Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Hello and welcome to
Speaker 1: another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: Tracy, remember that episode we did several weeks ago about
Speaker 1: waste and fraud and abuse in medicare I do.
Speaker 2: It was full of interesting facts and figures, such as
Speaker 2: the US government spends one percent of the federal budget
Speaker 2: on dialysis.
Speaker 1: And the thing about that episode, so we were talking
Speaker 1: to be you, Professor Jetson, Leader Luise, you know, the
Speaker 1: thing about that episode that's striking is if you look
Speaker 1: at government spending and probably a lot of all bureaucracies
Speaker 1: even outside the government, but if you look at government
Speaker 1: spending or government waste or government fraud, et cetera, there
Speaker 1: are many things that everyone can point to and say
Speaker 1: this is waste, this is bad, we should change this.
Speaker 1: But like that's clearly just being able to like identify
Speaker 1: some bad process or whether it's in how you you know,
Speaker 1: how purchasing works or how hiring works or anything like,
Speaker 1: clearly that's not enough to fix it. Like identification almost
Speaker 1: seems like the easy part.
Speaker 2: No, I think this is actually endemic in a lot
Speaker 2: of large organizations, although I am certain there are specific
Speaker 2: things about the government process that are unique to them,
Speaker 2: But it feels like at large organizations everyone kind of
Speaker 2: feels helpless, right, Like everyone can say we need to
Speaker 2: do this better, or this is ridiculous, or we should
Speaker 2: change this, but no one actually seems able to fix it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I anyway, Yes this is my this is my
Speaker 1: perception as well. But we are in an era, you know,
Speaker 1: the vibes have changed. We are in an era where,
Speaker 1: once again and probably because inflation remains high, people see
Speaker 1: the avious failures of what people call state capacity. You know,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of stuff built under the Biden administration.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of stuff allocated. People are frustrated
Speaker 1: by the speed of things, whether you look at charging stations,
Speaker 1: rural broadband, the speed with which any project gets implemented.
Speaker 1: We're in a moment of frustration, and people want to
Speaker 1: see two things. They want to see waste and spending
Speaker 1: decline in many cases, and they also want to see
Speaker 1: that the spending that we actually do allocate turns into action,
Speaker 1: good results. Right, We're in a period where sitting aside,
Speaker 1: what will happen, etc. Like there is this public impolicy.
Speaker 1: We want to see results for things that we do.
Speaker 2: Speaking of good results, can I just say the last
Speaker 2: time we spoke to this guest who we are about
Speaker 2: to speak to again, we were complaining about how clunky
Speaker 2: the Treasury Direct website is and how you had to
Speaker 2: click little buttons to get in instead of just typing
Speaker 2: your password. And I think shortly after that someone sent
Speaker 2: me a screenshot and said that they had fixed it. Amazing,
Speaker 2: So you know this podcast can lead to real results.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's the answer. We just need to do podcast
Speaker 1: episodes on various things that aren't working and that someone
Speaker 1: here is it and stuff like that. But yes, this
Speaker 1: is a we are in an era for people demanding results. Anyway,
Speaker 1: you mentioned that last episode we did with this guest,
Speaker 1: she really is the perfect guest to talk about now
Speaker 1: in this era of doge and the sort of impulse
Speaker 1: to see government root out waste and fraud and abuse
Speaker 1: and become more efficient. We're going to be speaking with
Speaker 1: Jennifer Palka. She is the author of the book Recoding America,
Speaker 1: currently serving as a Senior Fellow at the Nascannon Center.
Speaker 1: She was the founder and former director of the Code
Speaker 1: for America initiative. She's been on the Defense Innovation Board,
Speaker 1: so has seen how government actually operates and spends and
Speaker 1: works and builds technology at a very granular level. Perfect
Speaker 1: guest to have back on. So, Jennifer, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for coming back on out laws.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: You know, when it comes to government spending and waste,
Speaker 1: you know, I think there's sort of two There are
Speaker 1: sort of two things that people I think it's sort
Speaker 1: of useful to divide the conversation in two things, because
Speaker 1: there are major things that the government spends money on,
Speaker 1: like various entitlements or having a large military, et cetera,
Speaker 1: that some might consider wasteful per se, right, and then
Speaker 1: there is the other aspect, which is just like within
Speaker 1: the realm of things that many people agree we need,
Speaker 1: is government getting the best bang for the book within
Speaker 1: the sort of expectation that this is you know, legitimate spending.
Speaker 1: And so some of these fights that in conversations that
Speaker 1: are going to be held onto the new administration are
Speaker 1: going to be in the first category, where it's like
Speaker 1: big political questions about where we should be allocating our money.
Speaker 1: But from your perspective, even setting that aside, when you
Speaker 1: look at sort of the actual expenditure, like, do you
Speaker 1: see big dials that can be turned in terms of
Speaker 1: this can be done better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny you say, like people get concerned about
Speaker 3: the bang for the buck. I think people get really
Speaker 3: concerned when they're like, any amount of books is not
Speaker 3: getting a bang. Yeah, right, you know, we're it's it's less.
Speaker 3: I understand the frustration and the switch to a dialogue
Speaker 3: around government efficiency that Elon Musk is pushing, But I
Speaker 3: think we've gotten to that place because people are saying,
Speaker 3: you know, we're getting very little results. We would be
Speaker 3: tolerant of, you know, reasonably high spending if something we're
Speaker 3: coming out of this and you know, you talk about
Speaker 3: the defense world for instance, I mean, our spending keeps
Speaker 3: going up, and in theory, we're spending more so that
Speaker 3: we can be safer and have greater deterrence. And in reality,
Speaker 3: I think that that greater spending is actually keeping us
Speaker 3: from making the changes that we need to make such
Speaker 3: that the system is more effective in a fefficient you know,
Speaker 3: people just still do these like big bang projects because
Speaker 3: they have the money for them, they have all the
Speaker 3: trappings around them that make them really slow all the procedure,
Speaker 3: you know, instead of these you know fast you know procurements,
Speaker 3: like we need a ton of drones, for instance, instead
Speaker 3: of these you know, big heavy weapons platforms. But we're
Speaker 3: still putting a lot of money into these things that
Speaker 3: don't get us any results for twenty years. By the
Speaker 3: time you know, we get the results, the thing isn't
Speaker 3: actually needed anymore. What we need is drones instead of ships.
Speaker 3: And you know, I really think that the dialogue is
Speaker 3: changing for like, hey, where's the bang at all?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah, it feels like when organizations are sort of
Speaker 2: swimming in money and have large budgets, they don't actually
Speaker 2: have to think about how to best spend that money, right,
Speaker 2: And so I well, I wanted to ask you more
Speaker 2: your position on the Defense Innovation Board. One thing I've
Speaker 2: been wondering is why does the Pentagon to this point
Speaker 2: always seem to fail its audits.
Speaker 3: Hmm, okay, there's so many reasons for that. One of
Speaker 3: them I think speaks to a cordys function that you
Speaker 3: see across government, which is we do everything in this
Speaker 3: very very bespoke way. So it used to be over
Speaker 3: five thousand different back end systems, including accounting, systems just
Speaker 3: within the DoD. I don't think that number has gone
Speaker 3: down that much. How do you get so many different
Speaker 3: systems in you know, it's obviously a huge institution, but
Speaker 3: like you would think there would be a standard way
Speaker 3: to start to do accounting. But what happens is that Congress,
Speaker 3: you know, puts some new requirement for reporting on this
Speaker 3: particular program or this particular department, and they go, okay, well,
Speaker 3: we need really bespoke software to handle these, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of ourcane and in the weeds kinds of requests
Speaker 3: from Congress or someone else. Some of them are like real,
Speaker 3: Congress isn't backing off on them, and some of them
Speaker 3: are kind of imagined. But that's how we get this
Speaker 3: very heavyweight requirements development process in government, where like the
Speaker 3: job of a bunch of people for a long time
Speaker 3: is to go around to everybody and say, what are
Speaker 3: all the things that you're going to need for this
Speaker 3: system to work. Well, if you do that, they come
Speaker 3: up with a bunch of things. That means you can't
Speaker 3: just buy an off the shelf commercial accounting software the
Speaker 3: way that even a really big enterprise would, because you've
Speaker 3: come up with all these like bespoke things that need
Speaker 3: to happen. Some of them are rail and some of
Speaker 3: them are invented. And one of the things we said
Speaker 3: on the Defense Innovation Board was it's actually not about
Speaker 3: like doing better software to accommodate all those requirements. It
Speaker 3: is about getting rid of those requirements so that you
Speaker 3: can just buy commodities where But that's just really hard
Speaker 3: because it's sort of you know, flow that power is
Speaker 3: flowing the wrong direction. You don't have people who do
Speaker 3: software going telling Congress to remove this requirement. It's just like,
Speaker 3: you know, the stream needs to be a reverse. So
Speaker 3: one of the reasons is just that they literally have
Speaker 3: all these different systems that are supposed to feed into
Speaker 3: one big picture of what the Department of Defense is spending,
Speaker 3: and you know what it's receiving, and it's just incredibly complicated.
Speaker 3: Now there are other reasons as well, but I think
Speaker 3: that's one of the core. It's functions that you see
Speaker 3: at play.
Speaker 1: Let's back up for a second. So you wrote your
Speaker 1: book Recruiting America. You have a great substance right now
Speaker 1: called eating policy, and I want to get into some
Speaker 1: of we'll get into some of the posts you wrote
Speaker 1: about fixing hiring practices, and so forth. But I'm curious, like,
Speaker 1: did you have a moment in your life, like the
Speaker 1: sort of like founding trauma or whatever, where you're like, oh, wow,
Speaker 1: this really something that you know, something that scandalized you
Speaker 1: such that you've now devoted your work to writing about
Speaker 1: and elucidating the issues that come up with things like
Speaker 1: government hiring and spending.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a funny question. I think what happened was
Speaker 3: I started looking at this whole issue of government technology
Speaker 3: back right after Obama was elected. Was we were working
Speaker 3: on this idea of web two dotto if anyone remembers that,
Speaker 3: what would gov Dato look like? And some colleagues and
Speaker 3: I were sort of going to DC and talking to
Speaker 3: people about how software got done in government. And I
Speaker 3: remember this story. This is not the traumatic part, but
Speaker 3: I remember the story from this guy who I'm from
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley and he was working with the Department of
Speaker 3: Labor and he was like, let me explain to you
Speaker 3: how we do stuff here. It's like you have to
Speaker 3: get soldiers from New York to d C. And you
Speaker 3: go out and like source the iron and like you know,
Speaker 3: have engineers speck out the requirements for the engines, because
Speaker 3: you're going to build an entire railway instead of just
Speaker 3: buying the soldiers some train tickets, and that can't be right,
Speaker 3: that's crazy. But as I got into it, actually that
Speaker 3: really is how this works. Often there's just not this
Speaker 3: sense of like just how to use what's out there
Speaker 3: because of this obsession with you know, doing everything from
Speaker 3: the ground up. But before I worked in tech, my
Speaker 3: first job out of college, I worked in child welfare
Speaker 3: agency and I saw how badly the operations were there,
Speaker 3: and you really see up close what's at stake these
Speaker 3: kids luck and I thought, oh my god, if we're
Speaker 3: doing software for the Department of Labor, this bad. This
Speaker 3: is also affecting things like child welfare. And we really
Speaker 3: ought to be putting like the best our country has
Speaker 3: to offer on the biggest problems. And it's kind of
Speaker 3: the opposite. And that's really got what made me, you know,
Speaker 3: want to start Code for America.
Speaker 2: Say more about the process of building everything from the
Speaker 2: ground up, because I remember the last time we spoke
Speaker 2: to you, one of the crazy numbers in that conversation
Speaker 2: was the amount of requirements for a specific software project.
Speaker 2: What is the exact process like walk us through the
Speaker 2: I guess the life cycle of putting out a government
Speaker 2: You know, we can talk software in particular because you
Speaker 2: have a lot of experience with that a government software project.
Speaker 2: Where does it start, what are the various like hoops
Speaker 2: that people have to jump through, and then where does
Speaker 2: it end up?
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe I'll talk about the unemployment insurance system in California,
Speaker 3: which it worked on very briefly as the coacher of
Speaker 3: the strike team in that first year of the pandemic
Speaker 3: when everyone was waiting for their checks, and it was
Speaker 3: really a disaster when we came in because there was
Speaker 3: this huge backlog of claims. In fact, just coincidentally, the
Speaker 3: team at the Employment Development Department had just finally gotten
Speaker 3: to the point where they were going to put a
Speaker 3: bid for a sort of a modernization they would say,
Speaker 3: an upgrade they call a business system modernization out to vendors.
Speaker 3: And I don't remember the exact number of requirements in it,
Speaker 3: but it was in the thousands and they had been
Speaker 3: working on that for eleven years. So they started the
Speaker 3: requirements gathering eleven years ago and they were just putting
Speaker 3: it out to bid, and I think we became extremely
Speaker 3: unpop popular by telling the governor's office you really should
Speaker 3: not bid that out. It is even if it were
Speaker 3: one year old, it's now totally outdated because now we
Speaker 3: understand the problems that you need to be solved much
Speaker 3: better than you did a year ago, but certainly better
Speaker 3: than you did eleven years ago. And they did actually
Speaker 3: stop that and sort of revise it. But like, why
Speaker 3: are there those thousands of requirements that take I don't
Speaker 3: think that I should be clear. I don't think the
Speaker 3: requirements gathering was eleven years. It was a big chunk
Speaker 3: of that eleven years. Then you have sort of putting
Speaker 3: together the RFP and all getting it, you know, getting
Speaker 3: it approved for the legislature, et cetera. So you know,
Speaker 3: why does it get so big? Well, I think you I.
Speaker 3: Unemployment insurance is a good example of this. So unemployment
Speaker 3: insurance started in the nineteen thirty five Social Security Act.
Speaker 3: So we are well now it's twenty twenty five. So
Speaker 3: now we are ninety years of accumulation of policy and
Speaker 3: process and regulatory cruft essentially, So think about like stuff,
Speaker 3: you know, requirements and rules and guidance from both the executive,
Speaker 3: legislative and judicial branches just sort of falling like garbage
Speaker 3: onto something like unemployment insurance for ninety years. Like a
Speaker 3: rule of thumb is we always add, we never subtract.
Speaker 3: And this is a fault of our legislatures, primarily not
Speaker 3: the people who run the unemployment insurance system. They kind
Speaker 3: of feel like they can't do anything about this accumulation.
Speaker 3: What they do then is try to accommodate all of
Speaker 3: these changes over time while never actually fixing the underlying system.
Speaker 3: So like one of the metaphors someone else used for
Speaker 3: me is like layers of paint to just get put
Speaker 3: on well, you know, especially if you've lived like an
Speaker 3: apartment in New York that's been painted like ninety thousand times,
Speaker 3: eventually it cracks. That's sort of what's happening. Or my
Speaker 3: other metaphor, which is like archaeological layers, but they only
Speaker 3: ever appropriate money to just like make the fixes, not
Speaker 3: to go back and say, how would we actually design
Speaker 3: this system if we were designing it today, not just
Speaker 3: from a technological perspective, but how would we go back
Speaker 3: and say, oh, that you know, requirement from the forties,
Speaker 3: you know, that's been overwritten by these other things. Why
Speaker 3: is there still code in the system that's you know,
Speaker 3: that's dealing with that requirement from the forties and why
Speaker 3: is there still you know, memos pointing to that, confusing
Speaker 3: people about what the current state of the rules are.
Speaker 3: But like, really, what we need to do is do
Speaker 3: a full kind of regulatory simplification, policy and process simplification
Speaker 3: alongside our modernizations, and we just don't do that.
Speaker 2: Do government officials who are design these projects, how much
Speaker 2: do they ever work in tandem with vendors? Like well,
Speaker 2: they go out and say, hey, we're thinking about upgrading
Speaker 2: the system. What do you think we should do? Or
Speaker 2: does it always start with the requirement process and then
Speaker 2: that just got sent out.
Speaker 3: No, they do often work with vendors. The problem is
Speaker 3: that the sort of way the vendor game is played,
Speaker 3: and I'd say this is changing to some degree. It's
Speaker 3: like the vendors benefit from all that complexity, So the
Speaker 3: vendors never say, hey, why don't you go your legislature
Speaker 3: and ask for like, you know, get can we you know,
Speaker 3: collaborate in a project, sort of rationalize all of this
Speaker 3: policy craft and then we can make you a system
Speaker 3: that it's going to be you know, a lot more elegant,
Speaker 3: a lot more stable, a lot more scalable. Right, scalability
Speaker 3: is really really degraded by this complexity because like it's
Speaker 3: they're huge projects. I mean, I think even after we
Speaker 3: asked California to boot out the old business system monorization
Speaker 3: and started again, they still went out with something that
Speaker 3: I believe was almost two billion dollars. Might have been
Speaker 3: one billion, So forgive me if I'm getting that wrong,
Speaker 3: but that's still in the same range of like, that's
Speaker 3: a lot of money to like, quote unquote like do
Speaker 3: some upgrades on a system, because they really don't have
Speaker 3: that relationship between the executive and legislative branch. And also
Speaker 3: let's throw in the judicial to say, what this needs
Speaker 3: is a real breeboot. I mean, unemployment insurance is not
Speaker 3: that complicated in its basics, right, We're giving people a
Speaker 3: certain amount of money for a certain amount of time
Speaker 3: under certain conditions. But it's gotten wildly complicated, and that
Speaker 3: like the vendors don't seem to most of the vendors
Speaker 3: aren't really incentive to be part of that conversation about
Speaker 3: the simplification because then the projects are going to be smaller.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about government hiring and your experience, and you've
Speaker 1: written some sort of wild stuff on your subject just
Speaker 1: about how hard it is to get a talented person
Speaker 1: in the door. And this is even sitting aside the
Speaker 1: fact that government pay skills aren't the same as private
Speaker 1: sector pay skills, et cetera. There's no like, you know,
Speaker 1: equity upside for a talented engineer just working through the
Speaker 1: government HR process.
Speaker 3: What do you see the biggest problem with hiring to me?
Speaker 3: And there's there are many isn't the pay though I
Speaker 3: know that should be fixed and a lot of people
Speaker 3: do talk about that. It's that we don't actually assess
Speaker 3: candidates for their skills. So if you leave a part
Speaker 3: the like political appointees and the people who get appointed
Speaker 3: are things like JLA or schedule. See where you're using
Speaker 3: an exception and just talk about like the regular uh,
Speaker 3: open to the public competitive process. Ninety percent of those
Speaker 3: use on self assessments of the person's own skill and
Speaker 3: they tell you what level they are and a resume screen.
Speaker 3: So how it goes is as a hiring manager, you're
Speaker 3: like completely cut out of the process. The HR person
Speaker 3: is in control, and you say, okay, I need this
Speaker 3: job there's all this sort of back and forth about
Speaker 3: what the job is. The job descriptions aren't often up
Speaker 3: to date. Maybe there isn't a job description or a
Speaker 3: classification for the kind of person you need, especially if
Speaker 3: it's technical. Leaving all that aside, you finally post a
Speaker 3: position and let's say five hundred resumes come in. Well,
Speaker 3: your HR person has to give you a sert, a
Speaker 3: list of people that they deem qualified. And the way
Speaker 3: they get from five hundred to say ten on the
Speaker 3: sert is first they look for everybody who has cut
Speaker 3: and pasted from the job description into their resume and
Speaker 3: cover letter. Oh, by the way, that person had to
Speaker 3: have known to do a government resume which is usually
Speaker 3: like seven pages long as opposed private sector resume, which
Speaker 3: would be shorter. That's all another story. So anyone who
Speaker 3: has exact matches between the language in the job description
Speaker 3: and their resume can go through to the next step.
Speaker 3: Of those the people who rate themselves as a master
Speaker 3: on all levels then can go through to the next step,
Speaker 3: and from there they apply veterans preference. Now I am
Speaker 3: a fan of giving veterans preference, but when you have
Speaker 3: down selected out all the people who didn't want to
Speaker 3: cut in paste or didn't want to basically lie and
Speaker 3: just say that they were a master on every competency.
Speaker 3: The good veterans probably haven't ended up on that sert,
Speaker 3: And so as a hiring manager, you're given a cert
Speaker 3: of people who just knew how to play the game,
Speaker 3: but don't necessarily have the skills, and half of the
Speaker 3: time the hiring manager just rejects the sert. So, like
Speaker 3: an example of how this works with that, you know,
Speaker 3: looking for exact matches, was this guy that we found
Speaker 3: when we were working on the Defense and Avation Board
Speaker 3: who had literally won the hack the Pentagon contest, like
Speaker 3: the top security researchers in the country came together and
Speaker 3: this one guy he happened to be nineteen years old.
Speaker 3: One that thing, he's like incredibly talented, and the people
Speaker 3: there recognized this is the kind of guy that we
Speaker 3: need in the Pentagon making our systems more secure. So
Speaker 3: they try to hire him, but his resume like just details,
Speaker 3: you know, all the programming languages and frameworks that he
Speaker 3: knows how to use, because that's what you would, you know,
Speaker 3: you would talk about your experience with specific frameworks and languages.
Speaker 3: If you were applying for a private sector job, and
Speaker 3: the you know, HR people look at that and they go,
Speaker 3: we have no idea what that means. That doesn't match
Speaker 3: at all our language. And he gets kicked out literally,
Speaker 3: you know, in the first the first down select. But
Speaker 3: it doesn't stop there, like the people at the Pentagon
Speaker 3: continue to try to get this guy hired, and pretty
Speaker 3: high level people kept in intervening as they tried again
Speaker 3: and again to get Jack Cable hired, and it took
Speaker 3: months for him to like finally get through the process.
Speaker 3: In between, one of the HR people told him, why
Speaker 3: don't you go work for Best Buy selling TVs for
Speaker 3: a year because then you'll be qualified.
Speaker 2: That is nuts. So just to be clear, because he
Speaker 2: said on his CV specific programming languages like I can
Speaker 2: use like babbel and I'm an expert in I don't know,
Speaker 2: NPM or whatever. The HR manager didn't recognize it, and
Speaker 2: they're like, this is not what we're looking for.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right, and they explained to the Defense Innovation Board.
Speaker 3: They pulled up the language in the job description, which
Speaker 3: was like, you know, X years of experience doing a
Speaker 3: very generic language about like the completion of it tech
Speaker 3: you know, prods or something, which is like doesn't mean anything,
Speaker 3: and they were like, we don't see this, and.
Speaker 2: Just a question, this might be a cultural question, but
Speaker 2: why does HR not listen to the expertise of these
Speaker 2: specific hiring managers.
Speaker 3: Okay, that is a fantastic question, and I've actually done
Speaker 3: some research on like legally is that required? And I'll
Speaker 3: give you the answer in a second. But I think
Speaker 3: the real answer is that they're extremely risk averse and
Speaker 3: one of the principles that they're supposed to hold is
Speaker 3: uphold is a principle of fairness. And I like fairness.
Speaker 3: I think that's great, But the way that it gets
Speaker 3: applied is that essentially saying, we have all these very
Speaker 3: very specific rules designed to keep bias out of this process,
Speaker 3: and we are experts in those processes and those rules,
Speaker 3: and so only we can ensure that this process occurs
Speaker 3: without the introduction of bias and or you know, you know,
Speaker 3: some perceived or real you know, deviation from the rules,
Speaker 3: and so what they call them subject matter experts. Like
Speaker 3: in other words, if you're hiring from a programmer, like
Speaker 3: you would kind of want a programmer to evaluate that person.
Speaker 3: But programmers are not allowed to valuate the person again
Speaker 3: in ninety percent of these cases because they might introduce bias.
Speaker 3: And it's a perfect example for me of like, if
Speaker 3: you read the merit system principles that came out of
Speaker 3: the Civil Service Reform Act of nineteen seventy eight, Thank you,
Speaker 3: President Carter. That was, you know, an important thing that
Speaker 3: he did. They sound really great and they talk about,
Speaker 3: you know, hiring on the basis of merit, and fairness
Speaker 3: is in there as well. And you read them, you
Speaker 3: would say these are fantastic. Federal hiring is great, no problem.
Speaker 3: But what happened is as they get operationalized, they go
Speaker 3: through what I call the cascade of rigidity, where each
Speaker 3: step down from sort of a law or policy into
Speaker 3: like the way HR managers actually work on a daily basis,
Speaker 3: just gets incredibly rigid. And the rigidity means that you
Speaker 3: get kind of the opposite outcome of what the law intended.
Speaker 3: The law intended merit, we're really not hiring on the
Speaker 3: basis of merit because it's gotten so rigid as it's
Speaker 3: been operationalized. And I asked one of our researchers to
Speaker 3: go look into this, like is it in the law
Speaker 3: is it in the regulations? Is it in the guidance?
Speaker 3: Like who wrote in that HR managers control this process
Speaker 3: and hiring managers don't have a say. And it turns
Speaker 3: out it just sort of appears in this thing called
Speaker 3: the Delegated Examiner's Operations Handbook, which means somebody wrote this
Speaker 3: operational handbook and said, you know, this is HR manager's job,
Speaker 3: like you know, and so that's what people do. But
Speaker 3: like the law never said that in needed does the regulation?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: I just you know, Okay, So five hundred people apply
Speaker 1: for a job, you get ten. The hiring manager sees
Speaker 1: ten names, they sort of might have a feeling that
Speaker 1: these can't be the best of the five hundred. Can
Speaker 1: you say, look, just give me the five hundred. Let
Speaker 1: me scan through click on some of them, because a
Speaker 1: good hiring manager probably has some intuitions about what a
Speaker 1: good candidate might look like, like, will they let you
Speaker 1: see that five hundred person list?
Speaker 3: Well, I maintain that there is nothing legally that keeps
Speaker 3: them from doing that, But on a practical basis, no,
Speaker 3: they're not allowed to.
Speaker 2: So you touched on this earlier. But part of the
Speaker 2: reasons all these requirements have been codified is for reasons
Speaker 2: of fairness, and the US presumably doesn't want to go
Speaker 2: back to a system of patronage or nepotism or people
Speaker 2: hiring their friends and stuff like that. What would be
Speaker 2: I guess the suggested guard rails for stopping the government
Speaker 2: from doing that or maybe balancing you know, the two
Speaker 2: things fairness and hiring based on merit.
Speaker 3: It's a complicated question because of what I described earlier,
Speaker 3: which is, if you don't solve the problem of everything
Speaker 3: getting more rigid as it gets operationalized, even you know,
Speaker 3: acts of Congress to change you know, civil service rules
Speaker 3: at the highest level kind of you know, don't have
Speaker 3: the intended effect, but we are still always going to
Speaker 3: be trying to balance those things. I maintain that essentially,
Speaker 3: the merits and stant principles defined in that nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: eight CSRA are great. What we just need to do
Speaker 3: is sort of like pull the you know, pull the
Speaker 3: edifice back to the studs, like it's a massive remodel,
Speaker 3: but not like an upending of the foundation. The foundation
Speaker 3: is solid, and so we need to go have a
Speaker 3: full look up and down the stack. Where did we
Speaker 3: go wrong in that cascade of rigidity. There's probably there
Speaker 3: are tweaks that need to happen at the statute level,
Speaker 3: So I think like OPM and Congress do need to
Speaker 3: get involved. But a lot of it is just how
Speaker 3: has this been operationalized? Now you probably know that there
Speaker 3: is this sort of nuclear bomb that is being threatened.
Speaker 2: Oh I was going to ask about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Schedule F basically says if you can demonstrate that
Speaker 3: this person in the who has civil service protections today
Speaker 3: has sort of any adjacency to policy, you can reclassify
Speaker 3: them as a political appointc and then they lose all
Speaker 3: their civil service protections. And of course, uh Trump rolled
Speaker 3: that up like in the last month or something of
Speaker 3: his first term and has been very clear that he
Speaker 3: wants to bring it back in the beginning of this
Speaker 3: coming term. And you know, in my metaphor, that is
Speaker 3: at pulling up the foundation, because that is saying we're
Speaker 3: going to hire fire on the basis of loyalty essentially
Speaker 3: to an administration, instead of on the basis of merit.
Speaker 3: And we do really have problems with not being able
Speaker 3: to fire underperformers. They're a very small percentage of people
Speaker 3: who really should have been removed and it's super hard
Speaker 3: to remove them. I can tell you a couple of
Speaker 3: stories about that. But like, and we should fix that.
Speaker 3: We should fix that, not take away the protections for
Speaker 3: folks who stand up and say, hey, you need to
Speaker 3: know this. Oh wait, I disagree with you, so suddenly
Speaker 3: you're fired. Like, like, rebuild the thing from its strong foundation, don't.
Speaker 3: Don't pull the foundation out of the soil.
Speaker 1: The way I'm looking at the Delegated Examining Operations Handbook,
Speaker 1: three hundred and eighteen pages, many flow charts, many sub sections.
Speaker 1: It's many appendices. You know, I'm sure, look this serious stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that this needs to be a real document.
Speaker 3: But it is.
Speaker 1: There's a lot to it. This gets though to something
Speaker 1: that I think is maybe part of the core question here,
Speaker 1: and we sort of teased at it in the introduction.
Speaker 1: It's easy enough to identify these issues and say, look,
Speaker 1: this is absurd, and I imagine that if a lot
Speaker 1: of people experiencing this would agree, and probably over the
Speaker 1: years in government many people have come to the same
Speaker 1: conclusion that you have about the absurdity of some of
Speaker 1: these some of these workflows and so forth. In one
Speaker 1: of your pieces recently, something that you implied is that
Speaker 1: maybe the answer is not just more identification of the
Speaker 1: problems or sort of good intention, but maybe someone who's
Speaker 1: kind of a bully or someone who doesn't necessarily think
Speaker 1: the rules apply, and perhaps someone like you know, Elon
Speaker 1: Musk for example, someone with that someone with that character.
Speaker 1: Gravitas might be a word that people use energy. I
Speaker 1: don't know, talk to us more, because again, it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like just identifying these problems are enough.
Speaker 3: Well, I think evidently hasn't been because we haven't done
Speaker 3: that much. The chance to compete act is a you know,
Speaker 3: a good move in the right direction. It's past both
Speaker 3: houses and is I presume we'll be signed by President
Speaker 3: Biden before he leaves office. And it does a lot
Speaker 3: actually about the assessment problem that we just discussed, but
Speaker 3: it doesn't it probably doesn't do enough in my view,
Speaker 3: and again you'll have the problem of actually implementing it,
Speaker 3: which the new head of OPM is going to find
Speaker 3: out is pretty hard to implement when you have an
Speaker 3: HR workforce that risk averse and that sort of process obsessed.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I'm in that weird position as a Democrat
Speaker 3: and someone who very much cares about the rule of
Speaker 3: law and values the institution of government and wants to
Speaker 3: see it succeed in part because we have all these
Speaker 3: challenges that we government is the only institution that can
Speaker 3: really meet them, in my view, at least meet them
Speaker 3: in a way that is consistent with the democratic principles
Speaker 3: of our society. And yet we have neglected that kind
Speaker 3: of change, or we've just been not bold enough in
Speaker 3: trying to change the system as it exists today. I
Speaker 3: think it's part of culture of both the left and
Speaker 3: the right to fight a lot about like i'll call
Speaker 3: the what of government, Like what bills are we passing?
Speaker 3: You know, the Chips and Science Act and the Inflational
Speaker 3: Reduction Act and the by De Parson Instructure Law. Those
Speaker 3: are all the what, and like they were really good,
Speaker 3: I think in a lot of ways, but we neglect
Speaker 3: did the how? And the how is all these things
Speaker 3: like the functioning of government and hiring and again both
Speaker 3: parties do that. And because we've neglected the how, it's
Speaker 3: gotten really really sclerotic, I guess is a word, and
Speaker 3: in effective, as you talked about at the start of this.
Speaker 3: And so that democratic approach generally of let's be very thoughtful,
Speaker 3: and let's listen to all the voices and make sure
Speaker 3: we're making very measured decisions here, which is like the
Speaker 3: world I'd like to live in. That sounds great, and
Speaker 3: I like to think of myself as a thoughtful and
Speaker 3: measured person. But that kind of approach tends to like
Speaker 3: tends basically to add more process and more procedure when
Speaker 3: we already have a lot, and try to make sure
Speaker 3: that everybody is happy, and the result of that has
Speaker 3: been that we're not achieving our policy goals. And so
Speaker 3: I'm in that comfortable space of saying, I don't really
Speaker 3: agree with a lot of the policy goals of the
Speaker 3: incoming administration, but I have to acknowledge that a sort
Speaker 3: of extremely disruptive approach might be needed for us to
Speaker 3: just get out of the rut that we're in of
Speaker 3: always you know, always adding and never subtracting, and hope
Speaker 3: that the cycles of you know, change in power mean that,
Speaker 3: you know, if the party that I prefer ever gets
Speaker 3: back into power, some cleanup would have happened, and then
Speaker 3: they can sort of rebuild in that thoughtful, considered way
Speaker 3: that Democrats tend to do, you know, rebuild something that
Speaker 3: that's quite healthy and not you know, you know, out
Speaker 3: of sort of this cleanup, but recognizing that this period
Speaker 3: of disruption could be quite bad in many ways and
Speaker 3: yet maybe needed.
Speaker 2: I mean, there have been some virtually process free suggestions
Speaker 2: for firing workers made by Musk and Favec Ramaswani. I
Speaker 2: think Ramaswani wanted to didn't you want to like fire
Speaker 2: all employees with like odd numbered Social Security numbers or something?
Speaker 3: He did, And I will say that, a, that's really
Speaker 3: dumb idea, because the people in government who are the
Speaker 3: biggest advocate for change, who could be the vek in
Speaker 3: Elon's you know, greatest allies in making the kind of
Speaker 3: changes that they or at least reasonable changes, would probably
Speaker 3: get fired, leaving you with the ones that should have
Speaker 3: gotten fired. But I will also say that he said
Speaker 3: that on the campaign trail, and he's since given interviews
Speaker 3: that and I'm not trying to defend him, but he's
Speaker 3: since given interviews that demonstrate quite a bit more understanding
Speaker 3: of the right ways to do this. He's acknowledged, for instance,
Speaker 3: that you know, it's Congress who's in charge of laws
Speaker 3: and regulations, and they can't just ride rushshot over that
Speaker 3: that there's probably better ways to deal with the workforce.
Speaker 3: But he's certainly coming from this place of just completely
Speaker 3: crazy ideas that at least maybe move the Overton window,
Speaker 3: but should not actually be operationalized.
Speaker 2: Can you give an example of I understand we haven't
Speaker 2: done any big reforms to the hiring process, but I imagine
Speaker 2: there have been some attempts previously to improve it at
Speaker 2: the margins. Are there any successful demonstrations of changes here?
Speaker 3: Under the first Trump administration, a team at the United
Speaker 3: States Digital Service started something with the absolutely awful name
Speaker 3: of SMEKUA Expertise subject Matter Expert qualifying Assessments. I know,
Speaker 3: but it just doesn't sound okay.
Speaker 1: At least it's not dog right like. At least it
Speaker 1: sounds serious speaks, Yeah, keep going.
Speaker 3: Well, the funny thing is it sounds.
Speaker 1: Very governmentment, which I'm okay with.
Speaker 3: But essentially, this team looked at that problem of ninety
Speaker 3: percent of hires happening without a reasonable assessment of the
Speaker 3: candidate's skills and said, you know, we don't need to
Speaker 3: do this. The law and policy absolutely allow for real
Speaker 3: assessments and put together a process that hiring managers and
Speaker 3: HR their HR partners could use to for instance, assess
Speaker 3: you know, programmers by actual other programmers, you know. But
Speaker 3: it's because it's working within existing not only law in policy,
Speaker 3: but sort of the culture of the Office of Personnel Management.
Speaker 3: It's still a pretty heavyweight process. But the people I
Speaker 3: know who used it to hire people love it. They
Speaker 3: get great candidates through it, and it just it hasn't scaled,
Speaker 3: in part because I don't think it was a huge
Speaker 3: priority of the Biden industry, and in part because it's
Speaker 3: still just a lot of work to get all the
Speaker 3: people who can review these programmers resumes, for instance, to
Speaker 3: take time out of their jobs to do this in
Speaker 3: a very prescribed kind of controlled way, Like you can't
Speaker 3: just take someone's time and say, hey, look at this
Speaker 3: guy's resume, do you think he's good.
Speaker 1: What happens when you try to fire someone in the government.
Speaker 1: You know, we did that episode several weeks ago about
Speaker 1: medicure fraud and the importance of having good data scientists
Speaker 1: to look at. And let's say there's a data scientist
Speaker 1: who isn't good or isn't finding any whatever, it is
Speaker 1: what happens when you try to fire them.
Speaker 3: So most of the time on a practical basis. What
Speaker 3: happens is they say that HR will tell you it's
Speaker 3: going to be impossible to fire this person. Don't give
Speaker 3: them a bad rating, because if you give them a
Speaker 3: bad rating, we won't be able to transfer them. So
Speaker 3: let's work on finding a transfer so they can be
Speaker 3: someone else's problem. Not great. I heard from a friend
Speaker 3: recently at an agency who got a complaint one of
Speaker 3: his One of the employees on his team, complained about
Speaker 3: the team leader who reports to him. She felt it
Speaker 3: a formal complaint because that manager hadn't given her an
Speaker 3: outstanding or exceptional rating of this person had been absent
Speaker 3: a ton of the year, her skills were way outdated,
Speaker 3: and the HR team said, well, you know, the best
Speaker 3: thing to do is to, you know, assign her some
Speaker 3: work that she can do, or very specific work that
Speaker 3: you don't think she'll be able to achieve. But you know,
Speaker 3: you can't push back on this. We would lose, and
Speaker 3: you know, so we're just going to sort of manage
Speaker 3: the situation. And oh, by the way, your manager is
Speaker 3: potentially in trouble here because of this, this threat of
Speaker 3: a lawsuit, so it's like completely upside down, and what
Speaker 3: they will do is try to get that person to
Speaker 3: be moved on to be someone else's problem. It's really
Speaker 3: important to note that there is nothing that says you
Speaker 3: can't fire people in government, and there is some number
Speaker 3: and forgetting it that do get fired every year, so
Speaker 3: it's not impossible. The law doesn't prevent it by any means.
Speaker 3: It's more that there are many many pathways for employees
Speaker 3: to protest, you know, not just being fired, but like
Speaker 3: being given anything other than the top rating. And because
Speaker 3: they have all those pathways to protest, they can sort
Speaker 3: of run the clock out on all of those, sucking
Speaker 3: up all of the time of the managers and the
Speaker 3: HR people and the lawyers in a way that just nobody,
Speaker 3: you know, everyone's like it's not worth it, Like we
Speaker 3: can't get our work done if we're going to also
Speaker 3: try to manage this person out, and so they give up.
Speaker 2: It feels like there's also an incentive problem where if
Speaker 2: you're a manager dealing with a bad employemployee, you know,
Speaker 2: even if you manage to give them to another team,
Speaker 2: there's no guarantee that you're going to get the head
Speaker 2: count to replace them. And of course you have to
Speaker 2: start the hiring process all over again, and you don't
Speaker 2: know who you're going to get. And I feel like
Speaker 2: in politics, especially or government bureaucracy, where there's a lot
Speaker 2: of presumably internal infighting and you know, office politics, that
Speaker 2: there's a lot of empire building as well, right Like
Speaker 2: people do not want to see their teams reduce and
Speaker 2: their budgets reduced.
Speaker 3: That is undred present true, and I think it's an
Speaker 3: interesting dynamic right now with this sort of threat of
Speaker 3: you know, mass firings going on, that that instinct of
Speaker 3: I am more important the more people report into me
Speaker 3: is is sort of rearing its head in a way
Speaker 3: that I wish it weren't, because I think public sector
Speaker 3: employees have a lot to be proud of in terms
Speaker 3: of the results they can produce for the American people,
Speaker 3: and that ought to be the metric of of pride
Speaker 3: and status, not how many people report to them. And
Speaker 3: again I'm not a big fan of this, like let's,
Speaker 3: you know, make every civil servant afraid to come in
Speaker 3: every day. That kind of rhetoric is very sad to me,
Speaker 3: but I think it's it's also true that that the
Speaker 3: civil service, should you know, measure its value a little
Speaker 3: differently than it often does today. And I'm not saying
Speaker 3: it's everyone, but but that instinctive of empire building isn't
Speaker 3: as healthy as as we would like.
Speaker 1: Jennifer Pelka, thank you so much for coming back on
Speaker 1: odd lots. Maybe we'll u we should have you back,
Speaker 1: like in a year. We could do it. You can
Speaker 1: sort of give your assessment on what you've seen so far.
Speaker 1: We could sort of do regular uh regulator. Yeah, regular
Speaker 1: doge report cards and updates.
Speaker 3: I love that. That's great. We'll see if dog is
Speaker 3: even around you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, we'll see if it even exist. Certainly.
Speaker 2: All good for it.
Speaker 1: All right, thank you so much. That was fantastic. That
Speaker 1: was really good. Tracy just recketing and hearing some of
Speaker 1: those stories.
Speaker 2: Like about hiring, the stories are amazing. You kind of
Speaker 2: just want to your head against them going well.
Speaker 1: Like Also, it makes me wonder if it would be
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about applying for a government job,
Speaker 1: but if you just sort of know the hacks, right,
Speaker 1: if you just sort of know what a government resume
Speaker 1: is supposed to look like, and the importance of copying
Speaker 1: and pasting keywords and getting past that initial round, that
Speaker 1: seems like that's a good alpha for listeners if you're
Speaker 1: ever applying for a government job. Some good advice there
Speaker 1: from Jennifer.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The best government officials, the most effective government officials, are
Speaker 2: the ones who know how to copy and paste.
Speaker 1: Suppressing it is.
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, there was one thing I actually forgot to
Speaker 2: ask jen But you know, you brought up that like
Speaker 2: three hundred page document, and it struck me that people,
Speaker 2: I doubt anyone is reading that from cover to cover, right,
Speaker 2: probably not. And so if you were looking to streamline
Speaker 2: some of those processes again, I know, identifying the problem
Speaker 2: isn't the biggest issue here. It's actually trying to fix
Speaker 2: it and act on it. But it seems like you
Speaker 2: could use AI to go through.
Speaker 1: A lot of those rules, right yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And say, can you make this flow chart that goes
Speaker 2: on for five pages reduce it down to I don't know,
Speaker 2: half a page.
Speaker 1: The other thing I would just say is that a
Speaker 1: lot of the sort of I would say pathologies of
Speaker 1: the government are in my experienced pathologies of large organizations period, right,
Speaker 1: And I think you find people, you know, there are
Speaker 1: frustrations you have as a customer to large companies, There
Speaker 1: are frustrations you have as an employee of large companies.
Speaker 1: These things exist the way sort of certain institutions within
Speaker 1: an organization perpetuate themselves by holding onto power by sort
Speaker 1: of a strict adherence a handful of people that really
Speaker 1: know the rules.
Speaker 2: People that know the system, people that build the systems
Speaker 2: that no one else can.
Speaker 3: I They're just.
Speaker 1: Really hard to root out, and so they're hard in
Speaker 1: any organization. And obviously, you know, private sector entities sometimes
Speaker 1: benefit because someone says, look, we really need to cut
Speaker 1: this area or whatever in a way that often hasn't
Speaker 1: happened in the government. But these are really tough problems
Speaker 1: in organizations. And I think anyone who probablys in business
Speaker 1: school and goes into any Fortune five hundred company would
Speaker 1: probably be faced with sort of similar challenges in reforming
Speaker 1: any organization.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I will say this is obviously a highly
Speaker 2: politically charged issue, but you know, I think everyone on
Speaker 2: both sides of the aisle can agree that they want
Speaker 2: an effective government, right. You want a government that is
Speaker 2: doing good and productive things and not wasting people's money,
Speaker 2: because at a minimum, that feeds into a perception problem.
Speaker 2: And so this is a really interesting topic. I think
Speaker 2: we'll do more on it absolutely, Okay, shall we leave
Speaker 2: it there?
Speaker 1: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 2: This has been another episode of the Authots podcast. I'm
Speaker 2: Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 1: Follow our guest Jennifer Pelka, She's at Pelka dot and
Speaker 1: definitely go check out her substack and her book. Follow
Speaker 1: our producers Carmen Rodriguez at carman Armann dash O Bennett
Speaker 1: at Dashbot and Kilbrooks at Kilbrooks. From our Oddlogs content,
Speaker 1: go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where you
Speaker 1: have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter and you can
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Speaker 2: And if you enjoy odd Lots, if you like it
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