What a Waste

HEADNOTE

VIEWPOINT

HEADNOTE

Federal agencies could learn a thing or two from private industry about letting workers get the job done.

Last

summer, I spent three weeks in Iraq as a temporary employee for the Defense Department, helping develop a compensation system for the Iraqi civil service. This was my first experience as a federal employee, and what I found was eye-opening. The federal employees I met were highly competent, articulate, dedicated and did great work under difficult conditions. But often, the processes within which they worked were inefficient, sometimes ridiculously so.

In preparation for mv assignment. I attended orientation at Fort Belvoir, Va. Two hours of processing there were "crammed into a long, nine-hour day," as one of my colleagues put it. Getting an ID badge at the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters in Baghdad, which should have taken minutes, took three hours over four days. Government employees and contractors expected to "hurry up and wait."