Home / George W. Bush

IBM Center for the Business of Government presidential transition blog post.

In the report, “Building the Enterprise: A New Civil Service Framework,” the Partnership for Public Service calls for major reforms to the federal government’s decades-old civil service system and lays out a plan to modernize areas that include the outdated pay and hiring policies.

“Our nation’s civil service system is a relic of a bygone era,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service. “Our nation’s leadership must make it a priority to create a civil service system that our public servants deserve and that will produce the results our country needs.”

Produced in collaboration with Booz Allen Hamilton, the comprehensive report calls the federal personnel system, the foundation for effective government, obsolete and in crisis, and an obstacle rather than an aid in attracting, hiring, retaining and developing top talent.

“Good government starts with good people, and our nation is fortunate to count some of the brightest, most dedicated professionals among its ranks. But they too often succeed in spite of the current system, not because of it,” Stier said.

The report calls for overhauling the entire civil service system, including pay, performance management, hiring, job classification, accountability and workplace justice, and the Senior Executive Service, the nation’s career leadership corps.

Follow at #enterprisegovt View Related Infographics

RELEASE EVENT VIDEO

The Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton released “Building the Enterprise: Nine Strategies for a More Integrated, Effective Government,” a report designed to assist the Obama administration’s efforts to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the federal government. “Building the Enterprise” calls on the administration to take a more coordinated, multiagency approach to tackling today’s critical challenges. From reducing homelessness and safeguarding food to securing cyberspace and reducing joblessness, the report lays out the case for our government to build on current efforts by acting as a single, integrated enterprise.

By implementing these nine strategies, the report argues our government can begin to eliminate program duplication and overlap, and align scarce resources toward defined goals to better serve the needs of the American people.

On March 2, 2011, Partnership President and CEO Max Stier testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on streamlining the nominations process. In his testimony, Stier praised the Senate and its bipartisan working group for taking steps to reduce the number of political appointees requiring Senate confirmation. Beyond that, Stier encouraged the Senate to set goals for the incoming administration to get nominees’ paperwork in to the relevant committees so the Senate can vote on top administration officials at the beginning of the Congressional session. Stier also advocated for converting select political appointments to career positions and capping the number of political appointees at each agency instead of just across government.

On April 22, 2010, Partnership President and CEO, Max Stier, testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on the Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia on the presidential transition. Stier discussed the Partnership’s tracking of the 2008 transition and provided several recommendations based on the Partnership’s Ready to Govern (provide link to report) transition report, released a year after the inauguration. Stier thanked the members of the committee for their leadership in introducing S. 3196, the Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act of 2010, and offered additional recommendations, including mandating White House and agency transition councils.

Based on our examination of presidential transitions, and in particular the 2008–2009 experience, it is time once again to revisit and amend the presidential transition law to place requirements on the White House to better facilitate transition activities, and to enable campaigns and the president-elect to be better prepared to govern.

In this Ready to Govern report, we examine the three phases of the 2008–2009 transition—the pre-election timeframe, the period from the election to the inauguration and President Obama’s first year in office. In each section, we provide a short narrative based on the experiences and reflections of some key participants in the transition, and offer a series of recommendations for each phase on a broad range of transition issues. These include:

Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Office of President-elect Obama and the White House establishing the relationship between the transition team and the outgoing White House. “The chief of staff and the chair of the president-elect’s transition team enter into this memorandum of understanding in order to establish an orderly process for identifying individuals charged with transition responsibilities, to ensure that the government’s and the office of the president-elect’s standards of conduct are observed, to protect the confidentiality of nonpublic government information made available to the transition team during the transition period, to preserve the constitutional, statutory and common law privileges that attach to such information in the possession of the executive branch, and to protect the confìdentiality of transition information made available to the government.”

Letter ascertaining the winner of the 2008 presidential election from Acting GSA Administrator James Williams to President-elect Barak Obama on Nov. 25, 2008, which triggers to resources and support from the General Services Administration in support of the presidential transition.

This Executive Order, published in the Federal Register, issued by the Bush White House, directs federal agencies to facilitate the 2008-09 presidential transition. The order establishes a Presidential Transition Coordinating Council with the authority to prepare the federal government for the presidential transition.

The key to improving our federal government’s operational health is a robust management framework “a roadmap to reform” that tackles challenges from federal budgeting to the use of technology to deliver services. The centerpiece of the president’s government reform plan needs to be a strategy to restore prestige to and increase the capacity of our federal workforce.

Each aspect of the government deserves more attention, but the new president’s management framework should focus on the talented, but underutilized, civilian workforce. The goal should be clear: to improve organizational performance. Core components of an effective workforce, which foster high performance, include: