A broken personnel system in DoD
■"Waiting Out Logjam Of Nominees At Pentagon," by Leslie Wayne, New York Times, 12 August 2005, p. C1.
Right now a quarter of the top Pentagon civilian jobs are without officially confirmed occupants. As expert Loren Thompson points out, we're at war and we're missing two service secretaries. His opinion: "this is the worst confirmation logjam that we've seen," and we deep into a second term, not beginning one.
The excuse? Every time someone in Congress has a beef with the Pentagon, they block some nominee's comfirmation. John McCain's unhappy with the Boeing tanker deal, so the Air Force basically goes the entire year without a sitting secretary. Nice, huh?
Rummy's answer is equally bad: letting posts go unfilled. We've had no official undersecretary for acquisition in over two years.
Yes, there's a lot of in-and-out traffic of senior officials in the defense sector. It's a highly specialized field of senior management because of all the regulations and bureaucracy and special requirements. But if conflict-of-interest fears are driving this ungodly confirmation process, then all we're doing is scaring off talent. Instead of an effective embargo, why not just plus-us the enforcement?
Having all these regs and obstacles simply drives many fed workers nuts. I long held a beyond-top-secret clearance, so I was trusted with all sorts of information, and yet I was routinely submitted to all sorts of idiotic rules that reflect a fundamental mistrust of my motivations and behaviors by the bureaucracy, as though I might hold all sorts of secrets in my head just so I could go around bilking the government of all sorts of penny-ante assets. Trust me with state secrets but then hound me for $10 receipts on local travel. Simply amazing.
The hounding of political appointees obviously involves far larger sums of money, but the principle is basically the same. If we can't trust people not to abuse their jobs just for money, then how can we trust them on what really matters: the lives of American soldiers and citizenry?
Being a federal worker is no picnic, but when the government goes out of its way to make it even worse, you come to the conclusion that a huge make-over is required-and not just in the Reserve Component.
I wish Rumsfeld well in his ongoing efforts at reformatting the personnel system at DoD. I know he can't do much about the confirmation process, but I hope he breaks plenty of china in those areas he can actually change.