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With former President Donald Trump’s campaign still not accepting the government’s offer of services meant to help with presidential transition planning, good government officials are warning that the continued delays pose a “real risk” to government operations.

To ease the process of moving into a new administration in January, both major party’s campaigns have the option to access resources from the General Services Administration and the White House ahead of Election Day. But so far, Trump’s campaign has missed multiple deadlines to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) and begin receiving those resources.

“So much of what they will need in order to be prepared to run our government depends upon having access to information and resources that are dependent upon that MOU with GSA,” Max Stier, the Partnership for Public Service’s president and CEO, told reporters during a press conference this week. “They have more time to get it done, but the clock is running.”

Both campaign transition teams also had an Oct. 1 deadline to sign an MOU with the White House to define the terms of their access to agencies, including personnel, facilities and documents after the election. A Biden administration official said an MOU with Harris’ transition team is in place, and they are “actively working” with the Trump transition team to complete an MOU.

“The federal transition coordinator has engaged both eligible candidate transition representatives to negotiate memoranda of understanding,” the official said in an email statement.

Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris previously named leaders for their transition planning teams, which officials at the Partnership said is an important step in the process. But without signing an MOU with GSA, those leaders and their teams will have a harder time getting transition planning work off the ground and running.

Through an MOU with GSA, presidential campaign teams can get access to space, supplies and information ahead of the November election. The idea is to have a solid footing in transition planning ahead of Election Day, making for a smoother transition to a new administration once a winner of the presidential election is determined.

The Sept. 1 deadline for signing an MOU with GSA has come and gone, but Partnership officials said signing an agreement is still important, especially as time runs short before the Nov. 5 election.

“A new president, on day one, will be responsible for addressing incredibly diverse and complicated issues,” Stier said. “You need to have real-time information about what those are, and you need to have people read into them so that they are actually ready to be able to help lead those agencies. There will be a career workforce that will be in place, but for that political team to understand what’s going on, they need that MOU, and they need the time to be able to actually understand that landscape.”

A GSA spokesperson said in an email to Federal News Network that GSA has extended offers of services to both major party candidates and is prepared to begin providing services to the Trump transition team once an MOU is executed. GSA has entered an MOU with the Harris transition team, the spokesperson said, which outlines terms for using federal office space and various resources, such as office equipment, communications and IT services.

What transition planning resources does GSA offer?

According to the Harris transition team’s MOU with GSA, her campaign has access between now and Nov. 5 to 20,000 square feet of office space in D.C., enough to house about 100 staff members. They’ll also be able to get office furniture, equipment, secure laptops and software for their work in planning the transition process.

Through an MOU, GSA can also offer transition teams cybersecurity protections, as well as the ability to identify campaign team members who might need immediate security clearances following the November election.

“You really do want to be moving forward as fast as you can, getting people cleared, so that they are going to actually have access to information that is non-public and classified,” Stier said. “It will be a real problem if they don’t have the MOU in place.”

Under the Presidential Transition Act, GSA also offers a “resume bank” to both transition teams, once an MOU is in place.

“For either candidate, who is in the position to be accepting hundreds of thousands of resumes in the next few months, having something like that established before the election is very useful,” Valerie Smith Boyd, director of the Partnership’s Center for Presidential Transition, told reporters during this week’s press conference.

If the Trump team signs an MOU with GSA, all the same resources will be available to his staff as well. GSA said it offers information and assistance on an equal basis, regardless of party, and separates each team’s spaces both physically, and over IT networks. GSA also assigns separate staff members to support the teams onsite.

Trump’s transition team did not share any details with Federal News Network on when or if there were plans to sign an agreement with GSA, or how far along the team currently is in its transition planning work.

Recent reforms present new challenge for agencies

The upcoming presidential transition will also be different in part because it’s the first election since the passage of the Presidential Transition Improvement Act. The 2022 law made reforms to “ascertainment” — the process that gives the presumptive election winner access to resources and the ability to coordinate with agencies to prepare for an administrative transition.

After GSA delayed support during the 2020 presidential transition, the Presidential Transition Improvement Act changed GSA’s role by requiring an “equitable” release of transition services to both candidates, in the case that there’s not a clear winner immediately after the election. If there is still not a clear winner five days after the election, GSA would have to offer resources to both candidates until there is a clear winner.

But Partnership officials said those reforms also present agencies and career federal employees with a new challenge — the possibility of having the additional work of collaborating with two sets of transition planning leaders, rather than just one. The career federal workforce has been through the presidential transition process many times over, but the changes from 2022 could make the process more cumbersome — especially without enough leg work done ahead of Election Day.

“Federal agencies are doing the hard work of preparing for what may be double the effort that they usually spend in the transition process,” Smith Boyd said.

Right now, both campaign teams “are understandably focused on who’s going to what battleground state,” Stier said. “But the end result here is, who’s going to be actually ready to keep us safe and run our government effectively?”

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

The Transportation Department’s recipe for RICE all starts with the same basic ingredients.

RICE, which stands for registration, inspections, compliance and enforcement, is a technology platform that nearly every office and modal needs.

Cordell Schachter, the chief information officer of the Transportation Department, said there are numerous platforms across the agency and all need a standard set of functions to begin with.

“Let’s build in-common on any on a platform that has an authority to operate (ATO) from a cybersecurity perspective, that then we can flex to meet the unique needs of each of those operating administrations so that DevSecOps discipline is provided consistently across the whole platform, but yet we still provide an opportunity for each business owner or operations owner to come and get what they need from the platform ,” Schachter said on Ask the CIO.  “So the inspection of a vehicle that’s under one administration’s responsibility would be different from a different kind of vehicle or conveyance, and we want the platform to be able to accomplish all of that.”

Schachter made moving to modern development techniques one of his three top priorities. Within that area, DoT is moving toward a DevSecOps methodology, taking advantage of low-code platforms and cloud services.

Over the last year or so, DoT has launched that common platform and started developing applications in a more agile way.

“In the next year or years, hopefully we’ll get the chance to move from that first not even just crawling, but just thinking where we wanted to crawl to and now we’re someplace between crawling and walking. I’m looking forward to being able to run and really develop these things at scale, and also give the taxpayers a better deal because they’re going to invest in that RICE platform once, and then hopefully save money as it’s reused for those custom purposes,” he said.

One big challenge, Schachter said, is he doesn’t have a good idea of how many RICE platforms already exist across the operating models. Part of the reason for that is because not every system provides the four ingredients and many just need one or two.

Solving DoT’s mission challenges

Schachter said his team is trying to assess just how many of these RICE platforms, partial or full, exist and should have a better idea in 6-to-12 months.

The RICE platform modernization effort is one example of DoT’s ongoing digital transformation and security initiatives.

Schachter said all of these efforts are more focused than ever on aligning incentives with intentions. This means holding vendors accountable for meeting specific service levels as well as ensuring their workforce has the necessary skills to help DoT modernize.

“When we now replace legacy applications with low code or no code platforms, then that’s the kind of relationship that we want. It’s newer for us than the way we previously operated. The contracts we write, the solicitations that we let, are going to be different than what we have in the past. So we’re going to need partners who work with us to get it right,” he said. “Our intention is to have a modern system that’s always available, that’s secure, that maintains privacy, that does what it’s supposed to do, and now the incentive should be, because vendors are in it to earn a reasonable profit that they do that, but accept the responsibility that goes with the intentions that I stated.”

Schachter added that there may be different requirements for different platforms, but it all comes back to solving DoT’s mission challenges.

Ongoing portfolio deep dives

Internally, the DoT’s CIO’s office is driving down a similar path with employees.

Schachter said training is now a requirement from the entry level General Schedule positions to the most senior GS and then Senior Executive Service positions.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in establishing an internship program as well as formalizing our training programs and communicating expectations. We are making sure that our teams know that there’s resources available for them to be trained on a regular basis,” he said. “We expect our staff to have two weeks of training a year. That’s the minimum, and some of that’s going to be self-directed study, online information, formal courses available online, or it could be a classroom, if that’s the only way it’s delivered.”

Additionally, he has ensured there is funding for employee training by working with DoT leadership, specifically in the budget office, to make it a “must have” expense and not a “nice to have” one.

Another way DoT is aligning incentives with intentions is through budget and portfolio deep dives with each office and operating administration.

Schachter said these analyses focus on IT, customer experience, cybersecurity and funding.

“We realized some of the reason why the systems are the way they are is the only way to have funded them in the past, would have been to take money out of mission and of other things that that operational administration was supposed to do. I think we need to grow the pie bigger if we’re always robbing from the left pocket to put enough money in the right pocket, and then we’re not really making progress,” he said. “Given the imperative to be more cyber secure, which everyone will agree with on the top line, what is that going to take? We need to be more descriptive of what that cost is. How do we do those two things? How do we generate the right level of support? I’m giving people very specific examples of the need while still maintaining security. And I can tell you, it’s a challenge, but one that we have to accept and drive through.”

The cost models just don’t focus only on cybersecurity, but extend to paying for development, modernization and enhancement too.

“We’ve done a lot of work over the last year or so talking with every operating administration, with their staff, building up our staff within the CIO organization, specifically to address these questions. We realized, just like our technologies were a little long in the tooth, well so are some of our cost models. So not only do we have to update the technologies, we also need to update those models as well,” Schachter said. “We really are trying to obey both the spirit and the letter of the [the Federal IT Acquisition and Reform Act] and at the same time do the very best job we can to give people the best service at the best price.”

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

• Federal employees impacted by Hurricane Milton are eligible to use paid leave donated by their colleagues. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has established an “emergency leave transfer program” for those under threat from the hurricane. The OPM program lets feds donate their unused time off to a leave bank. Feds impacted by the hurricane can then use the extra paid time off during the emergency, without having to dip into their own leave hours. The emergency leave program for Milton comes about a week after feds affected by Hurricane Helene received the same options from OPM. Employees should contact their agency’s HR office for more information.
• Many federal retirees will get a 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment for their retirement annuities next year, but not everyone gets that full COLA. Retirees in the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS), just like every year, will receive a smaller cost-of-living adjustment. In 2025, that means they’ll get a 2% COLA. The initial rationale for giving FERS annuitants a reduced COLA was to try to balance the scales with those in the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). But federal advocates and some lawmakers have called the difference “unfair” and have pushed to give FERS annuitants a full COLA rather than the reduced amount. This year in particular, concerns are growing as the smaller COLA is coupled with a significant health premium increase of 13.5% for feds in 2025.
• A Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) database left some personally identifiable information on VA employees and veterans viewable to all users. Now three VA whistleblowers are getting recognition for reporting the problem. The Office of Special Counsel found VA officials violated federal law and department policy by not restricting access to these records. The VA whistleblowers received this year’s Public Servant Award from OSC. The VA has since updated its database so that records are only accessible by VA employees with a valid business reason.
• Military installations in Florida avoided severe damage after Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday night. U.S. Special Operations Command and U.S. Central Command remain evacuated from McDill Air Force Base. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s top spokesperson, says both commands “continue to operate out of multiple locations, ensuring no degradation to operations.” As of Thursday morning, the Florida National Guard has deployed over 6,500 Guard personnel. The response includes over 500 high water vehicles, 26 helicopters and over a dozen watercraft to assist with recovery efforts. Another 3,000 National Guard members from 19 states are also ready to provide further support if needed. Two-hundred fifty personnel from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are assisting with tasks, including temporary roof repairs, managing debris, controlling flooding and clearing waterways.
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists faced retaliation over chemical safety disagreements. The EPA’s inspector general’s office says scientists were passed over for promotions, received lower performance evaluations and got reassigned to other parts of the agency — all over disagreements about chemical safety. EPA scientists generally face a 90-day deadline to assess new chemicals for commercial use. Kyla Bennett, the director of science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says scientists were pressured to avoid backlogs. “They would do these risk assessments on new chemicals, and they’d say, ‘OK, we found that this one causes cancer,’ for example. And the managers would say, ‘No, no, we don’t want to say that,’ and they’d delete the cancer designation. And it was happening over and over and over.”
• The annual governmentwide customer satisfaction survey puts the General Services Administration (GSA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) at the top for IT services. Employees at the NSF and the GSA gave their Offices of the CIO high marks in a new survey. As part of the President’s Management Agenda’s business of government priority area, OMB and GSA surveyed more than 246,000 employees about their satisfaction levels across back-office functions. In the IT category, NSF employees’ ratings lifted the agency to the top across four of seven areas, including IT equipment, IT functions and IT support. GSA employees’ ratings lifted their agency to first or second in six of seven areas, including receiving the top rating for IT communication and collaboration.
• Federal employees are telling the General Services Administration they like the co-working space pilot launched just over a year ago. GSA says the program, which started in July 2023, has hosted more than 1,100 employees from 78 departments and 85% of them say they plan to return to the co-working space. Employees can take advantage of these government-managed office spaces in six cities, including Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Tacoma, Washington. Later this year, GSA says the federal co-working program will launch a digital booking system pilot, letting users make and manage their own reservations.
• The Defense Department is exploring the idea of creating a separate path or a sub-path within the software acquisition pathway specifically for artificial intelligence. An alternate path would allow the department to iterate more rapidly and accommodate the faster cycles of development that AI requires. Deborah Rosenblum, the acting deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, says it will most likely be done through the software pathway given its inherent flexibility and agility.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

The Army Corps of Engineers delivers critical public and military engineering services, whether it’s managing the waterways that keep the nation’s economy moving, restoring critical infrastructure when disaster strikes,  building military facilities, or protecting wetlands and wildlife habitats. The Corps also delivers a wide range of IT services and capabilities to support its diverse missions.

The Corps manages thousands of software applications that support their mission customers. Dovarius Peoples, the corps’ former chief information officer who now serves as the General Services Administration’s deputy CIO, said the organization is in the midst of modernizing its major business systems, including its project management system, its financial management system, and its real estate management system.

“That’s just a few of the many systems that we’re modernizing, and they’re on the cloud journey,” said Peoples.

The Corps currently operates two main data centers—one in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the other in Portland, Oregon—which house the Corps’ IT infrastructure and support its various operations. These data centers, however, experience frequent damage to physical cables due to car accidents and construction work, resulting in lost connectivity or degraded performance.

To address these challenges, the Corps is relocating these data centers to more optimal locations at Equinix data centers in San Jose, California, and Ashburn, Virginia. The move will centralize data operations and improve the Corps’ connectivity and resilience by positioning them closer to major cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.

“From a Corps of Engineers perspective, we’re going through the various aspects of data center consolidation. We’re also going through app assessment as well as app rationalization, and we’re going through modernization. We are implementing various aspects of zero trust inside of our hybrid concept, and we’re focusing on that end state of being that of data but allowing our mission partners as well as our customers to be able to control some of that end state as well,” said Peoples.

The Corps plans to to complete its hybrid cloud implementation by the end of the fiscal 2025. Peoples said they expect to have their financial management system functioning within this new cloud environment by that time as well.

The transition to a hybrid cloud is in full swing, but the organization is carefully considering its data costs, specifically its expenses related to uploading and retrieving its data. The goal is to ensure the information is accessible when it’s needed while optimizing storage costs and keeping expenses under control.

“As we continue to evolve in our modernization journey, we’re applying those aspects as lessons learned to not repeat some of those things as it pertains to app refactoring, app migration, app assessment, as well as the data aspect from a storage perspective,” said Peoples.

Transitioning to a hybrid environment

From a mission readiness standpoint, moving to the cloud has allowed the Crops to have backup systems in place to ensure continuous operation in case of a failure.

It has also allowed the organization to avoid costs associated with hardware purchases through shifting to Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions where applicable.

As for the long-term strategy, however, Peoples said the Corps is considering whether there will ever be a need to shift back to on-premises solutions in the future.

“One of the things we’re keeping in mind as we begin to look at this, the question that a lot of technicians should be asking themselves is, how long will the cloud in a major cloud capability continue to be prevalent? Will we ever go back to this on-prem aspects of things?” said Peoples.

“From a Corps of Engineers perspective, that’s why we evolved. And we looked at this from a hybrid concept because there’s going to be a significant time where you’re going to have to bring those resources back on-prem. So from a budgeting perspective, we’re also looking at when that will happen or when that requirement will come into play. To avoid that, we’re taking a streamlined approach to identifying what can really be hosted inside of a pure cloud environment without any mission impacts, disruptions, or the requirement to bring those back on-prem at a certain point.”

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

Tom Temin And just give us the brief background on the Recompete Pilot Program. These are recompeting for pilots to do what?

Rachael Sun So the Recompete program at its core is a program that’s designed to invest grant funding into economically distressed communities across the country. Really, the goal here is to tackle this distress with a focus on jobs. So of the six awardees we were very excited to announce last month, really, And most of them focus on one of two things. So either a strategy to create jobs in communities that either no longer have them or have been historically underinvested in, or to perhaps invest in communities where there are access to good jobs. But certain parts of the community have been left out of the access. So in those communities, it might be certain barriers that leave people out of the economy, whether that’s workforce training, access to wraparound services, things like that. But really, at its core, this program is a jobs program with a focus on places that have been historically left behind across the country.

Tom Temin And the release describes this as finalists, these six areas as finalists. So there was a first round in which many more communities got sort of seed funding.

Rachael Sun Yep. Great question. So maybe just going backwards about a year. I can give a bit of context on the program origin and how we got to this point. But the recompete program was authorized as part of the 2022 Chips and Science Act. So we received authorization for appropriations up to $1 billion. We were very lucky to receive $200 million in appropriations in fiscal 2023 to really pilot the first round of the competition. And so backtracking about a year, we launched the notice of funding opportunity as a two phase competition to your question. So in the first phase, really, we asked applicants to come to us and say, Hey, at the highest level, what is the concept for your plan to address economic distress for your community? In that phase, we received 565 applications. So this was the highest subscribed competition we’ve ever run at the Economic Development Administration. Really speaking to the level of demand across the country. That 565 at the end of phase 1 became 22. So we selected 22 finalists. President Biden announced them in December of last year. And those 22 finalists really represented the top 10% of the country in terms of plans that we really believed in, that we thought this is a real strategy to address economic distress, really improve employment in these communities that have been so left behind. So that was phase one to phase two. And then phase two or to announcement, which is what you just referenced. So the 22 became six. We were able to award those six anywhere from $20 million to $40 million each in grant funding to really then move forward and implement the strategies that they had proposed. And then in parallel, we also awarded over the past year about 24 strategy development grants. So those grants are about half $1 million each, really intended to help teams continue to refine their strategies as we know this stuff takes time, and we really want to see the work go forward.

Tom Temin And you mentioned the money originally came from the Chips and Science Act. Are these grants, do they have anything to do with semiconductor production or manufacturing in any way what the strategies are?

Rachael Sun Great question. So it was authorized through the Chips and Science Act, but the specific activities of focus for recompete are as related to direct some conductor investments. Really, the activities that we’re funding are within the spectrum of what EDA would generally fund, and we’re quite flexible on that. So we’re funding anything from workforce training programs to small business supports to building infrastructure to coordination and governance dollars within these communities. But I do want to take a step back and put it in context of why it was authorized through chips. So while we could be as a program focused on distressed communities, we know broadly that here at the EDA, our mission is to prepare American regions for competitiveness on the global stage and to be really competitive and secure in this global economy. And so we can get to role within that as we know that it’s impossible to do this while we know that many parts of the country continue to be left behind. And so through programs like recompete, we can bring those left behind communities and really invest in them so that they can achieve economies that work for both their local residents but also thrive within the global economy.

Tom Temin We are speaking with Rachael Sun. She’s acting director of the Recompete Pilot Program, part of the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration. And just two of the areas that I know a little bit about Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Birmingham, Alabama. Those are places that used to be wealthy in the metalworking and metal processing, steel and so on, which has mostly fled almost all of the United States. Just describe for us briefly those two areas. What did they do and what will they be doing with this grant money?

Rachael Sun Yeah, totally. Thanks for bringing this up, Tom. So on Allentown exactly speaking to what you just mentioned, what we’re seeing in the Allentown community and more broadly within the Lehigh Valley region is a resurgence in manufacturing. So as you said, historically, steel focus, historically industrial. Now seeing actually growth in manufacturing sectors above the national average. And so that’s kind of what the team said to us. Hey, we’re seeing all this regional growth, but there are three specific neighborhoods within the city of Allentown that have not really been seeing the benefits of this growth. And so we see residents there, about 70% of the community there is Hispanic or Latino, where we actually do see really high unemployment. And so we see poverty rates at about 34% in those communities. We see that the number of working age adults in those communities significantly lags the national average rate. And so they said, Hey, we’re really going to take this opportunity to zone in and take a highly targeted approach, and propose a plan that really gets residents in this communities to those good jobs that are in the surrounding region.

Rachael Sun So to speak a bit more to that. We just awarded them $20 million to implement a series of eight different projects. Those projects fall into a couple of categories. So they have a workforce development training program that’s intended to reach those residents. They have some work focused on child care. We know across the board that child care continues to be a barrier for residents to access good jobs and even participate in training. So part of the funding will be to bridge those gaps and also to increase the supply of child care in that community. Another bucket of funding for them will go towards improving transportation access. So how are you expected to continue to retain a job or retain training without affordable, easy transportation to those locations? And then the last piece is focused on continuing to invest in local manufacturing, continue to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring small businesses and jobs into the community. And so we’re really excited about this program, because as you can tell we have a pretty broad funding remit to give flexible funding towards communities in a locally driven way. And that’s what we’re seeing happening in Allentown and excited to kick off that grant over the next few months.

Tom Temin And by the way, what do they make now in the Lehigh Valley? Do we have any sense of what’s driving that manufacturing resurgence?

Rachael Sun It’s a great question. So I think there’s a lot of tradition in the Lehigh Valley, and especially we were just in Allentown last Monday doing high customization, low volume manufacturing. So the strategy really isn’t to choose a specific sector per se, but you have all of these manufacturing business owners who are able to say, Hey, we can take you end to end on a product development and really be able to customize this product. So it really varies across the spectrum. Anything from water sanitation products to thinking about industrial manufacturing to other sectors. But really the specialty is being able to customize to the degree possible.

Tom Temin So it’s not motors for electric cars, for example, quite yet.

Rachael Sun Multiple sectors, but yes, focusing on quite a few.

Tom Temin And what about Birmingham?

Rachael Sun Yeah, totally. So in Birmingham, this is also one of our places where you see that the strategy is there are actually quite a lot of good jobs. But again, people really can’t get to those jobs. So they’re focused on four neighborhoods on the northwestern side of Birmingham, and these are four neighborhoods that have been historically redlined predominantly black, have seen the effects of multiple decades of disinvestment. And so really in Birmingham, there’s a focus here on employer commitments that we saw above and beyond in the competition. This team was able to bring in employer commitments of nearly 4,000 plus jobs, where over the course of the year that they participated in this competition, the team went around to the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. They went around to the local pipe fitting company, to the local Birmingham utility company and say, Hey, we are applying for federal funding up to 20 to $50 million. And what we’d like to do is ask you to say, Hey, if we get this funding, will you commit to hiring residents from these communities, even though we know that there’s some cost to you. And so they were actually able to secure again 4,000 plus commitments to hire from these companies, which is really exciting. And then similarly, our funding is going towards workforce training led by a local HBCU, similarly going towards a black business entrepreneurship center. So a center that brings together a lot of entrepreneurship support orgs in the region to be able to bring folks into the economy, not just to train and get a job, but in some cases start their own business. And then similarly, transportation, childcare, things that we see as common barriers to attaining employment.

Tom Temin And just a final question on some of those issues that you hope are helped by these grants, including childcare and transportation, those are ongoing issues for families. Do the strategies include a way to make those sustaining locally in the community? Because if federal dollars for, say, paying for childcare run out, then what? People are back where they started in some sense.

Rachael Sun Absolutely. It’s a great question and something that we often discuss with our grantees, especially now that we’ve asked the competition stage and now we have to implement. So the push that we’ve given and what the grantees shared with us is, we’re not just providing stopgap funding for these wraparound services, we’re actually increasing the supply overall or making investments that are intended to increase supply, such that we’re not saying here’s a voucher to go get childcare for the training program, which is part of the scope. But in addition to that, we’re saying, Hey, what does this child care operator or this child care provider actually need to do to increase and improve its business model so that it can be sustainable long term even when funding dries up? I do think broadly, it’s a great point that you raise. This funding is nowhere near, I think the amount that was needed for the program. We saw such demand across different places in the country. So I do think with more funding we’d be able to continue to pilot different ways to improve the sustainability of these plans. But it’s really a good question and something that’s top of mind for us as well.

Tom Temin And first of all, we should start with the fact that you are a former Fed executive yourself.

Russell Robinson Yes, 22 years of federal service. I started out with the Department of Education in 2000, seven years there, and then went to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), five years, then three years at the Veterans Affairs (VA). And then my last eight years was at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a component called Program Support Center, which was a shared service entity within the Office of the Secretary.

Tom Temin All right. So you’ve covered the geography as well the agency stuff. And the Key Executive Leadership Program that’s been a part of the School of Public Service for a long time also.

Russell Robinson Yeah. The Key Executive Leadership Program is in its 49th year, and its mission in civil service, public service, specifically, federal service is to turn ordinary managers into extraordinary leaders. And I’m actually a proud alum of the master’s program there.

Tom Temin All right. And our friend and regular guest, Bob Tobias, ran the Key Executive Leadership Program, and was a professor in it, I think, almost as long as it was.

Russell Robinson Yeah, Bob is one of the most brilliant, I was going to say federal minds, but he is one of the most brilliant minds in the game. And he was the director of the program when I was there. And he handed off the reins to my good friend Patrick Malone. And Patrick has been running, I believe for the last 11 years.

Tom Temin All right. Well, let’s get to what’s new here, and that is the Key Undergraduate Leadership Program that you’re heading up. What is that all about?

Russell Robinson Yeah. So the again, the Key Executive Leadership Program really gets to how do we turn ordinary managers to extraordinary leaders. And we really focus on creating leaders who focus on self-awareness, emotional intelligence, building relationships, as well as delivering results. And as I said, we’ve been doing that for 49 years. And I think a couple of years ago, our provost, Vicki Wilkins, was having a conversation with an undergrad student who was basically saying there’s no room for humility and vulnerability in leadership. And I think they had a meeting of the minds and was like, why are we waiting to teach this outstanding type of leadership to middle age, mid-career senior executives? And they decided to start this at the undergrad level.

Tom Temin So in other words, an undergraduate had said you have to be a dictator to be a leader, essentially. And Vicki said, wait a minute, we got to get to this generation sooner.

Russell Robinson Well, and I think part of that is we have focused so much on with undergraduates on delivering results. And I think Tom, you get older and you realize, well, delivering results are great. But it’s also about connecting and building relationships. And I think that aspect of leadership and also culture wasn’t being stressed. And there’s a gentleman by the name of Howard Husock, who’s with the American Enterprise Institute, and he wrote a position paper basically saying public administration schools across the country aren’t preparing leaders for public administration work. In essence, he was making the argument for the key program and undergraduate program, but he was tasking universities, public administration, schools at the grad level, and we’re doing it at the undergrad level. So I’ve got 23, 18 year olds who just started this semester on this journey of learning this value of leadership that focuses on strategy, agility, connection and self-reflection. Those are our four pillars.

Tom Temin And these 23, 18 year olds aspire to civil service careers.

Russell Robinson They’re amazing. I got a young man who plans to be the president of the United States. I have one who wants to be secretary of state. I also have students who want to go into law, and there are certain policies within public administration that are their passion projects. So there’s this aspect of we created this program to teach a new type of leadership, but we’re also hoping that we are going to create a pipeline for this young talent, this young Gen Z talent, into public administration. And I’ll be honest, it would be great if it was at the federal level. But if it can happen at the state or county level or city level, that’s just as fine because I think from a public administration standpoint, that’s where public administration lives and dies is that state and local level.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Dr. Russell Robinson. He’s a professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University. And tell us more about your observations of these Generation Z people. They often, I think, get mischaracterized by people that never met any of them as stuck on TikTok and all of this nonsense, which some of them are, frankly. But that’s not universal, is it?

Russell Robinson No, I’m blown away by their passion to want to serve public administration. This isn’t the group that says, I want to get into government, and I’m going to get a SES and get my high three so I can do X, Y and Z. They’re committed to individual passions, whether it is the environment. We have one who wants to go into government law to change policies toward violence, towards sexual abuse victims. Very strong, but it’s interesting. Last academic year between, I’m still a professor in the Key Executive Leadership Program, and last year my student age range was 20-62. And in my my classes with my Gen Zs and millennials, I said, Hey, what do the the federal leaders my age, Gen X and the baby boomers need to know about what you want from leadership in public service. And then I went to my key certificate classes where I’m teaching Gen Xs and baby boomers saying, Hey, what did the Gen Zs and millennials want from a leadership standpoint to want to be in public administration? And the disconnect is scary. The younger group that we want into public service, we hear all this information from OPM about this retirement cliff and we’ve got to get this younger group in. And I don’t think we’re scratching the surface where they’re even being heard or understood. And they grew up  different. I got a 24 year old trying to convince him of life before dial up internet is a scary thing. So they have a take on things that is different from my take. But at the end of the day, they want to feel heard. They want to feel valued. They want to feel like they belong to a part of a tribe. And that’s the same with everybody.

Tom Temin There’s also the sense that they can thrive and enjoy organizational life, which is a lot of human interaction.

Russell Robinson Yes. And there’s also this aspect of you are a leader, but I go back to results in relationships. It’s also this understanding that at 18 you need to start to understand that to deliver results are great, but oftentimes what gets you in the door or gets you ahead or gets you known is how you build relationships with people. And I don’t think that is something that has been stressed at the undergraduate level. But I teach in the certificate program, and I teach people my age who have not focused on the relationship aspect.

Tom Temin Sure. And as I happen to be one of the last boomers still around in the workforce, I found and you probably found this too, and probably what you teach in the executive leadership panel is that just treat people as human beings, respect them and don’t have a priori expectations for how they’ll think just because of their age.

Russell Robinson So there’s a gentleman by the name of Kevin Oakes, who is the founder of the Institute for Corporate Productivity, and they’re doing a lot of future of work research. And what they are talking about, this future of work is really based on leaders who, one, they’re curious. So they’re always in a learning state. The focus over having the right answer is asking the right question. But that also includes bringing various stakeholders into the conversation. And I think in a post-COVID world, post George Floyd world, if you’re doing if you’re leading based on how you led 15 years ago, you’re not, I think most workers in the workforce at the end of the day are really articulating this desire to feel some sort of human connection and to be treated with dignity in the workforce. And I think this program, again, we’re starting with 18 year olds and giving them a leadership foundation that really leans in toward a future of work.