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Rating the agencies

- March 30, 2009

Every other year the Office of Personnel Management conducts a mammoth survey of the federal workforce. 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). In the 2008 survey, the results of which were released a couple of months ago, 37 agencies were rated.

The official release of the results listed only the agencies that placed in the top ten of each of the four categories, apparently to avoid embarrassing the bottom-dwelling agencies. Joe Davidson of the Washington Post subsequently obtained the complete lists, which included all 37 agencies, and identified the bottom ten on each dimension as well as the top ten in a piece in the Post. He also put the full listings — ratings as well as rankings — for all 37 agencies available online.

Working from the online data, I determined that the four dimensions are easily reducible to one overall dimension; the correlations between agencies’scores on any pair of dimensions are all .88 or above. In plain English, the four sets of scores, despite some idiosyncrasies, all boil down to the same thing, which we can think of as an agency’s overall performance in management and administration.

Combining the four sets of scores into a single standardized score produces the following:

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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. (I don’t know much about the Broadcasting Board of Governors and haven’t been able to dig out much, except that the former chair, Kenneth Tomlinson, was accused of, but not prosecuted for, improprieties of various sorts both there and in his previous stint as chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)