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.
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Ron Sims at HUD
I don’t know a great deal about Ron Sims, head of King County in Washington (that’s Seattle and some surrounding areas), but apparently he’s going to be Deputy Secretary at HUD and based on Kate Sheppard’s writeup he seems like an excellent choice:
Sims has built up a national reputation for his efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the Seattle area and prepare the region for some of the now-unavoidable impacts of climate change. His work on global warming helped earn him acknowledgement as a Public Official of the Year in 2006 from Governing magazine, which honored him again in 2008 as one of America’s Innovative Leaders for his work on mass transit.
King County’s plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions was enacted in 2007, and it’s already seeing results. According to its most recent climate report, in 2007 the county reduced emissions from its operations by more than 6 percent below 2000 levels, as measured by the Chicago Climate Exchange, a voluntary cap-and-trade market. It was the first county to join the exchange, and King County Metro Transit was the first major bus transit agency to join. [...]
In his new post, Sims will apply lessons learned from his work in the Seattle area, but also take inspiration from cities like Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, and San Francisco, where mayors have launched innovative programs to curb emissions. “My job is to find those areas where folks are doing that and say, folks, let’s meet, let’s begin to work with Secretary Donavan on a strategy that basically says we’re not having to start from scratch,” said Sims.
The Seattle are is far from the ideal in terms of transportation policy, but my understanding is that they’ve made some important strides in recent years and that it’s one of relatively few metro areas where political leaders understand that controlling demand for space on roads—rather than endlessly building more highways—is the key to resolving congestion issues.
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