The Office of Personnel Management is giving agencies a brighter green light to make their chief information officers political appointees.
OPM is telling agencies they can reclassify these senior executive service (SES) roles to general instead of career reserve. The new policy is asking agencies to send their reclassifications to OPM by Feb. 14.
One key part of the memo is OPM is only “recommending” and not mandating this change.
“Under the last administration, agency CIOs often had ‘responsibility for or substantial involvement in the determination or public advocacy of the major controversial policies of the Administration or agency.’ These policies involved such issues as cybersecurity; artificial intelligence and machine learning; digital infrastructure, including internet, cloud and privacy policy; government accountability and efficiency; digital access and communications; diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, and sustainability and innovation,” the memo stated. “Each of these items standing alone and all of them taken together amount to significant political issues over which CIOs exercise authority. When an agency CIO makes policy choices about which of these topics to prioritize and fund — and which should be deemphasized or defunded — the CIO determines government policy in important ways.”
At the same time, OPM issued another similar memo that focused more broadly on members of the SES. Agencies were told to revert any positions the Biden administration moved from “general” to “career reserve.”
“Congress was clear that a SES ‘position shall be designated as a career reserved position only if the filling of the position by a career appointee is necessary to ensure the impartiality, or the public’s confidence in the impartiality, of the government,’” OPM stated. “Limiting the managerial flexibility of agency heads or the President over a class of officials defined by their ‘exercise [of] important policy-making, policy determining, or other executive functions,’ raises serious constitutional concerns.”
Deadline to look at SES positions
Agencies have 45 days to send a report of those positions that should be or are in the process of being redesignated.
“If an agency head believes that the President’s goals and priorities would be better served by keeping any such positions as career reserved positions, the agency head shall submit a request to retain the specific position as a designated career reserved position and explain the reasons therefore,” OPM stated.
While there was some hand wringing in the federal community over this move particularly for the CIOs, experts say both of these memos are more of a meow than a roar when it comes to changing the classification of SESers.
“On surface, the CIO memos is not that big of a deal,” said Jason Briefel, the director of policy and outreach at the Senior Executives Association. “Within the SES, there are certain slots that are ‘career reserved’ and there are several slots that are ‘general’ positions that could be held by career employees or non-career SES or limited term or emergency appointees. That is the design of the SES system. At the governmentwide and agencywide levels, they have flexibilities and caps on what percentage need to be appointees. The smaller portion of the posts for SES slots are for non-career appointees and administrations always have had them.”
The debate over whether an agency CIO should be a political appointee has raged for much of the last 30 years.
CIO classifications have flip-flopped
Some agencies, such as the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, have political CIOs because Congress wrote them into law. Other agencies, including the departments of Energy, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, have moved the CIO position from career reserve to general when it suited their needs for a specific hire.
To many, the answer of whether a CIO should be career or political continues to remain as it has for the last almost 30 years: It depends. But what has become clearer than ever is the role of managing, implementing and securing technology puts the CIO and deputy CIO on a higher plane across all agencies.
Thus, requiring the federal community to continually re-ask the political appointee question.
“How the agency positions the CIO’s role in theory versus practice for the best possible function is really a question of how the head of the agency and the culture of that agency sets that role up for success,” said Dan Chenok, the former Office of Management and Budget official who helped with the Clinger-Cohen Act and now executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, told Federal News Network back in June when HUD transitioned its CIO back to career from political. “Given the ubiquity of technology today, what is the right balance? My own personal view is a political CIO is more likely to be close to the head of the agency, and a career deputy CIO gives you continuity.”
The Trump administration is moving quickly to fill several CIO positions with political appointees. Greg Hogan came to OPM to lead its technology office; Michael Russo is now the CIO at the Social Security Administration; and late last week Ryan Reidel joined the Energy Department from Space X as its new CIO.
Of those three, both SSA and Energy have been political appointees in the past. OPM has traditionally been a career position.
Expanding the CIO talent pool
One former CIO, who requested anonymity because they didn’t get permission to speak to the press from their current company, said reclassifying CIOs will help bring in better qualified technology leaders.
“Technology is changing and most federal agency CIOs have little technology background. They are good leaders or mangers, but they aren’t going to be super technical. They need to be today,” the former executive said. “As a simple example, CIOs need to have been a product manager or have deep experience in things like DevSecOps. They need to be a practioner and if you haven’t seen it and done it, you can’t manage it and improve agency technology as well.
Agencies are really software companies that need to ship product and lot of CIOs haven’t done that. This memo does make it easier for a SES person who doesn’t just have to be a career person.”
The former CIO said being a political appointee is less important as to whether they are successful in improving the agency’s technology services. It’s all about the person’s background.
Another former CIO, however, disagreed with that idea that CIOs coming from the private sector are usually better qualified.
This former technology executive said while most agency level CIOs need to know enough about technology not to get “fooled” by contractors or others, their biggest skillsets are to manage the people, process and culture of their agency.
A key piece of OPM’s memo recognizes how the role of a CIO has changed over the years.
“To be sure, like many policy-determining and policy-advocating jobs throughout the government, agency CIO roles require a baseline of technical knowledge necessary to understand broader issues and make decisions for the agency,” OPM stated. “But a modern agency CIO is not a mere engineer, scientist or technocrat. He does not spend his days writing complex lines of code, setting up secure networks, or performing other ‘highly technical’ tasks. Instead, he crafts and effectuates policy, and sets and deploys his budget, based on his administration’s priorities.”
Rules for SESers don’t change
Briefel said OPM’s recommendation doesn’t change the fact all SESers must be qualified and approved by OPM.
He said general or career reserved positions still have to go through the Quality Review Board (QRB) process and get their executive core qualifications (ECQs) stamped by OPM.
“One of things SEA has been calling for as part of our reform agenda is that these mission support C-suite functions should be career SES because agency operations are complicated and much different than the private sector. We know that for many coming into these roles from the private sector can be challenging,” Briefel said. “So if an agency is making the CIO a general SES allocation, then they also should make sure their deputy CIO is a career reserve so they have continuity and senior level accountability if appointees come and go.”
Briefel added that reallocating CIO roles to general from career reserved has no connection to the return of “Schedule F,” or what is now called “policy/career” classification of federal employee. He said members of the SES already are “at-will” employees and can be fired without regard to law.
“We don’t know what the new SES performance plans will look like and there are other unanswered questions about the future of the SES. Those are things we’d like to talk about with Trump administration, OMB and OPM about,” Briefel said.
The first former CIO said one other change would make sense for agency CIOs would be to make them term appointments. They said coming in for only two years limits what they can get done and impact agency modernization efforts.
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