The Generational Shift Needs to Happen in the Federal Workforce

Ross Gianfortune
This is GovExec Daily, where we bring you the federal stories that really matter.  It's February 23, 2023. I’m Ross Gianfortune.

America is aging, with the baby boom generation moving into retirement. A third of all American workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are over the age of 50. But as much as the broader workforce is aging, the federal workforce is surpassing it, with more than 43 percent of federal employees over the age of 50. The retirement wave that hangs over the federal workforce has been slow going, but attrition without replacing those workers with younger workers means a loss of institutional knowledge, professional experience and, ultimately, mission delivery. 

Our show has talked a lot recently about government modernization and that includes reforming the human capital systems to bring in more young workers. Our guests today argue in a recent op-ed that sustaining the federal workforce means making it easier to hire more young workers. The federal government, they note, needs to recruit and retain a new generation of “idealistic, energetic, skilled and diverse individuals.”

Anthony Fauci spent more than 50 years in government service, including as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Max Stier is the president and CEO of the nonpartisan nonprofit, Partnership for Public Service. They are co-authors of a Washington Post op-ed headlined  “The federal workforce is aging. It’s time for a new generation.” After a short break, they’ll join the podcast to talk about how to recruit more young people into government service.

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Ross Gianfortune

Seven percent of full-time feds are younger than 30 as compared to 20% in the broader labor market, that's from OPM and BLS statistics. Why does the federal workforce need to get younger? What's wrong with having experience? And why does this matter right now?

Anthony Fauci  
Well, I think the first thing that you have to emphasize so that people don't get a distorted or skewed impression of what we're talking about. There's nothing wrong with people who have a lot of experience into I've been doing this for a very long time. But if you want to have a sustainability of fresh new ideas of individuals, who will actually be the leaders of the future, within the framework of government, when you have a percentage of people who are at a younger age that is so low, that just tells you that within a period of time, that skewing will even get worse. So the way you get a system to really flourish, is to make sure there's a constant inflow of new ideas. And people who bring a different perspective and younger people do that. Again, there's sometimes a misinterpretation, that you're comparing the value of young people versus the value of old people. That's really not what we were talking about. We were talking about the sustainability of freshness, vibrancy and enthusiasm that comes with young people. And the more we do that, I think the more vital our government service will be.

Max Stier  
Yeah, I agree. 100% I think this is fundamentally about generational diversity. And it's a now issue because younger people come to the table with different ideas, different capabilities. I think about you know, my son as a as a digital native and he understands technology in a way I don't. I would add that that 7% Number You referenced is the general number for those under the age of 30 the numbers 4% for those in the IT The area which is counterintuitive, and even more troubling, and it's as Dr. Fauci said, a problem for the future, because those are the people who you hope to grow into the more experienced leaders over time, and you just don't have them. But my very first job in the federal government was as a Special Counsel in the antitrust division two and Megaman in a long, long time ago, I should say. And one of the things that she recognized was that, that the antitrust division didn't have the traditional paralegal complement that every other legal organization she'd ever seen had a people fresh out of college who came for a short period of time, two years into the legal organization gave them an opportunity to check out whether they wanted to go in the law and gave incredible energy to the organizations they join. I will tell you that the managers in the antitrust division resisted, is mightily when an proposed bringing in traditional paralegals, they were like we need full time lawyers, we don't need these people are going to be here and gone. A year after she started the program, you would have had to have those managers to take the talent away, the energy of the organization was changed the flow of ideas, the innovation, it fundamentally changed the entire pace, and and thoughtfulness of the organization to have that cohort well represented. And we need to see that writ large in our in our government.

Anthony Fauci  
And there are I think every discipline has good examples of that Max gave a really good example. An example that I've experienced over a long period of time in my own laboratory, which is a scientific laboratory at the NIH that I ran for over 40 years, is that when you bring in continual flow of young people, they may not have the experience of the older ones. But they ask questions that generally when you've been around for a long time, you kind of don't ask those questions, because you just accept things as the way they were when someone brand new comes in. They don't hang on to tradition, because they've only been there for a very brief period of time. And they ask some very probing questions that can in fact, inspire the middle level and older individuals to start rethinking about things in a new way. So young people in an organization, not only for themselves being young, and with fresh thoughts, but they also instill into people who are a bit older, these newer thoughts. So it isn't as just they're the only ones that have a lock on freshness, but they can instill freshness into the organization,

Courtney Bublé  
Gen Z, young millennials, they're often very keen on making a difference, and doing good for the world, being politically active. But oftentimes, you know, we're seeing they're saddled with student debt. They're trying to afford rent in expensive cities, they're navigating economic uncertainties, most recently from the pandemic. How would you kind of square those two things with wanting to get you know, more young people in government?

Max Stier  
There's no question that the financial pressures and the debt loads, for those coming out of school today are, are crushing it are grown. I mean, it's become a larger and larger problem. I will say that this is in many ways a question of prioritization of by federal leaders, there are authorities for agencies to provide student loan forgiveness as part of their compensation package, and of consequential size. And so this, to me is more than anything else, a leadership issue, we need leaders inside government to prioritize, you know, first and foremost, the recognition that this is important to have this generational diversity, to ensure that there are actually jobs that are available for young people. So as Dr. Fauci said, it's not just about prior experience, but also about capacity, looking for people who can be trained and then create value over time. It's about putting the money out so that you can deal with issues like debt forgiveness, and creating environments that are going to retain the talent in investing in managers to learn how to support and engage and help younger people learn, which is how they're going to keep them.

Anthony Fauci  
Again, just get back to get back to some specific examples in the very early years of the HIV AIDS pandemic. It was very difficult to get young people involved in this particular line of research because it was brand new, and there was uncertainty in it. And we needed young good investigators with MD MD PhD approaches, they wouldn't want to come into the research agenda, the research arena, excuse me, because of the financial burdens that we're talking about now coming out of medical school or their postdocs with a large amount of debt. So we We instituted, and this was quite a long time ago, a debt forgiveness program for them that was specific for that field, it was so successful in getting young people involved in a very important scientific arena, that again, got adopted by the NIH to have loan forgiveness for a number of disciplines. And the results of that are overwhelmingly positive in getting a number of young individuals involved in a field that would not nearly have been as successful without them.

Max Stier  
At heart, most people I believe in I think, certainly most Gen Zers. Having two children myself of that of that era, they care about purpose, they're looking for an opportunity to make the world a better place. The federal government has the most powerful value proposition on this floor of any employer, in the country and in the world. And this is really about unlocking that incredible value proposition, the opportunity is there. And now we need to make it real in order to deliver on having the right talent mix in our government, and better services for the American people.

Anthony Fauci  
You know, Max, I asked my special assistant who has children as you do in that age group. And I said, “What do you think the characteristics of young individuals in that age group, and I'll just read you a note, because it's always absolutely what you said.” “They value experience on material things, being genuine appreciate appreciating transparency, they have a desire to keep learning, and are open to learning new things, new trades, new experiences.” And I can tell you, from my own experience in the government, the opportunity to expand your knowledge and learn new things, is plentiful. And I think that's an unappreciated reality of government service is the opportunity of how many people we know come in at one level in one area of interest, who, because of the opportunities to expand your range of knowledge, have wound up in a situation different from and much more gratifying than when they originally came in?

Ross Gianfortune  
Certainly, I know there's a lot of senior executive service people who have in been in those exact situations to move from mission to mission and keep learning and things like that. But let's sort of talk about the pipeline. And the way that you get people into these jobs. USA Jobs is sort of famously slow and difficult to navigate developing these pipelines, should agency HR shops be specific to them? Is this an internship thing? Is this direct hire authority? Things like how do you execute this pipeline idea to get people in federal service that are Gen Z, or young millennials?

Max Stier  
At the end of the day, in my view, the buck stops with the leadership, that there are a set of hurdles in order to be able to attract that next generation into public service that needs to be addressed. And I want to walk through very quickly what those are. But it begins with leadership, recognizing, as Dr. Fauci does, how important that is. And none of it happens without that commitment. And part of the challenge is that everyone is in firefighter mode, which means that they're focusing on the problem of the second and not on the long term investment needed to address that pipeline. I believe there are four core issues that need to be addressed. And I'm going to deal with them temporarily, as opposed to in order of importance. But it begins with the fact that the federal brand is tainted in many respects as a master brand. And we've done a bunch of research around this. If you say the federal government, one people assume that you're talking about Pickering politicians in Washington, they don't actually think about career civil servants. And we need to change that. So they actually understand the nature of our government in the fact that it is actually made up of professional talented career civil servants that are largely not in Washington, DC. Second, they're not aware of specific opportunities for themselves. So if they're an engineer, they don't recognize the federal government is the largest employer of engineers. And that goes for any profession that one can think of. Third, and very importantly, you've identified the hiring process itself is broken in many different ways, including the difficulty of using USA Jobs, but that also extends inside the agencies with classification challenges where it's a you know, it's a broken system around having to classify every single job in different very arcane ways. And then we come to the retention question, which Dr. Fauci referenced in terms of the kinds of things that are gonna actually pull Hold on to young people who decide they want to come to government get through the process and arrive. By and large, the retention numbers are not as good at that at that cohort level as it is for the rest of government. And we're not investing enough there. So we need to deal with all those problems. And it requires ultimately, leadership commitment to make it happen. And at the end of the day, there's such a strong value proposition that it is doable, and will make a big difference if we do it.

Courtney Bublé  
Max, I have a follow up question. You brought up congressional leadership. Are there specific bills you could think of that Congress should give more attention to or legislation you'd like to see, because if it doesn't happen from the agency, you might have to have it from Congress, especially if you want to talk about sustained change, you know, when it's ministration coming in the next, what more would you like to see from Congress?

Max Stier  
So I definitely think there are ways in which Congress can make systemic changes that would improve the functioning of government. I do think that there's a lot that can be done even without legislative change. You mentioned earlier student internships. Again, every organization that I'm familiar with outside the federal government in this country, uses student internships as their primary entry pipeline for for new talent, that does not happen in the federal government. You know, it happens in pockets. And but it does not generally, it's not the general strategy for most agencies. And that's something that actually can change. Without any rule changes, there's some rule changes would make it easier. But by and large, that's something that can happen in the here. And now without requiring legislative change. There are some issues that I think, are fundamentally legislative in nature. An example of that would be our pay system, I think it's quite remarkable that we have, again, across the government, a pay system that was designed in 1949, when the bulk of government workers were clerical workers, not professionals, as they are today. And the concern was about creating internal equity, as opposed to market connectivity against specific occupations. And there are attempts to make fixes where you have, you know, PM, creating special pay schedules and certain occupations, there needs to be a broader reform. So that we're you know, you're never going to have a federal government that can compete against the top top dollar for a lot of this critical talent. But it's important to be in the ballpark. And by and large, the federal government is not in certain occupations where there's high competition for for the talent. And so that would be an example where I think it's incumbent upon Congress to, to make some significant changes to the way we compensate civil servants so that it's not a general across the board pay increase, the one that is actually targeting resources to where there are market needs in order to be able to generate the talent that you want.

Anthony Fauci  
Yeah. And Max, I think the one of the things you mentioned in the first part of what you just said, your explanation, the whole idea of the internship programs is so, so vitally important, you know, we have these management interns that come through when I was at the NIH, and they have the opportunity of rotating for a few months at a time in different subsections of a particular agency. So they get a feel for the entirety of the agency's mission. And I have to tell you, Max, I have, I never say never, but I don't recall anyone who went through that program who didn't come out, absolutely enthusiastic about wanting to stay on in government. And I think if you just give them the opportunity to get a taste of it, to see what the opportunities are, that's when we'll get the very brightest in here. So I think an enhancement of those internship and internship related programs would be a very, very big step in the direction of getting even more talented people. And

Max Stier  
I agree entirely, and I think it's both, many people might be willing to experiment, take 10 or 12 weeks to try out a government agency and not commit to full time employment and they get get hooked. And I also think, equally important, it's the best way to assess talent. There's no tests, no interview, nothing that is as good as an opportunity to work with someone in determining whether they're the right talent for the job. And so we struggle in the federal government all the time with assessment, this is the best way to assess is to actually try somebody out. So, and it's scary when you look at how few interns there are actually in the federal government. And even more important how few interns are part of internships that are strategic, which are actually part of the human capital planning as opposed to, you know, friends and family program. And so that is something that agencies can and should be doing now, as Dr. Fauci stated, you know, NIH is doing stuff, there's, you'll see, pretty much everything that should happen in government is happening someplace, just often not in as many places as you want it to. So actually surfacing bright spots is an important way of generating improvement across government. And the mobility point that Dr. Fauci made is also fundamental, we need people to move around. And that will help keep them and it will give them better perspective and make them more effective.

Courtney Bublé  
In talking about, you know, the importance of internships, do you foresee these internships being able to be paid because I know that's often a barrier to entry for a lot of students, especially if they have student debt.

Anthony Fauci  
There are always, at least in the more than five decades that I've been in government, before I stepped down recently, there are always understandable budgetary constraints. But what you have to do is analyze what the priority of a very mild to modest investment in a certain area what the ultimate payoff is, I mean, there, there has to be a sensitivity to the fact that there's not unlimited money. And I have to have dealt with that for a very long time in the area that I was in, in the government. But one of the things that's important to do is to balance what the ratio of investment versus outcome is, and the amount of investment that you would put in getting a salary even though it could be modest, though it may be for an intern, that you can get a certain percentage of those people that ultimately would get really turned on. By the experience. It's like a very, very high interest bearing investment.

Ross Gianfortune  
I'll ask again, about execution. The Partnership for Public Service has the ear of a lot of important people in town, it's an influential shop. Max, what is the partnership's role in moving this ball forward and executing these kind of recommendations?

Max Stier  
I think Dr. Fauci is influential, we are not influential enough. So I'm very, very pleased to do anything I can with Dr. Fauci, who is who is obviously done so much for our country? And it is it is, it is fantastic that he is taken on this issue as his next act. So you know, the answer is that there's a lot that can be done. And it is important to recognize that we all have a piece of this. So yes, there are reforms that Congress should pursue, they could make it easier to, for agencies to convert, its student interns. So as this seems very tactical, but it's actually quite important. Today, if you are hired as a student intern, as part of the Pathways Program, by a federal agency, you can convert easily into a full time employee, if a third party is actually hired intern doing the exact same job as the intern who was working directly for the government, that conversion rate is not there. And it actually is, is is not sensible, that evaluation is done by the same person, that federal agency, you actually can get a lot of great and diverse talent through these third party providers of interns. So there are rules like that that could and should be changed and can't be done by Congress. But even more important, I think the agencies themselves have the ability to prioritize the need, as Dr. Fauci just stated, both in terms of providing pay, but also in actually providing positions for people who are newer to the workforce. And and it's going to require no real work to make that happen. You know, it's one of the more surprising aspects here, which is, many agencies prioritize prior experience over people who have high capacity and can learn in ways that diminish the opportunities for so set aside all these other challenges. You don't have the demand signal from the agencies, you're never going to change this proportion, issue. So but this is this, there's a piece of this for everybody. I think there are good models of success, which is also very important to recognize, and that we can replicate. But it begins again with everyone taking ownership of this as an issue.

Courtney Buble  
Dr. Fauci, the last time we spoke, I believe it was in September you said that as you're thinking about your next act as you about to leave government that you might want to work on you know, inspiring the next generation of young scientists in your next move. Can you give us any updates on what else you'll be doing besides working with the partnership?

Anthony Fauci  
Well with all due respect, working with the partnership is not gonna be my main activity. I love Max but.

Courtney Bublé  
Tell us what's next.

Anthony Fauci  
Well, no, actually. Oh, Um, the reason I was attracted to my discussions with Max is that coming from different directions, we're gonna be able to accomplish the same thing. So one of the things I made it as a stated goal of what I was going to do is I'm going to continue in the arena of science and public health. But I'm going to do it in the sense of trying to partner with or attract younger people, both by inspiration of what I write what I speak, for example, I will be writing, starting probably within the next month, my memoir, which is my experience of, you know, a young boy who grew up in the streets of New York City, and then found his way into the field of medicine, and then got involved in a half a century career at the National Institutes of Health and the opportunities that I've had and the challenges that I had, that's one way to inspire younger people who would read something like that, I mean, my main goal is to maybe have everybody read it, they may get something out of it, but predominantly, for young people who might be considering going into public service, that that might be something that they could latch on to, I also, will very likely, I'm negotiating about that now associate myself, with the university, on a senior staff. And when I'm on that senior staff, one of the critical goals rather than doing more research or writing more papers will be to try and get to a situation where I can inspire younger individuals to seriously consider a career in the career that I've chosen. Science, Medicine, public service, public health. So those are the things I'm going to be doing. So that's why when people say retired, I stepped down from federal service, but I'm not exactly retiring. Well, to that end,

Ross Gianfortune  
I guess, we'll end on this, can you talk about the value of public service?

Anthony Fauci  
What it means to me is that when it comes down to you look at yourself, your inner self, of what it is that you accomplish in what you do, the gratification of having a positive impact that goes well beyond yourself. And those immediately around you is a feeling the likes of which it's difficult to explain. It just it really surpasses any other feeling of gratification that you can. And I did it from the field of medicine and science and research. But there are countless other ways that you can do that. If you go to work in the morning, and you are doing something that is going to have impact. And that's it said in the title of what we're talking about public service, you are serving someone other than just yourself. And depending upon the field you're in, that may be millions of people, not only in this country, but globally, because the United States has such an impact in so many areas at a global level. I mean that, you know, at the end of the day, you've got to feel good about what you're doing, you know, when all other things are considered that ranks right up there. So that's really what I mean by the kind of feeling that you get when you're doing that on a day by day basis.

Ross Gianfortune  
Thanks so much for being on the show with us and we appreciate your time.

Anthony Fauci  
My pleasure. Good to be with you guys.

Max Stier  
Thank you very much.

Ross Gianfortune
Thanks for listening to GovExec Daily. Our show was produced and hosted by Courtney Bublé and me, Ross Gianfortune. We want to thank Max Stier and Anthony Fauci for joining the program. Our music is the song “Signals” by Catfish Dancing. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can email us any feedback at podcast @ govexec.com or hit us on Twitter @ Govexec. Check us out on Facebook or LinkedIn by searching for Government Executive.

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