Uncle Sam Doesn't Want You
Heilemann, John
Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You Government agencies are a haven for the mediocre because they don’t tr3/ to get anybody better by John Heilernann They were the kind of kids companies fall...
...Recruiting tool as revenue enhancer...
...Elsewhere in the office, a middlemanagement type experiments with a different sort of recruiting technique-aggressively flirting with his secretary...
...Mainly, though, OPM’ recruiting drive has suffered from an acute disparity between talk and action-an abundance of the former, scarcely any of the latter...
...Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You Government agencies are a haven for the mediocre because they don’t tr3/ to get anybody better by John Heilernann They were the kind of kids companies fall over each other trying to hire-smart, personable, hardworking, well-groomed...
...When a student comes to me with some vague idea he or she might be interested in working for the federal government, I don’t even know where to start,” explains Anne Stewart, placement director at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs and Citizenship for the past 13 years...
...Nor was the roster of firms: Arthur Andersen, IBM, Morgan Stanley, CBS, Aetna . . . the usual suspects...
...The job descriptions themselves are written in dreadful bureaucratese...
...Take VISTA, a hated remnant of Great Society idealism that drops young people (earning subsistence wages) into poor rural and inner-city environs to teach and perform various sorts of social work...
...After a while, you just decide it’s not worth it...
...wonders Phil Kehoe, a senior at Berkeley...
...skills of Houdini to figure out how to get in...
...I’m not going to put my other career options on hold and then end up with the Agriculture Department calling...
...Other absurdities abound...
...That of an asset information systems development manager with the Customs Service, filled about six weeks ago...
...I’ve talked with hundreds of line managers and administrators from practically every federal agency,” she says...
...Well, I say to Walt, arbitrary cut-off points are part of life, you know, it happens to everyone...
...The results are predictable...
...The woman at the other end of the line replied: “I have no idea...
...Breeders, Inc.-both of which did told senator avid pryto seek out employees, looking longer and harder and in groups where the government hasn’t looked very much before...
...Another, Mary McLeod, says that when she visited the Department of Labor, a personnel staff member told her that unless she “knew someone” her chances of getting an interview were slim...
...To simplify the job-seeking process, agencies were given “directhire” authority to recruit for and fill certain positions on their own, sans OPM...
...Devine intervention It wasn’t always this way...
...And change it can...
...A 1988 report called “Civil Service 2000,” commissioned from the Hudson Institute by OPM itself, seconded that verdict...
...Fully half are convinced that such jobs are, in fact, inherently monotonous and futile...
...The countless job listings and other notices that fill the glass cases on the walls are a rainbow of blue, yellow, pink, and green...
...Call it “Sorghumsomething...
...so he could talk about the agency before interviewing each of them individually...
...For general information on federal employment, press I . For a list of federal career opportunities, press 2. To hear agency recruiting messages, press 3. To repeat this message, press 8. Beep...
...Another career adviser recalls: “We had a recruiter from the energy department who actually told several honor students that they’d be idiots to want to work in government...
...Here you take a test and then God knows what happens...
...A couple were major players in student government...
...I don’t get very excited about a lot of people who take over agencies, but somehow I think that you have what I call the RMA, the right mental attitude...
...Its first rule, I surmise, must be “Treat all potential job applicants with complete indifference...
...others that seemed promising on paper turned out to be less so once implemented...
...Terrific...
...came to interview in 1982: “[It] resembled the ticket booth at a Michael Jackson concert, with lines of motley students staging all-night vigils to get ahead...
...The recruiting materials at school are vague and way too general...
...The recruiter was not...
...OPM’s new policy was to send would-be civil servants directly to the places where they wanted to work, but it seemed no one had thought to inform the agencies...
...A program analyst vacancy at the IRS is detailed thus: “Incumbent is responsible for developing and issuing instructions, procedures, and forms necessary for field program execution...
...According to the “Career America” brochure, calling it is “your first step to begin learning about the exciting public service career that awaits you...
...I couldn’t believe it...
...When one finally appeared, it had no phone number printed on it...
...But Pat Ingraham, a professor of government at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton who studied the matter for the Volcker Commission, argues that it cannot be denied...
...And all he said was, ‘You see, this is what I do...
...government does a lousier job of recruiting than Taco Bell and DeKalb Swine Breeders, 1nc.-both of which did make it to MSU...
...I never thought I’d find anything in government that would let me combine my interests in international affairs, business, and trade,” explains Julie Rauner, a desk officer for Latin America at the Commerce Department...
...The ideal policy would not, however, include ACWA...
...I was furious...
...Worse, says Harvard’s Lynn Wehnes, OPM has informed colleges that this may be the only time the exam is offered this academic year...
...Even the test’s high scorers are frequently completely ignored, competitively in theory but far from it in practice...
...Most thought not...
...While OPM’s recent reforms have allowed the agencies to hire directly, that’s only true for certain hardtofill technical, scientific, and specialized positions...
...There are, after all, only about 10,000 of those plum jobs in a federal civilian workforce that has topped 3 million ever since 1940...
...We were there to make sure these kids were able to get an education, as they were entitled to under the law...
...These hapless employees are sent forth thoroughly unprepared: more than half, says OPM, receive no training whatsoever for their mission...
...Usually this means that recruiting chores are handed out as a sort of booby-prize to those who lack the seniority or guile to avoid them...
...Apart from cosmetics,’’ says Syracuse’s Anne Stewart, “nothing much has changed...
...To compete with the private sector’s slick marketing efforts, a $39.4 million campaign called “Career America,” featuring a glossy brochure, was launched...
...Unlike his former boss, he values the civil service enough to have talked up its virtues...
...That they went to Harvard didn’t hurt, either...
...ehernr mowenn ta,g eenspcye.c ially at shops full of the best and brightest whatever s , ” wrote Terry Cutler, one “No longer will the of Devine’s assistants, in Most of the u-si government does government be able to sit a 1986 op-ed piece in back and wait for candiThe wail Street Journal...
...Daunting because the job information center at OPM’s Washington headquarters has for years been notorious for its mindnumbing inefficiency...
...By making the process of getting a government job as cumbersome, slow, and red-tape-riddled as possible, the administration guaranteed that even the most determined would-be bureaucrats would ultimately go scurrying off to interview at Salomon Brothers or, worse, to apply to law school...
...Twothirds of them, according to OPM, treat recruiting as a “collateral duty”-that is, one for which no full-time staff (or staff member) is responsible...
...To make information easier to get, a nationwide phone number was initiated, providing “up-to-the-minute” federal job listings...
...They’ve got these computers that are supposed to answer your questions, but don’t,’’ he told me...
...The Who, then, would have envied Constance Berry agency never recovered...
...That of a fishery biologist at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, taken nearly two weeks earlier...
...The goal, therefore, should not be-cannot be-the elimination of “knowing someone” but rather its democratization...
...The number of graduates applying for work through the Civil Service Commission, as OPM was then called, doubled under JFK...
...I quickly find that despite each department’s different function, their personnel staffs seem to have been trained by the same manual...
...Some said you had to take a test...
...The disastrous thing about the dearth of campus outreach-not to mention the kind of tragicomic episodes described by Ingraham and others-is that it leaves untapped an incredible reservoir of students who are interested in public service but aren’t sure exactly what to do about it...
...I think [ACWA] is going to deter a lot of kids...
...but she was the lone exception among nearly 20 others...
...That ratio reveals something irrefutable: the top dogs can’t do it alone...
...Such shenanigans are inevitable under any recruiting and hiring system...
...In the private sector, it’s so straightforward...
...Only seven were federal agencies...
...Government’s greatest triumphs during the past centurythe New Deal and the New Frontier-were wrought by the hands of the country’s “best and brightest” college graduates...
...Those planning to take the test (actually one of six tests covering the majority of jobs that liberal arts majors might want) this fall had to register by early October, well before many angst-ridden seniors had set foot in their college placement offices...
...It’s pure hell over there,” says Mary Ellen Glynn, a former legislative assistant on Capitol Hill who tried getting job information from OPM when she first came to Washington in 1987...
...Others said no...
...I love it-I can’t imagine anything in the private sector that would give me the same sense of accomplishment...
...But they make a simple point: Recruitment is still not high priority at the agencies...
...Despite OPM’s “encouragement” of individual agencies to hunt new talent aggressively on college campuses, few have done so...
...Concrete information was scant...
...My first stop is OPM...
...And then there’s Lisa Carlos...
...What did I get for my eight dollars...
...At OPM, as he did elsewhere, Reagan put a frantic ideologue, Donald Devine, in charge...
...Back then, government work was as seductive as investment banking would trations-civil rights, the Peace Corps, the War on become decades later...
...Nine months,” he says, “I’m about ready to give up...
...Next it’s a whirlwind tour of the agencies-IRS, Commerce, Energy, Treasury...
...For information about federal salaries and benefits, press I . For information on how to apply for federal jobs, press 2. For information on student and intern employment programs, press 3. To repeat this message, press 8. . . . On and on this goes, menu after menu after menu...
...Sorghumsomething That perception, shared by virtually every student and not a few bureaucrats, needs to change...
...More than 30 percent of the civil service hirees in any given year go through “excepted authorities,” meaning sional and Administrative Career Examination, was dropped in 198 1 because it allegedly discriminated against minorities...
...But the students have no say about which agencies they might like to work for...
...to help “simplify” federal employment policy...
...The oldest...
...I keep sending out these damned applications and nothing ever comes back...
...It was suspected that the school had decided to have the migrant kids kept out of school by saying they had head lice...
...assists in planning, evaluation, and implementation of nationwide programs for exempt organizations...
...When I asked him how he got his job, he said, ‘My mother works downstairs...
...So I get in line to talk to one of the assistants...
...What was strange was that one company-the country’s biggest, in fact-didn’t make the list: the federal government...
...Long lines, unhelpful people, totally useless...
...But these were mostly governPoverty-those days were long gone...
...That means a lot of our kids who might have been interested will be out of luck,” she comments...
...The most telling...
...I ask a job seeker in his mid-20s...
...That kind of aggressive marketing could help the civil service, too...
...Government work is mostly pushing paper...
...In addition, ACWA was created noncompetitive channels arranged by agencies to bring in particular people...
...by contrast, in the early eighties, they John Heilemann writes for The Economist in Washington...
...Obviously delighted by this piece of evidence that the Reagan administration was irrevocably over, Pryor replied: “Ms...
...Open to [this agency’s] employees only” is also common...
...jumped on the shuttle to New York...
...He was right in front of me...
...As Andrew Nussbaum, a law student at the University of Chicago, pointed out in an op-ed piece this past October in the Los Angeles Times, you don’t have to be antimilitary or antinational security to realize that such agencies “hardly exhaust the government’s employment opportunities...
...The bits that I can understand provide slim comfort...
...OPM should follow the logic that led it to give direct-hire authority to the agencies for certain jobs to its natural conclusion...
...There it’s very cut and dried...
...Unfortunately, though, that’s about it...
...He was gruff and unknowledgeable...
...Like magic, Kopp soon had 2,500 applications (for 500 spots) from kids who, a year before, might just as easily have ended up swapping stocks on the trading floor...
...ACWA’s defenders argue that without it, the merit principle that supposedly guides federal hiring would be thrown out the window-that the premium placed on “knowing someone” would become astronomical...
...I haven’t had a single interview yet . . . and I’ve got a college degree...
...But despite efforts at improvement by his Office of Personnel Management (0PM)-the government’s main headhunter-the recruiting system remains a shambles...
...Newman...
...The purposeful neglect of government recruiting had, in effect, helped to bring on “a slowly emerging crisis of competence” in an array of federal programs...
...The principal of the school in the nearby town was having funding troubles and he couldn’t keep all of his buses running...
...And what I hear is that the quality of new hires is just getting worse and worse...
...Newman, George Bush’s choice to breathe life into a VISTA was emblematic of how Reagan’s indis- rigor-mortised OPM...
...Reagan and Devine knew that the best way to kill off an undesired agency was to cut off its source of new blood...
...It’s tempting, of course, to dismiss the accounts of Pryor’s interns as petty complaints...
...In fact, it has created yet another obstacle for students who have, by this time, already cleared Still more common are mid-level positions filled quite a few...
...secretaries were frankly discouraging...
...The point here is not that government agencies are often staffed with apathetic know-nothings or that someone should make sure that vacancy listings are kept current (although both those are true), but that to the eager student interested in serving the public interest, whether temporarily or for a career, the whole system must seem a hopeless quagmire...
...Judging by the initial flurry of activity at OPM that followed, Pryor’s optimism seemed justified...
...Personnel officers were brusque or absent...
...The only thing they could agree on was that they didn’t care to find out...
...the bureaucracy, at least as vital to the national security, should do the same...
...When I got to the window, she pulled the partition right in my face, without even saying hello, goodbye, or I’m sorry...
...I make note of 10 openings at random and leave...
...they have brochures describing their jobs, they come to campus to talk to you, and you can decide,” says Rebecca Slaven, a 1990 Vanderbilt grad who interned on Capitol Hill, liked Washington, and thought for awhile about coming back to work at an agency...
...And it might not even be such a tough sell, because-truth be told-a great many government jobs are not boring at all...
...Said one: “Government isn’t like that anymore...
...The corporate route provides them with the path of least resistance...
...government is becoming the first choice...
...reviewing and analyzing the impact of complex cases and those requiring National Office examination plan approval...
...After waiting in line to talk to the woman behind the infamous information counter (who is pleasant and perfectly helpful), I return to jot down a few job listings...
...Welcome to Career America’s College Hotline, a summary of career opportunities for college students and graduates...
...Government’s greatest triumphs during the past centurythe New Deal and the New Frontier-were wrought by the hands of the country’s “best and brightest” college graduates...
...It was cucumber season and we went out to a migrant farm camp, where the poverty was worse than anything I had ever seen before-worse than in Mexico...
...It’s just form after form after form, all essentially indecipherable without some sort of secret code book...
...Let public service be a proud and lively career,” Kennedy said, and college students listened...
...The place was awash in new programs, many of them-in theory-right on target...
...I shuffle my feet...
...Reach out and touch no one And this is only for the lucky few who personally brave Washington in search of professional fulfillment...
...As for the lack of information on campus-arguably more critical, since that’s where most students will make their first career decisions-she points to the “College Hotline” 900number and says things are much better...
...Many government positions hide their merits behind bland job descriptions...
...Before he even applies, he has tangled with a government that lives up to the most outlandish stereotype of confusion and rigidity ever offered by Ronald Reagan and his conservative cronies...
...Again, the comparison with the private sector is instructive,” she says...
...Every other agency and program practically vanished from campus...
...Law” focusing on the bureaucracyon, say, the Agriculture Department...
...He rushed through...
...During the Reagan administration, federal recruiting was actually designed to reinforce ment majors, enrolled in an upper-level course called “Politics in the Modem American State...
...It would also feature deferrals for government student loan payments so long as the fledgling civil servant’s salary fell below some limit, say $18,000 per year...
...The other agencies are somewhat more promising...
...But when I asked how many of them had thought about working in government, they looked at me as if I’d asked if they had considered becoming botanists...
...Perhaps what’s needed is a television series like “L.A...
...Important work, and far from what most of us think of as “auditing...
...But each of my calls took more than 10 minutes, creating two questions for every one answered...
...If these tedious occupations can seem sexy, why can’t government...
...Outlandish pay may have helped fuel the investmentbanking binge, but equally important was the perception that the jobs were hot stuff...
...The federal government is an equal opportunity employer...
...And although I left my name and address after the appropriate beep, the packet I requested in September on government careers in writing and public affairs has yet to arrive as of this writing two months later...
...Only seven were federal agencies...
...Just laying your hands on information about what positions are out there requires the investigative savvy of Bob Woodward and the patience of Job...
...No matter how inspired4r inspiring-their visions, they are sure to be frustrated if carried out by mediocre hands...
...He’ll come in and start apologizing immediately,” explains Chuck Sundberg, a placement officer at UCLA...
...Discouraged, I return to my office to phone about the jobs I learned about at OPM...
...You ask them to send you stuff and it never comes...
...A decentralized system in which agencies are responsible for their own recruiting makes infinite sense...
...The military, defense agencies, and CIA went on as before, to the point where they were the only representatives of government seen at many colleges...
...Syracuse’s Anne Stewart suspects that Kehoe is not unusual...
...But to listen to Carlos, the job is everything but...
...Did recruiters come to campus...
...Back then, government work was as seductive as investment banking would trations-civil rights, the Peace Corps, the War on meet our basic expectations, let alone go beyond that to better our lives, it needs creative, intelligent, dedicated people to develop and run its programs...
...Washington naturals, right...
...No wonder: About the same proportion believe that government jobs are not “challenging or intellectually stimulating...
...And don’t let anyone tell you that it can’t because of its meager salaries...
...You send a resume, you get an interview or you don’t, you get an offer or you don’t...
...George Bush seems to understand this principle somewhat...
...The typical manager will tell you, ‘It takes longer for [new employees] to do the work and it’s not adequate once it’s done...
...So it was no surprise that by April, most of the seniors in the discussion sections I was leading as a graduate student had jobs lined up after graduation...
...But with fewer buses, it meant the migrant kids filled them up before they got into the more affluent neighborhoods...
...Had they been the normal hodgepodge of art history, literature, and economics majors, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought...
...Management consultants, who spend most of their waking hours poring over spreadsheets in airport terminals, are nevertheless worshipped by business school students far and wide as jet-set powerbrokers...
...But with the government, you can never find anything out...
...The job application process is so confusing that even college career counselors don’t understand it...
...It’s that kind of cachet that government has to regain if it’s going to work well...
...Agency outreach to campuses is still almost nonexistent...
...In Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis described the scene outside Princeton’s career services office when Lehman Bros...
...It was on that trip that I first realized how critical it was to these people that I was there-that there be bright, motivated people there to help them...
...Real estate speculators, who lately have been spending much of their time scanning the want ads, are still seen as shrewd predators by many undergraduates...
...for example, fewer than a dozen agencies had recruiting messages on the Hotline...
...Almost any college career counselor can tell you about a common problem: The Underconfident Government Recruiter...
...Tell me how that makes sense...
...The government resurrection...
...Several bulletin boards are blanketed with the aesthetically pleasing pages of the “Career America” brochure, which pictures a remarkably racially balanced lot of young workers demonstrably enjoying their jobs...
...I can’t tell you the number of students who simply aren’t willing to wait until May to find out whether they have a job or not...
...Fifteen minutes of throat-clearing later, I am informed that I should come back next week...
...they just add to the problem...
...Pat Schroeder has suggested, include a ROTC-style scholarship program offering full or partial tuition to students willing to commit to a stint in a federal agency...
...Obediently, Devine halted all recruiting by his agenCYThe rest of the agencies were forced to follow OPM’s lead...
...I go around and talk to people when I feel like it and if I don’t no one checks and I pull down thirty-twopoint-five a year and it’s a piece of cake.’ Then he left...
...Consider Teach for America, a widely heralded new program through which recent college grads work as teachers in disadvantaged neighborhood schools for two years at salaries of $18,000 to $29,000 per year, depending on the district...
...When someone who sits five floors below Director Newman is closing up shop at 2:30 p.m., the message is obviously not trickling down...
...I’d give up a big salary, at least for a while, if I thought the government would challenge me and teach me...
...The most recent...
...The military shells out more than $385 million a year for ROTC...
...I know our salaries are uncompetitive,’ he says, ‘I know we’re not glamorous.’ Instead of talking about their strengths, they dwell on weaknesses...
...Hence, departments were commanded to stop visiting campuses and developing recruiting materials...
...Probably never...
...I had arranged for a recruiter from a federal agency-I shouldn’t say which-to come to [campus],” she said...
...Unfortunately, they appear to require that code book Mary Ellen Glynn was talking about...
...But worse, in the absence of any meaningful recruiting efforts, the quality of the civil service entered into what political scientist James Q. Wilson calls “a death spiral...
...Her official job description-“ to conduct site visits of federally funded projects and to check compliance with regulatory and statutory guidelines and provide technical assistance”is all eyeshades and fine print...
...The students were there...
...All of this was done selectively, of course...
...The tests are not a solution...
...One intern, Libby Schnipper, was told by a disgruntled HUD staff member, “Look, you fill out the forms, we put your name into the computer, and we’ll call you when it comes up...
...The reality...
...Career Americcs-find out why the US...
...Washington has done remarkably little to counter these perceptions...
...Meanwhile, J. D. Walt, then a young staff member for Pryor and currently a law student at the University of Arkansas, was dispatched on the most daunting of assignments-OPM itself...
...What that involved, it turns out, was writing, producing, and directing a video for the bureau on how it should go about selling off the ill-gotten possessions of convicted drug dealers in order to turn the highest profit in the shortest time...
...Even so, OPM would still have important work to do, especially in refurbishing the tattered image of government jobs...
...Reagan had shunned the goal of luring the “best and brightest,” and what the governobtaining jobs,” Newman or’s civil service subcommittee early in her tenure...
...Faced with congressional unwillingness to do away with the program entirely, the administration ordered all recruiting materials destroyed and terminated all outreach efforts...
...If the word gets out, maybe the best and the brightest will begin to take a second look...
...If government is to meet our basic expectations, let alone go beyond that to better our lives, it needs creative, intelligent, dedicated people to develop and run its programs...
...Pryor did what Congress rarely does: investigate a problem directly-in this case by sending his interns out to roam Washington’s federal corridors...
...The rest, stranded at their schools and probably not among those fortunate enough to talk with a competent government recruiter, are left with OPM’s great hi-tech hope: the automated College Hotline...
...That the government expects students to pay for the privilege of being electronically recruited says a great deal about what’s wrong with government recruiting...
...Contrary to Paul Volcker’s widely held view, federal wages are not keeping students away, the federal image is...
...many times the students couldn’t even get past security at the buildings...
...So I decided to wait, because I’d come all the way across town and all...
...And this need goes well beyond the political appointees and members of the senior executive service...
...Even if they had been interested, they said, no one had the faintest idea of how to go about getting a federal job...
...I decide to see for myself...
...Promotion Potential: None” is stamped across the top of at least half of them...
...Ironically, OPM itself is a principal reason why many of what would probably be the most enticing agencies-like the EPA or the Agency for International Development-don’t visit colleges to recruit...
...Law”’s razzle-dazzle editing and plethora of perfect teeth, thousands of otherwise intelligent young men and women think of as the epitome of glamour and panache...
...Last year, 222 organizations interviewed students at Michigan State...
...All of them took great joy in slogging through hundreds of pages on such burning topics as the evolution of bureaucratic structure at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA...
...I’m not going to tell you money isn’t important,” says Mary McLeod, “but experience is a lot more important to me...
...When Reagan left office, the bureaucracy was more bloated than ever, having actually swelled by 7.5 percent during his tenure...
...In the recruiting battle against the private sector, people like Carlos, Newmark, and Rauner can be the government’s secret weapon...
...Or a series of ads modeled on the military’s: “Be all that you can be, in the Treasury...
...Why, then, was it posted at OPM...
...Leonard Newmark, recently hired as an auditor at GAO, tells me how one of his first assignments was “figuring out ways to increase the Customs Bureau’s disposal of asset forfeitures...
...And they were hardly apolitical or lacking in public spirit...
...Neither could SUNY’s Ingraham when she ran across another, only slightly less common archetype -the Ignorant, Rude, Obnoxious, Lazy, and Tardy Government Recruiter...
...During the fabled first 100 days of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, the president’s lieutenants recruited with a personal zeal that bordered on the missionary...
...it’s awfully hard to prove that this year’s newly christened bureaucrats are less competent or efficient than yesteryear’s...
...We still see the same ones as before-the CIA, the NSA [National Security Agency], and the Pentagon,” remarks John Hennen, an assistant director of placement at the University of Minnesota...
...why will become clear to me later...
...Their jobs-engrossing, inspiring, important-are by no means extraordinary in government...
...I took one trip out into the middle of Indiana...
...job listings were out of date...
...Advertising budgets were slashed...
...Excited as they were by the dynamism of the Kennedy and Johnson administhem...
...Those who have served in the armed forces may chuckle when they see one of the “Be all that you can be” ads, but the campaign has unquestionably helped improve the quality of the all-volunteer military...
...A recent GAO report drove home the point: In most schools’ placement offices, the government is nowhere to be seen...
...And, of course, no budget means no recruiting...
...excellence but employee By not shooting for both, the government ended up with neither...
...But two years later, theory has yet to really become practice, and the recruiting system bears a distressing resemblance to the way things were...
...Without ACWA and OPM as a central and ineffective employee clearinghouse, the agencies would be forced to develop their own recruiting strategies...
...You try to get information directly and no one knows what’s available...
...Many are out of date, the application deadlines having passed days-or weeks-earlier...
...Several kept full calendars housing the homeless, saving the rain forests, and freeing South Africa (often simultaneously...
...Their smiling faces contrast noticeably with those of the would-be civil servants scouring the job listings and squinting at the interactive computer terminals...
...According to a survey by the National Commission on the Public Service (better known as the Volcker Commission), nearly 90 percent of college honor students never seriously consider working in government...
...Perhaps even more perverse, those agencies that do recruit are often phenomenally inept at it...
...The centerpiece of OPM’s innovations is a new civil service exam called ACWA (Administrative Careers With America), designed to restore “merit hiring” to a system widely criticized for lack thereof (its forerunner, the Profes“Why go through the hassle of taking this test when, number one, the only job you might get offered is with some agency you have no interest in, and number two, you might not hear for almost a year...
...But the idea of a pure “merit principle” determining government hiring policy has always been a naive dream, albeit an attractive one...
...You don’t know this until you’ve been in government awhile, but there’s this modus operandi that’s usually unspoken but very clear...
...Sadly, the view that “government isn’t like that anymore” is far from unique among America’s young “best and brightest...
...As I lean over the front desk in the Treasury Department’s personnel lobby, the young woman sitting behind it chats on the phone with her boyfriend...
...The military, too...
...Although this logic is straightforward enough, logic was never one of Ronald Reagan’s strong suits...
...Research assistance provided by Andrew Bates...
...Roosevelt and Kennedy understood that the bureaucracy, despite its shortcomings, could do great things...
...It is, for one thing, more colorful than I had expected...
...John Kennedy’s underlings did the same, and so did the president...
...For truly good government, good people need to be spread across every department and grade level...
...Hard to believe, but Walt found it worse than that...
...I went in there at least three or four times, and I still don’t have a clue about how you go about getting a federal job...
...But boy was I wrong...
...It might even, as Rep...
...Custom tailoring It hasn’t...
...Moreover, the applicant’s name often remains on the list for up to nine full months without prompting any agency response-plenty of time for him or her to be lured away by a private company’s recruiter who can hire on the spot...
...Under them, at times it did...
...According to Mimi Major, a top VISTA official in the Carter administration, “The Reagan people essentially said, ‘If you want to be a volunteer, we’ll make ment got instead, said the report, was “the best of the it as difficult for you as we can.’ Now you need the desperate...
...It was an auspicious start...
...And students might be spared some of the dispiriting chaos they now encounter...
...The best of Newman’s ideas have been poorly executed...
...To attract applicants, Teach for America’s founder, Wendy Kopp, touted it around the Ivy League and other top schools as “highly selective” and “extremely competitive...
...A GS-14 at the Department of Education explains: “If an agency has a lower-level employee in mind for some spot that’s opening up but that has to be posted and ‘competitive,’ they just tailor the job description so only that person’s [application] fits it...
...These are the kids who come in not knowing what they’re looking for and, in the absence of any other viable alternative, will end up going private,” says Lynn Wehnes, a career counselor at Harvard...
...It certainly couldn’t hurt...
...We had nine students sign up, all bright, all interested in federal employment...
...With each prominent New Dealer acting as his own employment agency,” writes historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Washington was deluged with an endless stream of bright young men...
...He told them to gather for a joint meeting at 8:30 a.m...
...But for that to happen, people of passion and creativity have to be assembled...
...You will be charged 40 cents per minute for this service...
...Reagan’s team systematically undermined recruiting efforts just as it systematically ran up the federal deficit, and for precisely the same reason: to cripple the cause of government activism...
...What they found, in Pryor’s understated words, was that “the system is not operating smoothly...
...Now, a year later, Marsha Frost, deputy chief for affirmative employment at OPM, tells me, “Those sorts of things are unlikely to happen today...
...The array of postings-all in one huge display case-is staggering, running from autopsy assistant and air traffic controller through grievance analyst to phlebotomist and police officer...
...Even allowing for glacial mail service, it’s fair to say, in “Doonesbury’s” phrase, that “there’re still a few bugs in the system...
...Having roared mightily that “government is not the solution to our problem, it is the problem,” Reagan directed his administration to conduct its recruiting efforts accordingly...
...The recruitment process is such a maze-it’s almost as if it was set up to keep good people out...
...a lousier job Of reCrUitill-Q t han dates for employment to “Government’s goal present themselves and should not be employee Taco Bell and DeKalb Swine endure long delays before make it to MSU...
...For all its flaws, however, the College Hotline is terribly clear about the application ordeal that lies ahead for any student who, after all this, decides the bureaucracy is still for him...
...Yet Newman, at the time a 28criminate antigovernment philosophy, when applied year civil servant who began her career as a clerkto recruiting, amounted typist in the Department to a recipe not for a lean of the Interior, seemed to bureaucracy but for a bad Last year, 222 organizations relish the challenge of one...
...Wle are going to have sufficiency...
...His mandate: institutional self-destruction...
...He finally showed up two hours late, refused to reschedule appointments, and instead just gave a big group interview...
...Slaven knows better than most just how frustrating “getting the low-down” on federal employment can be...
...Evidence of that decline is largely anecdotal...
...In her second year out of college, Carlos landed a position as a “program analyst” with the Department of Education’s migrant education office...
...Most of the U.S...
...And then there’s corporate law, a patently dreary profession that, thanks to “L.A...
...Postscript: All of the students there that day ended up in the private sector...
...How long have you been at this...
...Spooks and swine Nowhere is that more true than in the area with which Stewart and other college placement specialists are most familiar: campus outreach...
...True, one woman was considering Capitol Hill...
...It’s all coordinated...
...For the majority of management, administrative, and policymaking jobs, applicants must still go through OPM...
...All of a sudden she looks up and says she’s closing and that the last person she was going to wait on was the guy in the pink shirt...
...But what an astoundingly bad one...
...Indeed, according to OPM itself, almost 60 percent of the 236 federal departments and agencies have no recruiting budget whatsoever...
...She quickly does not need top gradu- interviewed students at Michigan declared that “tremenates, administrative of- dous changes” were fices staffed with MBAs needed in recruiting from Wharton, or policy methods throughout gov- State University...
...Go to the agencies, he told them, try to find out what jobs are there, come back and tell me what you learn...
...Witness my former students...
...Several others make similar comments...
...Lines of resistance Confronted with this observation, OPM’s response to Pryor was, essentially, give it time...
...A fair policy would give college students of all classes and backgrounds the chance to “know someone,” especially through summer internships and cooperative programs...
...To make light of such publicity tactics is not to dismiss their real potential...
...In the early sixties, eager young honor students lined up to buy train tickets to Washington...
...Kehoe thought about taking the writing and public information test, but then reconsidered...
...Arguments in favor of outreach, Devine would say later, were “basically a cover to get more money...
...You have chosen to get information about federal employment...
...If, however, you’ve ever dealt with one of these touch-tone systems-inescapable nowadays when calling banks, credit-card companies, or Amtrak-you know it’s more likely to be your first step to ripping your phone off the wall...
...When, queried Schnipper, might that be...
...Her congressional internship was with Senator Pryor, who during the summer of 1989 decided to see whether Newman’s OPM was living up to its promises...
...That, of course, was exactly the idea...
...A supervisory auditor slot at EPA, which, it turns out, never open to nonagency applicants in the first place...
...But I just don’t think that’s true...
...OPM estimates that the average call to the Hotline should last between four and five minutes, though no hard data is available...
...You call anyway...
...At 2:30 in the afternoon...
...The response is unanimous: 10 calls, 10 positions filled long ago...
...At most of them I am directed to the job vacancy listings...
...For five full years, VISTA didn’t even have a promotional poster...
...Students who pass the test, for instance, have their scores put on a rank-ordered list that agencies use to pick people to interview...
Vol. 22 • December 1990 • No. 11
