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Vice President Pence is obviously an intelligent, gifted politician who is a loyal advisor to President Trump. Also, I’m sure he works long hours faithfully serving our nation. But I would like to suggest that his talents can be used in additional ways. There is still some swamp to drain and the President does not have the time to lead all of those efforts.
VP Pence should take on some high-profile tasks commensurate with his abilities and position. Here is a starter list that should provide his President and the nation tremendous return and value added.
First task, Active Legislative Liaison. The decades-long adversarial relationship that has festered between the Executive and Legislative Branches is not serving we-the-people well and it needs some in-depth attention.
If he is not already doing so, Vice President Pence should spend some significant amount of time each week establishing and reinforcing working relationships, one-on-one, with Congressional leaders of both parties.
He could routinely call on and meet with important committee leaders. He could seize opportunities to address various caucuses in both the House and Senate. It would send a positive message if the Vice President met individually with all newly elected Representatives and Senators.
Schedule monthly luncheon meetings with leaders of both parties and both houses so that it becomes business-as-usual rather that a media event. Be conspicuous on the Hill every week, not just when there is a crisis brewing or a projected tie vote in the Senate.
Second task, Infrastructure Repair. President Obama’s trillion dollar “shovel ready” stimulus program turned into a race to the pork barrel by members of Congress without structure or accountability, resulting in untold billions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse with little or no overall impact on the economy. It did not lower unemployment as advertised, did not lift millions out of poverty as advertised, and it did not stimulate the overall economy as advertised,
The American Society of Civil Engineers has given the nation’s infrastructure an overall grade of “D”. Fixing deficient bridges, tunnels, dams and sewage-treatment plants, not to mention expanding high-speed Internet and modernizing the electricity grid, should be clear priorities.
Put Vice President Pence in charge and do something unique in Washington; that is, start with a strategic plan with an end-state and end-dates. Put the plan in the form of a phased campaign of prioritized projects. Develop measures of effectiveness to track progress against predetermined completion dates and budget. Do these things and then assess the overall value added to the nation.
Third task, Government Downsizing/Restructuring: A mammoth, sprawling, uncontrollable federal government was never the vision or intent of the founding fathers. Organizations have a propensity to grow to a point of diminishing returns, to where it ceases to be efficient, effective and no longer performs the functions for which it was created. At that point a large organization may even have a tendency to look inward and becomes self-perpetuating. Some or all of that could apply to the Departments in the Executive Branch today. It can be fixed but it will take some strong leadership, attention to detail and months of hard work.
Two years ago, America voted for change; we have seen a lot of it and it has been positive. But for any large organization, especially one as large as the Executive Branch, change is hard. Fear of the unknown is a powerful human force. Especially in government, there can be an entrenched, layered bureaucracy that is stiff and stifling.
There are over two million civilian employees in the Executive Branch, excluding the postal service. Most, I’m sure, are loyal, dedicated government employees who work hard every day. However, there are also legions of “bureaucrats”, defined in the dictionary as mechanical, unimaginative and inflexible. These are the ones showing up for “work” with their “rice bowl”, just putting in their time until retirement. They will vehemently cling to their lifestyle as change agents attack their stronghold. Change is enemy number one to the bureaucrats.
Accomplishing real, meaningful change requires a strategic plan and a relentless campaign that is led by someone senior enough to plow through all the obstacles and defeat the bureaucrats. The Executive Branch needs to be analyzed, block by block, and restructured to become more capable. That process needs someone as senior as Vice President Pence to pull it off.
On the subject of change: it is not the strongest of organizations that survive, nor the most intelligent; the survivor is the organization that is most adaptable to change. Structure your organization with agility.
How does all this get accomplished? It is a long and tedious process (even explaining it is a long, tedious read) but there are no viable shortcuts to re-thinking, re-designing and re-structuring large organizations and make them be all they can/should be.
First, Vice President Pence needs to set up a senior task force consisting of the deputies of all the departments, agencies and commissions. They will be the change agents and become the junkyard dogs of Washington.
Secondly, define the end state and end date for the campaign. For example, VP Pence might say, “Over the next six months our task force will look inside every organizational element of the Executive Branch. We will assess their mission (is it relevant today), their structure (too many or too few people), layering (is it OK or dysfunctional), can the organization integrate (communicate) vertically and horizontally efficiently and effectively on a day-to-day basis and finally, is the organization as a whole agile (able to deal with change as a matter of course)?”
Third, organization charts: The process begins in every department, agency, commission by putting together a very detailed organization chart. That’s the visual and it provides an immediate sense of the size, complexity and layering. Big government is layer after layer after layer. Some of the layers produce nothing; they exist just to oversee what is being produced at the layers below. Why the organization chart? Because it allows one to begin the analysis and restructure at the bottom of the organization. You CAN NOT reorganize and restructure top down; to be successful it must be bottom-up.
Using the Department of Agriculture as an example, there are 65 different organizational elements that come under the headings of departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices of, boards and facilities. Inside of them are departments, directorates, branches, sections, cells and individual elements. Every one of those becomes a “box” in the organization chart. Each organizational “box” must list the name of the element, number of employees and the grade of the leader, GS 10, 12, 13, whatever.
Within the Department of Agriculture, for example, the deputy Secretary (part of VP Pence’s senior task force) will form his/her own internal departmental task force. That task force (and this should be happening as well in every department in the Executive Branch) needs to task the leader of every organizational chart “box” to submit (“by tomorrow”) a one-page report to the task force.
The report format should include, as a minimum:
- MISSION STATEMENT: in one or two sentences describe what it is that element collectively does. (for example: responsible for writing, executing and enforcing Department Regulation 135, Beef Export Program, and reporting results quarterly to ………
The task force’ job is to ask itself: do we need Dept Reg 135 any longer? If so, could this be done with fewer people? Could the same number of employees also be responsible for Dept Reg 246, Pork Export Program? Do we need the report quarterly?
There are probably tens of thousands of worthless reports written every year by an entrenched bureaucratic mass that lives on forever sucking up tax dollars, stifling initiative and being a roadblock to progress.
It is inevitable that the task force will find elements that were stood up years or even decades ago to deal with a particular problem. The problem may no longer exist but the branch or division just keeps cranking out paper.
2. GRADE STRUCTURE OF THE EMPLOYEES:
Is the grade structure commensurate with the degree of complexity of the mission? Could two or more similar “boxes” be combined, perhaps scaled down and led by this same leader (a span of control issue)? Is the leader a “working leader” or just grading the papers of his/her subordinates and passing them up the chain?
3. HOW MANY MEETINGS DO YOU ATTEND PER WEEK?
This can reveal a lot about an organizational element and its leader. Many meetings are just to fill up time, or are a daily social coffee clutch, or make the person in charge feel like he/she is actually “leading”. Many are a colossal waste of time. If employees have time to attend too many meetings, they probably are not very busy to begin with.
4. WHAT DEPARTMENT REGULATIONS GUIDE YOUR WORK?
After reviewing the answers to the other questions, it may become apparent that these regulations are no longer necessary. This is another piece in getting the big organizational picture.
5. PRODUCT. A LIST, IN SINGLE SENTENCES, OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS:
Task force: Are the accomplishments in line with the mission or are they just doing “busy work”?
6. A SHORT STATEMENT OF VALUE ADDED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF…..(AGRICULTURE). That is, “without us the Department would not/could not do the following……….”
Human nature being what it is, some of these “one-page” requirements will become multiple pages from those subordinate leaders who believe their work to too important to be summarized onto one page. This is where the task force makes it known this is a serious and important initiative. Reports that do not meet the task force’s standard should, without even being reviewed, be returned with an “F” on it and a note to, “re-do in the proper format and submit by 0800 tomorrow.” This will get everyone’s attention. Any leader of an element should be able to produce their one-pager in a few minutes.
Task Force progress: Having looked at this first layer in the organization chart, the task force will then assess the relevance of the next level; are they adding value or just a pass-through to the next higher? They will assess span of control issues. This review process may lead the task force to come to an overall conclusion that the Department has too much layering which slows everything down, stifles ingenuity, complicates communications, leads to dysfunction and misunderstanding of assignments.
Vice President Pence should randomly attend Departmental Task Force sessions every week. He will be grading their work and progress; are they tough enough, too tough, thorough enough, on the right track? The VP will also be able to pick up strong points of a Department’s process and pass it along to other Departments as best practices.
During the process, it is important to not lose sight of the objective. The objective is NOT to reach some specific lower number of federal employees. The objective is to rid the government of “boxes” in the organization charts that have no “value added”, they just exist because they have always been there. The end state is an organization that is leaner, more focused, more efficient, more effective, and agile.
But, it will take leadership and a trememdous organized effort by someone senior enough to make it happen. Vice President Pence is the logical choice.
This process may look tedious and time consuming. Because it is. But unless you begin at the bottom and unless you include every element, you will never achieve complete success.
Once the task force has worked it way up from the bottom, looking at every element and finally looking at the mission, value added, etc. of a Directorate, then and only then will they be capable of looking back and seeing how many subordinate elements are off track, irrelevant, unnecessary or even counter productive. Then the task force will be capable of restructuring, re-aligning, re-tasking re-organizing the subordinate elements to create an organization that is more focused, aligned, responsive, innovative, agile and get rid of pockets of resistance.
Why do all of this work? Two reasons: 1) The most common attempts at downsizing, in my experience used numerous times over the past few decades, have been to declare a hiring freeze or order an across-the-board 10% cut, neither of which makes any sense nor achieves any positive result. 2) What I have described above has never been done before. We have just allowed the Executive Branch to grow without ever undertaking a necessary pruning process.
When completed, many positions (perhaps tens of thousands of them) will be eliminated. It will then take a couple years of shuffling the deck by the Office of Personnel Management to get folks reassigned or retired, but it is within the art of the possible and monetarily worth the effort. This could easily result in a 10-20% reduction in the Executive Branch civilian work force. Every 1% reduction in end-strength equals about a $1.5 billion saving in annual salary plus elimination of long-term retirement pay.
These three efforts by the Vice President will change the look, the feel, the capability and the agility of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.
Marvin L. Covault, Lieutenant General, US Army, retired. Author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders and WETHEPEOPLESPEAKING.COM, a blog on politics, national and international issues.