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 of 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 agenc