[Senate Hearing 117-252]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                                                      S. Hrg. 117-252

                  CHIEF HUMAN CAPITAL OFFICERS AT 20:
                   WHAT IS NEEDED TO EMPOWER CHCOs TO
         ENSURE HR PRACTICES SUPPORT AGENCIES' MISSION SUCCESS

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                            SUBCOMMITTEE ON
              GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS AND BORDER MANAGEMENT

                                 OF THE

                              COMMITTEE ON
               HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS


                             SECOND SESSION

                               __________

                             MARCH 2, 2022

                               __________

        Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov

                       Printed for the use of the
        Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
        
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                               __________

                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
47-457 PDF                 WASHINGTON : 2022                     
          
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        COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                   GARY C. PETERS, Michigan, Chairman
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware           ROB PORTMAN, Ohio
MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire         RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
KYRSTEN SINEMA, Arizona              RAND PAUL, Kentucky
JACKY ROSEN, Nevada                  JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma
ALEX PADILLA, California             MITT ROMNEY, Utah
JON OSSOFF, Georgia                  RICK SCOTT, Florida
                                     JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri

                   David M. Weinberg, Staff Director
                    Zachary I. Schram, Chief Counsel
                Pamela Thiessen, Minority Staff Director
    Andrew Dockham, Minority Chief Counsel and Deputy Staff Director
                     Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
                     Thomas J. Spino, Hearing Clerk


      SUBCOMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS AND BORDER MANAGEMENT

                   KRYSTEN SINEMA, Arizona, Chairman
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware           JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma
ALEX PADILLA, California             RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
JON OSSOFF, Georgia                  MITT ROMNEY, Utah
                                     JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri

                     Eric A. Bursch, Staff Director
       Robert B. Seidner, Office of Management and Budget Detail
  James D. Mann, Minority Staff Director and Regulatory Policy Counsel
                   Clark A. Hedrick, Minority Counsel
         Mallory B. Nersesian, Archivist and Subcommittee Clerk
                           
                           C O N T E N T S

                                 ------                                
Opening statements:
                                                                   Page
    Senator Sinema...............................................     1
    Senator Lankford.............................................    11
    Senator Carper...............................................    21
Prepared statements:
    Senator Sinema...............................................    33
    Senator Lankford.............................................    36

                               WITNESSES
                        Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Hon. Michael J. Rigas, Former Acting Director (2020-2021) Office 
  of Personnel Management........................................     3
Angela Bailey, Former Chief Human Capital Officer (2016-2022) 
  U.S. Department of Homeland Security...........................     5
Teresa W. Gerton, President and Chief Executive Officer, National 
  Academy of Public Administration...............................     7
Steven V. Lenkart, Executive Director, National Federation of 
  Federal Employees..............................................     9

                     Alphabetical List of Witnesses

Bailey, Angela:
    Testimony....................................................     5
    Prepared statement...........................................    47
Gerton, Teresa W.:
    Testimony....................................................     7
    Prepared statement...........................................    54
Lenkart, Steven V.:
    Testimony....................................................     9
    Prepared statement...........................................    63
Rigas, Hon. Michael J.:
    Testimony....................................................     3
    Prepared statement...........................................    42

                                APPENDIX

Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record:
    Mr. Rigas....................................................    68
    Ms. Bailey...................................................    71
    Ms. Gerton...................................................    73
    Mr. Lenkart..................................................    75

 
                  CHIEF HUMAN CAPITAL OFFICERS AT 20:
                   WHAT IS NEEDED TO EMPOWER CHCOs TO
         ENSURE HR PRACTICES SUPPORT AGENCIES' MISSION SUCCESS

                              ----------                              


                        WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2022

                                     U.S. Senate,  
                      Subcommittee on Government Operations
                                     and Border Management,
                    of the Committee on Homeland Security  
                                  and Governmental Affairs,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:45 p.m., via 
Webex and in room 342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. 
Kyrsten Sinema, Chairwoman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
    Present: Senators Sinema, Carper, Ossoff, Lankford, 
Johnson, and Hawley.

             OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR SINEMA\1\

    Senator Sinema. I call today's hearing to order.
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    \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Sinema appears in the 
Appendix on page 33.
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    I look forward to welcoming Ranking Member Lankford and 
other Members of the Subcommittee, who are on their way, and I 
welcome all of our witnesses to today's discussion about the 
role of the Federal Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCOs). It is 
kind of a fun name.
    A more effective and efficient Federal Government starts 
with a better Federal workforce. It does not matter how much we 
spend or how many laws we pass; if we do not have the right 
people in the right jobs, our Federal Government will not be 
successful in providing the services that my constituents in 
Arizona count on every day. CHCOs play a critical role in this 
effort. They oversee day-to-day workforce management to ensure 
the right employees are hired, trained, managed, promoted, and 
retained.
    The Chief Human Capital Officer role was created in the 
Homeland Security Act (HSA) of 2002 to elevate human capital 
efforts within agencies. After 20 years, it is important to 
explore what works about the CHCO role, what additional 
authorities they need to be successful and innovative, what 
gets in the way of their success, and how Congress can set up 
CHCOs for success. It is especially critical that Congress 
tackle the last part. The Government Accountability Office 
(GAO) has included Federal human capital management on its 
high-risk list for more than 20 years. Numerous recent reports 
have highlighted the immediate need to address Federal 
workforce innovation. Even the National Commission on Military 
and Public Service, the brainchild of Senator John McCain of 
Arizona, spent significant time discussing how to fix Federal 
human resources regulations and statutes.
    Our Committee is starting to make progress. We recently 
passed my bipartisan Chance to Compete Act, which I partnered 
with Ranking Member Lankford to pass. That bill makes important 
improvements to how agencies assess applicants and has strong 
stakeholder support from manager and employee groups. We also 
hope to advance Senator Lankford's Trust in Public Service Act 
soon. Today's hearing will build on that momentum.
    The merit system, which is the foundation of our Federal 
workforce policy, remains the ideal and should never be 
weakened. However, it is wrong to say that the merit system is 
the same thing as the existing personnel system. We have a 
personnel system from the 1940s that uses assessment criteria 
often from as far back as the 1970s and a hodgepodge of recent 
piecemeal changes that make the whole system more complex. We 
need to do better, both for Federal workers and the American 
people who rely on them.
    I want to thank our witnesses for the testimony they have 
submitted today. You four represent an incredible cross section 
of experience, and I thank you for taking the time to attend.
    I know that Senator Lankford is on his way to the hearing, 
and so I will have him complete his opening statement when he 
arrives.
    It is the practice of this committee to swear in witnesses, 
so if you will all please stand and raise your right hand. Do 
you swear that the testimony you will give before this 
committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but 
the truth, so help you, God?
    Mr. Rigas. Yes.
    Ms. Bailey. Yes.
    Mr. Lenkart. Yes.
    Ms. Gerton. Yes.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. You may be seated.
    Now I will introduce each of our witnesses so they may 
present their opening statements. I ask each of our witnesses 
to keep their opening statements to 5 minutes, but your full 
written statements will be submitted for the record.
    Our first witness today is the Hon. Mike Rigas. Mr. Rigas 
was confirmed as the Deputy Director of the Office of Personnel 
Management (OPM) and then served simultaneously in that role as 
well as the Acting Director of OPM and the Acting Deputy 
Director of Management of the Office of Management and Budget 
(OMB).
    Mr. Rigas, thank you for joining us here today. You are now 
recognized for your opening statement.

 TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE MICHAEL J. RIGAS,\1\ FORMER ACTING 
      DIRECTOR (2020-2021), OFFICE OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT

    Mr. Rigas. Thank you, Chairman Sinema, Ranking Member 
Lankford, and Members of the Committee. Thank you for the 
opportunity to testify before you today on this important 
topic.
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    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Rigas appears in the Appendix on 
page 42.
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    My name is Michael Rigas, and I served as both the Acting 
Director of OPM and the Acting Deputy Director for Management 
at OMB. In those capacities, I had the privilege of serving as 
both the Chair and the Vice Chair of the CHCO Council.
    People are the most important resource of any organization. 
I have worked in the private sector, the non-profit sector, and 
in State and Federal Government, and that principle holds true 
no matter what the organization. The Federal Government has 
some of the most dedicated public servants Americans could ask 
for, providing diligent and competent service to the American 
people every day. But as we are here to discuss, we still fall 
short as a Federal Government when it comes to attracting and 
retaining the best and brightest to Federal service and 
ensuring that poor performance and misconduct are effectively 
addressed.
    From my experience working with the CHCO Council, I can say 
they are a valuable resource and advisor to the OPM Director. 
They provide important feedback and suggestions for 
improvements to personnel policy. While they advise on and 
implement personnel policy, there are also limits to what they 
or OPM can do, and here is why.
    First, there must be a realization that OPM does not 
oversee the entire Federal workforce. Congress has created 
numerous carve-outs and exceptions to Title V, placing entire 
categories of employees and agencies outside the purview of 
OPM.
    Second, because of those exceptions and continued creation 
of new authorities, the landscape for managing Federal 
personnel has become overly complex and bureaucratic.
    Third, over time, the level of seniority of individuals 
designated by their agency heads as CHCOs has become less 
senior. For example, if you look at the composition of the CHCO 
Council from its first annual report in fiscal year (FY) 2004, 
you will see the CHCO Council comprised largely of 
Presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed officials, such as 
the Undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness of the 
Department of Defense (DOD) and Assistant Secretaries for 
Management and Administration from other cabinet agencies. That 
is no longer the case.
    But, even in the current environment, with all its 
complexities and limitations, real progress can be made with 
respect to improving how the Federal Government manages its 
most important resource, its people. Here are a few examples of 
recent actions that yielded positive results and can be built 
upon to continue to improve how we manage personnel and Federal 
agencies that serve the American people. With the right 
leadership from Congress, OPM and the White House, substantial 
progress and reform can continue to be made.
    In my roles both at OPM and OMB, I oversaw multiple efforts 
to address the underlying issues inhibiting the Federal 
workforce from being viewed as a first-in-class employer while 
advancing Merit Systems Principles and strengthening the State 
of the Civil Service. When our team came to OPM, we faced the 
largest background investigation backlog in history, with an 
inventory of 725,000 cases and timeliness that exceeded a year 
to receive a top secret clearance. This situation made it 
difficult for agencies to carry out their missions and recruit 
qualified employees in a timely manner. Because of the tireless 
efforts of both our career and non-career leadership, we were 
able to eliminate the backlog and safely reduce the amount of 
time it takes to conduct and adjudicate a background 
investigation.
    We also innovated to improve the hiring process, promoting 
skills-based assessments over applicant self-assessments, 
demonstrating how to successfully reduce candidate selection 
time from 45 days to 16 days, while vastly improving the number 
of qualified candidates to hire. This methodology should be 
more widely used as hiring efforts which rely on self 
assessments often yield lists of candidates hiring managers do 
not deem qualified for the job, resulting in cancellation of a 
posting, frustrating both candidates and hiring managers.
    As Acting Director of OPM, I advocated the expanded use of 
shared certificates, to make them available governmentwide, 
which allow qualified candidates who are not hired at one 
agency to be hired immediately by another agency looking for 
qualified candidates for that same type of position. This pilot 
has been in place at the Department of Health and Human 
Services (HHS) and should be expanded across the government.
    Use of skills-based assessments and shared certificates are 
things CHCOs can do today at their own agencies and would 
greatly reduce the amount of time to hire, save money for 
agencies, improve the experience of job applicants, and 
demonstrate merit systems principles hiring can be effective 
and efficient.
    While at OPM, I also made clear that our mission was to 
support other agencies and do everything we could to help them 
execute on their mission. One great example of that was our 
work with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) 
as we responded to the global pandemic. In 2020 alone, the VA 
was able to hire over 50,000 employees, including doctors, 
nurses, and front line responders to the pandemic, because of 
actions we took at OPM to provide VA the flexibilities and 
authorities it needed to move quickly.
    With leadership that is willing to focus on addressing 
these challenges, there is much that can be done. We know what 
works, and we have demonstrated how concrete improvements can 
be achieved for taxpayers, agencies, and Federal employees. I 
am encouraged by the bipartisan legislation you have sponsored 
in the Chance to Compete Act, which codifies many of these 
reforms to improve Federal hiring and personnel practices.
    Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. 
I look forward to answering your questions and working with you 
to strengthen the efforts I was proud to help lead during my 
time as Chairman of the CHCO Council. Thank you.
    Senator Sinema. Our second witness is Angela Bailey. I 
would first like to congratulate Angie on her retirement last 
month after 40 years of service to our country, and I hope that 
you enjoyed your trip to Sedona last week. It is a wonderful 
place to reflect and recharge, and you are always welcome back 
in Arizona. I am sure your former team on the border misses 
you.
    Ms. Bailey testified before this Committee a few months ago 
in her role as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Chief 
Human Capital Officer, where she was widely credited with 
bringing order and modernizing DHS's human resources (HR) 
programs. Before that, Ms. Bailey was the highest ranking civil 
servant at OPM, leading their Policy Division and serving as 
the Chief Operating Officer (COO).
    Ms. Bailey, thank you for your work and thank you for 
joining us today. You are recognized for your opening 
statement.

   TESTIMONY OF ANGELA BAILEY,\1\ FORMER CHIEF HUMAN CAPITAL 
   OFFICER (2016-2022), U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

    Ms. Bailey. Thank you. I must say I love Sedona. It was 
absolutely beautiful.
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    \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Bailey appears in the Appendix on 
page 47.
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    Good afternoon, Chairwoman Sinema and Ranking Member 
Lankford and distinguished Members of the Subcommittee. Thank 
you for the opportunity to appear here today. I appreciate you 
inviting me to speak about what is needed to empower CHCOs, to 
ensure HR practices support agencies.
    As you just mentioned, I have recently retired from the 
Federal Government after a career that spanned 40 years. Almost 
35 of those 40 years has been spent in human capital. Over half 
of my career was spent at the Department of Defense, and in 
2007, I was appointed to the Senior Executive Service (SES) at 
the Office of Personnel Management in several different roles. 
Then finally, my position in 2016 until I retired at the end of 
2021 was as the DHS Chief Human Capital Officer.
    But just as important as the positions that I have held in 
the agencies that I have served is the experience that I have 
lived over those four decades, witnessing events that have 
touched the lives of our Federal workforce, myself and my 
family included. These events, some historic and some that 
never actually touched the headlines, have shaped so much of 
who I am, what I think, and how I believe that the CHCOs have 
the ability to have a positive impact on their agencies' 
mission.
    It is important to understand that there is more to being a 
CHCO than simply providing human resource policy as the CHCO 
Act implies. It certainly takes more than the CHCO Council to 
address all of the issues impacting the Federal workforce and 
their families. So, yes, not only does the CHCO Act need 
modernization but so does how we approach the entire ecosystem 
which the Federal workforce accomplishes--in which the Federal 
workforce accomplishes their agencies' mission. I have several 
recommendations that I would like to speak to.
    One, humans are not capital, and they are not resources. We 
need to ensure that we start investing in our employees and 
their families. Investing their mind, their body, and their 
spirit is not ``woo-woo''; it is actually a mission imperative.
    Two, timely budgets are critical. Almost every single year, 
agencies are faced with a continuing resolution (CR). Most 
drastic of all are shutdowns. If agencies are to deliver all 
that is expected of them each year, then a budget must be 
passed and ready to begin on October 1st of each fiscal year.
    Three, alternative futures planning is essential. For the 
most part, agencies struggle to plan for the future. The lack 
of doing so has a ripple effect across the entire agency, and 
nowhere is it felt more so than within the human resource 
needs.
    Four, it takes the entire C-Suite. Nothing is accomplished 
by the CHCO alone. There is an interplay between the Chief 
Financial Officer (CFO), the Chief Information Officer (CIO), 
the Chief Acquisition Officer (CAO), the Chief Security Officer 
(CSO). The list goes on and on. The point is that we cannot 
underestimate the value that it takes an entire team in order 
to deliver and pull together to ensure that our agencies' 
missions are accomplished.
    Five, we need simplification and flexibility. There are 
over 100 different hiring authorities on the books. Some are 
for specific agencies; some are for across the entire Federal 
Government. No one can keep up with, manage, or use this many 
hiring authorities nor are they necessary. Agencies should be 
able to seek highly qualified applicants from all available 
sources. The DHS Enhanced Hiring Act proposal is an excellent 
example of how the simplified hiring process could become 
available for all agencies to be able to use.
    Six, we need to modernize classifications, qualifications, 
and awards. The Federal classification system is outdated, and 
it exasperates the pay and compensation disparity. One thing 
Congress could do is modify Title VI, which is DHS's Cyber 
Talent Management System (CTMS), to include all agencies and 
all positions for Civil Service reform to become a reality 
across the Federal Government.
    Seven, is that we have billion-dollar operations and we 
have this. To put this into perspective, DHS's budget this 
fiscal year is over $122 billion, it employs close to 250,000 
employees, and it has 22 different components and a mind-
boggling 90 committees and subcommittees overseeing its 
operation. Yet, despite all that tremendous responsibility and 
accountability, we still must go to OPM to get permission to 
hire one rehired annuitant, to get awards over $10,000, to do 
Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA)/Voluntary 
Separation Incentive Payments (VSIP), and a whole host of other 
things including direct hire authority. There is no business 
anywhere else in the entire world that would accept this kind 
of practice or even find this micromanagement sane.
    And even more surreal or perplexing is the fact that there 
is a belief that all of this requires legislation, that those 
regulations within OPM's purview cannot be changed without 
congressional support, which leads me to the last point, which 
is congressional partnership. Everything calls for a strong 
partnership, collaborative partnership between the 
subcommittees and other interested congressional parties, 
including the unions and veterans servicing organizations and 
good government groups, if we are going to see any type of 
change and modernization.
    I thank you again for this opportunity to speak with you 
today. I appreciate your willingness to listen and to entertain 
the idea of helping us help you make a difference. Thank you.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. Our third witness is Terry 
Gerton, the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the 
congressionally chartered National Academy of Public 
Administration (NAPA) and, before that, a career member of the 
Senior Executive Service. Ms. Gerton is well known for her 
bipartisan efforts to bring together executives and academics 
with different political philosophies to discuss good 
government practices and solutions.
    Ms. Gerton, thank you for joining us today. You are 
recognized for your opening statement.

TESTIMONY OF TERESA W. GERTON,\1\ PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE 
       OFFICER, NATIONAL ACADEMY OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

    Ms. Gerton. Chair Sinema, Ranking Member Lankford, and 
members of the Committee, I appreciate the opportunity to 
testify today.
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    \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Gerton appears in the Appendix on 
page 54.
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    I am a fellow of the National Academy of Public 
Administration and have served as its President since January 
2017. In addition to my experience leading the Academy, I spent 
3\1/2\ years as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. 
Department of Labor (DOL) and 8\1/2\ years as a senior 
executive in the Department of Defense. I have personal 
experience with the topic of today's hearing.
    I have been a hiring manager, a subject matter expert 
reviewer of applicant files, a member of senior executive 
hiring interview panels, and a member of the Army Senior 
Executive Policy Board. While serving as the Executive Deputy 
to the Commanding General of Army Materiel Command, I was 
responsible for the strategic management of over 80 senior 
executives, one third of the Army's total allocation, and the 
oversight of nearly 70,000 civilians in nearly every career 
field stationed around the world. I know how challenging it can 
be to make the Federal personnel processes work.
    The National Academy of Public Administration also has deep 
expertise in Federal human resource management topics. Over 50 
of our fellows claim experience in Federal HR, and of those, 
many themselves were Federal Chief Human Capital Officers. 
Across our history, many agencies have directly engaged the 
Academy and our fellows for support in managing and modernizing 
their own HR systems.
    The Academy agrees with GAO in its determination that 
strategic human capital management is an area of high risk in 
the Federal Government. In 2019, we identified the need to 
modernize and reinvigorate the public service as one of 12 
grand challenges in public administration, and our work in this 
area over the past 5 years has been extensive. We delivered 
last March our congressionally directed assessment of the 
Office of Personnel Management, and just last month we provided 
our assessment of the National Cybersecurity Training System, 
also at Congress's direction. Our fellows provided an action 
plan to the Biden administration on administrative steps it 
could take in its first year to actually modernize and 
reinvigorate the public service. In 2017 and 2018, we completed 
two papers outlining a fundamentally new vision for the future 
of Federal service, No Time to Wait, Parts 1 and 2.
    Taken collectively, our research communicates a vision of a 
federated Civil Service system based on talent management and 
driven by mission accomplishment and merit systems principles. 
But we have made little progress in achieving this vision, and 
the pandemic has only made systemic reform more difficult. 
Significant spending programs to support national recovery, 
combined with nationwide reimagining by individual workers of 
their employment preferences, have created even greater numbers 
of vacancies across the Federal workforce. The urgent need to 
hire new employees to manage these new programs, the perpetual 
shortage of individuals with technical skills in cybersecurity, 
data analytics, and other Science, Technology, Engineering, and 
Math (STEM) fields, and the growing attention on developing 
government programs with a focus on customer experience and 
expectations have created a perfect storm.
    The role of the CHCO is more important now than ever, but 
we cannot modernize that role and then leave them in the 
antiquated system we currently have and expect different 
results. We must undertake a systemic renovation of the entire 
Federal personnel system, and the Academy's assessment of OPM 
is the place to start. That study provides a road map of 
actions needed to raise the attention on, and the value of, 
human capital for addressing critical workforce issues, by 
reframing OPM's mission and affording the Agency the foundation 
required to lead strategic human capital management 
governmentwide. Within such a system, CHCOs can be empowered to 
be the strategic personnel leaders within their agencies that 
the Chief Human Capital Officer's Act envisioned 20 years ago.
    The CHCOs I know recognize that the government's 
effectiveness is the product of its people. They understand the 
potential impact on the daily functions of government, and they 
relish their position on the front lines of mission 
accomplishment. But making this construct real will require 
commitment and support both from the Administration and 
Congress. It will also require a concerted effort to improve 
the capacity of the human resource community governmentwide.
    Recruiting, developing, and retaining the right talent 
should be a priority, nonpartisan concern. Whether you believe 
government should be smaller or larger, we should all agree 
that the government needs a highly skilled workforce to serve 
the American people.
    In this case, the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) 
pandemic may have a silver lining. It has already forced myriad 
changes in what we believe possible and driven adaptation and 
distributed work arrangements, technology, and hiring 
flexibilities. We dare not waste the opportunity that this 
tragedy has created. There simply is no more time to wait.
    Chair Sinema, that concludes my statement. I look forward 
to your questions.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. Our final witness is Steve 
Lenkart. Mr. Lenkart is currently the Executive Director of the 
National Federation of Federal Employees, the third largest and 
the oldest Federal labor union. Previously, he served as a 
career member of the Senior Executive Service, including as the 
Executive Director of the Merit Systems Protection Board 
(MSPB).
    I would also like to thank Mr. Lenkart for his tireless 
work on trying to help Federal wildland firefighters. He has 
worked closely with my staff on this issue that is of vital 
importance to our nation as fires have become more deadly and 
our heroes risk their lives to protect us.
    Mr. Lenkart, thank you for joining us today. You are 
recognized for your opening statement.

TESTIMONY OF STEVEN V. LENKART,\1\ EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL 
                FEDERATION OF FEDERAL EMPLOYEES

    Mr. Lenkart. Thank you, Madam Chair and Ranking Member 
Lankford. It is a pleasure to see you. Thank you for that warm 
intro. Your staff has been absolutely fantastic, as you have as 
well, looking out for our wildland firefighters as they begin 
another year out in the forest for longer and more dangerous 
seasons every year.
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    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Lenkart appears in the Appendix 
on page 63.
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    I am Steve Lenkart. I am the Executive Director of the 
National Federation of Federal Employees. I am a career member 
of the Senior Executive Service. During my Federal executive 
time, I served in leadership positions at the Department of 
Homeland Security, also worked with the Federal Salary Council, 
Federal Prevailing Rate Advisory Committee (FPRAC), and also 
served on the Executive Committee of the Small Agency Council.
    But as the Chairman mentioned, I was also Executive 
Director of the Merit Systems Protection Board. As we all know 
in this room, that agency is an independent agency responsible 
for safeguarding a fair, effective, and efficient workforce for 
2 million Federal employees.
    I am very happy to say that as of last night, with the 
consent of the Senate, we finally have our nominees passed out 
and they are ready to get to work over at the MSPB, to start 
working on a 5-year backlog. They have been without a quorum 
there for 1,880 days. I wish them luck as they try to chip away 
at that backlog.
    My overarching message today is to preserve the merit 
system principles codified in law in 5 U.S. Code (USC) 2301. 
The merit system principles are there to inform policies 
regarding recruitment, selection, development, and maintaining 
an efficient and effective workforce. The merit principles are 
timeless. They were written 30 years ago, 40 years ago. Even 
though they are based on things that happened in the past, they 
were actually written for the future, and they were written 
because of the mistakes that we made over the past 245 years 
trying to run a government.
    Somewhere within the confines of the merit principles is a 
relationship between OPM and the Chief Human Capital Officers 
of the Executive Branch. This is a complex relationship with 
overlapping definitions. They both are facilitators and 
enforcers of human capital for the government. So we ask 
ourselves questions: How much leash do you give to CHCOs to 
administer the workforce under their charge? How much autonomy 
should a CHCO have to ensure that they are still adhering to 
the merit systems principles?
    There is also structural improvements that we can explore 
as well, too. A more proactive use of the CHCO Council. We can 
create a robust OPM Advisory Council consisting of members of 
the public and private sectors, labor and management, academia, 
and other groups to bring innovation to HR. I personally am in 
favor of installing more career reserve leadership at OPM and 
for CHCOs and Chief Administrative Officers across the 
government.
    There is also policy improvements to explore. I am not a 
huge fan of direct hire authority although I think it does have 
its place. I am not a huge fan of the excepted service although 
I think it does have its place. But I do think that there is a 
right way and a wrong way to do both of those things, and the 
wrong way is to do it without protecting merit.
    But if we learned nothing else from the last part of the 
last decade is that we need to get a grip on the mighty river 
of non-career political appointees across the Executive Branch. 
Most Americans do not know about the thousands of political 
appointees that come and go, non-career executives, and 
Schedule C appointees.
    I am not against political appointees. I was one. But these 
jobs are wildly in violation of anything resembling anything 
merit-based. It is a type of secret workforce inside the 
Federal workforce. Some are hired with questionable skills and 
experience. Some come from fake think tanks that are covers for 
dark money. The career managers and staff cannot hold them 
accountable for their performance or for their conduct.
    Madam Chair, I never bring a problem without bringing a 
solution. One solution is to simply allow career managers and 
executives to supervise political appointees, those that are 
not confirmed by the Senate. Political appointees serve at the 
pleasure of a President, but they are subject to the same 
accountability, transparency, and performance laws that apply 
to everyone else. If you are worried about career employees 
blocking appointees' agendas, you should not be because if 
those agendas are legitimate merit principles will protect 
those missions, too.
    Now very servingly, in the last part of the last decade, 
again not now, in the last part of the last decade, we saw an 
unparalleled uptick in dark money investments to move 
operatives into the government under the cloak of political 
hiring exemptions. On the way out, these same operatives test-
drove a new authority, Schedule F, created by Executive Order 
(EO), that authorized the permanent hiring of political 
appointees under an unchecked special classification of 
employee that is above accountability and transparency. Unless 
you are wildly corrupt in mind, you will understand how 
offensive and dangerous this idea is to an open and free 
democracy.
    However, I think these dark forces like what they saw. I 
think we are going to see a return of Schedule F type tactics 
in the future. It is all going to be pushing secret agenda on 
taxpayers' dime.
    In conclusion, I thank the Subcommittee for prioritizing 
the relationship between OPM and CHCOs and starting the 
conversations to make OPM and CHCOs the most effective they can 
be in the interest of a fair, effective, and efficient and 
honest government. I look forward to working with the 
Subcommittee on these issues. Thank you.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. I would like to recognize our 
Subcommittee Ranking Member, Senator James Lankford, for his 
opening statement.

            OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD\1\

    Senator Lankford. Thank you very much. The four of you, 
thank you for being here. It is incredibly important to be able 
to be in this conversation, and I really appreciate you getting 
this out, getting it on the record, and so we can continue to 
be able to build on the conversations we have had in past 
hearings and work toward actual solutions.
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    \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Lankford appears in the 
Appendix on page 36.
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    The Chairwoman and I have talked about these issues often. 
We bring these issues up, and we are working toward actually 
getting to pragmatic solutions. Some of them have even been 
mentioned today in some of your opening testimony. I appreciate 
that very much, and we will look forward to ongoing dialog with 
that.
    We are at a critical point. We have quite a few Federal 
employees that are eligible for retirement. It continues to 
drag on and on with the hiring and the length of time it takes 
to hire. The latest numbers that we have is now 92 days to be 
able to get to a hire. That is actually better than it has been 
by a few days but still embarrassing for anything that is in 
the private sector. I have yet to run into a single company 
that goes to a job fair, interviews someone at the job fair, 
and says ``I will get back to you in 3 months'' in the process.
    We are at a very difficult spot to be able to get through 
the hiring time. We have to be able to make some decisive steps 
to be able to get to the future, and that is going to begin 
with improving our hiring process. Hopefully, we will begin 
with some of the conversations we have today.
    The best and brightest candidates really are not going to 
wait 3 months to be able to go through the process. As I have 
talked to several folks, the folks that work in Federal 
warehouses and others that have other options for other jobs 
they could literally start on this afternoon, they are 
certainly not going to wait 3 months to be able to go through 
that process.
    In 2019, the Commission on National Military and Public 
Service made recommendations to increase our ability to hire, 
train, and retain Federal employees. The Commission noted that 
the Federal human capital policies often focus on short-term 
fixes which add more complexity to the Federal hiring system, 
as has already been mentioned today, with over 100 different 
hiring authorities there.
    Whenever we have a hearing on this topic, that always comes 
up, is the number of hiring authorities. And just about 
everyone brings up at some point direct hire, expedited hiring, 
noncompetitive hiring, every time, and to say: We have 100 
different authorities. We do not like any of them, or we only 
use a fraction of those.
    Our hiring system is definitely broken, and it shows every 
time we get to one of these hearings and someone else asks for 
another way to be able to get around it. We have to be able to 
resolve that.
    The COVID pandemic I also declare to be the largest pilot 
program ever done by the Federal Government on innovation and 
managing people and hiring and basic oversight. We should take 
the lessons learned from that and start implementing them 
quickly.
    My fear is that after a 2-year, large-scale pilot that we 
are now going to start studying what we studied during that 
time period and spend another decade trying to evaluate, and 
the status quo will just remain. That will be disappointing if 
that actually occurs.
    At this point, we have to be able to resolve some things. 
Let me lay a couple things on the table that I want to be able 
to talk about as well.
    We have highly qualified spouses of our active duty 
military, who move with their family every 3 years, often to 
very remote locations and bases and posts around the country 
and around the world. They struggle to be able to find 
employment when they move every 2 or 3 years.
    Why not allow those spouses of our active duty military to 
be able to work in a remote position in any agency they choose 
to? We have clearly shown that remote work is possible. I do 
not mean telework where they are expected to be in one day a 
week. I mean truly remote work where they are never expected to 
be in unless there is a large-scale conference that they need 
to be able to attend.
    This would also dramatically open up opportunities for 
highly qualified individuals in rural America that struggle to 
be able to find good jobs. This would help those in rural 
America and would help rural America having stable income into 
some of those communities, where highly qualified individuals 
could remain in rural America but still be able to work in 
different jobs in our Federal Government as they are doing 
remote work.
    It would also help folks that are already in the Federal 
family that may work with DHS and work in remote border 
stations and that spouse of that individual that is serving our 
nation would like to have the option to also be able to work in 
the Federal family.
    These are pragmatic issues that we need to be able to learn 
from the pandemic and to be able to determine how can we 
actually turn what was really a painful season into new 
opportunities to be able to reach out to additional, new, 
highly qualified individuals, to make our government even run 
more efficiently in the days ahead.
    So there will be quite a few different issues that I want 
to be able to discuss on this, including the relationship with 
the CHCO Council and OPM, and to figure out who has what in 
what lane and how do we actually simplify that process. I look 
forward to the ongoing dialog as we go through this and getting 
a lot of your testimony on the record for work in future days.
    Madam Chairwoman, thank you.
    Senator Sinema. Thanks. We are going to begin the question 
portion of the hearing. Each Senator who wishes to speak will 
have 7 minutes for questions. I will start by recognizing 
myself for 7 minutes.
    My first question is for Ms. Bailey. By law, CHCOs are 
accountable for recruiting, retaining, and managing a 
nonpartisan and professional workforce. That is the same basic 
mandate that OPM holds. Congress, in previous administrations, 
has created entities such as the CHCO Council to improve 
coordination between OPM and CHCOs, but challenges persist.
    We want our human resources departments to be run by 
experts. What steps should Congress take to ensure that all 
CHCOs are human capital experts and are apolitical, and what 
needs to be done differently to allow CHCOs to thrive?
    Ms. Bailey. Thank you, Chairwoman, for your question. I do 
agree that CHCOs should be apolitical and they should be 
career.
    Senator Sinema. Go ahead.
    Ms. Bailey. All right. Yes, so I do think that the CHCOs 
should be career employees and, if not the CHCOs, then at least 
the Deputy CHCOs. But there needs to be within the CHCO 
leadership a recognition that career experts should be in those 
positions.
    One of the main reasons is because Federal--as everybody 
has testified and as this hearing is all about, is that Federal 
hiring is so incredibly complex and difficult to understand and 
to be able to implement and to do it within the merit system 
principles. And so having a very strong background in that, 
whether you come out of DOD or you come out of the Office of 
Personnel Management and you go into an agency, I think that 
that is really an incredible first step.
    The second thing I would recommend is that the CHCO 
Council, to the best of my knowledge, is the only council that 
is co-chaired by OPM and OMB. It is not actually co-chaired by 
the very CHCOs who run the agencies. Whereas, the CIO Council, 
the CFO Council, the Chief Acquisition Council, all of them are 
actually co-chaired by the very experts in those positions 
within the agencies. I do think that it would be extremely 
helpful if the CHCO Council was actually chaired by CHCOs and 
co-chaired by CHCOs on a rotational kind of basis, with OPM 
providing support and, of course, OMB providing its support as 
well.
    So those are two basic steps that I think would be 
extremely helpful for the CHCOs and the Council at large.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. My next question is for Ms. 
Gerton. Your testimony discussed the concern from GAO and other 
researchers that we are actually going backwards in human 
capital. If the CHCO Act was amended to provide more autonomy 
and provide CHCOs a larger voice in the development of 
regulations, would that alone be enough to reverse this 
backwards slide? Or, are other actions needed, and if so, what 
are they?
    Ms. Gerton. Chair Sinema, thank you for that question. I 
would refer to our recent report on the OPM assessment. We made 
some specific recommendations there for the role of CHCOs in 
policy and regulation development. We certainly agree that they 
are the subject matter experts and they need to be consulted.
    One of the specific recommendations, to Ms. Bailey's point, 
was that we recommended Congress amend the CHCO Act to 
specifically create a rotating co-chair for the CHCO Council 
from the members of the CHCO Council themselves. That will give 
representation and attention to the concerns of the CHCOs and 
create some stability in terms of their representation.
    We also recommended that OPM needs to establish a Strategic 
Planning and Policy Office within the organization, that is, a 
well-defined policy development process leads to more 
effective, responsive, and transparent policy development. That 
will explicitly then include stakeholders, including the CHCO 
Council, the Small Agency Human Resources Council, and other 
stakeholders in policy development.
    Then again to Ms. Bailey's point, the OPM Director needs to 
specifically include the CHCO Council and consider them as 
partners, strategic partners and expert advisors. Rather than 
simply using them as a communications tool, they need to have 
the standing that the other Chief Experience Officer (CXO) 
councils have within their professional fields.
    We think those three things together may not completely 
solve the problem, but they certainly will communicate 
leadership attention and put the CHCOs back in the center of 
policy and regulation development.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. My next question is for Mr. 
Rigas. Over the years, Congress has heard from CHCOs about 
challenges communicating with OPM. There are concerns about not 
allowing feedback on high-profile matters such as the Schedule 
F initiative at the end of the last administration, but the 
communications challenge has stretched to smaller items as 
well. Since OPM can usually override the CHCO Council on policy 
matters, what changes need to be made to the CHCO Council setup 
in order to improve the ability of individual CHCOs to be 
successful?
    Mr. Rigas. Thank you, Chairman. At least during my tenure, 
I was not aware of any communication challenges with the CHCO 
Council. In fact, the CHCO Council interacted more with OPM 
during my tenure probably than any other OPM Director in the 
history of the Agency. And that was largely because we were 
having weekly and biweekly calls with the CHCO Council to 
navigate our way through the pandemic, to make sure agencies 
had the flexibilities and authorities they needed and that we 
could answer some basic and some fundamental questions about 
what it was they could do as we were going through uncharted 
territory with respect to the pandemic.
    I totally agree; I think communication is very important. 
One of the roles that the CHCO Council is there to establish is 
to provide cross-cutting feedback to the OPM Director on issues 
that are affecting the various agencies that the CHCOs 
represent, who have missions and workforces that are as broad 
and diverse as the country they serve. I think we need more 
communication, and I certainly did not, I think, suffer from a 
lack of communication from the CHCOs when I was Chair. Thank 
you.
    Senator Sinema. Thanks. A follow-up: Were there times when 
you did not take recommendations or seek feedback from the CHCO 
Council when it came to key OPM decisions, like Schedule F, 
that had widespread impact on the workforce? Looking back, do 
you think there is anything that should have, or could have, 
been done differently?
    Mr. Rigas. We were communicating with the CHCO Council on a 
weekly and biweekly basis, like twice a week when I say 
biweekly, not every 2 weeks. There were regularly scheduled, I 
believe, quarterly meetings, the formal ones that are noticed 
in the Federal Register for the CHCO Council, when I was there.
    Schedule F was an Executive Order. I think that was 
apparent to everyone, that that was something that had to be 
implemented, but it was implemented through the career CHCOs. 
They were tasked with identifying position descriptions for 
policymaking individuals. That was actually really a career-led 
effort across the Executive Branch.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. My time is expired, so I 
recognize Senator Lankford for his questions.
    Senator Lankford. I will try to get my questions down to 
less than 25 minutes, and then we will see where we can go from 
there. Let me open this up for some dialog here as well, and I 
appreciate all your input and what you have written in this.
    Ms. Bailey, I hope you publish what you put out at some 
point because your biography that you have at the beginning of 
your written testimony, of kind of walking through that 
journey, is very insightful, to be able to go through all that.
    But I would like to throw a question on the table and have 
us interact on this. This seems like a tremendous amount of 
bureaucracy to be able to manage people and if I can go back to 
Ms. Bailey's conversation on her saying this is a multi 
billion-dollar organization. You are coordinating human capital 
for 200,000 people. Yet, you have people above you trying to 
instruct you on how to be able to do your job.
    You made the comment, saying, ``I have got this.'' I would 
define it better of ``If you do not trust me, do not hire me.'' 
What it really feels like at this point much of what OPM's job 
seems to be is ``I do not trust the people under me, and so I 
am going to micromanage them.''
    The CHCO Council is trying to be able to swap ideas and to 
be able to figure out who is doing a better idea, who has 
figured out how to get around one of these 100 hiring 
authorities and figure out how to be able to make it work, who 
has figured out how to be able to manage people remotely and in 
telework and other things. OPM's main job seems to be that they 
say, ``No. We are going to think about this, and we will get 
back to you in a year or two.''
    There is a lot of interplay that is happening here, a lot 
of conversation and dialog. What I am trying to figure out is 
where is there redundancy and there could be authority put down 
to be able to make decisions. We do not need 104 hiring 
authorities. We do not need 105. We need to figure out how to 
be able to hire, have a specific set of requirements on that 
and oversight for individuals that are not doing it well, that 
are not hitting their targets on it.
    How do we deal with this balance between OPM and the CHCOs? 
I would love to throw some things on the table and actually get 
out there what you really want to say. Can we do that?
    Ms. Bailey. Absolutely.
    Senator Lankford. Ms. Bailey, can I have you start first 
since you kind of opened this conversation with ``We have got 
this''?
    Ms. Bailey. Yes. Thank you, Senator Lankford. I think one 
of the bottom lines is that so many of our laws and rules and 
regulations and everything are actually written, quite frankly, 
for the 3 percent of the workforce or the 3 percent really of 
society that are not going to follow them anyhow. What we have 
done is we have built an entire system based on distrust. 
Everything is about whether or not we think an agency is going 
to do something nefarious.
    I think for OPM--and I was there for 7 years, and I loved 
my colleagues. They are incredibly bright. They are incredibly 
talented, and they know what they are doing. But their customer 
is Title V. It is not the agencies. It is to protect Title V at 
all cost. When you are protecting a law and you are not 
actually dealing with the realism or the practicality of what 
an agency is actually trying to struggle do to, there is going 
to, I think, be just a situation where we are banging heads 
with each other.
    Every single day as a CHCO--and, yes, over my 40 years and 
in particular as a DHS CHCO, every single day was about hiring 
high-quality individuals.
    I do not think we need 100 hiring authorities. I have 
always argued we need two. One, we need one that I think 
protects or at least gives veterans, our veterans, an 
opportunity to get employment within the Federal Government in 
recognition of their service to the United States. That is No. 
1.
    No. 2, we need a hiring authority for all others, and it 
should be from all sources. There is nothing in the law that 
says that we have to use USAJOBS. That is done through a 
regulation that was passed many moons ago, and it is incredibly 
outdated. When we go to a hiring event, I should be able to 
have the ability to have a conversation with someone, be able 
to collect their resume, have that conversation, match them up 
to what skills or what positions I have, and then be able to 
offer them a position. Those are the kinds of things.
    Now, I think your Chance to Compete Act that Chairwoman 
Sinema has put in place, or is working to get passed, is 
actually something that would be beneficial to us because in 
that regard we would be able to at least have really good 
assessments to be able to get those high-quality folks.
    We can actually hire people within one day. I have proven 
that in DHS. We had a cybersecurity hiring event. We made job 
offers in one day. It is possible to do this, but it takes 
having subject matter experts involved. It takes having the 
ability to use the right appointing authorities and making sure 
that HR and the managers work together to accomplish that.
    But again, I hope I am answering your question.
    Senator Lankford. You are.
    Ms. Bailey. I will yield here, so others have an 
opportunity.
    Senator Lankford. Let me ask, Mr. Rigas, what is the 
problem with that? Why do we get this interplay back and forth 
between OPM and the CHCOs? They have personal good 
relationships, but there seems to be overlapping 
responsibilities.
    Mr. Rigas. Yes, I completely agree with almost everything 
Angie said there.
    One of the things that when they say they have to come to 
OPM for a mother-may-I, like we want permission to do a VERA/
VISP to offer bonuses for folks to retire early or approving 
bonuses for employees over $10,000, those are in statute, 
required by agencies to go to the OPM Director for approval. I 
remember signing off on these, saying, what do I know about 
this employee at U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that I 
am approving a bonus over $10,000? Nothing, other than the 
glowing write-up about what they did and they achieved. That is 
something that Congress should look at and put back into the 
purview----
    Senator Lankford. How do we get that list? How do we get 
the list of all those things? This goes back to if I go to DOD 
and they say: Is anyone reading these reports? We send you 
5,000 reports. Does anyone read all these?
    Mr. Rigas. Yes.
    Senator Lankford. We have this monster staff, that that is 
all they do, these reports, and we do not think anyone reads 
it.
    How do we get the list of those items? Because in all 
likelihood most of those pieces of legislation were someone did 
something dumb, to go back to Ms. Bailey's comment, at some 
point.
    Mr. Rigas. Yes.
    Senator Lankford. It made the news, and Congress passed 
something and said this is never going to happen again.
    Mr. Rigas. Right. It is literally right in Title V. The 
$10,000 bonus is right in Title V. The VERA/VISP is in Title V.
    I think Congress is correct in wanting some kind of check 
or watchdog to make sure that there are not abuses when these 
things happen. But that could also be done by the agency's own 
Inspector General (IG), can take a look at these items rather 
than going to OPM.
    Senator Lankford. OK. Thank you. Ms. Gerton, do you have 
anything you want to add to that?
    Ms. Gerton. Yes, sir. Thank you. A couple of 
recommendations that we have made in the OPM assessment: One is 
that OPM really needs to be refocused beyond Title V. If you 
think about the CHCOs as their Strategic Human Capital Officer 
within agencies, you want OPM to be the President's Strategic 
Human Capital Advisor.
    We need to refocus it so that we have a comprehensive but 
strategic organization there at the center of human capital so 
that they are thinking about data analytics, they are thinking 
about lessons learned, they are thinking about training, they 
are thinking about the future, but that the actual 
responsibilities to manage the HR community and the workforce 
in those agencies is delegated to the experts in that agency. 
First, we actually do make a recommendation in that report 
about the specific revision to authorities for OPM in Title V.
    The second thing I would say is that in association with 
that reframing so that OPM becomes a more strategic 
organization, we need to take them out of the compliance mode, 
which again, as Mr. Rigas has said, many of those are 
articulated in law, and put them into the modern form of risk 
management so that where the data shows that there is 
opportunity or risks OPM can take a strategic focus there but 
they can leave the majority of compliance to the executing 
agencies. That empowers the CHCOs to do what they need to do 
within the framework that is established and moves OPM into 
that strategic management role for the entire Federal workforce 
so that CHCOs can do what they are already empowered and able 
to do but in a system that actually matches those authorities.
    Senator Lankford. OPM moves from a compliance organization 
and mother-may-I, to use your term on that as well, to more of 
a conversation from the Executive Branch, to say: We have 45 
percent of all Federal employees suddenly eligible for 
retirement. What are we doing about this? How are we helping 
protect the Federal workforce in the days ahead and then trying 
to initiate initiatives to be able to help offset that? 
Correct?
    Ms. Gerton. Exactly. Right now, OPM cannot even see that 
data because it is not integrated across the enterprise.
    Senator Lankford. OK. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. I am going to start a second 
round of questions and then--if you are interested, we will do 
a second round. Great. Wonderful.
    I am going to turn to Mr. Lenkart. Your union, the National 
Federation of Federal Employees, represents many of the 
wildland firefighter heroes at both Departments of Interior and 
Agriculture. The Union has partnered with the agencies to try 
to make firefighting safer and pay an appropriate and fair 
salary.
    As Congress is currently reviewing several different 
proposed bills, including one from Senator Carper called the 
Tim Hart Act, it appears much can be resolved within existing 
laws. If CHCOs had more authority to make changes within 
existing laws, what would be the day-to-day impact on 
firefighters in my State of Arizona and across the Nation, and 
what would be the downside, if any, of more CHCO authority?
    Mr. Lenkart. Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, there is a 
disconnect. As there is between OPM and CHCO, there is also a 
disconnect between CHCO and some of the workforce that they 
represent.
    The first part of that answer I think is between OPM and 
CHCOs. Allowing them to move ahead with some of the things they 
know are within the law and within you know, supported by merit 
principles. They can go ahead and--I think they need a 
flexibility to go ahead and do some things. OPM can always 
audit. The MSPB can always review actions and make corrections 
if necessary. Congress can always appropriate or authorize. 
There is a chance that you could service those wildland 
firefighters quicker and better and also answering things like, 
market pay and so forth, the things that we are struggling with 
the keep firefighters within the Federal service without losing 
them to State and local fire services.
    There is also the relationship. The second part is the 
relationship between the CHCO and the agencies. A lot of 
firefighters that I talk to do not believe that the CHCOs in 
their agencies actually have a full understanding of their 
needs, what the day-to-day job is like, problems with 
certifications, the burden, the financial burden. Sometimes 
they pay for certification training out of pocket because 
training money does not filter down.
    Part of this I think is also taking the CHCOs' staff out of 
their offices and then putting them out in the field with 
employees. I think that would be, first of all, fun for CHCO 
staff to get out and experience some of the real world. Stick 
them with a fire crew in a forest for a couple weeks. Stick 
them with a VA nurse and make some rounds on a floor. Have them 
sit on the border.
    There is a myriad of things that the government does that 
they can participate in to better understand the needs of those 
jobs very specifically. While they are there talking to people, 
they can also take notes on what that workforce specifically 
needs. They can take that back to the CHCO of that agency, and 
likewise, the CHCO can take it back to OPM if that is 
necessary.
    Some of the cons of that is, the further we get away from a 
centralized authority there is always the possibility that 
managers or political appointees can push a CHCO in a direction 
they do not want to go, whether it is illegal or it is 
unethical or it is pushing the edges of the law, that the CHCO 
is not prepared to do or comfortable with. So that has to be 
carefully observed and corrected, and those CHCOs need the 
support if the answer is no to somebody much more powerful than 
them. They need to be able to have that ability to say no and 
know that they are not going to get fired or demoted or 
transferred somewhere in the middle of nowhere as punishment.
    The final thought is as we decentralize some efforts which 
I think we can certainly do. We have to be mindful of about 
fair pay and equal pay across government. We cannot lose sight 
again of those merit principles I keep talking about. Those 
merit principles are not there to be obstructionist. They are 
there to remind us that we do have responsibilities greater 
than us as we are dealing with taxpayers' money, not private 
money, not shareholder money. We accelerated the level of 
responsibility, what we do with those funds and those 
authorities.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. My next question is for Ms. 
Gerton. Human resources specialists are often overworked, 
receive less training, and have fewer standards than in 
contracting and technology positions. How would you recommend 
that Congress strengthen HR specialist skills and abilities, 
and do you think OPM should set more ongoing certification and 
testing akin to the requirements for contracting officers?
    Ms. Gerton. One of the things we have consistently heard in 
our work around the personnel system is that the HR specialists 
are not prepared to do the work that we propose in a reimagined 
HR system. I certainly think that a more strategically focused 
OPM should be the proponent for the workforce and training 
development for the HR staff.
    OPM has been working on a human capital competency model 
for years. We certainly think that they should finish that up, 
but you do not want to describe a competency model for the 
system that you hope will be reengineered. We want to 
reengineer that system and describe the kinds of HR 
competencies that we want the workforce to have for a system 
that will work for the future.
    But once that is done, we absolutely agree that there 
should be a certificate and credentialing program for the HR 
staff, that OPM needs to coordinate with agencies to identify 
those skills and competencies that are needed, to understand 
how agencies are already training for those skills and 
competencies, and which of those programs might be able to be 
credentialed as part of that professional development program, 
and create both a development program and a progression program 
that ensures that our HR specialists have the problem solving 
and management skills to really be partners with hiring 
managers, again taking them out of the compliance mode and 
really helping them solve the problems of the hiring manager 
and making sure that they get the right people into the right 
jobs.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. Mr. Lenkart, based on your 
experience with the Merit System Protection Board, what can be 
done to prevent Schedule F or a similar action that would 
fundamentally undermine the independence of the workforce, and 
is there any role for CHCOs in that effort?
    Mr. Lenkart. There is, Madam Chair. Concerning the Schedule 
F itself, it was just a ridiculous Executive Order with no 
legitimate business purpose. Why you would consent to hiring 
somebody through a special process under the cloak of secrecy--
they do not report to anybody. There is no accountability. 
There is no transparency. There is no duty to report 
performance.
    I mean, private business does not even do that. I cannot 
imagine a CEO hiring, ``Yes. I am going to hire 10 people that 
are going to mill about around the office. They are not going 
to do anything or report to anybody.'' That guy would be fired 
in a heartbeat.
    When we are talking about the level of scrutiny and, again, 
the trust that the public places in us, I do not think we 
should be hiring people with a license to do whatever they want 
and wander around the government and look for things to do, 
especially if they are doing it at the behest of somebody else 
outside of government and they are doing it on the taxpayers' 
dime. The whole thing, from beginning to end, does not have any 
legitimate business purpose as far as I am concerned.
    Some of the things that we can do to prevent that from ever 
happening again is we can, first of all, as I mentioned before 
in my opening, we can have career executives and career 
managers supervise political appointees just like they 
supervise anybody else. There is absolutely nothing wrong with 
somebody who comes in at a policy level to report to somebody 
who has been here for a very long time.
    In addition to that, there needs to be some kind of 
requirements. I understand that political appointees are direct 
hires and it is a lot of wink-and-nod stuff. Now, I do want to 
clarify; a lot of political appointees--again, I was one--are 
very good at what they do. They serve a very good purpose, and 
having them not completely connected to a bureaucratic process 
is helpful if you want to get some things done. But it is 
really an extreme position of trust, and that can be violated 
very easily. I do not know if the good outweighs the bad.
    But in terms of political appointees, I have seen some 
really bad appointees come in. I mean people who were office 
assistants and then for political reasons are suddenly general 
schedule (GS)-14s and GS-15s, making 100 extra thousand dollars 
a year that they have never earned before, and this is a true 
story.
    You go around the government, and you can ask anybody, is 
there consistency in political appointees with how they work, 
how they operate, who they report to, what are they doing here. 
I mean, I would be shocked if anyone tells you from the career 
side that, yes, no, they have their act together and everything 
is fine. Everyone is going to tell you that, they come in all 
shapes, sizes, and forms.
    We have to do something to regulate or at least some kind 
of determination on experience and skills when the political 
appointees come in the door if there is not going to be any 
other process to regulate at what level they come in, where 
they work, and what they do.
    I think we can do better with reporting conflicts of 
interest. We can do better with reporting if someone gets a big 
bonus on the way out from the industry and now they are coming 
in as a watchdog and they got three times their annual salary 
and now they are going to be a watchdog over this industry for 
the next 3 years. You know, that is trouble there.
    I think that we can also do a little bit better on removal 
processes for appointees when they are accused of bad conduct 
or a repetitive bad performance. There has to be an entity 
other than a purely political one that can remove them.
    I think that is where CHCOs can come in and help quite a 
bit, in all these areas, and make sure that these things are 
regulated and adhered to.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. I would now like to recognize 
Senator Carper for his 7 minutes of questions.
    Senator Carper.

              OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER

    Senator Carper. Thank you so much. My thanks to you and 
Senator Lankford for hosting this hearing, calling this 
hearing, and for inviting our witnesses. This is something that 
I care about a lot.
    My guess is, Chair, you and our other colleagues have 
vibrant constituent services operations in your offices. We 
have them in Delaware. We only have three counties, but we have 
offices in all three counties. We have constituent services 
people in all three counties and very proud of the work that we 
do.
    We actually do a survey on a regular basis, on a monthly 
basis, to see how we are doing with respect to serving people 
and when they call on a particular issue. We ask for feedback 
on how our Federal agencies are doing in terms of responding to 
concerns of constituents.
    As it turns out, for the last 21 years we have been doing 
this, my offices up and down the State, all taken together, 
they are evaluating these monthly surveys: 96 percent excellent 
or good in terms of feedback from the people we serve, about 3 
percent fair, and 1 percent poor. The ones that are fair gave 
us a fair evaluation when we called them.
    In the same surveys, we asked people to evaluate the 
service that they are receiving from Federal agencies, and one 
of those Federal agencies that we get a lot of feedback on--you 
probably do, too, Madam Chair--is the Internal Revenue Service 
(IRS), which we underfund. We unduly have too few people 
working there. We do not have people necessarily with the right 
skills. It is something that repeats itself. I do not care what 
administration. Some of our colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle especially are, I think, more interested maybe in 
starving the IRS than making sure that they have the kind of 
resources they need.
    But with that sort of as a background, the Federal 
Government is here--I think we are here--to serve people, serve 
the American people. Now, there is a wide range of ways we can 
do that sort of service.
    The Chief Human Capital Officers serve in one of the most 
critical roles in our Federal agencies. They are the experts 
who oversee the hiring and retention policies for the agencies. 
Their work directly impacts how well the IRS or the Social 
Security Administration (SSA), which are two agencies that get 
a lot of attention from constituents who contact us because 
they are not getting the service they want or need from either 
the IRS, or in many cases Social Security. But the work of 
these folks at these agencies can serve everyday Americans who 
need their tax refunds in some cases or a disability payment.
    My first question is--and this is for Ms. Bailey. You have 
a unique perspective as you have worked both at the Office of 
Personnel Management in various roles and you have worked as a 
Chief Human Capital Officer at the Department of Homeland 
Security. What can the Congress do now, like right now, what 
can we do to ensure Chief Human Capital Officers have the 
authority and the tools that they need to address workforce 
shortages in the Federal Government? Please go ahead, Ms. 
Bailey.
    Ms. Bailey. Thank you, Senator Carper. I appreciate your 
question. One of the first things we could do--and actually, 
Madam Chairwoman asked this question as well, which is, where 
are all of the authorities and things that you could do to make 
changes?
    The CHCO Council in the last 6 years, but primarily the 
last 4 years, we actually created an entire list of every 
single authority which we believe should be delegated to the 
CHCOs as well as the specific language that we think needs to 
be changed within Title V. We not only provided that list to 
the Office of Personnel Management; we actually wrote the 
legislation to go with it. I am sure that the CHCO Council--I 
am not there anymore, but I am sure Traci DiMartini and a few 
of the others would be more than happy to share with you all of 
the work that was done.
    Senator Carper, I really think that the number one place to 
start is to have a meeting with the CHCO Council, have them 
pull out the list of every single thing that they have asked to 
have done, ask them to provide you with the legislation that 
they wrote and provided to OPM, and see if there is a way to 
have middle ground between yourselves and the CHCO Council in 
coming up with changes that are absolutely necessary.
    Senator Carper. That is a very helpful answer. Thank you 
for that.
    Ms. Gerton, the National Academy of Public Administration 
recommended that to modernize and to reinvigorate public 
service, something necessary to ensure Federal agencies can 
better serve our customers is--I always think of the American 
public as our customers. But agencies need more flexibilities 
to tailor their methods to meet their needs, and the Office of 
Personnel Management needs to evolve from compliance-oriented 
to customer-focused. I always like to say, ask your customer, 
whoever the customer might be.
    But this is a big task and one that has been studied and 
studied and discussed for years. Where does the Congress begin? 
That was for Ms. Gerton.
    Ms. Gerton. It is a great question, Senator Carper, and 
finding the starting point is always the key to solutions. So 
we first suggest that Congress consider restating the purpose 
of OPM to make it a strategic governmentwide advisor to the 
President. But, more importantly, not only in the OPM 
assessment, but I would refer us to our No Time to Wait study, 
where we said the key measure of HR success is agency mission 
accomplishment.
    To your point about the difficulties that the IRS and the 
Social Security agency are having serving their constituents, 
we have to agree on what the mission is. If the mission for 
those agencies is customer service and customer satisfaction, 
then collectively we need to make sure that we staff and 
resource those agencies to accomplish that mission.
    So making OPM a strategic advisor for the entire Federal 
Civil Service, delegating to the CHCOs in the agencies in a 
federated model the responsibilities that they need to make 
sure that their agencies have the workforce necessary to 
accomplish their mission, and then as Mr. Lenkart has said in 
his comments, making sure that all of those authorities and 
flexibilities are bounded by compliance with merit systems 
principles is our fundamental recommendation for change.
    Senator Carper. All right. Thank you. One last quick 
question, Mr. Lenkart. When I was privileged to chair this 
Committee a number of years ago, we were having actually very 
similar conversations around Federal workforce reform. Since 
then, there has been some changes but not enough. Everyday 
Americans still run into obstacles when interacting with 
agencies, and these obstacles are in part the result of 
workforce shortages.
    A question would be: How can Congress further improve its 
communication with Federal agencies and unions to build 
stakeholder consensus, so we can finally implement broader 
reforms in hiring and retention of the Federal workforce rather 
than just talk about them? That is to Mr. Lenkart, please.
    Mr. Lenkart. Thank you, Senator. It is a fantastic question 
and one that certainly is not an easy one to answer. We do silo 
in government, as all private business siloes. Everyone siloes. 
It is our natural tendency as human beings, to surround 
ourselves and deal with the world from that perspective.
    But we definitely need more interaction between Congress, 
between government agencies and stakeholders that are out 
there. The unions are only one part of that. There is a ton of 
affinity groups out there that deal with all matter of Federal 
employee interests. There are groups that watch over pay and 
benefits. There are groups that are there for advancements and 
opportunities and so forth. All of them have a seat at the 
table at some level.
    For someone who has had strong and deep relationships with 
Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, and both Republican 
and Democrat White Houses over the past 20 years, I am very 
comfortable in my own skin up here and speaking with all of 
you. But to the average employee, and to the average citizen 
for that matter, it is a very intimidating thing to come up 
here and talk with all of you, to talk to somebody from the 
White House, to talk with anybody from Congress. I think taking 
some of the mystery out of those relationships would certainly 
help, by just pulling people together more often. Whether that 
means that we are physically all in one room together several 
times a year or quarterly, I think that is something to 
investigate.
    I think between the Congress and the Executive Branch I 
would love to see more congressional staffers spend time in the 
Executive Branch, much like I would like to see CHCO staff 
spend more time with the people they administer in their 
workforce. I would love to see more congressional people come 
over and hang out in the Executive Branch in different areas 
and go out in the field and do things. Now there is no better 
way to understand the people that you are responsible for than 
to actually witness them firsthand.
    I think there is a lot of work we can do in that respect, 
bringing people together, taking a little bit of the mystery 
out of the process, a little bit of the intimidation away. And 
through that, I think we will have much better conversations 
and find better solutions.
    Senator Carper. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks, Mr. 
Lenkart.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you, Senator Carper.
    I move back to Senator Lankford for his second round of 
questions.
    Senator Lankford. Thank you. Mr. Lenkart, let me continue 
this conversation I started earlier on remote work, just from 
your own perspective here. I know there are multiple members of 
the Federal unions that a remote working or they telework. What 
is your initial concern on a higher number, or a higher 
percentage I guess I should say, of Federal workers, not 
necessarily increase the number of Federal workers but a higher 
percentage of those Federal workers that are doing work 
literally all over the country, military spouses, spouses of 
people that have other Federal jobs that are in this Federal 
family working in a remote area, people that work in very--or 
that live in very remote areas, in rural areas, having access? 
Do you have any concerns on that from the union side?
    Mr. Lenkart. No concerns. It is an excellent question, and 
I think the idea of remote work opens up a world of 
possibilities. It solves a lot of our problems with hiring in 
terms of people having to move to a certain location to do a 
job that they could do somewhere else. I think it is absolutely 
the gold standard for a lot of our military spouses that keep 
moving around with their spouses. They get deployed in 
different places, even overseas. You can absolutely log on from 
overseas and continue working and doing your job in some number 
of Federal agencies.
    Senator Lankford. Good.
    Mr. Lenkart. I think it is an excellent--that is an 
excellent perspective to have, and I think we have a lot to 
work on doing that.
    Now the good news is with COVID. If anything good came out 
of COVID, the one thing is we were forced to learn how to 
remote work----
    Senator Lankford. Right.
    Mr. Lenkart [continuing]. We were forced to learn how to 
telework. No way would we have gotten this far or had this kind 
of data and interaction if we were not forced to do this.
    We are at a place right now where I think that we are much 
more accepting of the idea of a remote workforce, the benefits 
of it, in terms of managing and, ensuring performance and so 
forth. I think it is a huge opportunity for the Federal 
Government to open up hiring to a lot of people that ordinarily 
would not be able to hold these jobs.
    Senator Lankford. Yes, I would agree.
    Ms. Bailey, how does this actually get implemented? What 
legislative authority is needed, or do right now agencies and 
CHCOs right now have the ability to be able to start listing 
jobs as an assumed remote work?
    Or, I guess it could be listed either way. It could be 
either someone that is hired in to be able to come into work in 
the agency, or they could be actually full-time remote and 
really give them either option on that. Is there any barrier 
right now legislatively to doing that?
    Ms. Bailey. There is not a single barrier. We have always 
had the ability to offer remote work. It is all based on where 
the duty location. Wherever you want to define a duty location, 
that is where it will be. If it is someone's home, if it is 
working out of the YMCA, if it is working in a military 
installation or at a border patrol station, anywhere you 
identify that being the duty location is where the person can 
work. There has never been a barrier to remote work.
    Senator Lankford. All right, so two big issues then. One is 
supervision, and the other one is culture because some people 
are going to say I need to see all of the chicks in my nest 
every single day to know that I can lay eyes on them or I 
cannot manage them, others are going to say you never see them 
anyway. What is the difference here on it?
    Let us talk about culture, and let us talk about 
supervision on that. What are the two barriers that we have?
    Ms. Bailey. All right. So both of those are--I would say 
culture is probably the biggest barrier. It is this belief that 
just what you just said. Right? That everyone has to be sitting 
all around me.
    But what I used to say to my supervisors or my executives 
all the time is you do not know what people are doing today 
anyhow. Right? Because you are not leaving your office.
    Even take myself as the CHCO. I had 350 employees who 
worked for me. I had to trust that they were doing their job, 
whether they were in the office, whether they were across the 
country, whether they were at the beach. I had to trust that 
they were actually getting the job done. It is about results. 
It is about holding people accountable and making sure that you 
stay in constant touch with them.
    When you are in these kinds of environments, what you 
really need to do is concentrate on, again, the accountability, 
making sure that we get results from folks, and if not, take 
appropriate action for their inability either that they cannot 
do the job or they will not do the job.
    The second thing is that you should have opportunities for 
people to come together, whether it is to celebrate, to 
collaborate, to create. There is always going to be 
opportunities in which you should bring people together because 
human connection is still important. Right?
    Senator Lankford. Right.
    Ms. Bailey. And so that is the one thing.
    From a supervisory standpoint, it is no different honestly 
than if they are across the hall because half the time you have 
no idea where they are or what they are doing anyhow because, 
again, most of the time you are not leaving your office.
    The second thing is, though, that you talked about is 
culture. You cannot legislate culture, just like you cannot 
legislate good management practices. Right?
    Senator Lankford. Right.
    Ms. Bailey. One of the things that we really have to do--I 
do believe that the pandemic has helped us at least understand 
from a culture standpoint. But I will tell you from a DHS 
standpoint, when I was there I had to also think about the fact 
that I have employees who are also still on the front lines. 
Right? I could not be so D.C.-centric, office centric, and only 
think about remote work without thinking about what it is like 
for the man or women who is on an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) or 
a horse or, doing any of the other things that our folks, our 
men and women, had to do.
    And so it is being able to like, I think, wrap your arms 
around all this and culturally drive for excellence, culturally 
drive for hiring high-quality employees, culturally drive for 
engaging with them and starting from a basis of trust. Again, 
that cannot be legislated. It is a leadership issue. It begins 
with leadership setting that kind of culture and that kind of 
environment and then absolutely driving that, not just from the 
top-down but from the bottom-up. It takes everybody if you are 
going to actually, I think, really be able to have this kind of 
environment that you are seeking.
    Senator Lankford. Yes. Mr. Rigas, one of the things that I 
hear often from different agencies and different CHCOs is they 
want a good list of highly qualified individuals to be able to 
choose from. I hear it all the time, to say: OPM provided XYZ 
or whoever it is provided XYZ list. I look at the list. I look 
at the opportunities. I do not have highly qualified 
individuals here. Where do I go get more?
    This is a way to be able to say: There is 300 million-plus 
Americans here. You could literally hire for this job from 
anywhere in the country. You got to be able to list it, 
advertise it, engage with it. You have to be able to have the 
ability to be able to actually hire people on a timely basis to 
be able to do it, but they could be from anywhere.
    What are the barriers to this that you see with OPM, and 
how do we move into let us hire more highly qualified 
individuals regardless of where they are in the country?
    Mr. Rigas. Yes, I think so. Some of the initiatives we 
pioneered when I was Acting Director was moving more toward 
skill-based assessments rather than candidate self-assessments.
    Senator Lankford. Right. Where I get to check the box and 
say, yes, I am very qualified.
    Mr. Rigas. Right.
    Senator Lankford. OK.
    Mr. Rigas. What happens there is because embedded in our 
merit systems principles is veterans preference everyone who 
checks off that they are most qualified, including veterans, 
you end up with a cert which has veterans as the top three 
individuals, and people say, ``Well, all I get are unqualified 
veterans. We need to get rid of veterans preference.'' That is 
completely wrong.
    What is wrong is you have everyone self-selecting 
themselves as highly qualified. What you need are skills based 
assessments. In that environment you will get and as I 
demonstrated in my opening statement--very highly qualified 
candidates and oftentimes more qualified candidates than you 
have positions for which you can hire at your agency, which 
brings my second point in, which is shared certificates. You 
can take that shared certificate and say, ``Hey, I got eight 
qualified candidates for this position. I only needed two. Does 
DHS or another agency need this HR specialist or an information 
technology (IT) specialist that we have already determined is 
highly qualified?'' They could then hire off of that cert, 
drastically reducing hiring time for the Federal Government.
    Senator Lankford. Right. But we are back to Ms. Gerton's 
statement earlier that that is a shift and a focus for OPM to 
say I am a facilitator to these individuals that are actually 
doing it rather than a permission, compliance-based group. You 
are really trying to facilitate that.
    Ms. Bailey mentioned earlier there is really just two 
hiring authorities that are needed, one for veterans and one 
for everybody else. What is wrong with that?
    Mr. Rigas. Yes, I have not seen that proposal. I think we 
certainly need to reduce the number of hiring authorities. The 
shared certification initiative I mentioned, HHS is already 
doing that within the many agencies under their umbrella. It 
does not require permission from OPM to do that. Other agencies 
can do that, CHCO-led at their agencies, on their own, right 
now today.
    That was something I was pushing for at OPM in 2020--we ran 
out of time--to make it a governmentwide initiative so that 
when you apply for something on USAJOBS you can either click a 
box, either opt in or maybe we could make it that you have to 
opt out if you do not want it shared, but that you are 
immediately--if you are deemed qualified for this job, you are 
hired--and if you are not hired, that any other agency in the 
Federal Government would then be able to hire you.
    Senator Lankford. Madam Chairwoman, can I ask a couple more 
questions?
    Senator Sinema. Yes.
    Senator Lankford. So, shorter resumes. Opportunities to not 
have the long written statement for certain levels that you 
have this basically fake paragraph or fake piece that someone 
else actually you hired wrote for you to be able to then turn 
in, which has become common in the process. The self-
certification. What we are trying to figure out is how do we 
cleanup this whole hiring process or to be able to say if they 
are listed in some other platform, as some other job platform 
or search platform out there, that also they could be then 
picked up by the Federal Government as well based on the resume 
they have there and the skill set be able to fit. What is wrong 
with any of those?
    Mr. Rigas. Yes, I think that all of the above approaches is 
exactly what we need. You need short, clear job descriptions 
which are easy to understand. You need to have the HR folks 
working in conjunction with subject matter experts who can then 
the hiring managers are ultimately the ones who determine 
whether an individual is qualified or not. So that interaction 
needs to happen early in the process so that the job posting 
that the hiring manager wants, and the HR specialists are 
working together to ensure that the assessment correctly 
reflects what is needed in the job. Then you can have either 
interviews or writing samples or one final step to ensure that 
you have the most qualified individuals, and you can move right 
to hiring.
    Senator Lankford. Yes, as long as their writing sample is 
actually that person writing.
    Mr. Rigas. Right.
    Senator Lankford. Right now, we assume quite a few of the 
writing samples are actually someone else writing it.
    Mr. Rigas. Right. Yes. So if you have a multistep process, 
that mitigates against any one of those sort of being faulty.
    Senator Lankford. What about the opportunity if they have 
their resume listed on LinkedIn and it matches what somebody is 
looking for at DHS, that DHS is able to go pursue them and say, 
hey, this matches up?
    Mr. Rigas. You could certainly do that, but you also have 
to be careful with the merit systems principles. You have to 
make sure that a position is publically announced and----
    Senator Lankford. Oh, I get it. It is publically announced 
that it is out there, but if their qualifications match what 
has actually been listed, those folks are not being--they are 
being pursued by private companies. They are just not being 
pursued by the Federal Government. They may have never 
considered working in IT in the Federal Government but would be 
very interested in that if only they heard about it, but they 
have never considered it.
    Mr. Rigas. Yes, I think----
    Senator Lankford. Again, if you are in rural Oklahoma, you 
have not met someone who has worked for the Federal Government 
before. You have never considered that until suddenly it pings 
up and says, I have the qualifications to do this. And they 
think, I am going to consider something I have never considered 
before.
    Now we are actually recruiting into areas where people 
would do remote work or possibly even relocate to be able to do 
it, but the authorities have to be there for the agencies to 
actually go pursue people----
    Mr. Rigas. Yes.
    Senator Lankford [continuing]. Then to be able to get them 
in the process.
    Mr. Rigas. Yes, no, I think that would be totally fine. You 
get to reach out to them and invite them to apply, absolutely.
    Senator Lankford. Right.
    Mr. Rigas. Yes.
    Senator Lankford. But it has to take less than 90 days to 
go through the process.
    Mr. Rigas. Yes, absolutely.
    Senator Lankford. Or 92 and a half, as it is currently.
    Mr. Rigas. You ought to be able to hire someone and get 
them in a seat in under 30 days. I think that is possible, and 
I think it can be done if we do the right thing.
    Senator Lankford. Ms. Bailey has hired people in one day 
before.
    Mr. Rigas. Right.
    Senator Lankford. It is doable. Any other comments on this? 
I know I have gone way over on time, but I want to be able to 
make sure we get as much as we can on the record.
    Ms. Bailey. Senator, if I can just mention one other thing. 
DHS's Title VI, which I wish--I do not know if Senator Carper 
is still on, but I do want to thank him for actually 
introducing that and giving us that authority.
    Our cybertalent management system is Civil Service reform. 
We completely reinvented everything with regard to recruiting, 
hiring, pay, compensation, has market-sensitive pay, has the 
ability to hire somebody that just comes out of high school and 
has been able to win a national hackathon as a qualifying 
factor. Right?
    It is really thinking about not just today but into the 
future. OPM supported that. OMB supported it. It actually has 
become a reality. It was implemented November 15, 2021.
    It is my recommendation that your Subcommittee take the 
time to sit down with DHS and have them walk you through all of 
the benefits of that because what you will find is that--and 
one of the things that we have agreed to is that--we would give 
that playbook to everybody, to every Federal agency. If you 
were to take Title VI and amend it from just being for DHS and 
amend it to all Federal agencies for all Federal positions, you 
would have Civil Service reform.
    It took us 7 years to do it. Right? It took a tremendous 
amount of time to peel back the onion on everything because 
when you throw away OPM's classifications and qualifications 
you have to actually know what the heck you are doing in order 
to then be able to build a system for the 21st Century.
    Senator Lankford. Thank you.
    Ms. Gerton. Senator Lankford, if I might make one point 
toward----
    Senator Lankford. Go ahead, if you are OK with that.
    Senator Sinema. Go ahead.
    Ms. Gerton. Your point about military spouses. When I was 
at Department of Labor in the Veterans Employment and Training 
Service, we worked diligently with the private sector on 
military spouse hiring. As an example, United Services 
Automobile Association (USAA), who of course is a very focused 
veteran employer, was anxious to bring military spouses on, 
recognizing the value of that hiring pool. They started a 
program where military spouses, regardless of where they work, 
could be trained as insurance adjusters and call center 
operators. So they could be anywhere and support USAA.
    That grew into strategic career development paths for 
military spouses, recognizing that they were highly qualified, 
could move around the world, be USAA's hands and feet basically 
in all kinds of places. USAA's model expanded further in the 
private sector.
    To Senator Carper's point about the need to staff up IRS 
and SSA, especially in the call center and customer-facing 
responsibilities, I offer that the Veterans Employment Training 
Service at DOL is a place to go for that. They have the 
specific responsibility to support military spouse hiring, and 
they have a network across the country through the workforce 
system that helps establish those kinds of relationships.
    To the last point about how do we make the more flexible 
system work--and of course, I am an advocate, as I have said 
many times, for the strategic reorientation of OPM--we have 
talked a lot about authorities that already exist but that 
people do not take advantage of. I want to make sure that we 
consider the role of the oversight community, the IGs, the 
auditors, the lawyers. In many cases, there is a culture inside 
organizations about what is and is not acceptable, what was or 
was not allowed, but that is separate from what actually is 
permissible. If we are going to reimagine the human capital 
system at the Federal Government, we need to make sure that the 
oversight community is engaged because in many cases they are 
the tacit setters of the permission framework within 
organizations.
    Senator Lankford. OK. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you, Senator Lankford. In the 
interest of time, I am going to ask one final question and then 
we will close the hearing. I know that at least one person has 
a travel issue we want to be careful about today.
    My final question is for Ms. Bailey. In recent years, we 
have seen outdated classification standards and rules, making 
it harder to hire people in emerging STEM fields as well as 
preventing us from reskilling employees in obsolete fields. 
Some classification standards have not been updated since John 
F. Kennedy (JFK) was President, and the current system does not 
account for the multidisciplinary knowledge needed for many 
senior positions.
    Based on your experience overseeing classification policy 
at OPM and in creating a new cyber personnel system at DHS, is 
there a way to empower CHCOs so they have more ability to 
design jobs and credentials that still uphold merit principles?
    Ms. Bailey. Yes, absolutely, and thank you for that 
question. It is absolutely possible to do this. This is one of 
the reasons why we walked away from the classification system 
for our cybertalent management system is because we recognized 
that it just cannot keep up with where we are.
    But I want to stress it is not just about the CHCOs, and 
this is where I said it takes the whole C-Suite but it also 
takes leadership. It was because of my partnership with the CIO 
as well as 
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), our 
cyberagency within DHS, that we were able to create what we did 
under CTMS. That is where we were able to identify what are the 
current skills and things that you actually need in order to be 
able to fill the--not just fill the positions but actually meet 
the mission needs.
    We have walked away from positions. You will not see 
anywhere on USAJOBS that we are hiring a position. We will say 
instead we are looking for folks that have a technical 
background or know forensic network and, have been able to do 
some other things or maybe worked in a nonprofit with regard to 
human trafficking and all because what we are really trying to 
do is find the people. Once we get the people in, we can then 
work out where it is that they are going to work, what kind of 
jobs that they are going to have, and then how we are going to 
actually pay them.
    It is a very private sector way of looking at this versus 
trying to box everybody into a position description (PD), that 
does not really cover what it is that they do anywhere and then 
box them into a job description that nobody really understands, 
and then they put in a bunch of buzzwords and check one through 
five that they can walk, talk, and chew bubblegum, and we never 
get the right, qualified people.
    It all kind of goes together. The point that I am trying to 
make here is that what we really need to do is we need to 
reexamine all of this.
    Again, from a DHS perspective, we have the playbook, the 
entire playbook on how to do this. It was through every 
attorney. It is through OPM, through OMB. Every single agency 
concurred with DHS's cybertalent management system.
    I really encourage that you take a look at that because, 
again, I think it is the answer to where we need to go with 
regard to seeking out and qualifying potential applicants into 
our positions.
    Senator Sinema. Thank you. With that, we have reached the 
end of today's hearing. I appreciate all of our witnesses for 
your time and testimony and thank our colleagues for their 
participation. This is an important subject, and I look forward 
to working with my colleagues to improve security for the Civil 
Service human resources function.
    Today's hearing record will remain open for 2 weeks, until 
March 16, 2022. That is when questions for the record are also 
due.
    Thank you all again. We are adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 4:14 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]

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