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The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) awarded two early-career employees – Jessica Lillo of the Office of Nuclear Material Removal and Kyle Fowler (Bush, Class of 2015) of the Domestic Uranium Enrichment Program – with the 2019 Linton F. Brooks Medal for Dedication to Public Service this month in a ceremony at DOE Headquarters.

This annual award recognizes NNSA employees with less than five years of federal experience whose actions and deeds exemplify former NNSA Administrator and Ambassador Linton Brooks’ spirit of commitment and achievement.

In his remarks, Ambassador Brooks praised Lillo and Fowler, and emphasized the strong qualities of their generation –early-career professionals in the Nuclear Security Enterprise. “Men my age are supposed to be grumpy about ‘the young’ and how they don’t measure up to what we were ‘when we were their age,’ ” Brooks said. “I’ve spent a lot of time with early-career professionals since leaving government and that’s pretty much nonsense. … Ronald Reagan often said that America’s best days are ahead of us. The more time I spend with early career professionals, the more I am certain that he was right.”

…

Fowler’s work has substantially improved NNSA’s strategy and readiness to meet its enriched uranium requirements, covering both technical and policy options to find a lasting solution. He and his team – part of the Office of Defense Programs – took the lead in developing an analysis of alternatives amid large staff turnover. He was recognized for his guidance of other colleagues during this process and commitment to embracing this responsibility and challenges.

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A recent National Association of State Chief Administrators report concludes that “as the public and private sectors battle for talent, government is falling too far behind in preparing for the workforce of the future.” One statistic from the NASCA report suggests that the public sector is already well along the way to losing that battle: Since 2013, job applications submitted to state agencies have declined by 24 percent.

The aging government workforce makes the challenge particularly acute for government. According to the most recent data, 30.9 percent of the public-sector workforce (excluding law enforcement and other public-safety occupations) is age 55 or older, compared to 23.1 percent in the private-sector workforce.

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The nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service announced in late May the 2019 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal (Sammies) finalists – 26 federal employees and teams from more than 20 federal agencies and 15 states as well as Washington, D.C. and Haiti.

The Sammies have earned a reputation as the premier awards program recognizing America’s best in government.

“Following the longest government shutdown in history, it’s imperative that we celebrate and recognize the important and critical work of our nation’s civil servants,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. “The 2019 Service to America Medalsshowcase our remarkable federal workforce who serve the public good and address many of the country’s greatest challenges.”

The 2019 finalists’ achievements include pioneering and perfecting a modeling program that predicts where people lost at sea will be found, cutting search and rescue times and saving thousands of lives; implementing facial recognition systems that simplify and fortify airport security; developing a way to quickly locate and assist chronic healthcare patients who are at risk of losing life-sustaining equipment due to widespread power outages; and uncovering and prosecuting the largest bribery and corruption scandal in the history of the U.S. Navy.

Other finalists include those who have revolutionized scientific research and our understanding of the long-term effects of concussions in veterans and athletes; transformed the historic Kennedy Space Center into a globally distinguished multiuser launch site for government and commercial space exploration; discovered six different genetic origins of kidney cancer and provided the foundation for the development of targeted therapies that have saved thousands of lives; and strengthened our nation’s defenses against nuclear and radioactive threats by developing performance standards and tests for detection systems that screen nearly 7 million cargo containers entering U.S. seaports each year.

Read more and vote for the People’s Choice award

Editor’s note: The following story first appeared on the Government Executive website. The Robertson Foundation is a proud partner of the Volcker Alliance’s Government-to-University Initiative.

In a research project last year, Carnegie Mellon University students used prescription drug data provided by the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Department of Human Services to create a model that could, with 78 percent accuracy, predict who was at a high risk of opioid abuse outside of pain clinics. Early detection allows clinicians to intervene before an addiction develops.

Other Carnegie Mellon students undertook a separate project, also using predictive data analysis, to help the Allegheny County fire department determine which buildings were at high risk of fires. Using data supplied by the fire department and other sources, students identified the top 56 buildings—out of 28,000 buildings in their data set—for priority inspections.

These projects are examples of how governments and universities can partner to solve real world problems, according to Associate Dean Jackie Speedy, at the Carnegie Mellon School of Public Policy and Management.

Similar partnerships can smooth the pathway into public service careers, added Scott Sellers, a leader in the Texas City Managers Association, which has assigned two seasoned “Managers in Residence” to 14 Texas universities to raise the profile of the profession and compete for the next generation of top talent. The effort has boosted collegiate membership in the association significantly.

Speedy and Sellers spoke at an event in Washington, D.C., hosted by the New York-based non-profit Volcker Alliance, which announced last week that it is launching two pioneering regional-level partnerships between government practitioners and universities. It says that these partnerships will respond to “high need areas for government: access to top talent, workforce preparedness, and support for applied research, predictive analytics, and program evaluation.” The two locations will be Austin, Texas, and Kansas City, Missouri.

The Volcker Alliance’s Government-to-University initiative is an idea along the same lines as a proposal announced by the White House Office of Management and Budget last summer. OMB proposed creating a Government Effectiveness Research (GEAR) Center that would be national in scope. It reiterated its commitment in the administration’s recently-released budget proposal for 2020, with the target of launching a national network by this fall.

The Alliance project, dubbed “G2U” for short, completed an exploratory phase in fall 2018. It convened a series of four exploratory design sessions to determine if there was a practical interest in government-to-university partnerships. It held sessions in Pittsburgh; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Kansas City; and Austin, Texas, attracting more than 200 participants ranging from university professors, career services leaders, deans, and students to government officials from federal, state, counties, cities, and towns.

Dustin Brown, a federal executive from OMB on sabbatical with the Alliance to participate in developing this approach, said that design session participants “found it exceedingly valuable to be together in the same room.” The Alliance found that participants in every site “emphatically endorsed the value of routine, structured regional collaboration between local, state, and federal government practitioners with universities’ leadership, faculties, and students. Public sector workforce recruitment and the alignment of research priorities rose to the top as the most productive topics for a regional group to tackle.”

In the coming months, the Alliance will partner with government and university leaders in Austin and Kansas City to establish two inaugural “G2U Regional Councils.” The Alliance will provide technical assistance support to each site, helping stakeholders develop a regional governance structure, identify priority projects, and enlist support from potential funders to foster local ownership and chart a course for sustainability over time. The Alliance hopes to expand to additional sites later this year.

At the launch event, Angela Evans, dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, observed that “this is a chance to do it,” that is, to create sustained relationships between universities and government. She compared the potential of the research network to something akin to the micro-task website Task Rabbit—bringing together talent with need.

Likewise, David Warm, executive director of the Kansas City-based Mid-America Regional Council, sees the role of G2U in Kansas City as both a hub and an intermediary. He sees G2U as an opportunity to broaden the pipeline of research and apply academic and private sector lessons to government in areas such as talent development and the use of data in decision-making.

Marking the one-year anniversary of the President’s Management Agenda to modernize and streamline the federal government, leaders from the executive office are steadfast in working toward several initiatives in workforce recruitment and acquisition processes, with further updates still to come.

“IT modernization is something that everyone knows is important. The technology is awful,” remarked Margaret Weichert, deputy director for management at OMB and acting director of OPM.

Technology is one of three drivers for bringing change in the federal government, as outlined in the PMA that was launched last year in Kansas City, Missouri. The other drivers are data and workforce.

One initiative is looking into the technology modernization fund to match IT funding with actual IT needs.

Those needs led the OPM to also look at the centers of excellence, “looking at how do we connect the dots around funding and the way technology projects actually work, which don’t fit neatly into one-year appropriation cycles and actually need more flexibility,” Weichert said at a National Academy of Public Administration panel in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.

Another initiative is to retool the workforce. Citing efforts to digitize paper-based processes across the departments of Labor, State and Homeland Security, Federal CIO Suzette Kent noted some challenges in doing so resided not just in the technology itself, but also in making sure personnel were adequately prepared to maintain and grow those tools.

“We needed the skill sets inside the agency to sustain those new technologies as we roll them out to make best use of what we can do with the cloud,” said Kent, in reference to email modernization efforts across the Defense Department.

In cybersecurity specifically, it takes getting more creative to recruit that expertise, said Kent. But it’s not easy. Currently, there are no job codes for those workers, Kent said, especially as the fast-pace movement of the technology industry is very often where those types of emerging roles will arise.

Procurement contracts will also come into focus, said Weichert, adding that procurement professionals should be empowered to use technology through data to save more money. Weichert said her team is working on a modernization program for acquisition, updates for which will be discussed over the next year.

In the next couple months, there will also be announcements regarding a competition to bring academia and the private sector to apply lessons learned to government. Called the Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center, such a partnership would allow government agencies to find new ways to test and learn technologies at a faster pace.

The General Services Administration is looking into various technologies such as robotics processing automation to get 24 multiple award schedules consolidated into one, in an effort to modernization federal acquisition, noted the agency’s Administrator Emily Murphy.

“The broad scale use of automated technology should be something that is standard and common in all agencies, not an experiment,” added Kent.

In the next several months, further information about the executive office’s proposal to integrate OPM’s functions into GSA and other agencies is also expected. Under the proposal, some provisions of which would still need Congressional approval, administrative services like human resources and IT would be done through GSA acting as a shared-service provider, Weichert said.

Editor’s note: The following first appeared on the IBM Center for The Business of Government website on February 4, 2019.

Last week marked the final installment in the IBM Center’s multipart series outlining key findings from our recent book, Government For The Future:  Reflection and Vision for Tomorrow’s Leaders.  In developing this book, we set out to offer a set of scenarios for how government could improve over the next 20 years, informed by lessons learned about government reform in the last two decades – lessons that the IBM Center has written about during our own 20-year journey since 1998, through some 350 reports and over 500 interviews with leaders.

At the outset of this initiative, we noted the positive contribution of government that recent times have shown to be of great import to the health of nations in the 21st century.

At any given moment in time, governments in the United States and around the globe are carrying out key missions in service of their citizens, learning from and engaging with partners in other sectors, and acting as cost-effective stewards of public resources. The countless positive daily actions of government leaders go largely unrecognized amidst a constant focus on the highly visible but far smaller set of challenges and problems faced by the public sector. However, stepping back to view progress over a span of decades reveals evidence of the sum total of this continuous evolution in government management—as well as providing perspective on the future of public service.   It is from this longer-term perspective about the performance and potential for government that the IBM Center for The Business of Government wrote the book.

Over the past several months, our many discussions around Government For The Future with government leaders and stakeholders have reinforced the view that an effective public sector can work with academic, industry, and non-profit innovators to drive long term improvement in areas ranging from technology to workforce development.  The importance of this long view is consistent with such recent initiatives as OMB’s Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center and the National Academy of Public Administration’s Grand Challenges in Public Administration.  The Center looks forward to continued partnerships with agencies and the good government community — such as our work with the Partnership for Public Service that builds on the book’s consideration of the future of artificial intelligence — that highlight how cross-sector collaboration can drive progress toward a future characterized by impacts across multiple domains, notably:

  • Citizens will drive government services and performance.
  • Government delivery will be carried out by multi-organizational networks.
  • Technology platforms will enable integration of new innovation.
  • Volunteers will support government activity.
  • Data will drive progress.

We remain grateful for the contributions of the co-authors and reviewers of Government For The Future.  Their insights enabled the shaping of a book that has been the subject of multiple articles and interviews, and continues to be leveraged as a teaching resource in public management schools and an informative briefing resource for government agencies.  The book is entering a second printing, available at Roman & Littlefield.

We welcome continued dialogue on how best to help government move forward, informed by experience of the many leaders whose activities provide a rich repository of lessons learned and effective practices.

Due to the government shutdown, the deadline for nominations for the GW Trachtenberg School of Public Policy & Public Administration’s Arthur S. Flemming Awards has been extended to February 28th, 2019.  Learn more about the awards honoring outstanding public servants, and submit your nominations: https://tspppa.gwu.edu/arthur-s-flemming-awards

The deadline for proposals for 2019’s Social Equity Leadership Conference has been extended to February 15, 2019.

The 18th Annual Social Equity Leadership Conference (SELC) is co-sponsored by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and co-sponsored and hosted by the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University–Newark.

Reflecting the increasing polarization of society and the reality that achieving social equity continues to be one of the most vexing challenges facing the world today, the theme of this year’s conference is “Achieving Social Equity in Turbulent Times: A Grand Public Administration Challenge.” The three subthemes that constitute the tracks for the conference are:

Track 1: Identifying and changing policies and practices resulting in social inequities in government, non-profit organizations and the private sector

Track 2: Measuring and assessing social equity across policy areas

Track 3: Social equity challenges and solutions, globally

The SELC 2019 planning committee invites you to submit a proposal to the 2019 Social Equity Leadership Conference by February 15, 2019. The proposal abstract should be no longer than 200 words and should clearly state how the proposal fits into the subtheme selected. While we are interested in problem identification, we particularly encourage proposals with an action orientation, and from various areas of interest including racial, economic, education, geographical, and opportunity inequities. We are seeking conference participation from academics, practitioners, and students.

Learn more and submit a proposal

The National Academy of Public Administration is launching a new program—Grand Challenges in Public Administration—to identify and address the biggest challenges that government at all levels will face through the 2020s.

We seek input from everyone—including practitioners, academics, students, interest groups, and the general public—on WHAT government must do over the next decade and HOW it should do it.

Learn more at NAPA’s website

In 2018 RFG supported the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA) Diversity Initiative. APSIA launched its Diversity Forum series in 2017 to inspire students and young professionals — and those who counsel them — to pursue careers in international affairs. The series particularly focuses on students who are traditionally underrepresented in the field. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and many other executive branch agencies, as well as Congress and the judicial branch, have identified the need for greater diversity as critical to a strong federal workforce.

In September 2018 Foreign Affairs’ fifth annual Graduate School Fair was produced in partnership with the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA) and sponsored by RFG. The panel discussion was based on the lead package from the magazine’s July/August 2018 issue entitled “Which World Are We Living In?” The panelists presented their theories of the world (Realist, Liberal, Tribal, Marxist, Tech, or Warming), and asked the audience to pick their sides. The discussion was followed by the Graduate School Admission Fair featuring over two dozen of the most prestigious universities in international affairs and public policy.

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