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Kinsale's avatar

For a number of years I worked at the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville, VA. FEI is the executive skills training and leadership development facility for the top levels of the career civil service. Founded by Lyndon Johnson, it was supposed to be the civilian equivalent of the Army and Navy War Colleges. It was a very frustrating experience for me. It was all we could do to persuade agencies to give our federal executives the time off to attend our one-month residential flagship program. Executive skills training was just never a high priority on any recent Administration's agenda be it Republican or Democrat. During my time at FEI, I was invited to spend some time at South Korea's equivalent institution, the Central Officials Training Institue in Seoul. I was very sad to see that, in comparison to the U.S., every career civil servant in South Korea is entitled to 2 full years of tax payer funded senior management training. Vociferous conservatives who accuse the U.S. federal government of hopeless incompetence ought to wise up and understand that, as with so much else in life, you get the government you pay for. If I had just one job I could do in the Biden Administration, I would want to run the Office of Personnel Management. From there, I would begin the unglamorous and thankless process of reforming and building a world class civil service for the U.S. It's way past time we realized Lyndon Johnson's human capital strategy for federal executives.

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RO Cokesville's avatar

This is another area where it would be nice to see blue states lead, but I don’t know of any cases where this has happened. Civil servants are better paid, but you still have the transition and prestige issues (and they aren’t *that* much better paid).

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