Government
Don't drive away the effective public officials
When a scandal breaks, the public often clamors for "heads to roll," especially the high-level officials that let the scandal happen "on their watch." Forcing them out is the safe course for government, but we often lose great public servants as a result.
Bob Peck. Image from GSA.
Bob Peck, the visionary head of the Public Buildings Service at GSA, was one of several executives forced out over the recent overspending in Vegas.
That event was inexcusable, but Peck wasn't the one who spent lavishly. Instead, he just didn't pay close enough attention to lower level employees and might not have reprimanded them strongly enough when the issue came to light.
Firing Peck will sate politicians' and the public's appetite for blood, but GSA will be worse off without him. And his story will drive away from public service effective leaders who are more interested in bringing the really significant, big picture reforms to government than in micromanaging their staff day in and day out.
Peck's work particularly affected DC, since his division was the one that pushed to bring retail to GSA's headquarters, signed deals with WMATA to locate more facilities near underutilized Metro stations in Prince George's and Fairfax, and made buildings in the area better neighbors.
In the comments on Wednesday morning's Breakfast Links, commenter jnb made an excellent point:
What happened to Bob Peck and Martha Johnson is an example of why it's hard to attract and keep good people in public service. If you're trying to make change at an organization at the scale they were trying to, a) you're going to tick people off who will do whatever possible to subvert, and b) you're not going to be checking all the administrative things that, in a less politically charged atmosphere, will inevitably trip you up if you don't catch them.OctaviusIII added:If you get someone who's totally focused on avoiding administrative problems
— employee behavior, leave-taking, food buying, travel, car use, etc. — there's little left over for the big picture stuff.
I sometimes get the impression that public servants are expected to do their job in sack cloth and ashes, always concerned and saddened that they use tax funds to survive. They need to innovate and perform and still hate themselves for working in government.Officials in power within government need to be held accountable for their offices, but those at high levels are in those jobs to handle things beyond the day-to-day. To then punish them for mistakes in low-level operations tells other officials that the more they focus on the big picture, the more they put themselves at risk. We need to praise and reward big-thinking officials, not punish them for being too high-level.
Some people in the public sector just want to plod along in a safe job, building up seniority and cashing paychecks without rocking the boat. Others passionately believe in improving the world around them, and are willing to accept the lower pay and greater scrutiny in order to make a bigger positive difference in people's lives.
It takes a lot of patience, too. There are people in any large organization who have created little fiefdoms over the years, controlling budget and ruling over everything that happens in their slice of the world. Tread into their territory, and you make an enemy. Higher-up officials may well put the harmony of the organization above moving game-changing projects forward.
When people in the latter group rise to higher levels and start having a big impact, they become more vulnerable. Since these people are human, they're not perfect. Maybe they're not the most careful at reviewing every financial report that comes along, since they're focused on the bigger picture, as seems to have happened with Bob Peck.
Maybe they launch a lot of great projects but don't build the most solid foundation of detailed plans behind every one, which some criticized Gabe Klein for. Maybe they accidentally say something a little offensive, as Rollin Stanley recently did. Even if the heat he took for saying something inappropriate didn't drive him away, it couldn't have helped Montgomery County keep him.
Harriet Tregoning seems to have avoided all of this. She has an almost inhuman ability to patiently yet persistently push for change while getting along with others. At least so far I spent a few months working inside the government, and realized it's not for me. I gained enormous respect for those who successfully effect change within that kind of organization, and learned a lot about how the people who obstruct change operate.
If we want change and want it to last, we need to dispense with the calls for blood every time there's bad news. Nothing excuses the enormous lapse at GSA, but we also have to focus on the real wrongdoers and calibrate our expectations for higher-level managers. Do we want public officials to live in constant fear of making a mistake, or empower them to improve our lives?
David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater. 
Comments
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If the latest trend of media expose's and listservs are an indication, I would say..absolutely. The problem I see is the unintended consequences of this new age of advocacy where the messages and oftentimes people, get lost in the shuffle.
Martha Johnson was the head of GSA and despite how great she was, she was the head while her agency spent 800k on a conference filled with employees videotaping themselves making it rain like PacMan Jones.
But don't make Peck into some sort of angel. He didn't think there was anything suspect about staying in a 2400sq lavish hotel suite. He also didn't realize that the $1900 his room was billed for the 300+ appetizers and refreshments were NOT part of the master contract. Hunh? Wheretheydothatat.com?
If we want to keep hope that others might be brave enough to step into the lions den, we need to consider the unintended consequences. What has been our contribution to the discussion of gov't corruption? How do we moderate ourselves? How do we educate each other?
I still can't figure out how Peck's role at the agency contributed to his ousting. But the dude was living large and in charge in a luxury 2400sq ft suite. That neither looks nor sounds right.
by HogWash on Apr 20, 2012 12:03 pm • link • report
In the instance of the GSA: yeah, it's disgusting to see that kind of thing on display, but I'm sure it was a helluva lot of fun for the low-level employees that did music videos about their issue areas.
How much would a similar-sized organization spend on a conference? How would they go about championing institutional spirit?
by OctaviusIII on Apr 20, 2012 12:16 pm • link • report
by OctaviusIII on Apr 20, 2012 12:17 pm • link • report
That event was inexcusable, but Peck wasn't the one who spent lavishly. Instead, he just didn't pay close enough attention to lower level employees and might not have reprimanded them strongly enough when the issue came to light.
Accountability means holding supervisors responsible even if they were not directly involved in individual actions. Peck's job is to supervise the "lower level employees" and also to reprimand them "strongly enough" when they behave badly (and not...NOT NOT!! when "the issue comes to light").
Think of the Navy tradition. That is a model to emulate.
I work in the corporate world. Too often, public debates talk about how corporations do accountability better than government. I have no basis to judge whether government is better or worse than corporate America. But I will say that even corporate America doesn't hold their leaders accountable. (Think Pandit at Citigroup, for just the most recent example. Google it if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
Peck may have had instituted some great policies. I said I don't know and I mean that. But tolerating behavior like this is absolutely unacceptable.
Firing him was the right move. If it were up to me, I would have fired the Administrator, too. She was allowed to resign.
I wish senior WMATA officials would show this level of accountability.
by WRD on Apr 20, 2012 12:18 pm • link • report
So yeah, it sounds like the GSA had a rather expensive conference. But can we please be angry over things that actually matter? Things that are numerically relevant?
My point is that any outrage over government spending that does not run in the tens of billions ($X0,000,000,000) is not worth talking about. And certainly not worthy of the time of members of Congress who every year funnel many times that amount of money to their campaign coffers and own districts.
by Jasper on Apr 20, 2012 12:31 pm • link • report
and
Officials in power within government need to be held accountable for their offices, but those at high levels are in those jobs to handle things beyond the day-to-day.
Part of his job was to supervise his subordinates. He failed at that miserably. You can't just wave that away with a "he just didn't pay close enough attention" wave of your hand.
Also,
Firing Peck will sate politicians' and the public's appetite for blood, but GSA will be worse off without him.
That GSA will be worse off without his (if you say so, I have no idea) is really irrelevant. When there's this level of dereliction of duty, past performance doesn't matter. That's not specific to government. Plus, it's not that he didn't catch the overspending in this case; it's that he allowed a culture of this kind of excess to thrive at GSA. (Along these lines, I'm continually amazed that Natwar Gandhi still have his job, but that's another discussion.)
I wish senior WMATA officials would show this level of accountability.
I couldn't agree with this more.
by dcd on Apr 20, 2012 12:37 pm • link • report
It's often not politically feasible for anything beyond a strongly-worded reprimand unless there's public outcry for more, but of course: by then it's too late and the public demands to know why nothing was done sooner.
Even more difficult is being able to properly reward those who do well...
by Bossi on Apr 20, 2012 12:45 pm • link • report
Bring back JoePa!
by charlie on Apr 20, 2012 12:46 pm • link • report
Don't know but..GSA spent 800k on a conference w/a much smaller number of guests (300) which included mind readers, 140k in preplanning trips, and 75k bike(team) building exercise among other things.
How would they go about championing institutional spirit?
By having them realize that the trip itself was a gift that should've lifted their spirits.
@Jasper, My point is that any outrage over government spending that does not run in the tens of billions ($X0,000,000,000) is not worth talking about
The DC budget averages around 8 billion and we complain about "wasted dollars" in our pols constituent services funds..which have nothing to do w/the budget. So don't be surprised that people are outraged that the gov't appears to have wasted money. We usually don't care about the amount..until it's someone we don't particularly like.
Although we see he's a thief, Harry Thomas didn't make the slightest dent in DC's budget.
by HogWash on Apr 20, 2012 12:56 pm • link • report
So the problem seems to be that Peck was inefficient at managing his own dep't. That's why he had to be shown the door.
Now only if the DC gov't head who lead while the city was being milked for millions of dollars..could've lost his job.
by HogWash on Apr 20, 2012 1:03 pm • link • report
Thoughtful and appropriate post. As a former gov't agency official, I don't envy Dan T. at all... (he dealt with this stuff at DDOT too) ...he has a grace period but the rocks with stuff creeping under them will be there for years and years. What David says is true, it is awefully hard to work on the visionary stuff day-to-day without worrying about the stupid-ass, sh*t staff does even WITH reasonably good supervision, let alone with multiple layers of supervisors not paying attention and a cultural problem. Yes, ulitimately in the chain of command it is a leader's responsibility, but speaking from experience it is extraordinarily deflating when it happens. You can only work to control it by packaging chaos in progressively smaller boxes. Sometimes, you can get it done and stabilized before the chaos realizes what you're doing...
by Some Ideas on Apr 20, 2012 1:06 pm • link • report
But I don't see how what happened can be excused. It clearly is a dereliction of his responsibilities as overseer of the various regional divisions of the GSA public buildings division for this kind of conference to have happened. Clearly, people didn't think it was outlandish, which is a problem. Although I think part of it was that it was the pacific division, which is 2000-3000 miles away from DC so they get some benefit from "being out of sight" but they shouldn't mistake that to mean "out of mind."
What's odd though about the GSA stuff is that the people working for the agency didn't think that it was odd. E.g., Suzanne works in procurement for a division of the Smithsonian, and yes, fundraising usually runs out of non-federal funds, but they are still subject to most of the same federal rules about spending and there is no way in hell that it would be allowed. So clearly Peck was failing on this dimension.
But the general point that working in govt., especially at high levels, can be thankless is true. You are always under the gun and can be scapegoated.
by Richard Layman on Apr 20, 2012 1:07 pm • link • report
by NikolasM on Apr 20, 2012 1:07 pm • link • report
by Arl Fan on Apr 20, 2012 1:13 pm • link • report
Agree in principal. Ultimately $800,000 is absolutely nothing. It does make for quite the show, and is something super easy for the republicans to attack to show how "government is WAY TO BIG!!11!!!1!!!!!1!1!!!"
by Kyle W on Apr 20, 2012 1:19 pm • link • report
That leads me to another question. Assuming that the head of GSA attended, Peck as the public building commissioner, would have been given the largest suite in the hotel.
by HogWash on Apr 20, 2012 1:27 pm • link • report
There is a big difference between us fooling around here, and Congress, supposedly serious people, wasting their time in hearings.
by Jasper on Apr 20, 2012 2:51 pm • link • report
by Brooklander on Apr 20, 2012 3:48 pm • link • report
Like Adrian Fenty?
by Kolohe on Apr 20, 2012 7:43 pm • link • report
The problems at GSA can be blamed both on the individuals who were responsible for this mess, but also the organization as a whole for allowing such a thing to happen in the first place.
While an official might do certain things that are good, once the public loses faith in a government agency, it matters little whatever else 'good' he or she might try to do in the future. To this extent, when something like this scandal unfolds, I think it's not accurate to call the public official 'effective.' Keeping the organization functioning and within the law is certainly part of the job description. It's absolutely unfortunate that this has happened, but at the same time, it's part of the job. If things go to hell on your watch, it's your butt that's on the line.
by Dave Stroup on Apr 22, 2012 11:37 am • link • report
by Noel on Apr 22, 2012 11:23 pm • link • report
"Officials in power within government need to be held accountable for their offices, but those at high levels are in those jobs to handle things beyond the day-to-day."
So, you're suggesting a million dollar spending bonanza is a "day-to-day" type of thing? If so, we have bigger problems than we realized. We're paying him to keep exactly this sort of thing in check. If he fails, of course he needs to go. He's being paid to pay attention to such spending, and "might not have reprimanded" is a perfect example of a soft-pedal spot where we need someone who can take ownership and be responsible.
by Cephas on Apr 23, 2012 10:29 am • link • report
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