With jobs order, Obama gives veterans more to celebrate

Presidential executive orders are lofty, historical documents, generally signed in White House ceremonies with pomp and circumstance. Seldom do we think of them beginning in a small town on the eastern edge of West Virginia.

But it was in Shepherdstown, with a population of 803 at last count, where President Obama's latest executive order, designed to facilitate the hiring of veterans in the federal government, got its start.

Since 1944, federal law has required that vets be given certain preferences when federal agencies hire. And this isn't the first time an administration has made noise about being nice to vets. What will come of this latest effort remains to be seen.

But the quiet signing ceremony in the Oval Office on Monday evening certainly was an important move in the right direction. By establishing an interagency council and requiring that progress be tracked and reported back to the president, the executive order created a mechanism with teeth.

"This is a very definite step forward in what veterans can take advantage of," Clarence E. Hill, the American Legion's national commander, said in an interview. "There has never been anything like a veterans employment office. This is a big step," added Hill, who attended the signing.

Soon after Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry took office this spring, he listed increased employment opportunities for veterans as one of his short-term goals.

In July, a multiagency team met at the OPM training facility in Shepherdstown, West Virginia's oldest town, with the charge to consider what had been tried in the past, what worked and what didn't.

"That is the team that essentially put together and began the design of the program that the president has signed into executive order," Berry said shortly after leaving the ceremony at the White House.

Obama's order says that it is "the policy of my Administration to enhance recruitment of and promote employment opportunities for veterans within the executive branch, consistent with merit system principles and veterans' preferences prescribed by law. The Federal Government will thereby help lead by example in promoting veterans' employment."

The preference already gives vets a good head start in the competition for federal jobs. On civil service tests, they get five or 10 points added to their passing scores. Then there's the "rule of three," which says an agency must select from the top three candidates but cannot pass over a vet in that group to hire someone without the preference.

The executive order signed by the president establishes a Council on Veterans Employment, tasked with creating a government-wide program to increase hiring of vets and instituting measures to gauge how well Uncle Sam does. There were approximately 480,000 veterans working for the federal government at the end of fiscal year 2008, according to the White House. How that number changes will tell the tale of the order's effectiveness.

"We know exactly right now how many vets each agency in government is hiring," Berry said. "We will know very cleanly and clearly a year from now if we have succeeded -- or are we on the right track, or have we missed the mark? The metric for accountability on this is very clear: Are more vets getting jobs in the federal civil service?"

The order lists 24 executive branch agencies that each must form a Veterans Employment Program "to be responsible for enhancing employment opportunities for veterans within the agency." The agencies are told to develop an operational plan, training programs for disabled vets, and mandatory instruction for human resources personnel and hiring managers on veterans' preference.

Obama's order also told Berry to "develop a Government-wide Veterans Recruitment and Employment Strategic Plan, to be updated at least every 3 years, addressing barriers to the employment of veterans in the executive branch."

One of the listed agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, is already moving to improve its employment of veterans. Last month, at a meeting with representatives of veterans organizations, Secretary Janet Napolitano emphasized the department's goal of hiring 50,000 veterans by 2012. It held a job fair for vets in July, and the department says its workforce now is about 25 percent veterans.

All of this makes veterans groups applaud, but Hill's organization also sounded a note of caution. "The American Legion is cheering, with reservations, an Obama administration initiative to provide more federal employment for military veterans," the group said in a statement.

And on the organization's Web site, Hill said the American Legion "would ask the President to do more to end age discrimination in the hiring of veterans. While age discrimination is technically banned, it is not unusual for National Guard and Reserve servicemembers to lose employment due to time spent away while deployed. After all, employers may downsize and go out of business. When this happens to a middle aged servicemember, re-employment can be especially challenging. Still, the Executive Order certainly has great merit, though we will continue to fight for more such initiatives."