The White House recently appointed Loren DeJong Schulman as Associate Director for Performance and Personnel Management at the Office of Management and Budget. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin  talked with Bob Tobias, who had a couple of ideas for what Ms. Schulman should set as her personal goals. Tobias is a professor in the Key Executive Leadership Program at American University.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin
I guess this is a pretty important position to begin with Director of performance and Personnel Management, it kind of implies the connection between the people and the program performance.

Bob Tobias
It does. So she’s responsible for actually implementing President Biden’s management agenda. She’s responsible for ensuring that the goals, that are identified by the agencies across the government, that are then recorded on the website performance.gov, are actually implemented. So it’s a huge job, very complex job. And President Biden made it even more complicated when he has declared that issues that go across departments, for example, like veterans mental health, be coordinated by [Department of Defense (DoD)] and [Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)] and [Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)], rather than each creating independent goals. So that collaboration adds another level of complexity to her very, very important difficult job. And what I’m suggesting, is that she had a performance goal for herself, which would be to increase the number of hits from the general public on performance.gov. The public should be accessing, in my view, performance.gov on a regular basis, because the website itself, on the homepage says, it quote, attracts what the U.S. federal government is doing about issues that matter to you, close quote. So if that’s the case, more members of the general public ought access performance.gov.

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Tom Temin
Ms. Schulman comes at an interesting time, because it’s past the halfway point of the administration. It’s a good year and a half or so, since the president’s management agenda was even issued. And it talks about elevating the federal workforce and empowering it, in greater detail, in greater degree. And it talks about better customer experience put out there, and of course, you need the right people to put out the best customer experience. The question is, it’s late, and she’s got some ground to pick up here.

Bob Tobias
She does have some ground to pick up. And in terms of this access to the public, I was thinking this morning, actually, about if I were a taxpayer, and I was trying to decide whether I would file my own taxes and call an IRS representative, or would I do TurboTax? And so I went on performance.gov, and I put in IRS level of service and I got 17 responses, none of which went to IRS level of service. Then I went to the Department of Treasury started scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, found level of service, but I only found level of service for fiscal year ’21. The plan was 35%, which means 35% of the telephone calls would be answered. The achievement was 18.5%. But nothing for fiscal year ’22. Nothing for fiscal year ’23. So as a taxpayer interested in the performance of the IRS, I was unable to get the information that I needed, and that mattered to me. So I’m suggesting that this website be more interesting, more available to answer taxpayer questions.

Tom Temin
Well, yeah, but how do they find out what taxpayers really want to know? There’s 360 million citizens in the United States, each one has a slightly different question on what he or she would like to get from the government. And so I think what you say, implies a need to, maybe, do some outreach.

Bob Tobias
Well, of course, you have to do outreach, but it’s really the basic information is there about performance, make that information accessible, make it searchable, make it accessible, encourage the public to apply. The fact of the matter is, that if this were to occur, maybe, just maybe, people would talk to their members of Congress, talk to their senators. Because the fact is, members of Congress focus not on public policy implementation or whether or not last year’s promises were effectively and efficiently implemented. Rather, they focus on new promises for the future. It’s easy to promise for the future. Because it’s the future. It’s much more difficult to hold yourself accountable for the promises in the past, and most members of Congress don’t do it. But if this performance.gov were actually a tool for the public, maybe they would.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Bob Tobias. He’s a professor in the Key Executive Leadership Program at American University. And I think part of the problem, is that website has a kind of a propaganda look to it in the front end. And this is something every administration does. The late Mike Causey used to complain about that everything the government puts out, extolled the virtues of the administration, whichever one happens to be. Thanks to the president’s genius and wisdom, we are able to buy 200 electric cars or something like that. And maybe, that’s what turns off people. Yes, we know people support the administration that’s in power, at the given time, Obama, Trump, Bush, Biden, whatever. But it doesn’t have an objective field, necessarily, what it is the information that the government puts out. And I’m not sure Mr. Schulman could do anything about that. But do you think that’s an issue?

Bob Tobias
It might be an issue, but that issue would go away, Tom. I think, if I could go to the search engine on the front page, and say, level of service. Because it’s part of their performance plan, but it hasn’t been updated, and it’s not accessible. If level of service were accessible, then I’d know as a taxpayer, should I make the call to the IRS? Or should I pay TurboTax?

Tom Temin
Right. And the other thing they could do, I think, too, is, as you say, what is it that most concerns the most people paying taxes? That should be like permanently on the front page of performance.gov. And then, there’s 9 million veterans, tailor it to what’s really going on and not listing of, I don’t know.

Bob Tobias
I don’t think performance.gov could be a website that answered everybody’s questions about anything, VA or anything IRS, but they could answer questions related to the performance plan that’s already buried in the website. So I’m not asking any more information be placed on the website, only that which is there be easily accessible.

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Tom Temin
All right, so have you written this to Ms. Schulman, yet? Have you gotten an answer?

Bob Tobias
I have not.

 

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