Uncle Sam doesn't want you; government agencies are a haven for the mediocre because they don't try to get anybody better - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1990 by John Heilemann

"In the private sector, it's so straighforward; they have brochures describing their jobs, they come to campus to talk to you, and you can decide," says Rebecca Slaven, a 1990 Vanderbilt grad who interned on Capitol Hill, liked Washington, and thought for awhile about coming back to work at an agency. "But with the government, you can never find anything out. The recruiting materials at school are vague and way too general. You try to get information directly and no one knows what's available. You ask them to send you stuff and it never comes. After a while, you just decide it's not worth it."

Slaven knows better than most just how frustrating "getting the low-down" on federal employment can be. Her congressional internship was with Senator Pryor, who during the summer of 1989 decided to see whether Newman's OPM was living up to its promises. Pryor did what Congress rarely does: investigate a problem directly--in this case by sending his interns out to roam Washington's federal corridors. Go to the agencies, he told them, try to find out what jobs are there, come back and tell me what you learn.

Wha they found, in Pryor's understated words, was that "the system is not operating smoothly." OPM's new policy was to send would-be civil servants directly to the places where they wanted to work, but it seemed no one had though to inform the agencies. Personnel officers were brusque or absent; job listings were out of date; secretaries were frankly discouraging; many times the students couldn't even get past security at the buildings.

One intern, Libby Schnipper, was told by a disgruntled HUD staff member, "Look, you fill out the forms, we put your name into the computer, and we'll call you when it comes up." When, queried Schnipper, might that be? "Probably never." Another, Mary McLeod, says that when she visited the Department of Labor, a personnel staff member told her that unless she "knew someone" her chances of getting an interview were slim. "When I asked him how he got his job, he said, 'My mother works downstairs.'"

Meanwhile, J. D. Walth, then a young staff member for Pryor and currently a law student at the University of Arkansas, was dispatched on the most daunting of assignments--OPM itself. Daunting because the job information center at OPM's Washington headquarters has for years been notorious for its mind-numbing inefficiency. "It's pure hell over there," says Mary Ellen Glynn, a former legislative assistant on Capitol Hill who tried getting job information from OPM when she first came to Washington in 1987. "It's just form after form after form, all essentially indecipherable without some sort of secret code book. Long lines, unhelpful people, totally useless. I went in there at least three or four times, and I still don't have a clue about how you go about getting a federal job."

Hard to believe, but Walt found it worse than that. "They've got these computers that are supposed to answer your questions, but don't," he told me. "So I get in line to talk to one of the assistants. All of a sudden she looks up and says she's closing and that the last person she was going to wait on was the guy in the pink shirt. He was right in front of me. So I decided to wait, because I'd come all the way across town and all. When I got to the window, she pulled the partition right in my face, without even saying hello, goodbye, or I'm sorry. I was furious."