This Interior Department senior executive has done it all when it comes to money
"In order to push money out on a grant or a cooperative agreement, you have to have statutory authority from Congress," said Andrea Brandon.
We’ve been interviewing some of the federal executives who recently became fellows in the National Academy of Public Administration. My next guest is one of them. And if it has to do with the disbursement of money, she’s done if or overseen it. The deputy assistant secretary for budget, finance, grants and acquisitions at the Interior Department, Andrea Brandon joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss more.
Interview transcript:
Tom Temin And how long have you been at the Interior Department to gain that much oversight?
Andrea Brandon I started at Interior on March 4, 2019. S0 I’ve been there six years.
Tom Temin So you’re a long serving Fed and this is the latest post?
Andrea Brandon That’s correct, yes. I’ve been in the government for 35 years.
Tom Temin Wow. Tell us a little bit about the history here.
Andrea Brandon This is wonderful. So I started my federal career at the National Institutes of Health. I started actually in a grant program office called the Minority Biomedical Research Support Program, which they don’t have at NIH anymore. And I was actually recruited out of that program. The head of that particular program actually was under the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH, which was under Dr. Ruth Kirschstein at the time. And I was actually recruited out of that program office to be a grants management specialist by Dr. Kirschstein. It’s a really neat story. I was doing secretarial work at the time, and I used to do the travel orders and the correspondence and so forth. And her secretary contacted me and said, Dr. Kirschstein wants to see you. She needs you in her office. And so I thought, oh my god, I think I’m in trouble.
Tom Temin I’ve heard that conversation.
Andrea Brandon I was so scared. And I went down to her office and I had a seat and she called me into her office and she said, I think you’re a little overqualified for that job. We have another type of job that you might be interested in and it’s called Grants Management, Grants Management specialist. Are you interested? Well, yes, I’m interested. So I shifted at that point in time from being a secretary to a grants management specialist.
Tom Temin And overseeing this whole portfolio now at Interior, again, budget finance grants and acquisitions, that pretty much covers all the money that goes out.
Andrea Brandon Definitely.
Tom Temin What are the commonalities? Because acquisition and grants both disperse money, but under very different circumstances, under different criteria. What’s the tying together thread for you?
Andrea Brandon So first of all, you’re right. There are different criteria In order to push money out on a grant or a cooperative agreement. You have to have statutory authority from Congress, from the Hill, it has to be a law. And for contract, that’s the way we do business within the government. So you don’t need statutory authority to put a contract to put a bid out on the street, because we need those to hire services, hire vendors to do services or to purchase pencils or computers, laptops, software, etc. But for a grant, we need statutory authority. Those are funds that we put out to serve a public good. That’s how we have our food stamps program, which is now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program under USDA. That’s how we build bridges and roads and so forth, buildings. All types of construction projects. We have energy, which is a hot topic right now, but we have energy grants and so forth. So definitely we have statutory authority to put the grant funding out. But for contracts, that’s just the way the government does business. We don’t need to have statutory authority, although there are regulations that are overseeing both types of money. And there are some similarities and some things that we borrow, the grants people borrow from the contract side and then over the years and then some things that the contracts people borrow from the grant side.
Tom Temin Sure. So do you have specialists that work for you that are knowledgeable in the grant process and in the acquisition process etc.?
Andrea Brandon That’s correct, Yes.
Tom Temin Yes. And just a quick detail question on grants. So each year Congress has to authorize and then appropriate for a given grant program. Does that extend to challenge grant programs in the the small contest level, $100,000 type of programs?
Andrea Brandon Yes. All the grants have to come through a statute of law, and also through appropriations. And you have to spend the money exactly the way that the appropriation law tells you need to spend it. Otherwise you can be seen as having an anti deficiency act violation, which can come with civil and criminal penalties. So we definitely don’t want that issue to occur. But yes, and then some programs, other types of programs, sometimes they have like five year statutory authority. Some of them have ten year statutory authority. So you don’t necessarily need to have them renewed, the program itself renewed year by year. It depends on what the statute says.
Tom Temin So there’s a lot of moving parts to keep up with.
Andrea Brandon Definitely. Yes, a lot of moving parts.
Tom Temin We’re speaking with Andrea Brandon. She’s deputy assistant secretary for budget, finance, grants and acquisitions at the Interior Department, and also a new fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Then in your career went from like GS-5 to 15. And now you’re a senior executive?
Andrea Brandon That’s correct, yes. GS-5, GS-7, GS-9, GS-11, 12, 13, 14, 15. And then, yes, senior executive. I became a senior executive in 2006, in the late part of May 2006, and with the United States Department of Agriculture. So I have been through various agencies and then I became a deputy assistant secretary within the government in June of 2016 for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Tom Temin And for someone starting out as a GS-5, someone young that might be doing I don’t know whether they still, well, there are administrative assistant still in the government. It might be the last bastion of them as far as I’ve been able to tell. And they would like to say to themselves, I could oversee $1 billion or $10 billion or $100 billion. I think I’m getting close to the digits that you oversee. What does it take? What’s your advice to them if they want to have that kind of scope in their career?
Andrea Brandon I feel like starting at somewhere in the lower levels provides you an opportunity to get a wider picture and to see how things are done at the baseline level. For me, like I said, I started as a secretary, so I did travel orders, travel vouchers. I actually was able, because I was in a program office initially, I was able to see grant applications that were coming in to that program office, usually at NIH. At that time, if you had an appeal, if you didn’t, they call it a rebuttal. If you didn’t like the way your application was scored, then your rebuttal letter would come into the program office at NIH. And then my boss saw he thought highly enough of me that he would give me those applications and those rebuttal letters. And so I was able to get on the ground floor and see how that’s done. And he would say, Hey, take a read of this application and then read their rebuttal letter. What do you think? I had a degree, a bachelor’s in behavioral and social sciences. So, Okay, I’m game, let’s take a look at it. And pretty much I was usually on target with my response to him. Of course he would take my recommendation or whatever I said and he would re-review it. He was a doctor, PhD.
Andrea Brandon But it was fun. I think if you come in at the bottom levels, it provides you an opportunity to really get to learn how all the different facets of the government operates and that like, for instance, also through NIH, I was put probably in my third year, I was put in a leadership development program that lasted a year. It was a 12 month leadership development program, and I actually maintained my portfolio of grant projects while I rotated between different offices. So, for instance, I was assigned permanently into the grant office to do grants management specialist work, but I also rotated to the budget office. I rotated to the contract office, I rotated to an administrative office so that I could see how they hire people, how they did what they call the SF-52, which is the form they cut when they’re hiring you or they give me a promotion or whatever. And so I was able to see many facets. I went to the peer review section to see what happens when the grant applications are peer reviewed and they’re sourced out to different panels and then how they make the panels, how they select the people for the panels and so forth. So I think that when you start at a bottom and you work your way up, then it provides you an opportunity to really see and get a good grasp at how everything works, not just that one stovepipe line of business that you’re in. And so that helped me throughout my career. As I moved up in advanced, things were not unfamiliar to me when I became an executive, when I became a manager first and then an executive. I already had some experience in the various lines of business. So I think working your way up is a good way to do it. Now, I’m not saying anything negative for anyone who comes in at a high level. But I think that you have to really, when you come in, you have to hit the ground running. And I think it puts a lot of pressure on you when you come in without all that baseline experience.
Tom Temin You’re like a vice president of engineering that started out with an erector set.
Andrea Brandon Yes, exactly. Yes. And I have fun with my rector’s. I’m very nerdy.
Tom Temin Well, but you’re also pretty dynamic. So a dynamic nerd is the best type of person to run something of the operation that you have. And in your day-to-day work, you can’t oversee every contract and every grant. Hey, Joe over there didn’t follow the rule of two to buy that copier off the Oasis contract or something. So what do you look for? What are the metrics that you tend to watch in your day-to-day when you get to work in the morning?
Andrea Brandon There are different metrics. For instance, with grants, we have the time that a grant announcement is put out on the street versus the time the applications come in versus how long does it take us to review the applications, and then how long does it take us to then make the grant award? So we’re tracking that metrics across the board at the current department where I am. And then you’re looking for in acquisition proposals same kind of thing. How long does it take us to put an RFP out? And then how the vendor applications come in and then we have to review them, and then we do a cost proposal analysis as well. And then how long does it take us to get the contract awarded as well? So we’re looking at that metric. We also have metrics to determine whether we have had inappropriate funding. So we want to make sure that we don’t make a lot of mistakes with putting the money out the door, whether it’s a grant or contract. So we have metrics, key performance indicators on that to make sure that we’re following the proper protocols for cost analysis or for compliance in the regulations. Like I said, there are regulations that oversee grants, and then for the acquisitions, the federal acquisition regulations. So you want to make sure that you’re following those protocols as well. So we do have key performance indicators on various types of processes. There’s also performance indicators on internal controls. So to make sure that each segment of an office is following whatever that policy and procedure is for that part of the line of business that they’re responsible for, and that there’s appropriate segregation of duties. So we have key performance indicators on that. And trust me, I have massive dashboards that are tracking all of this. It’s available to me because of our technology. It’s available to me real time. So every morning I come in, I open up my portal, my dashboard portal, and I can see all the different metrics that are going on and see it real time.
Tom Temin And this is all very metrics and rule driven types of process in the federal government. But do you ever look at the dashboard and something doesn’t smell right just because of your experience?
Andrea Brandon Yes, I have. And then I contact the director of that particular office. So let’s say it’s finance and something looks weird with something that’s going on in the metric. I will contact that director and tell them this looks a little odd to me, here’s why. And I give them the justification. And then either they’ll tell me, yeah, I know about that, Here’s what’s going on. Or they will say, Hell, we will look into that. Let me ask some of my other directors under me or some of the other staff and we’ll get back to you, we’ll get the information back to you. They have access to the same dashboards I have access to, and some of them have even more because they’re down at the finer levels of the operations that they’re doing. But a lot of times they also have already seen. So sometimes they bubble it up to me before I get to them. They’re like, Ms. Brandon, let me tell you what’s going on here. So everybody, I think I’ve tried to promote a culture over the past six years and even throughout my career, I try to promote a culture where people are looking at key performance indicators regularly. You’re keeping an eye out. You’re not just waiting for something to happen. You’re watching the process along the way and also making sure a key thing to that as well is making sure that people are trained. So if you have dashboards and they don’t know how to look at them, they don’t know how to read them or they don’t know how to do their own predictive analysis on what they see. Or if you see a problem coming down the pike, then those dashboards are useless. So I make sure that the people are trained as well. But they most of the time they see it before me and they bring it to my attention.
Tom Temin Kind of to see one, do one, teach one approach.
Andrea Brandon Exactly.
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Tom Temin
Tom Temin is host of the Federal Drive and has been providing insight on federal technology and management issues for more than 30 years.
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