Sometimes there’s actually good news from Capitol Hill. This time around it’s that a bill protecting federal workers who act in the public interest by reporting waste, fraud, or abuse is now the law of the land. It was just this past November [2012] when the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA, S. 743) finally navigated its way to passage. Not only did it pass. It was unanimously approved.

Hold your applause, though. Unanimous approval in 2012 followed fourteen years of debate. Fourteen years of procedural warfare would actually be a more accurate description of the saga.

Let’s put those fourteen years in context. Fourteen years is four years longer than it took the hero Odysseus to wend his way home after the wars. Fourteen years is twice as long as it took James Joyce to write his journey masterwork, Ulysses. And even though the whistleblower act didn’t have to battle sea monsters nor the entrapments of seduction, it did face other daunting obstacles before securing passage.

In fact, during four consecutive congressional sessions, the bill seemed poised to pass when last-minute, off-the-floor shenanigans scuttled the deal. During one infamous session, in the final hours of the final day of the 2009–2010 session, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle were stunned when an anonymous final-hour secret hold killed the bill. This was how the debacle was reported by the Government Accountability Project:

Earlier that month, the Senate had passed the . . . WPEA by unanimous consent. By midday, the legislation had also passed the House of Representatives, again by unanimous consent, with certain protections stripped. Headed back to the Senate, passage was expected to be merely a formality to a bill that was a decade in the making.

Instead, the legislation was sabotaged by one (or more) senator’s anonymous secret hold, a sinister tactic that allows for a senator to halt legislation from being voted on while remaining anonymous.

Who, you might ask, would oppose a common-sense bill that protects federal workers who just want to assure the honesty and efficiency of the day-to-day workings of our government? Look no further than inside the halls of bureaucracy themselves. According to Government Accountability Project Legal Director Tom Devine, “government managers at all levels made pleas and repeatedly blocked the bill through procedural sabotage.”

The shock and anger at the secret hold was so intense that NPR’s “On the Media” and the Government Accountability Project together launched the “Blow the Whistle Project.” Harnessing the power of what progressive historian Howard Zinn called “small acts” rather than “grand, heroic actions,” individual listeners of three hundred public radio stations across the country called their senators to ask them if they were responsible for the secret hold. In the end, through basic, grassroots organizing and committed individuals taking a few minutes to make phone calls, the project was able to narrow down the search to two senators—Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Jon Kyl (R-Arizona)—who might have been responsible for the secret hold.

In the end, the more responsible urges of our elected officials prevailed. What this means is that today, the protections of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act are helping federal employees breathe a bit easier, knowing that if they see something they can say something—without fear of punishment or censure. And when our federal workers—who work for us after all—are able to fulfill the obligations of their jobs without fear, we all benefit.

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Are government workers overpaid? According to many observers, the notion that government workers are living high on the hog is a myth [as reported recently by Madonna Gauding on Occasional Planet].

President Obama’s recent freeze on federal workers’ salaries was aimed, ostensibly, at trimming government spending. But the net effect of that move—which addresses a minuscule fraction of government expenditures and is seen as misguided by a chorus of critics—has been to add credibility to the prevailing propaganda that characterizes government workers as earning more than their fair share.

If you agree with George Lakoff—that facts don’t matter in today’s political climate—stop reading here.

But if you’re a fan of documentation, a recent post by Congress.org will be of interest. Congress.org has taken a hard look at federal employees’ salaries, and concludes: “How well do the best-paid federal employees do? Pretty well, compared to the rest of us, but still far below the millions received by the best-paid workers in the private sector.”

The salaries for the top five jobs range from about $199,000 to the mid-$200,000s. [Example: the job listed as the second highest paying among non-elected positions is  Chief Medical Officer, Department of Veterans Affairs, with a salary of: $220,382.] Considering the responsibilities that go with that job and the other top four, the salaries—while an enviable chunk o’change for most Americans—aren’t that generous, compared to what might be expected in the corporate world.  Click on the link, and decide for  yourself. If you’d like to do more research, you can go to the original source, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management [OPM], where you can rummage through 2010 Pay Tables for Executive and Senior Level Employees.

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Getting hired by the federal government can be a Kafka-esque experience, say many who, in the past, have attempted to find their way through the byzantine obstacle course leading up to, “You’re hired.” But that nightmare may be about to end, as the Obama administration institutes a massive revision of federal hiring policies. Announced to great fanfare in mid-May, the new procedures aim to simplify job applications, reduce the time frame between application and hiring, and ensure that the right person gets the right job.  All of these ideas make especially good sense now, of course, because America’s employment situation is dire, and because the federal government offers many hiring opportunities.

But government hiring practices have traditionally been much more formalized and regimented that those of private companies—primarily  because government hiring needs to at least appear to be fair and merit-based. (That outcome, as too many scandals about unqualified, incompetent and/or well-connected employees have demonstrated, has not always been the result.)  And the Obama administration is not the first to identify problems in federal hiring practices, nor is it the first to try to change the rules. The big change now is that President Obama himself is pushing for improvements, as evidenced by the memorandum he signed earlier this month.  He wants it done well, and he wants it done soon, and he has called for all federal agencies to implement the new hiring regimen by November 1, 2010.

The revamped hiring policy focuses on several areas that have caused obvious problems for many years. Among its highlights, the new policy:

• Eliminates the use of “knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA)” essays to assess candidates in the initial stages of the hiring process, and instead rely on resumes. The complaint about KSA’s has been that prospective employees have been required to respond to very preliminary questions with essays, when a resume might offer a clear description of the skills and knowledge he/she needed in previous jobs. The switch to resume-based hiring also brings the government’s process more in line with that of the private sector, potentially making government work more accessible and competitive.

• Requires managers and supervisors to play a greater role in the hiring process.  Under earlier policies, the manager or supervisor, who would potentially work directly with a new employee, might never interview the applicant.

• Use shorter job announcements written in plain English.  Current job descriptions, say many applicants, use obscure terminology and convoluted sentence structures, making it hard even to figure out what the job is.

• Eliminate the current “rule-of-three” process, where only the top-three-scoring candidates are put forward for hiring managers to choose from, and instead adopt the category rating system, where managers can select from many more candidates placed in broad quality groupings.  “Right now, once you make it through the meat grinder of this process, all these good candidates, who are well qualified — they’re best qualified — we throw them out and make them start over again,” says John Berry, head of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees federal hiring. “We’re going to stop that and now allow departments to immediately draw out of that pool.”

• Notify applicants of their status at four points in the hiring process. Currently, agencies take about 140 days on average to fill a job vacancy, and many fear that the best candidates get tired of waiting for the government and take jobs elsewhere. Leaders hope that the new reforms will get the government’s average down to 80 days.

“For far too long our human resources systems have been a hindrance,” says Berry. “We have great workers in spite of the hiring process, not because of it.”

A further streamlining move is evident on the federal government’s USAjobs website, where job seekers can now fill out a single, standardized application for any federal agency.

Last year, the Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) served as a guinea pig for new hiring practices, and the results have been encouraging. When the agency mapped out its existing hiring process, it identified 40 steps, which HUD’s top hiring officer said “looked like a wiring diagram for an electronic circuit.” Subsequently, HUD pared the process down to a 14-step program, standardized its procedures and, as a result, cut its average hiring time from 139 days to 77. In anticipation of the Nov. 1, 2010 deadline, other agencies are expected to use a similar mapping process to streamline their own procedures.

Will this latest effort make a difference? We can only hope that the Obama administration’s stated commitment to better, more efficient and open government will enable it to succeed where others have not.

The post Hire and hire. Fed revamps process for job-seekers. appeared first on Occasional Planet.