Which Agencies Are the Best
Apparently on alternate years the Office of Personnel Management does a huge survey of the federal workforce in which they, among other things, rate each agency on four dimensions. Lee Siegelman determined that “the correlations between agencies’ scores on any pair of dimensions are all .88 or above” so you can useful combine the four scores into a single composite and then get a nice chart:
The best-run federal agencies, according to this measure, are the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Management and Budget, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Three cabinet departments — HUD, Homeland Security, and Transportation — are bottom-of-the-listers. The worst-run agency by far, though, appears to be the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees nonmilitary international broadcasting by the government. It used to be part of USIA, but it became independent in 1999, and, to judge by the assessments of those who work there, seems to be something of a disaster. What is it about the Broadcasting Board of Governors that’s soo bad? Basically everything, according to the OMB survey: It ranks dead-last on three of the four dimensions iand 36th of 37 on the other dimension.
Fortunately, the Broadcasting Board of Governors isn’t that big a deal in the scheme of things. By contrast, the low quality of HUD, DOT, and DHS is a very significant problem. There seem to be some very interesting ideas about sustainable communities coming from the leadership at HUD and DOT that I’m very interested in, and that have important implications for our long-run growth, quality of life, and ecological sustainability. But it seems to me that these initiatives are unlikely to be successful unless the agencies running them can be reasonably effective.
23 Responses to “Which Agencies Are the Best”
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March 31st, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Is there a link available to this chart on the OPM website? thanks
March 31st, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Way to excerpt without linking to the original article.
http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/03/post_177.html
March 31st, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Here’s the post Matt was drawing from, with the chart.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:43 pm
This chart should really be divided by ‘weight class’ – direct comparisons between these organizations of vastly different sizes and scope do not make much sense. And no matter their place on the chart, some elements of the big Cabinet deparments are run really well, and others really poorly, so averaging out their score hides both of these.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Matt, any idea which of the departments have the largest career-professional:appointee ratio? It’d be interesting if there is a correlation.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:48 pm
It should also be noted that this is largely a ’self assessment’, not an outside audit, so likely tracks with how the morale of the organization is at the time of the survey (even on top of the survey dimension which is specifically about ‘job satisfaction’)
March 31st, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Which makes it odd that the State Department was so high on the list; the conventional wisdom that it was in disarray including open revolt a couple of years ago wrt going to Iraq, plus the ‘hail the conquering hero’ reception to Clinton on her first day on the job.
March 31st, 2009 at 4:52 pm
From the responses of more than 200,000 federal employees, the OPM calculates agency-by-agency scores on four dimensions: leadership (which indicates how favorably employees of an agency regard their leaders), performance (which indicates the extent to which employees believe their agency promotes improvements in processes, products, and services), talent (which indicates the degree to which employees think their agency has the talent needed to achieve its goals), and job satisfaction (which indicates how satisfied employees are with their jobs).
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Wow. Just wow. All four of the “dimensions” deal with how employees “feel” about their jobs and their bosses and exactly nothing with actually accomplishing anything in the real world.
Only in the world of US government bureaucracy can you come up with a measure of effective organizational management that ignores whether the organization actually does anything or not.
Great chart, though
March 31st, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Yeah. NASA’s awesome!
March 31st, 2009 at 6:16 pm
I note that OPM itself falls square in the middle of the pack. Shape up, guys!
March 31st, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Yglesias should really change the title of this post from:
Which Agencies Are the Best
to:
Which Agencies Have the Happiest Bureaucrats
March 31st, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Oh, look at Commerce….
March 31st, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Matt, what are these scores? Your post doesn’t say what the 4 factors are or what they’re getting at.
March 31st, 2009 at 11:48 pm
“Which Agencies Have the Happiest Bureaucrats”
Or, which agencies have the happiest brainiacs. I’d say “scientists,” except the nerdlingers at OMB don’t exactly do science.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:22 am
Campesino for the win.
April 1st, 2009 at 4:50 am
Why does NASA rank so high? To outsiders, it’s got lots of problems ranging from no coherent mission to repeated failures of execution. Self-deception?
April 1st, 2009 at 8:29 am
Oh, just one more. According to this chart the *best* government agency is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And it approved construction for the last nuclear reactor in the US in 1977.
April 1st, 2009 at 9:51 am
I think it is a big deal for the over three thousand employees of the BBG. Considering their budget is close to a half a billion dollars and the important mission of the agency your comments are very thoughtless. People working for a small agency should not have to work in such a poor environment just because they are not such a “big deal in the scheme of things.” On the contrary, if I was in the Obama administration I would want to initiate positive change anywhere I could, large or small agency.
April 1st, 2009 at 10:40 am
So I guess it’s correlation on the x axis. But what are the “scores” based on? Way to publish a graph that probably means nothing. But who can tell?
Please, TRY to do better.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:15 pm
The Broadcasting Board of Governors is an important part of America’s public voice abroad.
According to the BBG.gov website:
“The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) encompasses all U.S. civilian international broadcasting, including the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), Radio and TV Martí, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN)—Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television.”
“BBG broadcasters distribute programming in 60 languages to an estimated weekly audience of 175 million people via radio, TV, the Internet and other new media. The BBG works to serve as an example of a free and professional press, reaching a worldwide audience with news, information, and relevant discussions.”
If it had any credibility it could be the BBC of American international diplomacy. Instead, its credibility suffered significantly under Republican Bush’s regime.
Considering how important international outreach is on multiple fronts, it seems like it could be far more important than Matt is giving it credit.
For instance, for as many US dollars are being spent in Afghanistan, wouldn’t it be useful to put up some radio towers along the AfPak border (assuming they’d stay up) that broadcast in the native languages honest news mixed with local music? Then give out free cheap radios to communities within the broadcast range.
If you’re trying to communicate to people, isn’t this still an effective outreach?
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:58 am
we’re number one! we’re number one!
April 8th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
This topic is quite trendy on the Internet right now. What do you pay the most attention to when choosing what to write about?
April 15th, 2009 at 5:03 am
If you ever want to read a reader’s feedback
, I rate this article for four from five. Detailed info, but I have to go to that damn yahoo to find the missed bits. Thank you, anyway!