By Joe Davidson
The Washington Post | Posted: Friday, November 21, 2008 12:00 am
WASHINGTON - Jennifer Dorn, who has had four presidential appointments, remembers her first days in a new agency this way: "It's like being on a first date. How close do I dance with my partner?''
When she became head of the Federal Transit Administration in 2001, the Senior Executive Service staffers assigned to brief her were at first cautious, too cautious. "They were risk averse,'' she said. "They were very careful about what they revealed.''
Lauren Peduzzi was on other side of that dance, but she remembers it the same way. She was a career staffer with the National Transportation Safety Board assigned to work with the incoming vice chairman.
"There's a lot of playing it safe until you figure out what the political appointee wants,'' Peduzzi said earlier this week over lunch with Dorn, who graduated in 1969 from Corvallis High School and in 1973 graduate from Oregon State University, where her father taught journalism.
But playing it safe can hinder communication, slow the transition, and even sow distrust between the civil servants and politicos who must work as a team. Those issues were explored at a National Association of Public Administration conference Thursday. Dorn now is president of the Academy and Peduzzi handles its media. The opening session looked at the dance they described, but with facts and figures. Some of the data were encouraging, but not all of it.
The stats were in companion studies. One covered the views of presidential appointees confirmed by the Senate and the other presented senior executives' responses.
Particularly unsettling is that 20 percent of the senior executives agreed with the statement: "I have no knowledge of transition activities in this agency.''
"That's deplorable,'' said Kristine Marcy, a charter member of the Senior Executive Service who is now a consultant with McConnell International. She threw in "surprising and incredibly disappointing'' for good measure.
Marcy, who presented the report, formerly was chief operating officer at the Small Business Administration, in addition to positions at various other agencies. Her disappointment was echoed by Gail Lovelace, a conference panelist who also is the presidential transition director at the General Services Administration: "That was appalling to me.''
High-level civil servants have a responsibility to know about the presidential transition, said Lovelace, who has been working on it all year. If they don't, they can't guide their staffs.
"There's no excuse'' for the ignorance of her colleagues, Lovelace, herself a senior executive, said after the panel. "Go to change.gov,'' the transition Web site, she urged them. "It doesn't take a lot to find out what's going on.''
The survey was done in September and October. "It would be my hope that now that the election is over,'' she added, "that the senior executive in the federal government is paying attention.''
There also was a troubling finding in the survey among presidential appointees in the Bush administration. Almost four-fifths of the respondents said they were either unsatisfied with their orientation when they took office or had none at all.
G. Edward DeSeve, the University of Pennsylvania professor who presented the presidential appointee findings found that one "very significant. Orientation should be done continually and in many ways,'' including the use of electronic methods. He added that a formal process should be developed to bring career civil servants more fully into the political appointees' orientation.