what is often the hardest jobs to fill these days? It’s those call center jobs. It is the fact that you’re investing a different type of flexibility for those workers, not just work location, which you can’t always give them, but flexible schedules. Giving people the ability to swap shifts, giving people flexibility when it comes to how many shifts they take per week, helps you attract more people into those jobs and retain them. What you’re after is, can I measure how good a job they’re doing at delivering for my customers? Not that they show up.”

That gets us back to the land of cheese and whining. If Grothman, and other lawmakers, want to make sure federal employees are using taxpayers’ money appropriately, serving citizens effectively and not abusing their privilege of working from home, they should demand to see the data and hold agency leaders accountable for meeting mission-focused goals. The workplace has changed, the remote work cork isn’t going back in the bottle, so both supporters and detractors should stop arguing over what was or used to be, and focus on measuring agency mission success in serving citizens.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michele Sandiford

The term “telecommuting” was first coined in 1972 by Jack Nilles. At that time, Nilles was working remotely on a complex NASA communication system.

Source: Allied Telcom

The post Whine, cheese make the return-to-office debate pungent first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reining in full-time remote work for many of its employees.

With the Biden administration setting higher return-to-office targets, the CDC is now telling most teleworking employees to come into the office at least twice each two-week pay period.

The CDC is still carving out exceptions and allowing employees in IT and data science positions to work remotely.

Until recently, the CDC relied on remote work as a free, but effective, way to keep public health workers from looking for other jobs.

Sylana Tramble, director of CDC’s Human Resources Office, said the CDC, in 2023, tripled the number of applicants it saw for job postings, when the agency announced most openings as remote positions.

“When you’re limited to one geographic location, you’re limited to the talent in that location, the demographics of that location,” Tramble said on May 30 at the Professional Services Council’s annual FedHealth conference. “Remote [work] and telework really opened that up. Now we’re, I think, shifting a little bit back to center court on that. We’re looking to see how that will impact.”

The CDC previously supported full-time remote work for large swaths of its workforce.

“Before, you could be 100% remote, even if you lived in the Atlanta area, which is our primary location. Now, if you’re remote in Atlanta, and you’re not in one of these mission-critical occupations, or have some reasonable accommodation, then you’re going to switch from being able to work at home all the time to having to come into the office at least twice a pay period,” Tramble said.

The CDC is carving out some exceptions for in-demand tech positions. Tramble says IT and cybersecurity personnel in 2210 positions, as well as data scientists, are still eligible to work remotely.

“Those are going to be exceptions, for remote purposes. But everyone else will have to shift from remote to a telework status,” she said.

Tramble says that when it comes to workforce flexibility, the CDC is offering a better deal than other federal health agencies.

“There’s other agencies that have a much more, what I consider, rigid approach to that. We’re starting to see where we’re getting applicants from other agencies that are taking a little bit of a harder stance,” she said.

‘A pain point before the pandemic, and it’s gotten worse’

Recruitment and retention remain pain points across the entire health care sector.

“It was a pain point before the pandemic, and it’s gotten worse,” said Elizabeth Kittrie, a senior advisor for the Bureau of Health Workforce at the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Kittrie says 75 million people, or one in four Americans right now, are living in an area with a shortage of primary care providers.

About 122 million, or one out of three Americans, are living somewhere with a shortage of mental health professionals. And one in five Americans are living in an area with a shortage of dentists and dental health professionals.

A study from the de Beaumont Foundation found more than half of state and local public health workers have experienced symptoms of PTSD, and one in three are considering leaving the field.

“This is a problem across government staff,” Kittrie said.

‘I got the same sense there was burnout and PTSD’

Tramble sees those same symptoms of burnout and fatigue in the CDC workforce.

Before joining the CDC, she spent most of her career in the Defense Department, where she’s used to seeing symptoms of PTSD.

“When soldiers and airman and Marines, sailors would come back from deployment — you can just tell. There’s this reintegration. You get to go back to normal, whatever that is,” she said. “This was the first I worked at a non-DoD federal agency where I got the same sense there was burnout and PTSD.”

Tramble said the CDC has seen a “significant increase” in staff using the employee assistance program, as well as a significant increase in reasonable accommodation requests — “which can be either physical or mental accommodations.”

Tramble says this sector-wide issue of burnout also requires agencies to get smarter about workforce engagement.

“This is not just throwing pizza parties and having socials. This is really about connecting to the mission. Feeling like you belong, that you have a support system at work, that can help you navigate some of those things,” Tramble said. “I have been very impressed with the level of effort that the CDC has put into taking care of the workforce after a pretty traumatic two to three years,” she said. “If you have the right support system, you can definitely reach out and touch most folks.”

Tramble says these challenges forced the CDC to take a data-driven look at its workforce needs —now, and in the future.

“We didn’t really have a recruitment strategy, we didn’t have an engagement and retention strategy. We didn’t have this futuristic workforce planning so and we didn’t have the systematic IT infrastructure in place for our workforce to do what I would consider meaningful data analysis,” she said.

“We have spent the last couple of years changing all that. So now we have what I would consider very meaningful data.  We’re almost a tip-of-the-spear thing about how we can look at our current workforce, do competency gap analysis across the CDC — just figure out and then really hone it and specialize, where we need to do remote,” Tramble said.

CDC is on the hunt for certain skill sets. Tramble said the agency so far this year has hired 70-80 additional contract specialists.

“It’s very competitive out there, and the federal hiring process is a little dated and kind of cumbersome and painful. And then, once you get the staff on board, it’s really figuring out the best to take care of that stuff — whether that’s through engagement or career development and talent management,” she said.

The CDC is also looking to acquire more experts in data.

“We have to shift with our current workforce and create this agile workforce. Maybe the skills that you came in with were great, but then tomorrow, we’re probably going to need something a little bit different,” Tramble said.

More data expertise will also help the CDC with workforce planning and projecting what the workforce needs to look like in the future

“When you’re in a crisis is not the time to do that — it’s too late. So [it’s] getting ahead of that and having that plan and strategy in place,” Tramble said.

SAMHSA surges in Best Places to Work scores

Morale is improving elsewhere in the federal health care workforce.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) addresses behavioral health in the U.S. But it ranked second to last out of all agencies in the 2021 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government scorecard, as tracked by the Partnership for Public Service.

Out of 411 agencies, it ranked at 410.

But things are looking up. This year, SAMHSA scored 77 out of 459 agencies.

“It was a hockey stick-up kind of growth, and our employee strength more than doubled in that same period,” said Chandra Mohan, SAMHSA’s acting chief technology officer. “There’s more people to join in, and more people are satisfied, so to speak, in the job.”

Mohan attributes the higher scores in part to SAMHSA STRONG — which stands for “Supportive, Transparency, Respect, Opportunity, Necessary and Growth.”

“It’s beyond a cute acronym with a lot of platitudes,” he said. “It empowered the employees to have a say in the way many management decisions were taken, and the way some of them felt heard, in how the business was conducted.”

On the tech side of hiring, Mohan says SAMHSA can’t compete with private sector tech salaries.

“From the recruitment side, it’s the same challenge as everyone. We’re not competing with the big tech, we’re not going to offer a quarter-million dollars to college grads by any means, but I think we do offer a good benefits package,” he said.

But tech workers are looking for more than just competitive salaries. Mohan says new research shows Gen Z workers are placing a premium on jobs with purpose and impact, and work-life balance.

“If someone is looking for job fulfillment and mission, I don’t think there is a role that’s better than what we offer here,” Mohan said. “Not everybody wants to put in 70-hour weeks, an up-or-out philosophy that’s there in all consulting firms. SAMHSA offers a great opportunity for new people, and younger people to come in. We are attractive, from that perspective.”

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michele Sandiford

The original incarnation of the CDC was formed in 1943 in response to malaria outbreaks, though it wasn’t called the Center of Disease Control.

Source: cdc.gov

The post CDC, once largely remote, balances return to office with a burnt-out workforce first appeared on Federal News Network.

The company he co-founded, Sun Microsystems, did just that. It concentrated on a single class of product. The market for dedicated engineering workstations using specialized reduced-instruction-set processors eventually gave way to PCs as microprocessors and software grew more capable. But the seven-word strategy remains a useful way to think about life.

I call May through September the “Sammies Season” on The Federal Drive with Tom Temin show. Each week we air an interview with one of the finalists in the Service To America Medals program put on by the Partnership for Public Service. Many of the finalists really have changed the world through strong focus on something specific.

Bob McGaughey chuckled over having attended the initial reception for the Sammies finalists. The research forester with the U.S. Forest Service exhibited a reaction many Sammies finalists have expressed to me over the years. In effect: “What am I doing here?” They’re often modest about accomplishments manifestly impressive to others.

McCaughey early on learned programming. For many years, his enduring opus has concerned something that sounds arcane. He developed a program that takes data generated by light detection and ranging data, LiDAR. LiDAR, from airborne instruments, by itself produces lots of data but not much wisdom. McCaughey’s FUSION program makes LiDAR data useful in assessing large areas of forest or any other type of terrain.  He’s always improving and adding to the program, which is freely distributed for use by anyone needing to interpret LiDAR data.

If you think the Forest Service has an important mission, then you can see how a single forester tapping away in C++ has helped enable that mission.

For some, the arrowhead is aimed at a theme. For the Government Accountability Office’s Biza Repko, its delving into narrow corners of the transportation system and pulling out ways to improve safety. She nudged the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to diversity the anatomies of crash test dummies so they’re no longer all average-sized males. She prodded more than the tiny sliver of the railroad industry participating in a safety reporting program.

I once interviewed a man who’d been a NASA project scientist for decades. He oversaw a pair of satellites starting through their conception in 1972, their launch in 1977, and then for decades after. If I recall correctly, it was the Voyager I and II devices, which zoomed around several planets and eventually left the solar system.

Talk about dedication. I remember asking offhandedly if the satellites were like members of his own family, he’d been doting over them for so long. He enthusiastically said yes, they were an abiding presence at the dinner table discussions as his own human children were growing up.

You see this focus in companies too. A small Virginia company called Electra.aero concentrates on an extreme niche: very short takeoff and landing, hybrid powered airplanes with a technique known as blown lift. How’s that for specialized? It has development contracts with the Navy and Air Force. Like a hybrid car, the company’s planes have both batteries and an engine to charge the batteries. I asked founder John Langford if fuel capacity was therefore the flight distance limiter. He said, no, it’s people’s bladders. Because the planes at this point have limited payload capacity, they aren’t capable of carrying amenities like lavatories and associated plumbing aloft.

Such people don’t fit the cliched descriptions like “single minded.” Neither fanatics nor zealots, they simply have marshaled abiding enthusiasm for something important and for which they have talent. One presumes they have hobbies or other interests, but professionally they don’t dissipate their energies.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michele Sandiford

Approximately 25% of all Western medicines on the market today come from plants found only in tropical rain forests.

Source: Arbor Day Foundation

The post Success comes from ‘all the wood behind one arrowhead’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

The latest Best Places to Work results from the Partnership for Public Service are pretty promising — employee engagement is ticking upward for the first time in years, with many familiar agencies still topping the rankings.

But there are other pockets of success at agencies that don’t always see the spotlight. During a Best Places to Work event celebrating many of this year’s winners, some federal leaders were looking for what’s driving consistency at agencies, and how to make sure that keeps going.

It might not come as much of a surprise, for example, that the Government Accountability Office took the top spot this year for midsize agencies. GAO has remained the number one midsize agency in Best Places to Work now for four years in a row. For 2023, GAO’s engagement and satisfaction score was 87.2 out of 100.

The high score might come, at least in part, from the agency’s relatively new and more flexible telework program, said U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro. During 2023, GAO worked alongside its union to expand workplace flexibilities for employees. The program now lets agency staff work fully remotely, with supervisor approval. Other employees can telework up to four days a week.

“That’s introducing a lot of administrative changes in the agency — it’s a big change,” Dodaro told Federal News Network at last week’s Best Places to Work event. “Since we were so successful at maintaining our quality of our work and productivity during the pandemic, I felt this was a good step.”

Data from the Partnership echoes that same telework-to-satisfaction trend at GAO. During 2023, across government, employees who teleworked full-time had the highest engagement, scoring about 75 out of 100 on how satisfied they feel in their jobs. By comparison, employees who work in headquarters offices and at field offices scored 69.2 and 61.7 on the same satisfaction scale, respectively.

There are plenty of other factors, though, that also influence employees’ engagement and satisfaction at work. For Dodaro, maintaining good communication between senior leaders and employees is another key component.

“We have monthly townhall meetings — I meet every year with each team and office and answer questions,” Dodaro said. “You need to maintain it because you constantly have new employees coming in. But once you have that institutional commitment and culture at the agency, things will pretty much take care of themselves.”

The importance of survey participation

For some agencies, improving engagement can be a little more complicated, and sometimes take years. In the Partnership’s 2023 Best Places to Work results, about two-thirds of agencies overall either maintained or increased their employee satisfaction scores. That means there’s another third of agencies whose scores decreased.

The National Transportation Safety Board, as an example, dropped down a couple spots in the 2023 rankings, going from 13th place to 18th place for small agencies. The board’s engagement and satisfaction score also dipped by 2.2 points, decreasing from 70.9 to 68.7 in one year. But for Veronica Marshall, chief human capital officer at NTSB, there’s still an upside this year.

“One of the things I’m most proud of is we had our highest participation rate in the last 12 years — almost 89% of the agency,” Marshall told Federal News Network at the Partnership event. “Our plan is really to just look at the results, focus on those key areas we think are most important to our workforce.”

Marshall said improving the participation rate for the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) started at the top, with senior leadership. Since much of Best Places to Work comes from FEVS, Marshall turned her focus to educating leadership about the importance of the survey and making it clear to staff that senior leaders see a lot of value in employee feedback.

“They could, in turn, talk to the workforce about the importance of [FEVS] and how we really want to hear their opinions,” Marshall said.

That dynamic between senior leaders and employees gets a lot of credit for NTSB’s higher participation rates, but a little healthy competition didn’t hurt either. When the 2023 FEVS was out in the field, Marshall said she launched a competition among the board’s 13 different offices to see who could get the most employees to fill out the survey.

“At the end of that competition, the winner received a pizza party hosted and paid for by our chair,” Marshall said. “That healthy competition really helped to get our participation rates up.”

For Marshall, the next steps will be taking the feedback and data from employees and using it to try to improve the agency’s engagement and satisfaction score — and ideally, moving up in the Best Places to Work rankings.

“Again, really just listening to those opinions of the workforce and where we can pull those levers to help increase our scores,” Marshall said.

How workload can be a positive

Going down to an even smaller scale, agency subcomponents are also seeing some consistency in the rankings this year. The Office of Negotiations and Restructuring, an arm of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, once again placed first this year out of 459 agency subcomponents.

The office’s workload has increased in the last couple years, with more work stemming from a financial assistance program created as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. But for John Hanley, PBGC’s chief of negotiations and restructuring, that hasn’t been a detriment.

“My team has really risen to the occasion of meeting this demand to review these applications,” Hanley told Federal News Network at the Partnership’s event. “My team has just greatly enjoyed the challenge of keeping up with all of this, which I think has in turn led to an improvement in morale [and] energy. People are just dedicated to this role. [The work] is nonstop, but it’s been a real motivator.”

Like many other agency leaders, Hanley said employee feedback from FEVS, and high participation rates in the survey, are crucial.

“It is just a process of reminding people of the importance of being allowed to air their views via FEVS,” Hanley said. “There’s really just a component of making certain that people feel comfortable about that. I just avail people of the opportunity, make them aware of it, and then they follow through on their own volition.”

Getting higher participation often comes from whether employees actually think their input will be used to make changes. Employees are more likely to fill out a survey, like FEVS, if they see its results being taken seriously by leadership.

And governmentwide, that factor has been improving for the federal workforce. In the 2023 FEVS, on the question of whether employees believed the results of the survey would be used to make their agency a better place to work, results showed a 5-point increase.

The 2024 FEVS is currently out in the field for most agencies. At the Best Places to Work event, Office of Personnel Management Acting Director Rob Shriver urged agency leaders to work to keep those rates on an upward climb.

“This is really critical — really, really critical,” Shriver said. “I’m glad to see that the participation numbers have increased. So I would ask, once again, for a continued emphasis on making sure that we have strong participation in the survey. And as you all know, one of the things that’s really key to that is demonstrating to workers that their voice makes a difference.”

The post 3 promising pockets of success in Best Places to Work first appeared on Federal News Network.

The low coefficient of engagement employees have with their agencies stems from many possible factors. Top among them: leadership, functional performance, work environment. The low scores don’t necessarily mean employees hate the agency or working there.

As aside, it could. Ranked just above the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency lies the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Lurid stories of an environment of sexual harassment and a hot-tempered yet oblivious chairman have engulfed the agency. Even when an apparently toxic leader agrees to quit, it’s not until the Senate confirms a successor, which means employees could be stuck with him for another year. Hardly a recipe for improving an employee engagement index of 62 — down four points from last year.

At the Social Security Administration, a combination of workload, dated business processes and technical debt lead to overworked people and bad customer service. That’s according to Dustin Brown, who just joined SSA as chief operating officer. He left the Office of Management and Budget, where he’d spent 23 years.

In a forthcoming interview, Brown said the 2025 appropriation request will be crucial to improving staffing levels and technology support. The agency has requested an 8% boost. Officials want to improve basics like telephone query wait times and resolution rates. He said that two mornings a week, Commissioner Martin O’Malley holds “security stat” meetings to review performance metrics. O’Malley used that technique as governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore. Brown said detailed data and line employee input both inform decisions.

The ‘Commish’ named three priorities, Brown said: Reducing phone call wait times, speeding up disability claim and appeal processing, and fixing chronic problems with over- or underpaying benefits.

Brown called O’Malley a hero in the performance management community. By coincidence, that phrase came up in my interview with Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service.  Stier said this of the places-to-work scores:  “This is about better performing organizations and better mission achievement.”

Becoming a good place to work, then, requires a combination of leadership commitment to it. That and finding the technology and money resources to carry out performance goals. There’s no time to lose when, in some offices, attrition amounts to more than 20% a year.

As someone about to become a Social Security retirement benefits recipient myself, I’ll be watching to see how much the O’Malley-Brown leadership combo raises those scores.

As I covered extensively last year, the Bureau of Prisons had the lowest place-to-work index last year, 35.5. This year it’s a little better, but only to 38.1, putting the bureau again in the unfortunate spot as worst place to work in the federal government. It needs higher pay, more people who stay longer, and a vast improvement program for its crumbling facilities.

One federal observer who is intimately knowledgeable about BOP wondered why Director Colette Peters didn’t insist that the Biden Administration ask for the billions in overdue renovation with a threat to resign otherwise. It’s difficult enough to come to work and mingle closely with dangerous people. It’s another to do so in a leaky, moldy workplace.

In the past year, BOP has closed a couple of prisons, reassigned a couple to different security levels. It hasn’t solved its fundamental staffing and facilities problems.

The great NASA administrator Charles Bolden was determined to put NASA on the path to number one in the Best Places rankings. He still lives in the local area. I’ll bet if Peters rang him up, he’d share his strategy over a cup of coffee.

Nearly Useless Factoid 

By: Michele Sandiford 

In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed George N. Peek to head the first and second Export-Import Banks.

Source: EXIM: Export-Import Bank of the United States

The post Having best places to work means the government has worst places first appeared on Federal News Network.

Power is an all-pervasive force woven into all aspects of social life, which makes it difficult to study. But by using doctor’s and patients’ military rank differences, two researchers were able to measure how power dynamics in healthcare settings impact the quality of care patients receive.

After examining data from 1.5 million assignments in military emergency departments across the country, the researchers found that patients who outrank their doctors receive more effort and resources than patients of equal or lower rank. 

“Throughout the process, we saw that if the patient was higher rank than the physician, there was this sort of two to three, maybe 4% increase in total resources being used. That, no matter how we ran it, was consistent,” Stephen Schwab, an organizational health economist at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the study’s co-author, told Federal News Network.

The researchers also looked into how resource allocation occurs when doctors simultaneously care for both powerful and low-power patients. They hypothesized that all the patients would be better off in this scenario — if a physician gives more resources to one patient, it might spill over to all the patients they are caring for in an “order tests for one, order tests for all” type of approach. Another hypothesis was that high-power patients would get more resources without impacting other patients.

However, the study concluded that reallocating resources and effort came at the expense of lower-power patients. This reallocation of effort had negative effects on patient outcomes—low-power patients had a 3.4% greater likelihood of showing back up at the emergency department or being admitted to the hospital within the next 30 days. 

At the same time, high-power patients were 15% less likely to be admitted to the hospital after their emergency department visit.

“The powerful may unwittingly “steal” resources from less-powerful individuals,” Schwab and Manasvini Singh, a health and behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University and the study’s co-author, wrote. 

Race and gender also played a role in these power dynamics. 

While white doctors respond to powerful patients equally regardless of their race, Black physicians tend to treat their lower-power patients similarly but give “off-the-charts” treatment to high-power Black patients.

Schwab and Singh speculated that it is due to the fact that fewer Black individuals are in positions of military power, but the hypothesis is hard to prove.

When the researchers added gender dynamics, they found that, on average, doctors provide greater care for high-power than low-power patients of either sex.

But male doctors are a lot more responsive to patient power than female doctors.

Male physicians also give more resources and care to their female patients regardless of their power than to their male patients.

“We speculate that male physicians may provide more “kitchen-sink” type female care, e.g., pregnancy tests, pelvic exams, and other procedures,” Schwab and Singh wrote.

“But within this sample, we can certainly see that female physicians are giving their female high-power patients additional resources. Now, males also do the same. And for the males, it is actually significant — the female high-power patients get a lot more care and maybe double the difference with female physicians,” said Schwab.

The researchers also analyzed the patient’s retirement date to better understand whether patients get preferential treatment because of their status or because of their authority since patients maintain their status but lose authority after retirement. 

“The reason that we looked at retirements is we were truly trying to understand is this, ‘I am a colonel, you will do what I want you to do, sort of demanding,’ or is this a status thing,” said Schwab.

The study findings show that patients continue to receive preferential treatment for up to 5 years after they retire.

“We found that as suggestive evidence that this was really about status. It’s not about this command authority — you will do what I want you to do,” said Schwab.

Power imbalances persist in both military and civilian healthcare settings, Schwab said. It’s just easier to study power dynamics in military hospitals given the hierarchal structure of the military. 

“We show power to matter in the doctor-patient relationship, which, unlike other social contracts with power imbalances, often evades scrutiny because of a feature specific to medicine: the expectation that the physician is a perfectly altruistic agent for the patient and will thus be resistant to any distortionary effects of power,”  Schwab and Singh wrote.

Laura Nimmon with the University of British Columbia said Schwab and Singh’ discovery is of “serious concern to society at large.”

“These findings might be dismissed as distinct to the US military health care context because of the pronounced and ritualized power dynamics at play. However, Schwab and Singh point to egregious violations of the physician-patient contract also occurring in civilian settings,” Nimmon wrote.

The post A look at how power shapes care in military hospitals first appeared on Federal News Network.

Although GHC has been in the works for years — the final solicitation was issued in 2019 — implementation is only now beginning, because of a series of bid protests and technical challenges. HomeSafe, the eventual winner of the up-to-$17.9 billion contract, only began moving shipments via its subcontractors last month.

Tim Helenthal, the CEO of National Van Lines and a member of the new Movers for America group, said DoD’s established moving companies have been working for months with U.S. Transportation Command to resolve their concerns, but without any real success.

“Some of us, for a while, have said ‘Hey, there’s a train wreck that’s coming. And we’re getting closer and closer to the engine hitting us as we get closer to this implementation phase,” he said in an interview. “You’re starting to hear our concerns become more focused and get louder as that train approaches, and we’re seeing some some additional issues that we didn’t see before.”

As Federal News Network has previously reported, none of the large providers who currently handle military moves has agreed to participate in GHC. The biggest stumbling blocks are what they say are lower rates in the new program that would cause them to lose money on almost every military move, and a new requirement that those moves be governed by the Service Contract Act, which would dramatically change the way moving companies compensate their drivers by requiring them to be paid hourly wages.

“[The SCA] is a major problem for independent owner-operators,” said Scott Kelly, the president of Suddath Government Services, another large military mover and member of the coalition. “As we understand it today, through conversations with the Department of Labor and attorneys, those independent contractors would in effect have to become our employees, which is fiscally impossible. They don’t want to be employees. I think that clearly puts customer service at risk with absolutely no fallback plan, which is a huge problem.”

The new coalition is arguing that DoD should pause implementation of the contract, and that Congress should order the Government Accountability Office to conduct a comparative study of the current moving system against GHC.

One of the group’s first actions was to commission a third-party survey to help argue the point that customer satisfaction in the current system, known as DP3, is actually higher than what’s reflected in the data that’s collected by U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM), which administers the military moving system. Their point, essentially, is that there’s no urgent reason to move from the current system to the new one.

That survey, which included responses from 947 military families who have recently undergone moves, found that 90% of respondents were happy with how the companies handled their shipments, and 83% were happy with the timelineness of their move.

TRANSCOM measures things differently, but by its metrics, just 78 percent of military families were satisfied with their moves in 2023. Movers for America argues that’s because of a low response rate: only about 20 percent of military members respond to DoD’s official surveys.

“The people that are most likely to respond in any kind of a survey are the people that have the the worst moves,” Helenthal said. “There’s a naysayer bias problem with that. So the 15% of respondents are overrepresenting unhappy customers, and that would be true in any industry.”

TRANSCOM, which has been working for the last two years to refine its surveys and customer experience data, strongly disputes that idea. So far in 2024, the satisfaction rate has risen to 83% — up from last year’s 78%.

“I think what the data shows is that service members are calling it like it is,” Andy Dawson, the director of TRANSCOM’s Defense Personal Property Management Office told Federal News Network. “As of last week, our data shows we’ve moved 84,000 shipments. If 83% are satisfied, that’s a significant number of service members who are saying they received a good move experience. I think that shows these are not just people who are dissatisfied filling out the surveys.”

That said, in a system that moves 350,000 families each year, the difference between a 78% satisfaction rate and a 90% satisfaction rate can be enormous.

“Whether it’s 5%, 10% or 20% that aren’t satisfied, that equates to tens of thousands of service members each year that that are impacted,” Dawson said.

So TRANSCOM has been refining its data analytics since 2022, trying to gain more granularity on its understanding of how well the system is performing. Instead of one survey that’s sent to military members once their move is finished, they now get six different smaller surveys that try to measure, for example, how smoothly the process went at the start of their move, at the end of their move, and whether any of their belongings were damaged along the way.

Some of those data analytics are available via a publicly-available dashboard — and officials said more granular surveys will continue during the transition to GHC, so that TRANSCOM can measure the performance of the current system against the new one.

“We’re not going to go backwards from the amount of data we’re collecting now. Things might change slightly for improvement purposes, but they will receive essentially, the same surveys and the same survey questions,” a second TRANSCOM official said. “We might look at things differently, because the programs are not identical to each other, so things are going to look different here and there. But there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t use the old data and look at new data for comparison, trending and other analysis purposes.”

But comparing apples-to-apples is likely to prove extremely difficult for the foreseeable future, mainly because of scale issues.

HomeSafe announced a formal launch of the GHC program with a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Redlands, Calif. last month — heralding the first move under the new contract.

As of last week, only nine moves had been completed under the new contract. For now, HomeSafe and TRANSCOM are testing the new system with short-distance moves with the Army and Navy in a handful of locations, and both say military moves will gradually transition to GHC.

However, only one HomeSafe subcontractor, Joyce Van Lines — has been willing to identify itself as a participant in the new contract structure. That company conducted the first GHC move, from one location in the San Diego, Calif., area to another.

It remains to be seen whether other vendors will raise their hands to join the GHC project, and officials have not announced plans for anything beyond local moves in a handful of pilot locations. During the peak summer season, which begins this week, DoD only expects about 1% of its overall household goods volume to use the new moving contract. From there, it intends to start ramping up its use of GHC within the continental United States starting this September. International moves under the new contract aren’t likely to begin until September 2025 at the earliest.

The post Military movers urge DoD, Congress to pause household goods contract first appeared on Federal News Network.

Tony Boese likes to tell a story that epitomizes the reason why ASPIRE, an emerging initiative focused on training federal employees, is both a passion project and an opportunity to close long-standing gaps in workforce development.

Boese, the research programs manager and associate researcher in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Artificial Intelligence Institute, highlights the training saga of one person who had to take basically the same statistics course six different times.

“She had to take it twice in college as an undergraduate or graduate. Then, she also had to take it when she joined the Navy. Again, when she became a naval aviator. And again when she shifted jobs again to the Naval Postgraduate School. There’s no reason she should have ever needed to do that,” Boese said in an interview with Federal News Network. “There’s no real good system for [carrying forward your previous education] currently. You lose a lot of fidelity about what your training and experience was if you move agency-to-agency, particularly if you’re crossing the Defense Department to civilian duty line, and that leads people to have to waste their time and waste government time and dollars to be retrained.”

The wasting of time and effort is particularly frustrating when agencies are struggling to find and hire qualified employees in everything from cybersecurity to doctors and nurses to accountants. And then add to that the fact that currently, about 8.6% of the federal workforce is under age 30, according to the latest data from the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget. At the same time, more than 28% of the federal workforce is over age 55 — with the average age of a federal employee being 47 years old. The continuous need to hire, train and keep employees equipped for the future, the lack of standardization around training and education is detrimental to the government.

This is where ASPIRE, which stands for All Services Personal and Institutional Readiness Engine, can come in. This innovative approach to training and education can accomplish two major goals for agencies.

First, it can find potential employees who have an aptitude for data science or program management without focusing on degrees or certifications.

Second, ASPIRE can help agencies focus on ensuring their employees have the skill sets they need today and gives them a roadmap for the future.

“The general idea is a system that will help us identify gaps in current knowledge and readiness of employees and/or assess would be employees for their knowledge, given the specifics of their rate, role and agency,” Boese said. “Then once we understand what any gaps might be in the system, which is done through a computer adaptive assessment, then the gap analysis is done. Both of those use artificial intelligence (AI), and then it automatically populates an individualized learning pathway, which also uses AI, to help give that person remediation, or after remediation, it also supports people getting ready for the next position or just exploring curiosities.”

But what ASPIRE does, maybe more importantly, Boese said is try to deliver a good system for government to make sure that agencies don’t have any workforce skillset shortfalls, that employees are empowered for today and the future, and agencies can get the most out of every dollar in their training budget.

“The way we envision the system working in the primary functional process is as you take a computer adaptive assessment, that assessment is absolutely blind to you. All it knows is that you can successfully interact with the computer. So how that works is every question is generated based off your performance and past questions. It starts you in a middle level question and if you do well, the difficulty ramps up, and if you do poorly, the difficulty goes down. Most people will get 20 to 30 minutes of testing,” Boese said. “We don’t want to waste the time with people who don’t need to be tested, and we don’t want to make people who can’t pass the test suffer. It figures out, well, if you’re supposed to know A-B-C-D-E for your role based on the testing, and you know A-B-C, then it’s going to populate something that might have a little splash of those things just to keep fluid the educational experience, but it will mostly focus on D and E. You’ll get your lessons that may be focused on micro and Nano learning.”

He said the goal is to fill the gap or gaps in training as efficiently as possible, maybe in a few hours of “classroom” work versus 10, 20 or even 100s of hours.

The goal is to get the most out of every dollar spent on training, both in real terms or in time spent.

“Every hour of training multiplied across tens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers in the federal government multiplied by their salaries is a ton of money, and a ton of time off mission,” Boese said.

Carrying forward your knowledge

When NAII and its interagency partners more fully roll out ASPIRE, the goal is for each employee to receive an individualized learning plan, and have multiple ways to learn such as reading text, watching videos or even through AI-generated avatars.

“We do a test again to make sure you actually learned what you learned. I don’t think that anybody in the workforce is dishonest, but self-certification is not a standard on which we should rest our hats,” he said. “Then there’s badging and certification to help you carry forward and show others, ‘hey, look, I did this thing, I earned this thing.’”

That ability of an employee to carry what they learned forward to a new job or new agency is another key aspect of ASPIRE.

As Boese demonstrated with the example of the woman who took statistics six times in her career, having a mutually agreed upon system, set of learning standards and way to demonstrate competency would save time, money and frustrations.

“If we have a system like ASPIRE, where we are all tested in the same way, to the same level of rigor, taught on a mutually agreed upon body of information in a way that is agreed upon, in a system that we know is secure, and that has not been tampered with, and then we can have an output that says what you do or do not know,” he said. “That allows, for instance, somebody coming from DoD to VA, which is lots of people every year, you have a very high fidelity to say, ‘hey up, the Air Force wanted you to know, A through M, and the VA really only cares about A through G, but we’ve also got, you know, S, N and R down the line that we need you to learn. We can just say, ‘hey, look, all I need to do is spin up an S, N and R and then you’re ready to rock. And the VA can understand what you learned, which is a problem that maybe a lot of listeners might not know or think about.”

NAII is working with several agencies, including the Navy’s Naval Postgraduate School, the Air Force Research Lab, the Air Force Institute of Technology, NASA, the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services and several others to develop ASPIRE.

Moving out of beta stage

It’s currently in an alpha/beta mode with a few thousand users testing out the tools and approaches.

Boese said he envisions ASPIRE expanding this year to have tens or hundreds of thousands of users next fiscal year.

“We are starting with data science and AI because the National Artificial Intelligence Institute is the principal sponsor. Also, the original impetus for what put us on this road toward the system was the realization that medical practitioners and researchers were starting to use AI and that we had hired them because they were good doctors, not necessarily because they were good AI persons, and that obviously cropped out from there,” he said. “The Navy and Air Force were early joiners also wanted AI, data science and cybersecurity, while other parts of the Air Force are looking at a lot of electronic warfare and things like that. But the idea is that the system can and will teach certainly hard skills, coding, math and other stuff. But we’re also looking at research into soft skills to try to support potential partners like the Treasury Executive Institute, which is concerned about leadership, or leadership VA which is concerned about leadership management.”

Boese said ASPIRE is open to any agency or any federal employee who’s interested in participating. He said NAII also is looking for help to continue to develop the platform, whether money, people or other kinds of help.

“I think the big benefit is we don’t all need to maintain our own system. We don’t need to have separate licenses or even a shared license. It’s ours. We built it. We own it. The costs can be defrayed and can get very, very low over time because of that,” he said. “The fact also that the government owns it adds a great amount of security. We don’t have private sector or a third party that gets information about our workforce. It’s not just that we’re super secretive, but you could imagine if a third party system is getting continuous queries to teach certain things to certain people, it would not be very difficult for an adversary to reverse engineer where some gaps in readiness or function are or to deduce what we’re going to do next or to figure out a mission area. So it’s much better to have it government-owned inside the mote so that all the information is very tight and secure.”

Nearly Useless Factoid 

By: Michele Sandiford 

In 2023, California had the highest number of enrolled college students in the United States.

Source: Yahoo Finance

The post ASPIRE targets the waste in federal workforce training first appeared on Federal News Network.

According to Federal News Network’s recent survey, conducted by reporter Drew Friedman, a substantial number of respondents cited a lack of local lunch options as a reason they prefer maximum telework. They said lunch availability coupled with poor office design combine for a less-than-optimal office situation.

In the world of work, lunch looms as a big deal. In my own career, I’ve been lucky, having worked in small town and urban locations surrounded by great options. The Peterborough Diner, Nonie’s, Hunan Pagoda, Flash’s Cafeteria and Italia Deli live on in my fond memories. Although the days of a juicy hamburger and cup of coffee for $1.50 are likely over.

The presence of food options varies hugely by location, though. From published reports, major urban centers like Washington, D.C., San Francisco or St. Louis have lost many establishments. Even in these places, restaurant population varies by neighborhood, even by block. Worse are suburban office parks and isolated places like the Department of Homeland Security headquarters, where people deal with the one or two on-site delis or convenience stores, shlep in their cars or brown bag it.

Yet in the D.C. area, for instance, check out places like Hyattsville, Maryland or the DelRay section of Alexandria, Virginia that are out-of-the-way in a corporate office sense. They’re brimming with restaurants and sidewalk traffic.

One time many years ago, I visited Hewlett-Packard headquarters in Palo Alto, California. They showed me Bill Hewlett’s open-style cubicle/office. My eyes bugged out, though, at the cafeteria, a vast, multi-option food court essentially, where you could eat something different every day of the week. I’m guessing that’s long gone, as the legacy company has undergone round after round of breakups and mergers during the intervening years.

I suspect the lunch issue is proxy for the more generalized resistance to return-to-the-office among the cubicle class. No one has cracked the hard stone at the very center of the debate  — namely, how people conduct the interaction necessary for a well-functioning organization.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, said in a recent hearing that some agencies’ customer service has suffered. He said congressional staff can’t get people on the phone at IRS or the Department of Veterans Affairs because they’re teleworking. If that’s the case, agencies can solve that easily. Desk phones can ring through to cells. They can —and many have — provision public-facing staff with the screens they need to work effectively. This is common in industry. In-person meetings with citizens must, of course, take place in federal offices.

Relationships and collaboration among people in your own agency presents the tougher challenge. A few points:

• People collaborate when they have to regardless of location. Forty-five years ago I worked on a magazine in Boston with editors in New York, Washington, Chicago and Anaheim, California. The sales staff lived in their territories, and would come in for sales meetings from about eight distant locations. Need I say this was before PCs, email and cell phones? We collaborated, and so did the rest of the world. The main staff, though, came to a downtown office five days a week. Chatter among staff members on a million daily details never ceased. I once got youthfully wrathful about something a corporate flack did or said, and slammed down the five-button, dial telephone receiver. Someone in the next office yelled, “Temin’s bangin’ the Bakelite!” Unfortunately, you can’t terminate a call on an iPhone with extreme prejudice.
• Forcing so-called core work days or collaboration days would be just that — forced. People collaborate on the spot for a specific reason, or they come together formally when the organization has a need to get people together. It must set a specific agenda and expected outcomes for gatherings to do anything worthwhile.
• Government is at a disadvantage relative to industry when it comes to meetings. On the private side, bosses can expense sandwich and brownie platters with Dr. Brown’s diet soda. That brings the added bonus of hefty leftovers, which attract a streaming inflow of scavengers. No waste. Government meetings seem more spartan, bring-your-own affairs.
• An old saw among speech givers is that, at a given moment, a third of the audience listens, a third sleeps, and a third thinks of sexual fantasies. Then came BlackBerries and smart phones. On Zoom or Teams, everybody is doing Lord-knows-what. Online or in person, establish a darn good reason for any meeting, keep it short, end it ruthlessly.

And leave time for a long lunch break.

Nearly Useless Factoid 

By: Michele Sandiford 

The state where workers earn the highest median annual wage is Massachusetts, where the median income as of 2023 is about $60,690.

Source: CNBC.com

The post 80%, maybe 100%, of life is showing up…for lunch. first appeared on Federal News Network.

President Joe Biden is calling for an AI talent surge across the federal government. And by the numbers, prospective hires are showing interest in the jobs agencies are trying to fill.

New data from the White House shows applications for AI and AI-enabling roles across the federal government have more than doubled between January and March 2024, compared to the same period in recent years.

A White House-led, interagency AI and Tech Talent Task Force, in a report released Monday, said agencies have hired over 150 AI experts, and are on track to hire hundreds more by the end of this summer.

The task force said 94 AI hires are expected to join government service through tech talent programs — including the U.S. Digital Corps, the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, and the U.S. Digital Service — by this summer.

“The message is clear: the public is ready and motivated to join the federal government to work on AI priorities,” the task force wrote in its report.

The report shows agencies are expected to bring on at least 500 AI hires between now and the end of fiscal 2025. That doesn’t include the 2,500 AI hires the Defense Department is looking to make this year, and the more than 9,000 new hires it plans on making next year.

Since Biden’s executive order on AI in government last fall, over 15 agencies have onboarded at least one new AI or AI-enabling employee.

“AI talent joining the government will be — and have already started — delivering on our AI agenda,” the task force wrote. “These new federal employees have written policy for the safe and trustworthy use of AI in government, and they are informing efforts to use AI to improve electrical grid resilience and to expedite permitting. They will be ensuring powerful AI models are safe for the public and working with our international partners to align our AI efforts across the world.”

Federal, state and local government agencies, since last year, have held several “Tech to Gov” virtual hiring fairs, with the goal of getting private-sector tech workers interested in public-service careers.

After one of these hiring fairs last fall, 32 federal agencies made about 100 new hires. More than 4,500 prospective applicants participated in the virtual job fair.

Agencies held another Tech to Gov job fair on April 18, with a focus on hiring AI experts. About 800 prospective applicants signed up for the job fair.

“Tech to Gov events enable agencies to take advantage of collective recruitment and branding power to hire more effectively, efficiently, and from a higher quality technical talent pool,” the task force wrote.

The Office of Personnel Management also released a slew of new policies for agencies to follow when hiring AI professionals. Among the documents, OPM released new skill-based hiring guidance for federal AI positions.

“The model empowers agencies to shift towards a skills-centric paradigm that emphasizes practical skills over educational pedigrees or past titles and prioritizes talent with AI proficiencies tailored to organizational objectives,” OPM wrote. “For new or rapidly evolving fields, such as those associated with AI, data, and technology, it is crucial that agencies adopt this skills-based hiring approach.

The Biden administration on Monday also announced plans to shift the federal government’s primary IT job series — about 100,000 total jobs —away from relying on college degree requirements to “skills-based hiring” over the next year.

OPM’s guidance also includes a competency model to help agency human resources offices identify qualified candidates for AI positions. OPM has identified more than 40 general competencies and 14 technical competencies that are important to perform AI work.

In addition, OPM also released guidance on how agencies should classify federal AI positions, and best practices to recruit, hire and retain AI experts. OPM finds AI work covers nearly 30 federal occupational series.

OPM is also giving federal employees guidance on how to use generative AI in the workplace, and what to avoid when using this emerging technology.

The White House AI task force, in a pulse survey of more than 160 federal employees at 36 agencies, found that more than half of the respondents said they did not have access to, or were not aware of, generative AI tools for use at their agencies.

About half of respondents also said they did not have access to the data sets, software, or resources needed to build, test or audit AI, and that there was no clear process for requesting those resources.

The White House’s U.S. Digital Service, in particular, has seen a surge in job applications. The AI task force’s report finds that USDS has seen a more than 2,000% increase in job applications for AI-related positions.

USDS Director Mina Hsing told prospective hires at the April 18 Tech to Gov hiring fair that a job in public-sector IT gives tech workers a unique opportunity to tackle projects that impact millions of Americans.

“I can sincerely say that working in the federal government here is one of the most challenging, but incredibly rewarding and fun things that I have ever done,” Hsing said. “It is just an incredible opportunity to serve your country, but also to do work that really matters and is incredibly important for people, while also bringing your rare set of skills to an environment that desperately needs them.”

USDS, over the past 10 years, has worked with about 30 agencies on hundreds of projects.

Ben Buchanan, White House special advisor for AI, said Biden made the federal workforce a particular focus in his recent AI executive order.

“When the president signed that executive order, one of the things he asked the most about as he was going through it was its provisions about talent, and making sure that we could get the people into the federal government to do this work,” Buchanan said.

The Department of Homeland Security is looking to replicate the U.S. Digital Service model. DHS recently stood up an AI Corps, and is looking to bring on 50 AI experts who will help lead AI projects across the department and its component agencies.

Christopher Kraft, deputy chief technology officer for emerging technology and AI, said DHS is giving its workforce the opportunity to experiment with AI tools, including generative AI tools like ChatGPT.

“It’s really going to help DHS continue to evolve and deliver leading-edge artificial intelligence solutions. And this is where we need experts like many of you to help us and come join our team,” Kraft said.

Robin Carnahan, the administrator of the General Services Administration, said AI will help agencies deliver public-facing benefits and services more quickly. But first, agencies need the right talent to get this work done.

“We need your talent. We need your innovative ideas, whether it’s AI automation that simplifies repetitive tasks and processes, better design and security, or better integration with legacy systems. We need folks just like you to make sure government effectively delivers for our people,” she said.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By: Derace Lauderdale

By 2025, there will be 100 million AI workers globally in the industry.

Source: thesocialshepherd

The post White House looks to add 500 AI experts to federal workforce by 2025 first appeared on Federal News Network.

That’s what the government — which still operates a modified version of the Rural Electrification Administration — might do.

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, by statute, sunsets a year from September 2025, more than five years after onset of the pandemic itself. This seems logical on first glance. What will be left to oversee years after the trillions have drained away? The sunset model has precedent in the special inspector general operations for Iraq and Afghanistan.

The PRAC, though, received specific funding to construct a data analytics application that uses modern techniques to turn up fraud and abuse.  Congress passed the $2.1 trillion Cares Act in 2020 and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in 2021. Sadly, Congress funded the $40 million PRAC analytic platform in 2021. To borrow from Mark Twain, hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent claims ran away before oversight got its boots on. If the PRAC goes, what happens to the tool?

The potential loss of this tool means a monumental amount of work done by employees of the PRAC. I write about it here because somehow, it feels like a colossal waste of effort. On the practical side, agencies lose the future utility of a way of cutting improper payments. On the human side, it somehow disrespects earnest work to stem a terrible waste of money.

As we’ve reported, the PRAC staff itself early on wished it had an earlier analytic tool. The capability built by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board disappeared when the sun set on that storied agency in 2015. Note that Horowitz and others at the time urged Congress to preserve it. The request fell on deaf ears. The ill-named RAT oversaw spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It was as if the Navy tossed its guns overboard after a battle.

For more than a year, federal oversight officials have urged Congress to preserve the capabilities of the PRAC . Champions include, not surprisingly, PRAC Chairman Michael Horowitz and Comptroller General Gene Dodaro. Now a Senate bill to do just that, from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has bipartisan backing. Horowitz, who is also inspector general of the Justice Department, has publicly vocalized support for the bill. He argues that the program-agnostic application would help IGs with whatever channel of spending they wish to investigate.

Horowitz envisions the PRAC converting into a sort of service bureau for the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. Its capabilities and analytics staff would remain available for the inspectors general. It would even abet future prosecutions of pandemic fraud.

More than a tool, the PRAC built what it calls the PACE, its analytic center of excellence. To some degree it may look like bureaucratic self-preservation in wanting the software and the people together. That, too, has precedent. But Congress should look at it on a cost-benefit basis. If each million dollars to operate the PACE results in $10 million in fraud recovery, or $100 million in fraud prevention, then why close it?

Prevention most matters to overseers. It should also matter the most to program managers. Good gosh, they must have sensed how many Payroll Protection Plan, low interest loan, or emergency assistance funds dollars would go into the ether, given the overriding imperative to push the money out as fast as possible. That’s pretty much a guaranteed recipe for waste, fraud and abuse. It’s like building a car to go somewhere fast and hoping to add the brakes later.

The heartbreaking extent of pandemic relief fraud will probably never be known. In round figures the Congress appropriated $5 trillion. Charitably, $1 trillion went to false and fraudulent claims. That’s my estimate. Horowitz laments that detect-prosecute-claw back activities can at best recover 10% of the fraud, however much did occur. If a trillion, well then a hundred billion dollars isn’t nothing, but it’s not like preventing a $1 trillion loss in the first place, or maybe $900 billion of it. Or Congress appropriating only $4 trillion in the first place. Imagine that.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By: Michele Sandiford

People reported losing $10 billion to scams in 2023. That’s $1 billion more than 2022 and the highest ever in losses reported to the FTC.

Source: Federal Trade Commission

The post Eternal question: What to keep, what to toss out first appeared on Federal News Network.

It’s been a year since the Biden administration first called for more frequent, “meaningful” in-person work at agencies. In that time, initial uncertainties over whether a return-to-office would really happen have been replaced with a bigger burning question for federal employees: Why?

Why do feds have to wake up earlier, commute to work and sit at a desk all day? Why is the Biden administration trying to fix something that many don’t believe is broken in the first place? And why aren’t federal leaders’ rationales for returning to the office lining up with many feds’ actual experiences?

At first, many employees wondered if the Office of Management and Budget’s April 2023 memo meant they’d have to work in the office more (as it turns out, at many agencies, that is what happened). But now after months of return-to-office plans coming to life, feds’ questions are turning much more to the long term.

Reasons for federal return-to-office unclear to many

In early April, Federal News Network conducted a survey of current federal employees to gauge their perspectives on recent return-to-office changes at their agencies. Within a week, we received 6,338 responses.

Of the survey respondents, about 30% said they work entirely remotely, 6% work entirely in-person and 64% were working on a hybrid schedule — a mix of in-person work and telework.

Over half of employees said senior leadership at their agency had not clearly explained the purpose of returning to the office. More than a third were in strong disagreement.

Alongside return-to-office announcements, many agencies sent messages to their employees, saying they believed increasing in-office work would lead to stronger collaboration, productivity, efficiency, culture, trust and interpersonal connections.

But in practice, whether feds have been working in the office more often for just a couple weeks, a couple months, maybe longer — or even if their return-to-office plans are still undetermined — more than two-thirds of survey respondents agreed that in-office work accomplishes the reverse: It makes them less productive.

Some feds who took the survey pointed to a disconnect between the productive, flexible experiences they’ve described while teleworking, versus what their agency leadership was promoting about the value of in-office work — they said it doesn’t line up.

“We proved how beneficial and productive a modern telework environment can be,” one survey respondent wrote. “Why would I want to go back to the ‘old way’ of doing things that is obviously a relic of the past?”

Expectations vs. reality of in-office work

The April 2023 memo from OMB first outlined the expectations for agencies to increase meaningful in-person work. In other words, OMB said, that means in-office work that’s “purposeful, well-planned and optimized for in-person collaboration.”

“Planning should recognize that some operating units have improved performance while using workplace flexibilities, while also optimizing in-person work and strong, sustainable organization health and culture,” OMB wrote in the 2023 memo.

But many federal employees said OMB’s expectations aren’t aligning with the realities of working in the office.

“Most spend the day in their offices participating in meetings in ‘Zoom’ meetings which they could just as easily do from home,” one survey respondent wrote. “I’m not sure what, if anything, is being gained by those workers coming into the office.”

Many said they felt like coming into the office served little purpose. In the view of some respondents, it was simply a way for agency leaders to fulfill expectations from the administration.

For many respondents, coming into the office has led to little difference in collaboration — and has even been a hindrance for some. Disruptions from coworkers and exhaustion from long commutes contribute negatively to employees’ productivity.

“Working in the office before the pandemic was draining due to commuting [and] prepping for going into the office,” one respondent said. “During the pandemic, employees got the work done and were productive. Requiring in-person work now is arbitrary and driven by factors other than productivity [or] providing good work-life balance.”

Efforts to boost collaboration falling short

Many agencies have implemented what are commonly called “core collaboration days,” in other words aligning employees’ schedules so they’ll be working together in person on the same days. The idea is to foster better collaboration, whether that’s through work-related activities or just getting to know colleagues better on a personal level.

Some respondents agreed that in-person work was in fact better when there were planned meetings or activities for coworkers to collaborate on, and when employees coordinated their days in the office.

But at the same time, many employees said core collaboration days aren’t making as much of an impact as agencies had initially hoped for. Survey responses were overwhelmingly neutral on the effects core collaboration days have on work-related tasks, or interpersonal relationships with coworkers.

Some respondents noted that bonding among coworkers could happen naturally, and didn’t see a need for specific time dedicated to the effort.

Other views on core collaboration days leaned more negative. More than 40% of respondents said these days are adversely affecting staff morale. About half of respondents said core collaboration days actually make them less productive.

“I spend a lot of time chatting and socializing instead of working,” one respondent said. “We spend a lot of time complaining about why we are in the office and how out of touch management is.”

On top of that, some respondents said their agencies’ return-to-office plans aren’t accounting for much collaboration at all.

“We are still staggering days, not everybody is in [at the same time],” one respondent wrote. “The support services aren’t there — no cafes, no gyms. We sit next to each other and log into the same Teams meetings.”

Another respondent wrote, “I went in once for an ‘all-in’ day, and senior management had set up coffee and donuts in one of the conference rooms for everyone. I went in and said hi to the three other people there. We truly had nothing more to talk about, so I left. I didn’t even get coffee or a donut.”

Return-to-office adversely affects views of leadership

Return-to-office announcements and changes are also impacting federal employees’ opinions of senior leadership, and their agencies overall.

While about 49% said changes to in-person work had no effect on their views of agency senior leaders, another roughly 47% said they now feel more negatively about senior leaders after return-to-office announcements. Less than 5% said in-person work made them feel more positively about senior leadership.

It’s also clear that feds place more direct responsibility on senior leaders for return-to-office changes. In the survey, close to three-quarters of feds said return-to-office changes didn’t impact their views of immediate supervisors or managers. Just 22% said the changes had a negative impact on their views of supervisors.

Additionally, in contrast with the language of the OMB memo, many feds believe returning to the office has underlying ulterior motives. A majority of survey respondents said they believe the return-to-office push is either politically motivated, a response to concerns from Congress, an effort to revitalize local economies — or some combination of those factors.

Few respondents said they saw the return-to-office push as an administrative effort to improve customer experience or address collaboration challenges among federal employees.

“There is a consistent swing between heavy encouragement to return to the office and assurance that telework flexibility will remain in place,” one respondent wrote. “The goal posts seem to be consistently moved in terms of management’s expectations, and it has had a resultant and unsurprising reduction in our trust in management to uphold promises or commitments regarding work schedules that take our home-life balance into account.”

Another respondent wrote, “I think the policy needs to be more flexible, meaning that it actually gives individuals a say in the matter. If someone wishes to work in-person, then allow them to report to the office. However, if someone’s work can be done completely remote and the person wishes to work remotely, then allow the individual to do so, especially if there is no issue with the person’s productivity.”

Nearly Useless Factoid

By: Derace Lauderdale

71% of remote workers said remote work helps balance their work and personal life.

Source: Forbes

The post Survey: Feds question the ‘why’ behind return-to-office push first appeared on Federal News Network.

We pilot our lives through many stages. I say this as prelude to telling you that I’ve started the glide path to my own retirement after what will have been 17 years at FNN, 32 years covering federal matters in one medium or another, and 47 years of professional work. Readers, listeners and FNN colleagues will be stuck with me for one more year, though, because I don’t like to leave things to the last minute.

Between now and then, columns on retirement and financial matters will continue to focus on federal employees. No weekly diary about me, but maybe an occasional anecdote and the understanding that in certain respects, I’m sort of psychologically aligned with those who are also headed towards retirement.

I’ll say this: The retirement decision brings decidedly mixed emotions.

You feel positive anticipation about a change of pace even, as in my case, you don’t plan to check completely out of your field but just want to dial back the day-to-day grind. Few, even in our building, quite know the energy and persistence it takes me and my producers to get the Federal Drive show finished and ready five days a week, year after year. I’m lucky in that I love the work and operate in a highly supportive organization. I love that moment when, arriving in the FNN garage, I pull off my motorcycle helmet and march upstairs to my studio and dig in to the day’s tasks — multiple and varied.

But your body and psyche somehow get together to tell you when it’s time; that perhaps your capacity for replenishing your daily energy expenditure isn’t quite as resilient as it was a year or five years ago. You want to leave the parade while you’re still hitting your stride.

You feel worry about money. Will Social Security, my union pension, and what my wife and I have accumulated after decades together carry us through? If I had a Thrift Saving Plan account, I’d be one of those TSP Millionaires we write about from time to time. Our financial planner keeps admonishing us not to worry. But I worry.

You feel satisfaction in what you’ve accomplished, tinctured with regret at opportunities not taken or pursued.

You feel uncertainty about your identity. This may be the most potent producer of trepidation about retiring. For so many of us, work is nearly indistinguishable from identity, sense of self and self-worth. I plan to do things in the federal market and stay involved in a limited way. The key to happiness in this mode is maintaining realism and a healthy perspective.

The happy retirees I know find fulfillment in things they now have the time to pursue. My friend and regular Federal Drive guest Bob Tobias gave me a great example just the other day. Bob had a significant career — first president of the National Treasury Employees Union, founder of the Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund, long-time professor in the Key Executive Leadership Program at American University, among other things.

Every morning, in his home in a rural area of Maryland, Bob spends three hours reading and working at a fairly recent passion: writing poetry and trying to get it published. He also spends time with a group working to enact a legislative ban on Schedule F — the civil service reform tried by the Trump administration, not the IRS tax form.

I know retired feds who chair boards of local charities, who pursue art, and who teach underprivileged kids. They’re not melting into anonymity, but rather acquiring a new identity.

This isn’t good bye. Like I said, I’ll be around for another year. I hope you’ll feel free to send me a note with your thoughts on retirement planning and dealing with the money, healthcare and life issues you’re dealing with.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By: Derace Lauderdale

Among the top 1% of individuals, those between 65 and 69 years saved, on average, nearly $2.7 million for retirement.

Source: RetireGuide

The post Another column on retirement. This time, I’m joining you first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Government Accountability Office estimated that there were about 540,000 civilian spouses of active duty service members in 2021. About 90% of those spouses are women.

Approximately half of those spouses were employed in 2021 and about a third of them worked part-time.

Military spouses working part-time told the watchdog they were underpaid or overqualified for their jobs, not earning retirement benefits, and lacked career advancement opportunities. While civilian workers often encounter similar difficulties — frequent moves exacerbate employment challenges for military spouses. 

“[Military spouse employment] has been a top issue for military families since the 2009 survey. And we’ve seen it year over year as this being one of the primary challenges that military families are facing — challenges in spouses being able to stay employed,” Jessica Strong, the senior director of applied research, told Federal News Network. 

“When military service members are moved and relocated from place to place in the course of their military service, often that means that spouses have to leave a job behind that they worked hard for or have to transfer their professional license to a new duty station or to a new state. Or even move overseas, where they have fewer opportunities for employment. We have highlighted that as a primary concern and how it impacts military families’ likelihood to stay in service or to recommend military service to the next generation.” 

Spouse employment was one of several issues lawmakers took to heart when they addressed the quality of life panel last year. After months of work, the panel’s final recommendations to better support spouses are out.

In 2022, the Defense Department authorized $5 million in total for a three-year pilot program to provide fellowship opportunities for military spouses. The program has proven to be successful — last year, 422 fellows participated in the pilot program, exceeding the one-year goal of enrolling 400 fellows. About 85% of those fellows secured a job with an average salary of $65,000 and above. In January, over 100 military spouses enrolled in the program and of the 23 spouses who have already completed their fellowships — all of them found permanent employment.

As Congress ramps up its defense authorization work this month, the panel recommends that lawmakers permanently authorize the pilot program to continue facilitating spouse fellowship opportunities.

Additionally, the panel wants the Defense Department to expand childcare access for military spouses looking for a job. 

Military spouses seeking employment have to verify their employment status every 30 days once their child is enrolled in a childcare program. Unless an extension is granted, their child can be removed from the program after 90 days of unemployment.

The panel says eligibility for child care programs should be expanded from 90 days to 180 days without having to obtain authorization from an installation commander. 

Transferring professional licenses has long been a challenge for military spouses. In 2020, lawmakers authorized the Defense Department to work with the Council of State Governments to reduce the relicensing burden spouses face when relocating to a different state. 

There are currently seven agreements that are up for consideration by state legislatures in 2024 — massage therapy compact, school psychologist compact, social work compact, cosmetology compact, dietitians compact, dentists and dental hygienists compact and interstate teacher mobility compact.

As of now, the Defense Department’s authority to enter into a cooperative agreement with the Council of State Governments expires in September. The panel recommends that the 2025 defense bill gives the DoD permanent authority to work with the council to help more spouses navigate different licensing requirements when they move.

“I could tell you countless stories that we heard from the countless people who came in front of our working group about why all of this is so important,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) said during a press conference last week. 

2025 costs complications

The Pentagon’s fiscal 2025 proposed budget is only 1% higher than this year’s budget request, which could result in reduced spending on a wide range of programs. Lawmakers, however, vowed to get all of the final report’s recommendations into the 2025 defense policy bill.

“Every year we have struggled with defense spending. This year is no different. But we’re going to at a minimum have an $895 billion bill, we’re going to find the room in that bill to do this. But yes, we’re going to have complications. I’m not going to argue that we won’t, but this is because a whole spectrum of threats and platforms and issues. But this is going to be done,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.).

Nearly Useless Factoid

By: Derace Lauderdale

Underemployment affects 31.6% of military spouses, many of whom desire full-time positions.

Source: U.S. VeteransMagazine 

The post Lawmakers expanding military spouse employment programs first appeared on Federal News Network.