During his tenure as the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget over the last four years, Jason Miller faced no bigger issue than how to manage the return to office of federal employees after the pandemic.

Up and down Pennsylvania Avenue and across the country, everyone had advice and an opinion about how this effort should go.

Miller, whose last day is January 20, said he approached this hot button issue with a simple premise: Are agencies making management choices that optimize for mission delivery, whether they are a service provider or they serve some other set of functions?

Seems pretty straightforward.

But over the last three-plus years, Miller faced pressure and questions from both sides. Republican lawmakers continually pushed for more data despite OMB’s telework and remote work report delivered to Congress in August. And federal employees and their unions urged the Biden administration to ensure managers had more flexibilities to determine what’s best for their organizations.

“There has been a lot of confusion on where agencies are and where they are today,” Miller said in an exclusive interview with Federal News Network. “We released a short, 3,000 page report this summer that included a summary table that showed exactly where agencies are. Slightly more than half the federal workforce can’t telework at all because of their job function. They work at the Transportation Security Administration. They’re a nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital. For the just under 50% that can telework, just over 60% of their hours are at a worksite. There are some agencies that were still making changes when we released that report, and I said that to the Congress as well is that there were some agencies that I know based upon our interactions with them and our guidance were working to increase the amount of in-person time because in-person time matters. It matters to innovation; it matters to teamwork and collaboration; it matters to new hires to inculcate them into the culture of an organization, to help them learn, to help them find mentors, but it’s about getting the balance right because ultimately, we’re an employer that we’re competing in the market, and we have to be competitive.”

OMB’s 3,000 page telework report

Miller said the data OMB collected shows that agencies are in line with the private sector, on average, when it comes to the number of employees working in the office.

“This doesn’t mean that we can’t tailor it further and that we can’t further optimize, as some of the agencies were not where they needed to be at that point in time,” he said. “Ultimately, it is their people that are going to make them successful. I think that sometimes that is something that we don’t say enough and we don’t focus on enough in the federal government. Our focus has to be on having strong teams, having strong people and having strong talent. That’s what’s going to make our agency successful, and sometimes the political back and forth forgets that element.”

Miller testified before House lawmakers in April about the administration’s return to office plans where he told lawmakers that OMB was holding agencies accountable for meeting the at least 50% target of having employees in the office.

OMB followed a few months later with the 3,000 page report.

In between and still today, Republican lawmakers railed against the Biden administration’s approach to letting agencies determine what makes the most sense to ensure mission success. Members introduced numerous bills to require federal employees to come back to the office full time, to cut locality pay for feds who telework and a host of other bills aimed at reducing telework.

Miller said the administration always tried to keep the idea at the forefront that there are 2.3 million individuals who work for the government, who have families and are more than just employees doing a job.

“The first thing the President did upon taking office was signing an executive order to protect the federal workforce. Now it’s the right thing to do as an employer, but also in our role as the federal government serving the American people, you had to have a workforce that felt safe and protected in order to do the work that they were doing on the front lines, whether it was folks at the VA or people providing a range of services, or folks in parking lots that were helping get people vaccinated,” he said. “That piece of business, how do we operate was a really broad, hard set of things, both we have to operate as an enterprise and work together. There’s consistent policy that we’re putting out, but also unique things come up all of the time in the breadth of the federal government’s operations that you’re trying to solve and you’re trying to do it right. How much time that took and how hard that was is not something that I fully anticipated. I mean, obviously I knew it was going to be hard operating during a pandemic, but that set of activities was unique, something that I absolutely knew I was taking on.”

Successes through the PMA

While the return to office issue garnered a lot of attention at OMB and on Capitol Hill, Miller focused significant efforts on improving how the government works, ranging from addressing customer experience to rewriting how grants are managed to modernizing how agencies hire new employees.

Marcus Hill, president of the Senior Executives Association, praised several of the areas of the President’s Management Agenda that Miller led.

“This focus on both those the government serves and works with, and how it treats its own employees, has returned positive results for the American people,” Hill said in an email to Federal News Network. “The Biden administration took important actions to reboot the government’s talent pipeline for college graduates and early career talent, including tech talent. Most notable is the restoration of internships in government, and paid internships at that, after they had essentially been eliminated.”

Gregory Stanford, the director of government and public affairs for the Federal Managers Association, added OMB’s efforts to work with agencies to, for example, reduce wait times at the IRS, to promote hiring reforms to boost recruitment and retention, the use of talent pools on USAJOBs and the Office of Personnel Management’s first data strategy, are all areas of success during Miller’s tenure as DDM.

Jenny Mattingley, the vice president of government affairs at the Partnership for Public Service and a former OMB fellow in the federal workforce branch during this term, said the administration’s work on skills-based hiring stands out as a key area where the President’s Management Agenda created sustained focus and engagement across the government.

“One example of this is the final rule released by OPM this past April to update the Pathways Program. This was a critical step forward to improve the talent pipeline by providing opportunities for people to enter public service through nontraditional routes like AmeriCorps, Job Corps, and apprenticeship programs,” Mattingley said in an email to Federal News Network. “It also made important changes to encourage skills-based hiring and lowering required internship hours so agencies can more easily convert qualified interns to full-time positions.”

Flexing management muscles

Miller said OMB’s rewrite of the grants circular and the creation of the Made in America office were among the accomplishments that stood out to him.

He said managing the process to define the range of infrastructure programs that had never before had domestic content requirements, and doing that fast, was something that tested his management muscles.

“We had stand up capacity at agencies and thousands of recipients who had never thought about domestic content requirements. We had to figure out how to do that. We had to define things like, what’s a construction material and put that in writing, in guidance, that people could then understand and implement,” he said. “It was something I was eyes wide open to and that we would have to do, but it got a lot bigger as we went. It was a really hard and incredibly important piece of business that I will think will be a lasting legacy of this OMB and this administration.”

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Biden administration fell short on addressing pay compression issues that have plagued the federal workforce for decades.

Lack of progress around pay compression

SEA’s Hill and other federal management groups expressed the most disappointment in that issue, especially since the Biden administration said it would try to address in the 2024 and 2025 budget requests. In the 2024 request, OMB wrote, “The administration will take action to rectify long-standing white-collar Senior Executive Service and higher graded General Schedule (GS) pay compression, as well as blue-collar Federal Wage Grade pay limitations through development of a legislative proposal.”

Pay compression worsens slightly in most years due to the annual federal pay raise and an existing pay ceiling near the top of the General Schedule. Salaries of career GS employees, according to federal statute, cannot exceed the pay for political appointees and others at level IV on the Executive Schedule.

The salaries of those senior-level feds do increase with annual federal pay raises, but the pay ceiling means they don’t reach their “full” raises. For 2025, any GS grades and steps that would be put above a $195,200 salary after the 2% federal pay raise will see their earnings compressed down to that number.

“The Biden administration pledged to address federal employee pay compression in two budgets, but did not deliver a policy proposal on this to Congress. The government’s compensation policy continues to disincentivize good employees to enter the ranks of management and leadership, as financial incentive for doing so decreases given pay compression,” Hill said. “The next DDM should lead a transparent conversation with Congress on the compensation flexibility necessary for the federal government to compete for professional and technical talent.”

Miller said he understands the frustrations around pay compression, but it’s unclear why lawmakers didn’t address it.

“We highlighted the issue of pay compression. We engaged with the Congress. It’s something that we obviously would have continued pushing forward on. But we are where we are,” he said. “It’s a problem that’s going to grow over time. The pay compression issue adds more people, if you will, every year. Given the current construct, I can’t assess the precise reason that the Congress wasn’t ready to take it on, but that’s where we are.”

SEA’s Hill said he also wished the administration would’ve done more to reach federal supervisors, managers and executives, who can drive focus and progress against key priorities.

“The policies of the administration related to the workforce did not adequately account for the added burden or expectations placed upon managers, who have for many years received little or no training or support on how to achieve new directives,” he said. “To drive effective change in the government, political leaders need to work with federal executives and managers to achieve shared goals for improvement and progress.”

The Partnership’s Mattingley added she would’ve liked to have seen OMB put more resources behind agencies to achieve the management goals.

“More focus on building out tools for agencies, updating outdated regulations and policies and aligning agency budgets to PMA priorities should become a standard playbook for driving progress on governmentwide initiatives,” she said.

A message to employees

Despite these shortcomings, OMB’s legacy on management issues is solid. And Miller, for his part, offered a simple message to federal employees as the administration turns over.

“Many individuals who have chosen a career in public service, my first message is always the same, whether it’s now or it’s two years ago, thank you. Sometimes we make it harder for people to choose careers in public service than we should,” he said. “My second is, remember why you chose to do what you do because what you do is incredibly important, irrespective of the current administration, the next administration or the administration after that, what you do is incredibly important, and we need good people who care, who are focused on mission and executing every day.”

Miller didn’t say what would come next for him. He said the focus remains on improving federal management until Jan. 20.

“I’m a runner and I am planning to run a couple of really fast half marathons this spring with a little bit more time on my hands to train appropriately for them, and I plan to go to a lot more of my kids events this spring than I have been able to over the most recent years,” he said.

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