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Meet the new boss

Four weeks into the job, the new head of OPM meets the press for the first time.

Federal News Network Staff

September 16, 2008 9:16 am

3 min read

By Max Cacas
FederalNewsRadio

Michael Hager held his first official meeting with news reporters whose main beat is the federal government since leaving the Department of Veterans Affairs more than a month ago.

He says in his first four weeks on the job, there is one topic that has consumed a good deal of his time: preparing for hurricanes, and their possible effect on feds along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. Hager says he and his staff have spent hours in the government’s “storm recovery room” trying to answer agency needs as they arise.

Among those needs, he says, is keeping track of federal workers no matter where they might be in the wake of a serious storm:

With Gustav, we sent out communications to locate a little over 20,000 employees affected by that hurricane, and I’m delighted to announce that every single employee has been accounted for.

He adds that OPM is doing the same in the wake of Ike, awaiting an improvement in telecommunications in Texas and Louisiana to begin accounting for nearly 30,000 feds in the most recent region to be affected by severe weather.

End to End

Turning to questions from reporters, Hager was asked about the recently announced “end to end” initiative to reform the hiring process across all federal government agencies.

Calling it, “the single biggest customer issue we have,” Hager says that hiring policy has been a source of irritation in both his previous federal jobs at the VA, and before that at the Small Business Administration. And he says that while most of the heavy-lifting on the “end-to-end” initiative was done prior to his arrival, he says that he fully concurs with the goal of the initiative:

We’re going to set a standard of 80 calendar days to measure the requisition-to-the-fill date; roughly 55 business days.

He says that tracking the progress of “end to end” has become a top priority for the regular meetings of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, with the goal of seeing which agency can actually reduce the number of days for a new hire below the 55 calendar day threshhold.

RetireEZ

On another issue, Hager said he has no news on the status of Retire Easy, one of the top priorities for his predecessor. Hager says he and his senior staff meet almost daily on the subject:

We are analyzing it every day, we’ve completed lots of analysis, we have lots of analysis that has yet to take place, and we will be making decisions on the status of RetireEZ betwween now and sometime in October.

Hager said no decision has yet been made about the future of Hewitt Associates, the primary outside contractor for RetireEZ, whose work was suspended seven weeks ago by OPM.

Four Day Week

Recently, Hager and OPM have found themselves exchanging opposing points of view with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D.-Md.), who has proposed codifying a four-day workweek for most federal workers as an energy saving policy.

Hager believes he and Hoyer are actually closer than they think they are to a possible solution, noting that the Maryland Democrat has apparently backed away from saying that the entire federal government should be placed on a four-day workweek.

He also adds that between “workplace flexibilities”, and programs such as teleworking, more than half of all federal workers participate in some form of alternate work arrangement allowing them to reduce the number of days when they must endure a long commute to get to work.

Transition

In a closing note, Hager indicated that OPM’s planning for the transition to a new administration is on his “top five” list of things to do. And he says he is confident that when it is all over, this presidential transition will be one of the best in history.

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