The Office of Management and Budget filled a key personnel and performance leadership role with a familiar name.

Federal News Networks has confirmed that Loren DeJonge Schulman is starting as the new associate director for performance and personnel management today.

She replaces Pam Coleman, who left in August after 20 months in that role.

DeJonge Schulman joins OMB from the Partnership for Public Service where she was vice president of research, evaluation and modernizing government for the last two-plus years. In that role, she helped lead the Best Places to Work in Government rankings and focused on issues around improving federal workforce management.

“We are thrilled to welcome Loren DeJonge Schulman to OMB. Her extensive experience in strategic planning, good governance, and modernizing government makes her a perfect fit to lead the Office of Performance and Personnel Management — an office that leads on critical administration priorities, including advancing the President’s Management Agenda, supporting the federal workforce, furthering evidence-based policy making processes, and making government more accessible, equitable and effective for the American people,” said Jason Miller, the deputy director for management at OMB in an emailed statement to Federal News Network.

Strengthening and empowering the federal workforce is one of three pillars of the Biden administration’s PMA. The focus over the last two years has been around improving the recruitment pipeline overall, particularly by hiring early-career talent and interns.

The latest workforce update on the PMA showed what DeJonge Schulman’s likely priorities are for 2023 and beyond. A November memo from the three leaders of the workforce priority goal requested agencies take steps to measure their progress against four goals:

• Create a more equitable employee engagement experience across the federal workforce, including across employee groups and organizational units within agencies;
• Improve the federal hiring process to efficiently hire the best talent;
• Attract the right talent to the right roles; and
• Promote diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) strategies and practices across all human capital activities.

This is DeJonge Schulman’s second stint in government. Early in her career she joined public service as a Presidential Management Fellow and spent a decade at the Defense Department and the National Security Council.

At the NSC, she was the director defense policy and strategy, Middle East policy from January 2011 to November 2012.

Before that, she worked at DoD from 2007 to 2009 in a variety of positions, with her last one being special assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, where she focused on strategic planning, management and reform priorities across the defense enterprise, including the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review and Defense Efficiency Review. She also said she coordinated DoD contributions to White House initiatives and national security decision-processes.

After leaving federal service in 2015, she led research efforts at the Center for a New American Security around national security and preparing the national security leaders of today and tomorrow.

“Loren is a passionate, inspirational and mission-driven leader who cares deeply about creating a better government that can more effectively and equitably serve the public. During her tenure at the Partnership, she developed and implemented a research agenda that generated forward looking thought leadership to change the way our government works, created capacity-building tools to enhance government effectiveness, and produced analysis and benchmarking to drive government performance insights for leaders and public accountability,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, in a statement to Federal News Network. “In her new role at OMB, she will build upon these successes and help drive greater impact and reform across the federal enterprise.”

As DeJonge Schulman comes to OMB from PPS, the good government group brought in former OMB official Jenny Mattingley as its new vice president for government affairs. Mattingley spent the last 18 months working as a program manager in OMB’s federal workforce branch focusing on improving the federal hiring process and creating a stronger federal workforce.

Prior to her time at OMB, she served as the executive director of the federal Performance Improvement Council and was the founding director of the White House Leadership Development Program, which focuses on developing enterprise senior leaders across government.

Mattingley also previously advised good government organizations on policy and advocacy issues related to government management.

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