Occam’s Razor

USGS: a great place to work

For about two years now, I have been working for the U.S. Geological Survey. I work at their headquarters building in Reston, Virginia. I am a civil servant with twenty-three years of federal service. The USGS is actually the fourth federal agency where I have hung my hat. For me there is absolutely no question about it: working for the USGS is a wonderful and stimulating experience. For twenty years, I worked at agencies full of mediocrity. Sometime they bordered on being dysfunctional. Consequently, sometimes my hard work was not appreciated. Now, I look forward to coming to work. There is no reason for me to look anywhere else in Club Fed. USGS is where I will hang out until I retire. The only thing that upsets me is I had to spend twenty years wandering the federal wilderness before I found a home at USGS.

If you take the time to visit the USGS jobs site, you can read exactly why it is a great place to work. For the most part the information on the page would apply to any federal agency. Arguably, these days any one of these standard federal benefits would qualify it as a great place to work. Try getting a defined pension benefit plan as a new employee even at IBM these days.

One of the reasons I like working at USGS is that, of the four agencies for which I have worked, it feels the least like a bureaucracy. It is more than the casual dress. USGS is part of the Department of Interior, and our unofficial department motto seems to be, “We don’t need no stinking suits and ties!” Of course, since we manage federal lands many of us spend our days out outdoors getting very personal with nature. However, many of us are still tied to our desks. Except for some in the Department of Interior headquarters in D.C. and various senior executives scattered across the country, few of us do the suit and tie thing. Even my Associate Director usually arrives in slacks and a button down shirt (no tie). He keeps a sports coat and some emergency ties discretely in his office should the situation warrant. Casual Friday? I am trying to imagine how that would be different. Every day is casual day where I work. I wear jeans to work every day. I generally avoid wearing T-shirts, although many employees wear them routinely. I could wear sneakers too but I prefer wearing modest hiking shoes instead. The only time I have to play the dress up game is when I am going to an important meeting offsite. For example in December, I had to attend a meeting at the National Science Foundation. I still skipped the suit, but I felt compelled to do the dress pants, shiny shoes, long sleeve shirt and tie thing.

Of course dressing casual is more the business norm these days than dressing up. However, those of us who live and work around Washington, DC usually have to play the dress up game. The degree of dressiness is directly proportional to your distance from the White House. Particularly if you reach a certain federal grade level (generally GS-13 or above) the peer pressure to dress up can get quite strong. For more than twenty years, I did the dress up lite routine, which meant everything but the suit. I later years as I advanced to the upper grades I learned to keep a sport coat in my office for those occasions when I had to interact with people more than a grade above me. Needless to say it didn’t fit me. I always felt I was projecting the wrong image of myself when I dressed up for work. I am more of a jeans and polo shirt kind of guy.

So perhaps the casual dress culture is not that much of an asset. For me the most amazing thing about the USGS is that employees are fully empowered. There is of course a top down hierarchy; it is just that most of the time it does not matter. My associate director, for example, is a man named Bob. He expects a relative peon like me to also call him Bob. Everyone I meet feels fully vested in the agency and knows that their work matters. It matters because their work really does matter. USGS is, after all, an institution chock full of scientists. Scientists as a rule are far more concerned about science than they are about politics or hierarchies. Nothing is more precious to us than our reputation for accurate science.

In other federal agencies where I worked, many employees were clock-watchers. It’s not that they hated their jobs, it’s just that their evenings were far more enjoyable than their working hours. At USGS, most of us do not watch the clock. We are too busy happily engaged in our jobs. I trust that all of my employees will accurately account for their time and I am sure they do. Some I know will routinely work many more hours than they can charge for without authorization. They do it because they are involved with their work. They know that their contributions make a tangible difference to the quality of our science and the products that we put out. Consequently, their job becomes fun instead of a chore.

USGS is a very spread out agency. It has to be that way since ours is a big country. We need to be close to where the science is happening. Each state generally has a central office, and most have branch offices. To collaborate you have to work across geographical boundaries. Of course, this means a lot of conference calls and online Webex sessions. It also means a fair amount of travel. I am sure we have employees who never travel anywhere, but I think they are the exception. It is an unusual employee who does not have to travel somewhere on business at least once a year. Last year I was on an airplane five times for my job. I could have likely been on an airplane many more times had I elected it. Mostly I go to Denver, but last year I also visited Helena, Atlanta, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. It is good to get out of the office during the year for a change of perspective and scenery. My job has just the right amount of business travel. Often I have the opportunity to see some unique aspects of the areas that I visit. In my other jobs, I could go years between business trips, if I went on any at all.

No matter where I go though, the people who work for USGS are uniformly friendly, professional and interesting. Despite seeing many of them only once or twice a year, it is as if they are just down the hall from me. The many conference calls between business trips fill in the gaps. We are truly one big team. The only challenging part is dealing with the time zone problems. Invariably for those of us on the East Coasts this means our many conference calls are packed into the afternoons.

As far as I can tell, the only downside to working at USGS is we cannot own certain kinds of energy stocks. Since geology is the best-known part of our business (we also do water resources, biology and cartography), those engaged in geology may have insight into areas that are profitable for oil and natural gas exploration.

I suspect there are other federal agencies that are similar to USGS, but not many. I would bet NOAA and the National Science Foundation share many of our values too. I do know that I feel very valued and engaged at USGS. I appreciate the non-hierarchical culture; it is a perfect fit for me. If you want to impress people at USGS, do better science. For the most part though we are too engaged in our science to care too much about whether our own egos are puffed up or not. We are professionals in the best sense of the word.

March 17th, 2006 at 05:25pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

The True Size of Government

My agency is going through another one of its periodic, politically required, staff reductions. My agency is hardly unique. Cutting the number of federal employees has become the key metric for demonstrating that government itself is smaller. In 1996 when President Clinton declared the era of big government was over there were approximately 1.9 million of us on the payroll. This follows a downward trend that President Bush is only accelerating.

If government is getting smaller why does it still feel so big? Our office space has not shrunk, and I don’t pass rows of empty cubicles every day. The answer becomes a lot clearer when I look at who is now occupying cubicles of the departed. Their badges are not white. Their badges are pink. In my agency this means they are a contractor. It should not be news that the federal government has relied more on contractors and less on civil servants to get its work done. Indeed in my agency the political imperative to contract out is written into the performance plan of every manager. These contractors are doing work that previously was done by federal employees. Those in favor of a leaner and meaner federal government should applaud. But is the government really any leaner?

Clearly the cost of a federal employee is not a trivial expense. We come with generous leave allowances and decent health care plans. Those of us who remain often have other benefits, such as flexible work schedules and, increasingly, flexible work locations too. And no civil servant I’ve run into can candidly admit they haven’t seen fellow employees abuse the civil service rules and get away with it. Clearly some reforms are needed. I can report after nearly 20 years in the federal trenches that the stereotype of the lazy government bureaucrat is a rare exception to the rule.

One motivation for hiring a contractor instead of a federal employee is that they are expendable. Or are they? I found a curious thing when I arrived at my agency in 1998. Many of the contractors had been working for and supporting the agency longer than many of the federal employees. On those infrequent occasions when contract companies changed, the new contractor invariably picked up these old time contractors. Even more alarming from my perspective is that they often had sole subject matter expertise. If all our contractors were to leave tomorrow it is not even clear that my agency could even function in any meaningful sense. In the information technology shop where I work, many of us “feds” would be hard pressed to modify a line of code, and would be harder pressed to find it. If a contractor looks like a fed, talks like a fed, and squawks like a fed, isn’t it a fed? Clearly the Bush Administration doesn’t think so, and Congress shares this opinion. To admit otherwise would be to admit that government is not leaner than it was.

A leaner government should be able to squeeze more value for the taxpayer. As a taxpayer I certainly hope this is the case, but I am skeptical. Most of the contractors I encounter work on services contracts. While there are exceptions most of them work in-house. My agency provides them virtually all the standard services it would provide a federal employee. Their cubicle may be a bit smaller, but they use the same phones and copiers. When they travel, they use government travel services and get the same discount airfares. But there are a few things that are different. Some of them have to take leave on federal holidays. And work cannot be directly delegated. It must go through contracting supervisors, which can create lag times. In addition the contract can be performance based.

I do know that of those contracts I have seen that the billing rates have raised my eyebrows. I know there are indirect costs (such as the cost of the infrastructure) that must be added to my direct costs that make my official salary nowhere near my true cost to the government. But these are mostly services we provide to our in-house contractors. So it is tempting, though perhaps not completely accurate, to compare direct federal costs vs. contract billing rates.

If our contractors were federal employees I’d guess their average grade would be a GS-13 making perhaps $65,000 a year. Let’s add a generous 70% for other direct employment costs such as employer contributions to social security and amortizing costs for retirement then if they were federal employees they would cost the taxpayer about $110,000 a year in direct costs. This amounts to about $53 per hour.

How much is the government being billed by the contractor for these services? If you were to add 50 to 100 percent you would be in the ballpark. Ah, but contractors are disposable! Congress could come by tomorrow and wipe out the program they support and off they would go. But of course Congress hardly ever wipes out programs. So contractors stay. And their meters keep running.

The true size of government is hard to calculate. Statistics are hard to come by because it appears that agencies don’t want to collect this information. The Brookings Institution published a persuasive book called “The True Size of Government” in 1999 that argue as of 1996 there were in excess of 12 million fulltime federal employee equivalents. Even if the true number is half that amount, the true size of the federal work force is growing.

Federal employees keep retiring at a brisk pace, often spurred on by early retirement options provided by agencies desperate to make the latest politically motivated head count. Those who remain grow grayer. It is increasingly difficult for agencies to bring in new employees to replace them. It is a safe bet that domain knowledge is being transferred to contracting staff. This assumption means that large numbers of government contractors are in effect federal employees performing inherently governmental functions. And contracting agencies are likely making very nice profits.

As a federal employee I am concerned about this trend. Congress needs to examine the true size of government and think about what it means if inherently governmental functions are being done by those who are not federal employees. New and meaningful metrics on the true size of government are needed. As a taxpayer you should consider that increasing the number of federal employees might well be in your interest, provided they are coupled with meaningful reforms in the civil service system. Be suspicious of numbers you are hearing about how the size of government has shrunk. Most likely you are being sold snake oil.

January 22nd, 2003 at 04:20pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2003 | no comments