Tuesday, May 27, 2014

f***in' problems.

a moment of clarity. 

words. 

"...We don’t have a Shinseki problem, in other words. We have a President Obama problem. We have a Congress problem. We have a civil service system “in crisis,” as the Partnership for Public Service said in a recent report.

Such “scandals” will recur, likely with increasing frequency, as long as government leaders ignore the underlying problem: a personnel system that has not been upgraded to suit the 21st-century knowledge economy.

...It is a cumbersome system that can’t recruit or compete for talent and doesn’t reward top performers or punish poor ones. Some of the resistance to change is political: Democrats rely on government unions that are suspicious of merit-based policies, and Republicans are suspicious of government altogether. But Mr. Stier says the bigger obstacle to reform is structural. Political leaders want to influence policies that will bear fruit while they are in office. Civil service reform is hard work, requires sustained attention and would pay off mostly in future presidential terms.

 ...Less than 6 percent of the federal workforce is younger than 30 , compared with 23 percent in the country. As the public workforce ages and retires, dysfunction will increase, unless someone gets serious about attracting and retaining talent."

THE WASHINGTON POST: The true VA scandal is shared across the federal government

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