Reviving a Dispirited Workforce

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Obama on '60 Minutes': Security, Economy Are Priorities

In his first television interview since his historic election, President-elect Barack Obama said he has spent the days since the election doing 'whatever it takes' to stabilize the economy.

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One veteran OSHA staffer who asked not to be named said her agency has worked for 15 years on the same draft regulation, most recently on management-ordered revisions, without completion.

"Even though we can show bodies on the floor from this danger, nothing gets out the door," said the staffer, who ticked off a list of PhD-carrying colleagues who retired to be more productive elsewhere.

Some agencies are also suffering from double-digit percentage cuts in staff and resources, and the strain on federal workers has been noted in several independent reports. The staff of the Small Business Administration, for example, has dropped from 2,975 to 2,166 since Bush took office. The volume of federal contracting has nearly doubled during that period, from $207 billion in 2000 to $400 billion last year, while the number of staff members monitoring contracts has declined.

Also, some agencies have gone through much of this year without senior leaders. In May, eight months before Bush was to leave the White House, half the administration's top 250 political positions were vacant or filled by temporary appointees.

The jobs left in limbo at that early stage included five of the seven senior Justice Department positions, two deputy secretary jobs at HUD overseeing public housing and community development, and a position of senior adviser to the Treasury secretary on economic policy.

With this being the first election in 50 years in which neither the president nor his vice president ran for office, Kamensky surmised that many appointees may have expected to be replaced and felt no need to await election results.

Frank Buono, a retired National Park Service employee, said that the administration did a poor job of hiding "a fundamental hostility" toward his agency's job of conserving national parks. Obama's challenge, he said, would be getting the workforce to trust its leadership again.

"The atmosphere in the agencies, even among career people, is pretty negative," he said. "They have been completely browbeaten."

But there are rays of hope, Kamensky noted.