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Federal Recruitment

The United States government has a serious people problem. But it can be fixed.

by Nicholas Thompson

James Rice had never really thought about working for the federal government. But one day in early 1998, he noticed an intriguing stack of brochures from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the mailbox of the Atlanta homeless organization he'd run for eight years.

The brochure described a program called "Community Builders." HUD would train accepted applicants at Harvard's Kennedy School and then give them high-ranking federal jobs working in their local communities. Rice couldn't figure out why HUD had sent a stack of brochures to his office. His clients cared more about roofs and dinner than leadership training sessions in Cambridge. But, personally, it would allow him to do what he'd always done, just at a higher level and with the resources of the federal government. "It was a dream come true for me," he says.

Rice quickly sent in his materials. Six weeks later, in April, he got a postcard back from Washington saying that his materials had arrived at HUD. But spring passed and he heard nothing more. Then summer came and went. Then fall came and went and he almost gave up hope.

Finally, on New Year's Day, out of the blue, HUD called and asked whether Rice could come in for an interview three days later. Surprised, yet still enthusiastic, Rice agreed to head in. The interview went very well, Rice waited around a bit more, and in late February HUD offered him a job. Eleven months after applying, he had his dream and a plane ticket to Boston.

Rice loved the training program, but something strange happened when he started work. He'd come in to the office, walk around, and feel like he had entered a ghost town. People had jobs, but little interest in them. By three in the afternoon, everyone would have left. Used to 16-hour days, Rice was startled by people who seemed to log about five. Once a colleague stopped him in the hall and derisively declared, "You're nothing but an overachiever." To Rice, the difference came down to speed. "People just walk slower here," he says.

Four years into his work, the pace still frustrates Rice. He enjoys his own work and a few energetic close colleagues enough though that he's looking for a promotion and has found the job he wants. Plus, this time he thinks he has an application edge: He knows how to play the government application game.

"The government loves paper and verbiage," he says. Whereas all of his job applications in the past have been two pages long---a cover letter and a resume---this one is 44 pages including his attachments. He had friends from HUD edit it, helping him wade through all the complicated forms. "My friends read everything over and help me make everything longer and less concise. It's hard if you are used to being succinct."

Now all he has to do is wait. He filed the application in October and HUD called him in for an interview in February---where one of his interviewers demanded to know whether he ever talked to the press. Sensing the desired answer, Rice said no, and his name has subsequently been disguised for this article. For the sake of having a government filled with smart and ambitious people who can bring sense to the hiring system and alacrity to the office halls, "Rice" needs all the help he can get in winning this promotion.

Government's People Problem

Rice's story neatly illustrates a national predicament, as crucial as it is unnoticed around the nation's dinner tables. The federal government has a hard time drawing in top talent, and a harder time keeping it there. Subsequently, the United States government has a serious people problem.

The federal government offers a compelling array of work, from managing the Klamath national forest to tracking terrorists to evaluating insulation for the space shuttle to coordinating housing assistance in Atlanta. Try to imagine someone living a day in America without relying on the government, and the people who work for it: whether getting the mail, driving on a highway, or drinking a glass of milk they know is pasteurized.

But three huge problems impede the federal government from getting good people. First, very few people know about government jobs that match their skills and goals. Everyone has seen ads for the Army, but who has seen a Department of Education ad? Second, if people do learn about government jobs, the system forces them through a Byzantine and demoralizing application process. Third, if they finally come on board, they're often herded into stultifying grunt work and saddled with a pay and promotion system that seems created for 1950s clerks-which it actually was.

Subsequently, without young blood coming in over the past decade, the average age of the civilian workforce has climbed steadily upwards, creating skills shortages and an impending retirement wave. The government now employs more people in their 60s than in their 20s. In five years, half of the civil service will be eligible to retire.

Making matters worse, the two traditionally most enticing advantages of government work-stability and benefits-don't interest highly mobile Generation Xers as much as they influenced the previous generation. When asked what they want most out of their jobs, people in their twenties rank "opportunity to develop skills" first and "opportunity for promotion" second, well ahead of "benefits" or "job security."

Moreover, because civil-service work doesn't attract the country's brightest young men and women, employee quality remains well lower than it could or should be---which creates an unfortunate feedback loop. Bad or bored bureaucrats on the inside discourage people on the outside. Plus, when the system's not working, top talent leaves or never comes while low talent comes and never leaves. Ultimately, far too many offices operate like Rice's at HUD, creating powerful disincentives for bright applicants.

Only about one in six college students express any interest at all in the civil service. Worse, the percentage of students graduating from top public policy graduate schools and going on to work for the government has dropped by a third in the last two and a half decades. Only about one in four winners of United States Truman scholarships-awards given to promising undergraduates aiming for public service careers-goes on to fulltime work in the civil service, even though the program tracks most into federal government internships after college. "Sometimes students see people who go and work for the government as fuddy-duddy bureaucrats not bright enough to work elsewhere," says Nadinne Cruz, the director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University.

Maybe the most discouraging statistic comes from Paul Light at the Brookings Institution. According to a 2002 survey, the number of people in the government who say that they come in to work solely for the paycheck exceeds those who say the government gives them the opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile. That reflects both the culture of government work and the kind of people who stay in. According to that same study, 70 percent of Americans believe that federal government employees are motivated primarily by job security.

Even the attacks of September 11, 2001 haven't substantially increased the number of people who want to work for Uncle Sam. New York delis may be selling out fireman calendars, but Manhattanites aren't lining up to join the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or even the military. "We've got a lot more people coming in here to tell us how much they appreciate our work, but not more people saying they want to join," says Sergeant Andrew Holland at the New York City Army recruiting outpost in Times Square.

Backing up Sergeant's Holland's observation is a September 2002 poll done by the Partnership for Public Service (PPS), a Washington non-profit formed in 2001 that now leads numerous efforts at solving the federal civil service's people problem. That poll found that although a majority of Americans see the government's work as more important today than before the terrorist attacks, 80 percent say that their interest in working for the government had either stayed the same or dropped since the attacks.

Combine these trends with the government's undeniably increased importance and relevance in the post September 11th world, and we now face a federal recruitment zero hour. The impending retirement wave opens up the opportunity to bring in fresh minds who can steer government in the transformed world. But it raises the possibility that government will fill the job openings, if it fills them at all, with people who lack both inspiration and experience.

For the sake of everyone in this country, let's hope it's the former---and let's hope James Rice gets his next job.

Talent Show

Government talent level matters. It's profoundly in our national interest to have CIA analysts who can quickly learn Arabic, IRS officials who effectively track offshore accounts, and a Department of Education that processes student loans correctly. If those examples aren't sufficiently compelling to you, look at the air traffic control tower next time you approach O'Hare.

Right now, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has severe attrition problems and limited response plans. Last year, the FAA hired about 350 people, and has plans for about the same next year. Unfortunately, it takes from two to four years for an air-traffic controller to earn certification and between 700 and 1,100 FAA controllers will likely retire in 2006 when the current crop of recruits is finally ready to start work. In other words, a lot of empty chairs will probably be filling control towers soon.

To fill that gap, the FAA may persuade old air-traffic controllers to stay past their planned retirement. But air traffic control is a young person's job because of the necessary rapid response skills. According to a report by the House of Representatives when it passed the current law mandating that the controllers retire at 56: "the controllers themselves are convinced that the demands of the job are so great that only young, healthy adults can consistently do a safe, competent job."

Fortunately, important people have noticed the quiet personnel crisis. In the last two years, both President Bush and the General Accounting Office (GAO) have listed human capital management as one of the handful of most high-risk areas for the government, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has started ranking agencies on how well they assess their human capital challenges. (It has given almost all failing grades. But at least someone's keeping track.) On the Hill, a few Congressmen, most notably Ohio senator George Voinovich, have chosen to plunge into this subject-one that offers few political rewards.

Beyond the growing attention, there are other reasons to think that the government has hope. Federal jobs always look better when the private sector is in trouble, and the business world has lost both jobs and luster in the past year. In addition, numerous state governments, which often compete with the feds, face bankruptcy. The West Wing even now allows people to turn on the television and see a government that works. In short, the stars are aligned for a revolution in federal personnel. For now though, most of the government seems to aspire to mediocrity when it comes to personnel.

Nobody Knows

Government's first problem is education: very few people know that there are jobs available or how to get them. According to a PPS poll in October 2002, Americans say that they know vastly less about jobs in the federal government than jobs in the private sector. Not only that, but most Americans guess a number far higher than reality when asked to estimate the percentage of government jobs located in Washington.

It's not surprising though that people know much less about what the government offers. For one the major media rarely delves into real discussions of what government does, outside of the White House and the State and Defense Departments. In fact, a new Washington non-profit, the Understanding Government Foundation, was recently formed with the express intent of improving coverage of the government. The foundation notes in its mission statement that the New York Times doesn't have a single person whose job consists of regularly covering the Department of Labor or the Department of Education.

Moreover, Corporations scour college campuses looking for people, and constantly try to pluck talent from their rivals. When not recruiting, they also get their names into public circulation much better than most government agencies. When did you last see the U.S. Mint sponsor a softball team?

Government at times even seems absolutely set on derailing positive accounts about its hiring and the opportunities it provides. For example, the Defense Contracts Audit Agency (DCAA) treated this reporter as though he had just called in a bomb threat when he inquired about good things others had said about the agency's hiring process.

First DCAA gave him a lengthy statement written in federal gobbledygook and asked to insert it directly into this article, a process DCAA hoped to facilitate by providing a Microsoft Word file of the statement. Then, after two informative conversations, spokeswoman Donna Truesdell sprang the news that "Agency policy requires that we approve articles for which we have provided input prior to publication," a policy seemingly taken from the government of Zimbabwe. Denied that censoring authority, Ms. Truesdell snapped over email: "i will have to ask you to delete ANY reference to DCAA in your story." Amazingly, the organization did all that to try to stave off a short section on all the good work it has done in becoming an employer of choice.

Promotional problems also come from the top. The last five presidents have all run against the bureaucracy, telling people implicitly not to work for the government instead of telling them about all the opportunities. Ronald Reagan stacked his administration with anti-bureaucrats and cut off recruiting for many social programs. VISTA, the urban social work program, didn't have any promotional posters for five years. George H. W. Bush continued that trend to a lesser extent, and then handed the baton of indifference to Bill Clinton. Running against the civil service had helped Clinton earn his New Democrat bonafides, and he focused most of his civil service rhetoric on telling people about the jobs he'd cut, not the great ones they could get. Like his predecessors, Clinton was praising the civil service by the time he left office, but much less publicly than he had attacked it in his first few years.

Moreover, given the frequent civil service hiring freezes that have come in the past two decades, current employees often feel protective about available promotions and anxious to funnel friends into the few existing openings. At the very least, they use the buddy system to make sure that their friends find out about jobs first and can jump through the necessary hoops. According to a 2002 Merit Systems Protection Board report, 62 percent of unionized federal employees believe that their organizations should promote internal candidates first before even considering outsiders. Consequently, candidates from outside the government only compete for half of all federal job openings.

Conservatives often complain about intrusive government. When it comes to hiring and entering people's lives to offer them jobs though, government seems contentedly Libertarian.

The Outsiders

Even if people do find out about government jobs, the system is set up to keep the outsiders out. Many eager applicants, for example, can't navigate through federal job descriptions, which often seem written in a code intelligible only to government employees and, subsequently, their friends.

Let's say you want to work at Southwest Airlines in customer service. Your first step is the website which directs you to its "People Department." There you find the image of a smiling woman right next to a link called "luv your job." Click on the link and you get a list of bullet-points on what skills you need, such as "excellent communication skills" and "typing ability or keyboard skills." Following that is a clear, simple list of the steps for applying and a list of reasons to do so, including "FREE UNLIMITED space available travel anywhere Southwest Airlines flies! "

Now let's say you want to apply for a job in customer service at HUD. You click on the jobs link and get the following warning: "You have requested a document that is external to HUD's World Wide Web site. HUD cannot attest to the accuracy of information provided by linked sites." That's startling and confusing enough, but if you bother to click to the next page you'll be faced by a complicated form asking your location and status, including whether you are "a current Federal employee in an excepted service position covered by an interchange agreement."

Ignore that legalese and charge forward, and you'll reach the page with the job listings. Click on the "customer service representative" tag and you get to yet another page with a barrage of technical info. After searching for a minute, you will probably find the next magic button: "View announcement for PO-DEU-2003-0007ABZ." Bingo! You're finally at the job description.

The description is complicated. It includes "Promotion Potential: GS-07," a phrase unfamiliar to people who aren't familiar with government classifications and the system which places almost all employees on a scale from GS-1 (entry level clerks without high-school degrees) to GS-15 (experienced managers). The first line of the job description is, "The incumbent is the first point of contact for HUD's customers and the Department, and will function as the generalist who is generally knowledgeable of HUD services."

Even if you aspire to be a generally knowledgeable generalist, you're still going to have to convince HUD that you meet their job requirements. Where Southwest asks for "excellent communication skills," HUD asks for "Ability to communicate orally with others in person and over the phone," and then requires backup in the form of "separate narrative statements describing how their experience satisfies each Quality Ranking Factor (QRF)/Knowledge, Skill Ability (KSA) by describing: 1) where or how the particular KSA was acquired, 2) where and how the particular KSA was used."

You then have to muck through 1,992 words on veterans' preferences, special advantages to displaced federal workers applying under the "Career Transition Assistance Program/Interagency Career Transition Assistance Program (CTAP)/(ICTAP)," and the following useful tidbit: "Giving your social security number is voluntary. However, we cannot process your application without it." At long last, you'll find the address to which you need to send your application. If you get there, you too may have a chance to become PO-DEU-2003-0007ABZ.

The Trials of Hercules

Job applications are far from the only tedious part of the process. In order to hire someone, agencies need approval from their personnel departments, which depend on the agency's Congressional appropriations. Then they have to write a position description, get the vacancy announcement out, develop a rating plan, rate the applicants, make double sure that it hasn't passed over any veterans, interview the candidates, get higher-level approval, and then complete the required background checks. Because of the bureaucratic overload, each of the steps takes between two and four weeks. If hiring someone to the Senior Executive Service (SES), the top layer of career appointees that rests above GS-15, the process goes through another review board of SES members.

Background checks and clearances can also derail the process. The Defense Security Service for example revealed in 2001 that it had a backlog of 440,000 people awaiting clearance. The most basic clearances can take several months, and clearances for the most senior positions take, on average, more than a year.

The government often requires other forms of unwelcome scrutiny. Many people are scared of applying to the IRS, for example, because all hires face an intense back audit and scrutiny-which worries even people who do pay their taxes. Conflict of interest laws can also slow things down: sometimes so many revolving doors are locked that there's no front door to walk through. In 1994, for example, the FCC tried to hire people to work to implement a recently passed telecommunications law. "But everyone smart who knew anything about it had helped draft the bill in some way," says Blair Levin, then the agency's chief of staff.

The result is a process that's nasty, brutish, and long. "For the higher-grade positions, you slave away for hours," says Andrew Webb, a former Coast Guard official who has been applying for government jobs for the past three years. "Then you throw the application into a black hole and wait (sometimes months) for word that your application has been rejected or forwarded on to those who actually conduct the interviews and make the hiring decision." Kristina Filipovich, currently a student at the London School of Economics says, "I've come across really interesting positions at places like USAID, but in the end I didn't apply because it was so much work and such a nightmare."

Overall, it takes an average of about three months for the government to hire anyone, an untenable delay for many applicants. Seventy percent of college students say that they are unwilling to wait more than four weeks for a job offer. Other agencies are even worse. Before Colin Powell started streamlining the process, it often took two years from the time a Foreign Service Officer applied for his job to when he started work. Asked about the length of time it takes to make new hires, Dan Blair, the assistant director of the Office of Personnel Management, which overseas all of the government's personnel issues, responds: "If you can wait for them for that long, do you need them? And if they can wait that long, are they the kind of person that you would want?"

The Gordian Knot

The wearying hiring process stems in large part from one of the deepest structural problems with all government reform: a several-thousand page set of rules that politicians generally find much easier to add to than subtract from. Most of these rules were designed to keep political meddlers out, and they do that. They happen to keep the best young talent out too.

The current civil service rules date back to 1883 when a disappointed job seeker shot President Garfield, or, perhaps more important, when Republicans, about to lose control of Congress, switched sides in a fight over personnel-figuring they might as well protect their own previous hires and block Democratic patronage.

Since regulations are easier to add than to remove, Congress has repeatedly solved minor issues by stacking new layers of regulations on the expanding heap. "Federal recruiting has always been a mystery wrapped in an enigma, or, actually, a mystery wrapped in detailed rules. And, like so much of what the government does, the rules are always a good idea to start with but then you add them all together and you have got quite a hurdle," says Robert Knisely, a veteran of seven different cabinet agencies.

For example, the government has extremely complicated rules on hiring veterans, with different points and restrictions added depending on when they served. OPM's handbook on the subject has more words than this entire article and includes such provisions as awarding ten points to the scored application of the mothers of a deceased veteran who "died under honorable conditions while on active duty during a war or during the period April 28, 1952, through July 1, 1955, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign medal has been authorized." The mother loses those points if she remarried someone besides the deceased veteran's father and remains with him.

That rule may make sense. Some of the eligible mothers suffered substantially because their sons fought for the country. But personnel offices need to be completely versed in all 15,000 words on veterans' preferences as well as scores of other rules, regulations, and stipulations. That's not a recipe for speedy or clear hiring.

Another more notorious example was the "Rule Of Three" which served as a wrench in the works of hiring from when Ulysses S. Grant signed it into law until Senators George Voinovich (R-OH) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI) largely nullified it in an amendment to the November 2002 Homeland Security Bill. Under that rule, agencies had to rate applicants numerically primarily based on experience and veteran status, with management selecting only from among the top three applicants. Intended to ensure the consideration of more than one applicant, the rule really just added an arbitrary twist to hiring. Worse, managers had to use the rule sequentially, moving from one list to the next if hiring multiple people for the same position-meaning that only 12 candidates could be considered for ten jobs.

Complicated rules also slow down firing, which in turns slows down the number of spots that open up and prevents organizations from cleaning out folks who bring down morale. According to a 1999 MSPB report, "even a relatively small percentage of poor performers can have a disproportionately large and negative effect." Managers who want to fire someone generally have to offer the worker improvement plans, and then exhaustively document the employee's shortcomings. Even fired employees have the opportunity to appeal with a union grievance, or through the Merit Systems Protection Board. Member of protected classes based on race, age, gender, or handicap, can appeal to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In a 1994-1996 study by Robert Maranto, now at Villanova University, 85% of civil service managers said that they thought that personnel rules made it too hard to fire people.

Calling Alexander the Great

Some of the rules do have real merit, and it would surely be a sad day when political appointees could fire civil service employees on whims. No one should want an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) where everyone feels under constant threat to produce reports that please whatever administration happens to hold power.

One solution would be to hire half of all civil servants with two- or three-year renewable contracts. Poor performers then wouldn't need to be fired, their superiors could just decide not to renew them. That would create some knowledge gaps, and reduce the incentive to apply for people focused on job security. But it would dramatically increase the number of openings for top young talent while increasing incentives for high performance, as is done in some agencies such as the Border Patrol that put hires through initial probationary positions. People focused on job security, who may not be the most ambitious applicants in the first place, could apply for the permanent positions.

But even without major overhauls such as hiring significant numbers of employees on non-permanent contracts, the rules are still decidedly too complicated and the people who should have a real incentive to untangle them seem uninterested. Cabinet members have the most at stake when it comes to hiring top talent, but the average cabinet head stays for about two years, the first six months of which she spends trying to locate the cafeteria and figuring out who she can trust. Then, in the next year and a half, she has to focus on having an impact and setting her legacy-and every minute spent recruiting smart young people is a minute that's not going to get her on C-Span or in for lunch with the president.

Furthermore, Congress doesn't have a real incentive to make things better since few constituents really take the time to learn about civil service reform, and the issues rarely make it deeper into the press than Government Executive magazine or the Washington Post's federal column. When calling the press office of a Senator working vigorously on civil service reform, this reporter was asked, "Why are you calling? I mean, nobody from the media calls about this."

The only people with real stakes in civil service reform are government employee unions, and their principal stake is stasis. A reform that brings new people in more quickly can threaten those folks already inside. At the very least, it disrupts a system that they have learned how to play. Moreover, public employees don't have the same incentives to bring in top talent as their private sector counterparts. In the private sector, top talent increases the odds that everyone will get rich; and, bankruptcy might result if top talent stays away. Government employees will have the same jobs, and the same paychecks, no matter how good their colleagues are.

The Road To Reform

In fairness, the government has made some moves to clear up and streamline the process. For one, in 1996, it moved hiring authority outside of OPM and into agencies' own "delegated examining units," saving a step. More saliently, the government has put all of its job postings online at a single site called "usajobs," which OPM's Dan Blair calls the government's most important recruitment accelerator. The site is extremely useful, and at least everyone knows where to start. OPM also held an online job fair in April 2002 that allowed candidates who came to the site to immediately apply online, generating about 20,000 applicants for 230 federal technology jobs.

The government also has recently shown an ability to hire people quickly in a crunch. The Census Bureau hired over half a million people before it had to start knocking on doors for the 2000 census, though all into short term positions. Most impressively, the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) filled 50,000 jobs, mostly as airport screeners, in only ten months last year.

TSA's experience can't be directly compared to the rest of the government since Congress exempted the agency from many federal civil-service regulations, including the need to track employees in the lockstep GS system. More important, it was hiring many people for identical jobs, allowing much faster processing of applicants. The TSA, for example, hired a private company that passed all the applicants through a series of online and then physical tests. The first cut included questions on citizenship, education, and criminal records. Next applicants had to identify objects going through a metal detector and prove that they could lift heavy luggage. Those tests whittled the original pool down to a tenth of its original size of 1.5 million, and ensured that only qualified people remained in the hunt.

That test not only saved time, but instilled a certain amount of pride in those who passed-a phenomenon common to the Marine Corps and the State Department's foreign service officers, all of whom must pass rigorous exams to become part of their teams. Ultimately, the agency turned in an impressive performance. Chris Mihm, who helps oversee human capital issues for the GAO, says that it's too early to give a final judgment on TSA but that, overall, what the agency has done "is an enormous achievement."

That doesn't of course mean that there weren't hitches. The TSA initially hired a headhunting company called NCS Pearson that it has since let go after many gaffes. At one point, for example, NCS Pearson set up a job fair in Orlando International Airport without notifying the head of the airport. When Airport President Bill Jennings came over to investigate, NCS Pearson tried to have him arrested. The TSA also had a bit of trouble identifying people to get its message out. The first 50 news stories to specifically cite someone as "Transportation Security Administration Spokesman" refer to 13 different individuals.

Still, few in Washington expected that the TSA could meet its targets, and even critics suggest that it has done a decent job. According to one former TSA official who quit because he thought that agency was collapsing into turf wars and mayhem, " In the larger sense, given what they started with, they have done a fairly decent job of making lemon aid out of lemons." GAO's Mihm puts it a little more positively, pointing out that no one in Washington thought the TSA would hit its targets: "When government does have enormous challenges, and when it pays the right amount of attention, enormous achievements are possible."

Either way, one can only hope that the same is true of the general hiring problem that the civil service faces.

Pay Me or Play Me?

The most obvious solution to government's hiring woes would simply be paying people more. And the first solution proposed by unions to the government's current hiring crisis would implementing a significant Congressionally mandated pay raise, FEPCA, which both Clinton and Bush have blocked from implementation.

But raising salaries isn't as important, or as unambiguously useful, as one might think. For one, working for the federal government at current salaries won't send you to the bread lines. The average executive branch employee earns over $54,000 a year, and that counts many very low-level jobs. The average librarian working for the United States government, for example, makes $65,000 and the average astronomer comes in at around $100,000. In Washington, D.C., because of all the senior positions in the city and special bonuses granted to people in areas with high living costs, the average salary exceeds $70,000. Moreover, government offers good benefits, including the opportunity to buy into the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan, the largest health plan in the nation. One might not get the concierge service formerly available at Enron, but government isn't particularly likely to collapse and take employee pensions with it.

Second, no agency should want people motivated more by money than by service. The SEC for example is building a huge new building behind Union Station in Washington D.C. and clashing with local residents over a design meant in part to accommodate huge offices intended to serve as recruitment bait. But are people drawn into the SEC by big sunny offices the kind of people who are going to crack down on corporate misdeeds, or are they the type who'll be dropping off job applications when they show up to inspect the books?

Still there are places where the government should raise salaries. The most significant is in science and technology, where top people often stand to earn millions for doing almost the exact same work outside the government as it in it, even though the government can offer excellent research facilities. This is a particularly critical area because immigrants make up a substantial portion of the national scientific and technological workforce and the federal government, for the most part, can't hire noncitizens.

Pay can also make a big difference in the law, given that many law-school students graduate with backbreaking debt. A recent study of law-school graduates by the Partnership for Public Service says that debt blocks two-thirds from considering public service jobs. At best, it means that lawyers often go into the private service first and then head back into government, where several agencies, most prominently the Department of Justice, offer extremely prestigious positions. Jill Dash, a 27-year-old lawyer now at the Federal Trade Commission, says her debt burden made it "fiscally irresponsible" to not enter the private service after finishing law school. But after two years of paying off her loans while working at Akin-Gump, a haven for Washington D.C. power players, she switched back to the government. "This is what I wanted to do when I was a kid," she says.

For every Jill Dash who comes back in though, probably a dozen head to corporate law intending to come back to public work and then never quite get back to it. Many people don't want to quit a profession that pays third-year associates as much as the Secretary of State.

Raising salaries across the government, or even just in the law and technology sectors, would of course be extremely expensive. But the government could take two interim steps that would be both inexpensive and helpful. First government could expand student loan repayment programs, which agencies can legally offer but rarely do. This would get extra money to the young people who need it most. Second government should pay bonuses to high performers, raising the incentives for ambitious young people who know that they will do well wherever they go to work.

Paying one's best employees may seem like an obvious solution, but it's very rare in the federal government. Currently, inflation and location bonuses account for over 80 percent of all pay adjustments in the federal government. Even when the government does try to offer merit-pay bonuses, the idea is quashed. For example, in January 2002, the FAA, which is exempt from most civil service regulations, allocated money for merit pay and then just decided to spread it evenly across the agency. That might make everyone a little bit happy, but it's a foolhardy strategy if you aim to bring in and retain stars. It goes a long way in explaining why a recent PPS poll showed that managers working in the federal government, by a ratio of four to one, believe that the private sector does a better job at rewarding outstanding employees than the federal government.

Interestingly, the whole government civil service system is based on a set of "merit systems principles." But almost nothing is done based on merit. One obstacle here, again, comes from the unions-which care much more about keeping everyone who's at the table equally fed than about bringing people in from the outside. According to Jackie Simon, spokeswoman of the American Federation of Government Employees union, "what they did with bonuses at the FAA was ideal." The result, reports OPM is that "an employee needs to do little, if anything, to earn these increases. They are essentially entitlements."

Another obstacle is that the government has developed a culture that promotes some serious grade inflation, and it's awfully hard to promote anyone based on merit if everyone gets the same grades. According to Paul Light's recent study of the civil service, of the hundreds of thousands of federal employees rated on a pass/fail system in 2001, only 0.06 percent failed, or about one out of 1600. Meanwhile surveyed employees estimate that more than 20 percent of their colleagues are poor performers.

Show Me The Work

Even offering student-loan repayments and merit bonuses wouldn't do nearly as much as giving bright young recruits useful work. In the White House and the Congress, young people have terrific mobility and opportunity---which is why young people flock there. The same of course is true in the private sector where you can become general manager of the Red Sox at 28 or president of the University of Louisiana system at the age of 26. In the federal government, even if you can climb up through the GS system, you are still stuck below the SES and the political appointees. Only about one percent of the members of the SES are under 40 years old.

More important than just the promotion ceilings, young people sense that one can get trapped in government. A recent PPS poll found that recent college graduates think that the private sector is better than the government in allowing employees to take initiative by a ratio of more than 30 to one.

Young government employees on the inside often come to the same conclusion. Carlos Cruz-Abrams, for example, is a University of Virginia Law Graduate who joined the INS two years ago under a special recruitment program but now is jumping ship and heading into private law. For him, as with most of his other departing young colleagues, money doesn't matter nearly as much as opportunity and novel work, which he wasn't getting even though he had entered on one of the INS' fastest tracks. "I don't want to be doing the same thing in 20 years," he says.

Tellingly, retention rates for Presidential Management Interns (talented recruits brought in through special hiring authorities and allowed to rotate through different agencies) match retention rates for regular government employees for their first three years. After the three-year mark, the success of the program collapses, largely because PMIs don't see opportunities to advance fast enough. Shikha Bhatnagar, a PMI now at the Department of Commerce, knows she's going to leave in a year. She doesn't want more money, but she wants to run something big. She doesn't want to crawl up into a GS-15 spot and still look up at each administration's political appointees. "When I'm 50 I want to be in control of what I'm doing," says Bhatanger.

One way to give Bhatanger that chance would be to create a job resembling that of the permanent undersecretary in Britain's civil service, a top ranking official who moves up through the civil service to a position directing the entire diplomatic corps. Beneath him are a series of Deputy Under Secretaries, who have significantly more power than members of the SES, which is as high as a civil servant can go in the United States. Unfortunately, there has been little movement in the U.S. to create a system like that.

Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You

Even more important though than providing opportunities for advancement is convincing people that federal work doing really matters. That was true for the federal government under Franklin Roosevelt. "With each prominent New Dealer acting as his own employment agency," wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "Washington was deluged with an endless stream of bright young men." It was also true when John F. Kennedy asked people to "ask not what your country can do for you," and inspired federal government job applications to double. "It was exciting to work for the United States government in the 1960s. We walked to the office each morning alive with the sense that we had important business to attend to," wrote former Peace Corps official and Washington Monthly founder Charles Peters in his autobiography.

Specific agencies with the right leadership can also inspire top talent. In the early days of the Peace Corps, for example, director Sargent Shriver took a deep personal interest in bringing in top talent. He devoted 20 percent of his time to recruiting and made sure that his staff knew that they too were expected to entice their top friends, travel around college campuses making pitches, and think carefully when evaluating candidates. "You knew that your standing was going to fall very fast if you didn't put real effort into evaluating people," says Peters. It helped that the agency was new, fresh, and doing good work around the world.

The same thing happened with NASA as the country got closer to sending a man to the moon, arms control in the seventies, and even telecomm regulation in the early nineties. Clinton's FCC commissioner, Reed Hundt, also devoted a great deal of his energy to recruiting and, assisted by the Internet's early promise, stockpiled former Supreme Court clerks.

In the past two years, Colin Powell has had parallel success at the State Department, both because of his star power and because of the attention he has put into recruitment. He came into a department that was only spending $70,000 a year on recruitment---about one two thousandth of what the Army spent in 2001 promoting its slogan "an Army of one." But under Powell, State has designed a series of flashy ad campaigns urging people to join "the front lines of diplomacy," as well as a inspiring web campaign that shows an American flag and a blue sky morphing into the phrase "unlimited possibilities." Powell's state department has also become the most aggressive federal agency when it comes to offering to help repay student loans. Subsequently, in Powell's first year on the job, the number of people who signed up to take the Foreign Service exam nearly doubled, and the number has climbed since.

More recently, the Transportation Security Administration's hiring success can also be explained because had a compelling and immediate mission: hiring a posse to protect the planes. One of the men who signed up and earned a spot as a baggage screener is an 84-year old veteran who served in a highly decorated Japanese-American Army brigade during World War Two and who just wanted an opportunity to serve his country again.

Of course, not every agency can thwart the next Mohammed Atta or send a man to the moon, or a guy with a plough to Ouagadougou. Every agency, however, can have people at the top who care and who inspire. Every agency can create a culture where people can see that their work matters. James Rice joined HUD, persevered through the endless delays, and now is looking to move up, because he knows what HUD could do. Every agency can take advantage of the fact that it is part of the largest, most complicated, and interesting organization in the world-and one out to do good things for America. That's what government does, and agencies succeed when they can tap into the patriotism and the spirit of good deeds, while navigating the obstacles created by civil service laws and culture.

To see how that happens today, it helps to take close looks at three agencies that, to vastly varying degrees, have figured out how to make hiring work, and how to bring in the sort of government worker that America deserves.

The Taxman

No one likes paying taxes, but the IRS got off to a good start. Abraham Lincoln founded the agency to start collecting taxes during the Civil War, a cause a large majority of Northerners supported. In 1864, Mark Twain even said that he enjoyed paying taxes because it made him feel "important." After a few fits and starts, including a Supreme Court ruling striking down the tax, a Constitutional amendment made the income tax permanent.

Until World War II, only the top-earning five percent of Americans paid income taxes. But the tax changed drastically during the war, and soon everyone paid. Criticism followed. In 1952, Einstein said "the hardest thing to understand in the world is taxes," and within a few decades the IRS had become a public enemy, with the worst coming in 1985 when overworked tax collectors deliberately destroyed documents in Philadelphia. At the time, the Washington Monthly called the agency an "incompetent bully." Top marginal rates reaching up to 90 percent also created deep resentment across the nation and led to popular anti-tax movements, which actually accounted for much of Ronald Reagan's early success.

The IRS's nadir came in 1997 and 1998 when it became the nation's federal bugaboo. Suddenly newspapers filled pages with stories of IRS agents fabricating evidence and organizing baseless raids. The public face of the Treasury Department's largest agency, for a moment at least, wasn't a friendly tax collector trying to help the government. It was Tony Deaton, a tax investigator who allegedly often showed up drunk, worked to frame government officials, and was only dismissed when nabbed in a government car with cocaine and scales. Perhaps even more important, the agency had blown over $3.5 billion trying to update its computer systems.

Later, some of the accusations were discounted or disproved, but the agency had already gotten its comeuppance. A new commissioner named Charles Rossotti came in and turned the structure upside down with the assistance of consultants Booz-Allen & Hamilton. Congress helped by throwing the new team a bone in the form of exemptions from several key civil service regulations, including, for example, restrictions on merit-pay bonuses.

One of Robert McNamara's "whiz kids," Rossotti had formerly run American Management Systems, a gigantic Virginia consulting firm. His first advantage was knowing more about people than he did about tax law. This was a major deviation for an agency that had long considered itself too complicated for outsiders. Frank Reeder, a longtime OMB official, describes analyzing the IRS' information systems and asking who they had hired for a key position. "Of course we hired someone from the inside," an IRS official told Reeder. "There was no way that someone from the outside could understood this."

But when you get a punch to your jawbone as hard as the IRS did, that kind of parochial thinking tends to dissipate. Few people resisted bringing Rossotti in, and he quickly started overhauling the agency's structure: ditching a system comprised of 33 districts and switching to one with four divisions focusing on nonprofits, individuals, small businesses, and large companies.

It also didn't take long for Rossotti and his top management team to recruit top people. First, they brought private sector executives into 40 "critical pay" positions that Congress had granted them. These critical pay employees were exempted from normal hiring regulations, could earn as much as the vice president, and had to come from outside the agency. That last requirement did raise eyebrows internally. But, as Larry Langdon, whom came over to the IRS from Hewlett Packard under the program, points out: if you want to know the latest tax evasion schemes, it helps to have people from the business world.

Then, after setting up the leadership, the IRS moved to bring in younger revenue agents and other mid- and low-level employees. That process had basically four components, starting with a recruiting plan based on computer models that tracked expected attrition and retirement rates and made predictions about areas that would matter in the future.

Second, the IRS had to sell itself. Agency recruiters hadn't set foot on university campuses since 1994 and it hadn't done much before then either. So it had to train people to go back out there. Ultimately the IRS decided to take 33 employees off their current jobs and require them to focus entirely on campuses. The IRS also hired a marketing firm to figure out what young prospective employees wanted. Perhaps not surprisingly, the agency learned that its targets were most concerned about "opportunities for personal growth" and that they didn't actually know much about the IRS. Armed with that data, the IRS began advertising online and sending out campus recruiters nationwide.

The agency also tried to figure out ways to make training opportunities more interesting. An increasing number of recruits head down to Glynco, Georgia each year for a few high-adrenaline weeks at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center learning how to kick down doors and dodge terrorists by spinning their cars around corners. The organization also makes sure that current employees have opportunities to learn other skills and gain useful certifications. The GAO, which has a long history of castigating the IRS, recently lauded the Oakland IRS office for training managers in creative thinking and risk taking.

The benefits seem real. Silvia Tovar, for example, works fulltime in the Dallas office and then spends her evenings running an independent organization of IRS employees who try to help recruit Hispanic employees. Tovar says she does it because she wants to help the agency in return for it for supporting her while earning a mid-career college degree.

Third, the agency moved to process applications more quickly. The agency ranked applicants based on their accounting school GPAs and then called the best in for interviews. At the interviews, the agency tested them in whatever skill their job would actually consist of, for example making applicants talk to actors imitating irate taxpayers. Oddly, few agencies follow this element of the selection process.

Then, fourth, the IRS has had to figure out how to close its deals by offering bonuses or accelerated placement in the GS system, as well as opportunities for funding for continuing education. "We want people who are good enough that they could leave if they wanted," says Ron Sanders, who was the IRS's chief human resources officer during the restructuring. State of the Union

Along the way, Sanders and Rossotti did their best to maintain strong relations with their union, opening the door at the beginning of the process and negotiating before implementing their strategy, choosing small fights early on over large fights later. This was particularly important given the vigor with which the union could have fought many of the reforms-such as giving 40 senior jobs to outsiders. "Rossotti came in, and he didn't know a thing about unions," says Robert Tobias, the former head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents the agency's workforce. "But he said 'I want to open this place up, and the only thing that you can't be involved in is when I decide evaluations for executive promotion.' He included, he involved, and he listened."

For example, Rossotti wanted different telephone answering sites to specialize in different areas of tax law---so that IRS employees in one geographic area would be well versed in one technical area, instead of dispersing their knowledge over many different areas. This sort of change brings union outcry at many government agencies: it challenged the IRS employees' views of themselves and, as current NTEU head Colleen Kelley says, "people don't like change." But Rossotti worked with the NTEU on the change, the union helped design the transformation and the measurement tools used to determine how well it worked. Ultimately, the transformation went smoothly.

The decision to include unions in what may seem like minor issues is particularly important in government because, unlike most private-sector unions, government unions can't strike over pay. If they do walk out, they face the fate of the air-traffic controllers sacked by Ronald Reagan in 1981. Subsequently, government unions tend to fight harder over smaller issues. That's how they gain leverage, show potential members why they should join, and protect the rights that unions do currently have.

Moreover, the IRS reform process, which Kelley calls the best she's ever participated in, boosted morale. Unions may be one of the heaviest anchors holding back government reform, but they do serve a purpose. They also represent people likely to get out of bed a little slower on Monday mornings if they believe their bosses want to railroad them. Ronald Reagan demoralized the federal workforce by casting them as inconsequential extras on the set of his grand show. George W. Bush demoralized the federal workforce by immediately, and without negotiation, cutting bargaining rights when he entered office. The IRS leadership let the unions, and thus the employees, know that they mattered from the beginning.

The results are certainly promising. Unleashed from a hiring freeze in 1994, the IRS ended up hiring close to 1,500 people in 2000 and about 700 in 2001. The agency also has improved retention, in part because it brings all of its recruits in to start work together at the same time, creating something of a team esprit de corps.

Reviews have been good. "The IRS is the best agency at hiring now, absolutely," says Joe Cowart former OPM press secretary in the Clinton administration. "It was people with a lot of pride who got embarrassed on television." Employment satisfaction polls from Gallup hit bottom during the 1998 hearings but have been increasing every year since, according to the agency. The IRS is doing a "darned good job," says Patricia Ingraham of Syracuse's Maxwell school and an adviser to several major government reform efforts.

Still, the IRS has plenty of catching up to do. Between 1988 and when the agency lifted its hiring freeze, it had shrunk by more than 20 percent. Not only that, but the agency has seemed cowed by the Senate hearings and, since then, has focused much more on customer service and being polite to taxpayers than actually collecting taxes. One's chances of being audited dropped by more than half between 1997 and 2001 and the agency pursues less than one in every four tax dodgers known to use offshore accounts.

But bright people moving in should increase the chances that the agency will soon return to cracking down on cheats. Paying one's own taxes may no longer make individuals feel "important," as Mark Twain said 140 years ago. But given that the IRS funds the rest of the government, it sure is important that everyone else pays up too.

Department of Defense

Unfortunately, although the IRS has done a good job at identifying needed changes and getting to work, the biggest recipients of its funds, the Department of Defense, hasn't.

Consider the presidential management internship program (PMI) in the Department of the Navy. Young men and women come in for two-year terms, comprised of four six-month rotations. They spend two rotations in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations, watching and assisting as crucial decisions are made: how should we position the fleet around Turkey as we wait for their parliament to deliberate on whether we can base a war there? How forcefully should we work to intercept North Korean vessels bringing Scud missiles into Yemen? Then, they spend one rotation working on the Navy's budget: seeing how the pieces go together and what gets valued most. Then they spend one rotation at sea, learning what that life is like and meeting the people carrying out the orders from command central.

The people who come in through the PMI program are bright, and the program seems to have created an ideal way to recruit and retain top talent. Participants learn crucial skills, make a personal connection, and get the sort of broad training that young people say they want and that often makes them perform their best.

But is the Defense Department thinking of using a portion of this year's $100-billion budget increase to expand the program? Nope. It's actually thinking of reducing it. There are so few spots open overall, and the retention rate of PMIs is so high, that the department thinks the program is taking up too much space.

That's the paradox of Defense Department recruiting: it's a sexy and powerful place to work. If you like geo-strategy, you can help decide whether to give Kirkuk to the Turks or the Kurds while carving up Iraq. If you like health care, you can run the biggest system in the world. The Department has about 700,000 employees, more than a third of the entire civilian government workforce, and they do just about everything: from intelligence gathering to putting lugnuts on Humvees. "If you are in the Agriculture Department, you have to fight every day to make yourself feel relevant. But in the Pentagon, you're in the Pentagon," says Phil Carter, a former army officer who worked in the Pentagon's legal department last year. Not surprisingly, the people who are already in are very happy with their jobs. According to a study released in June of 2002 by Paul Light at the Brookings Institution, morale at the Defense Department has risen significantly since September 11th while dropping a little bit across the rest of the government.

But in much of the Pentagon, particularly in the core Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), almost no one young gets hired except for PMIs, and now even they are being phased out. A few folks from the armed forces trickle in, and OSD did independently hire one young Afghan Fletcher School graduate in the past year. "Recruit young people? We don't do that worth a toot," says a longtime civilian employee of the OSD.

The department's first problem is simply that it bore brunt of federal downsizing in the past decade, losing 35 percent of its workforce between 1989 and the present. The department is smaller now than when Donald Rumsfeld took it over in the Ford administration.

But the agency is also one of the most political agencies: with a leadership team focused keenly on getting its licks in before a new administration comes in, even if that effects the department's long-term health. "Not only do they not bring talented people in, on the civilian side, there's no career path, promotions are haphazard, and there is no structure to the personnel system," says a senior defense official. "They take a maximum 4-year view because that's the maximum time that they think they will be there before they go back to their law firm."

Every agency has political appointees, and for good reason. You always need new ideas, and people who aren't tied to the way things have "always" been done. But under Donald Rumsfeld, the department has been digging in its heels, taking a cue from a Nixon underling named Fred Malek who wrote a 600-page manual for placing political appointees in the civil service.

The result is that high-level civil servants don't move up, and their former positions don't open. The position of senior civilian adviser for combating terrorism has been vacant since 2000 because Rumsfeld hasn't wanted to promote anyone from the civil service, according to an official in the OSD. When the most powerful civil servant in the department, Doc Cooke, the so-called "Mayor of the Pentagon" died in 2002, he was replaced by a political appointee. "The politicals always go after the civilians, but this administration is going much deeper into the bureaucracy," says another Republican senior official, who, like most everyone else in the Department, asked to be quoted without identification for fear of political reprisals.

Buying it up

Outside of the OSD, the department takes personnel issues more seriously, though the problems are no less dire. Consider the Defense acquisitions team, long the most ridiculed part of the Defense Department. It bears responsibility for the $600 toilet seats two decades ago, a $76 screw a few years ago, and countless large weapons boondoggles with multi-billion dollar contracts running well over estimated completion times and cost.

It's also an area where the right people can make a huge difference. Steven Kelman, who ran the office of federal procurement at OMB under Clinton, credits one man, Terry Little, with overhauling the way that the government buys JDAMs-the smart bombs used so effectively in Afghanistan. Little realized that price would drop if DOD just told potential contractors what the department needed in plain language, instead of demanding specific, highly technical requirements. The result: when Little called for a rebidding on the main JDAM contract, the competing companies came up with their own innovations and the price dropped by nearly half. Next, Little sent DOD employees to work with the final two teams in a bidding war for the JASSM missile. Functionality climbed up, and price dropped down. "It's really this one guy, Terry Little, who's responsible," says Kelman.

Little's insight came from years spent watching the process work and learning the cons of the contractors. But for a long time Terry Little didn't have anyone learning at his feet. He didn't hire a single person between 1993 and 2001 and didn't have anyone under age 30 on his 70-person team at the end of that period, according to a Government Executive report. The Congressionally mandated cuts were too deep, and thoughtful agency-wide planning on how to build a farm team was too scarce.

That sort of problem in the personnel part of the acquisitions team did begin to dissipate a bit toward the end of the Clinton administration when Jacques Gansler, Clinton's undersecretary for acquisition technology and logistics, came in and realized he had a crisis on his hands. There weren't any young people around, which meant nobody around had grown up with the modern technology the Defense Department relies on. Moreover, given the growth in the amount of work that the federal government contracts out, the Defense acquisition workforce was transforming from "doers into managers." In other words, the Department needed people with the management, not manufacturing, skills and needed to recruit people quickly who already had these skills.

But quickness is a rare speed within the Defense Department's acquisitions team and Gansler was limited from hiring much beyond a few senior positions. He did however get the authority to create an optional pay-banding system, potentially creating incentives for defense acquisition employees to work harder and for hard workers to come in. Arguing for these reforms was made much easier by Defense's success with demonstration programs at the Navy's China Lake and San Diego weapons labs. At those two labs, the Navy has for 20 years put employees into broad pay bands, instead of the rigid GS system-allowing salaries to fluctuate much more than in the rest of government where civil-service rules fix raises and promotions at very specific levels. The reform has resulted in significant increases in worker quality and only a three percent rise in overall salary costs.

Gansler left with the Clinton administration, but the pay banding experiment continues, though with limited participation. There are a few reformers trying to change the system from the inside and, in the spring of 2002, they tried to get Congress to pass a law granting civil service exemptions to the whole department and potentially allowing for the introduction of pay banding everywhere. But the bill came in late and Congress dismissed it, probably unfortunately. If Defense and the Department of Homeland Security compete over many similar people, it's probably unfair to exempt only the latter from civil-service regulations.

Defense could probably come back to Congress and get it, given the charitable mood toward the military right now. To make that step though, Defense would need either strong commitment from the top or clear thinking from the middle. Neither seems prominent right now.

Outside the Ring

Given its size and the complexity, Defense does of course offer some positive examples. Civil-service-reform experts frequently cite the demonstration projects at the China Lake and San Diego weapons labs with approbation. And a few Defense recruiting innovations can be found in what some insiders call "the hinterlands."

For example, in 1999 the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) realized that it faced a coming personnel crisis. It hadn't recruited in years and, according to spokeswoman Donna Truesdell, "we had no image or brand." Subsequently the Agency hired the Philadelphia Service Center of OPM to help develop a new recruitment strategy. Prior to 1996, OPM had coordinated all hiring, to mixed reviews. But a 1996 law took that authority away from and allowed agencies to operate on their own. Forced to compete, OPM has started doing much better work.

The OPM team put in charge of recruiting at DCAA quickly trained Agency personnel in campus recruiting, built an online application system, and created a clear and easily negotiable website with current employee profiles. The Agency also created a mentoring program and pays for continuing education programs, two critical ways of increasing retention and satisfaction.

Subsequently DCAA has hired about 1000 accountants over the past two and a half years, an order of magnitude above its hiring in previous years. DCAA met its goals in large part simply because it has more money and opportunities. But, also according to a member of the team that designed the recruitment strategy, demand created supply. Previously, the agency not only faced limits imposed by Defense budget cuts, it didn't believe it could hire good people. So it just sat still and didn't worry about filling the jobs that will open up during the coming retirement wave. Once it started hitting university campuses and attracting talent though, it realized that people do want to work for government agencies that sell themselves well, no matter how boring their names. Encouraged, it expanded its recruiting.

Be All That You Can Be

But by far the best recruiting in Defense comes from the military side, even if it has its own set of problems. The services start the recruiting with their well-known slogans and advertisements. Advertising Age magazine rated "Be all that you can be" as the second most successful slogan of the century, and the Army spent $150 million branding its new "an army of one." The services even have a shiny station on an island in the middle of Times Square in New York where service members often sit until midnight chatting with potential recruits leaving the Mama Mia and the All Star Cafe.

The Army has even created a video game that allows players to pretend that they are recruits going through basic training and fighting terrorists. "Empower yourself. Defend freedom," proclaims the website which offers free downloads as well as access to a daily web diary from a soldier in Afghanistan. Since its release last summer, over a million people have downloaded "America's Army."

The services know to appeal to young people's idealized versions of themselves. The Army's recruiting brochure blasts on its first page "Who I am has become better than who I was." The Marine Corps' advertisements always focus on pride, and it describes its boot camp as something that "transforms a young person with the courage to succeed into a mature, highly disciplined, and fully capable Marine." Similar to the TSA's tests, except a thousand times harder, the 13-week camp filters out second-tier recruits and makes most everyone who passes truly feel good to be a marine.

The services have also developed structures that basically require them to recruit well, because they know that they depend on the strong legs of young people and the fresh skills common in a generation that grows up with increasingly complicated computer technology. Subsequently the military has an up-or-out policy for its officer corps and a similar "high year of tenure" program for enlisted men: if you aren't promoted after staying in for a certain length of time, you leave. For example, personnel rules say that promotion to the rank of commander or lieutenant colonel should happen after 15-17 years of service, that 70 percent of eligible officers should make it, and that the rest should leave. This ensures that enough old people depart to create room for the next generation.

But even with their slogans, strategies, structure, a hot video game, and an impending war, each of the services has recently either missed, or been forced to lower, recruiting targets. Many people have come into recruiting stations, but they aren't signing up. The Army for example hit its 2002 target of recruiting about 80,000 people. But that's still considerably less than the 140,000 recruited two decades ago and it's not enough to compensate for the shortfalls in the late '90s. "What we have now is patriotism lite," says Charles Moskos, a sociology professor at Northwestern who specializes in military issues.

There are three main explanations for the decline in enlistees. First the better the economy does, the easier it is for young people to find jobs and the fewer people enlist. That's not a problem, so to speak, now. It did however contribute significantly to recent shortfalls. Second, more and more young men and women go to college, and few want to enlist after graduation-a phenomenon Moskos suggests solving by offering shorter enlistment periods. Third, the lack of a draft and personal connections with the military has changed the way Generation X views the military. Everybody used to have an uncle who served. Now, in many circles, everyone has an uncle who deferred. That phenomenon could perhaps be solved by Moskos' second big goal for the military: getting someone with the same stature as Elvis Presley to join. "I've often asked recruiters what would they rather have: their budgets tripled or for Chelsea Clinton to enlist. They always say the latter," says Moskos.

Chelsea Clinton may well be playing "America's Army" on her PC right now, but it's unlikely. Thus it seems probable that, for a while at least, the military will continue slipping from its perch as the undisputed champion of government recruiting. Interestingly, a new challenger is rising up from one of the most unlikely places.

>From Green Eyeshades to Green Berets.

The General Accounting Office (GAO), may well possess the least inspiring name of any government organization. It's not the General Oversight Office, the Supreme Accounting Office, or the Central Watchdog Agency. And why is it an "Office" anyway and not, say, a "service"? It's also housed in what is perhaps the ugliest building in Washington: a drab concrete slab originally designed for document storage.

In other words, it sounds like a dreary repository for idle bureaucrats, the kind of place that no ambitious person wants to work. According to 26-year old University of Wisconsin public affairs graduate student Clare Mamerow, when she first heard of the GAO, she thought, "Yuck, not interesting."

But something remarkable happened to Mamerow. While talking to a favorite professor about career plans, she learned what the GAO actually does: scour government programs such as Medicare and farm loans for waste and inefficiency, bust soldiers who use Pentagon credit cards to pay for lap dances, and even sue the likes of Dick Cheney over energy commission records. "That sounded up my alley," said Mamerow.

She missed her bus to the interview and showed up sweaty, but that didn't matter. Her two interviewers were engaging and clearly took an interest in her. "They were really trying to figure out where I would fit in," says Mamerow. "It wasn't like 'you're a warm body, we'll figure it out.'" Swayed by the interview, Mamerow joined the team.

Coming in as an intern, she had little reason to expect more than a great deal of photocopying and faxing. But she ended up loving her job. The GAO made her feel important and gave her the opportunity to do real work, analyzing how the Veterans Administration dealt with Hepatitis C patients. Today, Mamerow is a full-throttle booster of the organization at which she once turned up her nose.

And the GAO is doing that for more and more sharp, ambitious young people. "It is really creating a buzz," says Phyllis Brust, director of career services at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, where the GAO has been the top recruiter for three of the last four years.

Green Eyeshades in History.

The General Accounting Office hasn't always been a recruiting hotbed. Fourteen years ago, the Washington Monthly called it a "one-eyed watchdog," running errands for Congress and publishing half-baked exposés that "went for the capillaries." The first comptroller general, J. Raymond McCarl, missed the Teapot Dome scandal but did manage to make a stink when he found a mule purchased by the Tennessee Valley Authority without authorization.

"They went out to hire people with accounting degrees from third-rate schools and then turned them into bean counters," says Steve Ebbin, who spent three years with the agency in the late 70s. And there's still a bit of that there. GAO reports can be turgid and many employees seem clearly linked to the actual pair of green eyeshades that the agency keeps in a little mini museum on the building's top floor. In one recent 3,200 word report, the GAO managed to write "human capital" 99 times, making that phrase more common than either the words "of" or "a."

But the core message of the 1989 Washington Monthly piece and much of the criticism of the agency is that it could do more. After all, its charge when created in 1921 was to investigate "all matters related to the receipt, disbursement and use of public money." And in the last few years, it really has, particularly under the leadership of its new Comptroller General, David Walker.

Walker's technical advantage is that the Comptroller General serves a 15-year term, meaning that his initial groups of interns will grow up into his trusted advisers by the time he checks out. Furthermore, in 1980, the GAO was exempted from the government's civil service legislation, allowing it to offer merit pay bonuses and hire without regard to hindrances such as the Rule of Three. Since November 2002, no agencies have had to abide by that latter rule, but it slowed many of them down during the past two decades as the GAO built its current workforce.

Still, Walker's single greatest advantage though is that he genuinely cares about his employees and his hires. At a recent GAO awards ceremony he resembled Bear Bryant, calling his agency "number one in the world, and no one else is even close." He then handed out awards to employees who had studied everything from the VA's resource allocation system to investigating allegations that departing Clinton White House officials had trashed the place. The cake served said "GAO: leading by example," a motto which Walker always pushes. One of Walker's first actions when he came on board was engraving the words "accountability, integrity, reliability" above the entranceway of the main building. All of that could seem to be corporate posturing, except that Walker spends an enormous amount of time of time talking to employees, supervising them closely, and traveling to campuses to talk about the GAO.

Subsequently, when it comes to recruiting on campuses, GAO seems a step ahead of everyone else in the government. The GAO focuses on about 45 schools, sending the same employees to the same campuses each year and tracking the number of young people each charms into applying and persuades into joining. Last year the number of applicants to the number of job offers was about eight to one, more or less the same as MIT's undergraduate admissions. "They do the best job by far," says Alexandra Bennett, the assistant career director at Syracuse's Maxwell School.

The GAO also gets the details right. It writes job descriptions vastly more clearly than most other government agencies'; the agency forgives student loans, unlike most government agencies; its promotional materials appeal to young men and women's best sides. For example, the main flyer exclaims that by joining young people will work to "ensure the accountability of the federal government for the benefit of the AMERICAN PEOPLE." Given how boring "General Accounting Office" sounds, those words almost never appear on promotional materials. It's just "GAO."

If those don't persuade, the agency even has a video on its Website where techno music accompanies clips of Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw talking about the GAO on newscasts, Senators extolling it, and sharp-looking diverse people testifying before Congress. The video even throws in a clip from The West Wing and ends with Walker saying he wants the GAO to be a "world-class professional services organizations that just happens to be in the government."

The GAO keys on interns as a potentially prime talent source, unlike much of the rest of the federal government. Private sector companies are nearly three times as likely to hire their interns as government agencies, but the GAO brings in interns at an even higher rate. Of the 142 interns that the GAO employed in the summer of 2001, 60 ended up taking full-time positions. "We get to them, and they get to know us. In the end we see if there should be a marriage," says Stuart Herman, who runs the GAO's Chicago office.

Plus the GAO makes sure to try to make interns and new hires feel welcome. Clare Mamerow, for example, wasn't just given interesting work and a mentor when she started at the GAO and was assigned to look at hepatitis and the VA system. She also was given business cards immediately. "That meant that I was important, that I was going to be talking to the public, and that I would need to be reached," she says.

Plus, recognizing that many young people today want to move around in their work the GAO makes sure that every new employee moves to at least three projects in their first two years. "They throw you in head-first," says Chad Davenport, a new GAO employee. Davenport, a 1994 Duke graduate, says that if he tells someone at a bar where he works, they generally don't know what it is, "but they think it's interesting when you tell them what you really do."

Not surprisingly, the GAO has a very high retention rate, and, at least according to its own numbers, it saves taxpayers about $87 for every dollar that's invested in it. John Kraft, who works in personnel for the Drug Enforcement Agency, says that GAO is currently auditing his agency and he is awed. "I'm extremely impressed with the detail, and they do far more than I would have ever expected. They ask questions, they look at everything. They say: 'We see this pattern. What does it mean?"

It does fun stuff too. This fall, the GAO created false paperwork for fake university in England called the Y'Hica Institute for the Visual Arts and wrangled grants from the Department of Education (DOE) worth $55,000. Showing a sense of humor, one of the fictitious students awarded a grant was given the name Susan M. Collins, the Maine Senator who had requested that the GAO look for holes in Education's student loan programs.

Walker of course wants to take as much credit for the revitalization as possible instead of saying that it comes simply from the GAO's exemption from civil service laws-which not only makes him look better, but makes the point that GAO can be an example for the rest of the government. "What has been done here can be replicated anywhere in government if there is commitment and sustained effort by the top management," he says.

For the most part, Walker is right. The FAA, for example, has been exempted from many of the same laws as the GAO, and it is a morass. It largely failed to take advantage of the flexibility that the government granted it by not requiring, for example, that it follow the lockstep salaries of the GS structure. Since its exemption in 1996, the FAA has created about 1000 memorandums of understanding on various contract provisions, creating the same complicated maze that normally stifles government hiring.

Plus, of the changes that the GAO has made (with the exception of merit pay and a little bit more hiring flexibility) would be possible in all areas of the government. There's no federal statute that says that HUD has to write its job descriptions in Cantonese or that AID can only notify job applicants of their status semi-annually.

What the GAO has realized is that any agency can make government work interesting, and then can draw top people in if it sells it that way. Then, if smart, ambitious people come in and are managed well, they can do good things everywhere.

Conclusion

Trust in government has increased since 9/11 and the importance of government was highlighted in the most dramatic fashion possible on September 11th, 2001. The INS could have prevented the terrorists from getting here. The CIA and the FBI could have found them while here. The FAA could have stopped them from getting on the planes. The Air Force could have scrambled jets faster and maybe saved the Pentagon. The Treasury could have tracked the terrorists' finances better. FEMA even published a report in August of 1997 with an image of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center, which, obviously, we would have done well to take as a warning.

Government doesn't have a specific product by which it can be judged. If Microsoft puts out a good version of Word, it'll get the credit, as will Ford if it builds a more efficient and sleeker car. But government doesn't have that-and it also often suffers death by anecdote, with one mistake generally getting more attention than 100 successes. The handful of people that the IRS took advantage of in the nineties made vastly more news than any of the complicated tax scams they cracked.

But as the GAO has shown, good hiring prompts a positive feedback loop. Smart people coming in make an agency better, and better agencies make smarter people come in. If the rest of the government can use that as a lesson during the incoming retirement wave, government could be transformed and regain some of its old mystique. The United States government, after all, is the biggest organization in the country and the most powerful institution in the world.

In the 2000 presidential elections the son of a president and the son of a senator both tried to run as outsiders, emphasizing their non-Washington roots and all that they did outside of government. Bush talked about running a business, and Al Gore may have spent as much time talking about his brief career as a journalist in Nashville as he did about his eight years in the White House.

We'll know that government has truly transformed itself when that pattern reverses-when people exaggerate their connections to it, rather than distance from. Perhaps one day we'll have a candidate who started his or her career in the GAO, or the IRS, and who makes that the campaign centerpiece. It could well happen if those agencies can truly transform themselves and become known as places where smart people work and do smart things.

Or maybe one day there'll be a candidate who starts in local government and then moves to a good federal position such as, say, assistant Secretary of the Navy. Maybe later he becomes governor of a big state like New York and then runs for president by emphasizing that he knows how the system works. And maybe there's enough latent trust in government that he gets elected once, or maybe four times. Then, who knows, maybe he could do great things with and for government.

Nicholas Thompson is a contributing editor for The Washington Monthly and a Markle fellow at the New America Foundation.

This article was cosponsored by Understanding Government and the Partnership for Public Service.