From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Centennial Webinar: Oversight Issues for the Next 100 Years

Description: For over 100 years, the federal government has used merit principles to support efforts to hire and retain an effective, high performing workforce, and to protect federal employees from political influence. On August 31, 2021, as part of GAO’s centennial, GAO and other experts discussed how the effective design and implementation of merit principles continue to impact the federal government's ability to attract a talented, high performing workforce that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive.


[Steven Putansu:] All right. Thanks, everyone for your patience as we get rolling here. I would like to welcome you all to the first webinar in GAO's Centennial Webinar Series, Foundations for Accountability, Oversight Issues for the Next 100 Years. Today, we're going to be talking about leading practices to manage, empower, and oversee the federal workforce, but before we do that, I'd like turn it over to Brody Garner who's going to share an introduction from the Comptroller General Gene Dodaro.

[Gene Dodaro:] Hello. I'm Gene Dodaro, Comptroller General of the United States and head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2021 marks GAO's 100th anniversary serving Congress and the American people. As part of our centennial celebration, we are pleased to present this webinar series called Foundations for Accountability, Oversight Issues for the Next 100 Years. We rely on a deep pool of expertise within and outside the agency to help monitor changes in public policy and management. In addition to our own people at GAO, we also consult with advisory panels, such as the Comptroller General's Educators Advisory Panel, independent researchers, and agency managers who implement the policies and programs we audit. We are proud to bring these experts together for webinars covering the following topics, leading practices to manage, empower, and oversee the federal workforce, building integrated portfolios of evidence for decision making, managing complexity across public policy challenges, the legal context of accountability, and major challenges for the next 100 years. These webinars will explore the goals, conflicts, tensions, and challenges that shape the need for rigorous, evidence-based decision making to improve government and support oversight. They will highlight promising and effective practices that can help achieve these goals and demonstrate what GAO has done and will continue to do to support in an ineffective, economical, efficient, equitable, and ethical federal government. I hope you will find them informative. Please enjoy.

[Steven Putansu:] So first, I want to thank the Comptroller General for his introduction and also for his support of the series, as I pull these slides back up. I also want to thank our panelists for agreeing to start the series off, and many people who've been working actually for more than a year now to plan and make this event happen and this whole series happen, with a special thanks to Mandi Pritchard and Brody Garner for their leadership in the series. As Gene mentioned in his remarks, GAO combines evidence from a variety of expertise areas and different evidence from scholarship, from practice, and I believe that one of GAO's biggest strengths is its efforts to hear from these diverse, wide range of stakeholders and seriously follow the evidence where it leads. For that reason, I'm personally very excited to see the range of perspectives at this and the other webinars in our series. For our first topic today, we're looking at leading practices to manage, empower, and oversee the federal workforce. Like many areas that GAO works in, this topic could easily span more than 90 minutes and today we're focusing on two major components of managing the workforce, the first being the merit system, and the second being efforts to recruit and retain a diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible workforce. We chose to address these two areas together because both are foundational cornerstones for ensuring that the government economically, effectively, efficiently, equitably, and ethically achieve results as Gene alluded to. For over 100 years, the federal government has used merit principles to support efforts to hire and retain an effective, high-performing workforce and to protect federal employees from political influence most famously associated with the spoils system. While these principles are focused on individual merit, scholarship and practice have increasingly demonstrated that group characteristics and improvements to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, or DEI&A, offer further benefits to workforce performance. Moreover, GAO has for decades, conducted reviews that include agency efforts to implement merit principles and/or achieve a diverse workforce, especially since the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which provided that for the federal workforce to reflect the nation's diversity, federal personnel management should follow merit principles, including treating employees fairly and equitably. Our speakers today will provide a range of perspectives and findings about these two topics, the relationships between them, related challenges, potential tensions, and efforts to achieve the goals of each, and we will attempt after the presentations to reflect on these lessons as GAO prepares for its next 100 years. I would like to take a moment to thank the speakers again, and I'm going to introduce them all before they present. However, I did want to have a few notes. Most of you who are here as participants are in listen-only mode. There is a chat box. The chat is open and active and you can feel free to chat in it. However, given the number of presenters we have and the time we have, fair warning that your questions, you know, may not be answered. We will be collecting them and saving them and kind of thinking about what to do with them afterwards to the extent that we can, but feel free to participate in that chat and to have kind of conversations that expand the dialog we're having here. Otherwise, I'm going to introduce each of our presenters and then I'm going to turn it over to Vicky Wilkins who is the first of them, so I will advance the slide. After that, each of them will present, and then we'll have a short roundtable Q&A at the end, but first, it's my pleasure to introduce Dean Vicky Wilkins, who's the Dean of School of Public Affairs at American University, where I did my graduate work, and a member of the Comptroller General's Educators Advisory Panel. She has led the School of Public Affairs in her role as Dean since July, 2018, and as the Chief Academic and Administrative Officer of the SPA, School of Public Affairs, she is responsible for the departments of government, the department of justice, law and criminology, and the department of public administration and policy. Under Dean Wilkins's leadership, SPA has experienced significant growth and it strengthens its position as a leader among schools of public Affairs. Dean Wilkins is a leading scholar in the field of political institutions, representation, bureaucratic discretion, race, gender, and human resource management. Her research appears in several academic journals including the American Political Science Review, Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Governance, Review of Public Personnel Administration, Administration of Society, the Policy Studies Journal, and The Legislative Studies Quarterly, just to name one or two. Dean Wilkins earned her BS in political science and history from Northern Michigan University. Her MS in human resource management from Chapman University and her PhD in political science from the University of Missouri. Today, she will be presenting a talk entitled introduction to representative bureaucracy and workforce diversity. Following Dean Wilkins, we'll have a presentation from Zina Merritt of GAO. She's a special assistant to the Comptroller General of the United States for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at GAO. Zina is in her -- she's been serving in her current capacity since November 2017 and is responsible for providing expert senior advisory services that help GAO promote an environment that's fair and unbiased and that values diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. Ms. Merritt led the effort to expand GAO's mission core values of accountability, integrity, and accountability to include what we call people values, to be valued, respected and treated fairly and ensure that these values were incorporated in executive expectations and agency policies and practices. Excuse me. She's responsible for overseeing the implementation of GAO's diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic implementation plan for 2019 through 2023, and has shared leading DE&I practices at forums and across federal agencies. These and other practices have contributed to GAO being ranked number one by the Partnership of Public Service for its support for diversity among midsize federal agencies for nine consecutive years. Ms. Merritt's received several GAO-wide awards including the distinguished service, meritorious service, community service, equal employment opportunity, diversity inclusion, and she's a two-time recipient of the John Henry Luke Mentoring Award. She completed the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government Senior Executive National and International Security and Women Empower Programming. She received a BS degree in business administration from Tuskegee University, and then MS degree in computer information systems from Texas A&M University in central Texas. Today, she'll be presenting intersectionality between GAO's people values, DE&I initiatives, and a merit-based performance system. Had to [inaudible] for a second there. Sorry about that. Following Zina, will be James Tsugawa. He's the Deputy Director of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board's Office of Policy and Evaluation where he's had responsibility for leading and supporting studies on federal merit system and assessing significant actions of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the federal government's central human resources agency. In that role, James has authored studies on selection, interviewing, automated hiring systems and employment and advancement of women in the federal government. He has previously worked as a policy specialist and evaluator with the U.S. OPM and as an HR Specialist within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. James was a member of the board of directors of the International Public Management Association for Human Resources Federal Section from 2002 through 2005, serving as the Federal Section President from 2004 and Co-Chair of the section's education committee from 2005 to 2007. James is a current member of ICMA-HR, the International Personnel Assessment Council, the American Society for Public Administration, and the Personnel Testing Counsel of Metropolitan Washington. James holds a BA degree in economics from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne. Today, he'll be presenting The Merit System in Federal Employment. Following James will be Dr. Shannon Portillo, who is the Associate Dean -- oh, gosh -- the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the University of Kansas Edwards Campus and the School of Professional Studies and a professor in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. Dr. Portillo's scholarship explores how formal policies and rules and informal social arms shape the work of public organizations. It's specifically interested in how racism and sexism impacts organizations and workers' experiences both historically and currently. Her work helps scholars and practitioners understand how inequities have been institutionalized in public organizations and workers' experiences both historically and currently, including courts, policy, city management, higher education, and the military. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Women's Foundation, the Army Research Institute, and other entities. Her work has appeared in a broad array of academic and popular outfits -- outlets, and she is currently working on her second book, To Me, Service is Core Value. Dr. Portillo serves as Co-Chair of Governor Laura Kelly's commission on racial equity and justice and the Chair of the Douglas County Commission, and today she'll be talking about the myth of bureaucratic neutrality, an examination of merit and representation. Finally, we will close today's session with Alissa Czyz, who's the Acting Director in the Strategic Issues Team at GAO. Ms. Czyz serves in this role currently and leads a portfolio of work on federal performance management and human capital issues. Prior to this role, Ms. Czyz spent 17 years in GAO's Defense Capabilities and Management Team. During that time, she managed reviews on a variety of topics including the Department of Defense's weapons systems sustainment, operational energy usage, humanitarian assistance efforts, prepositioning posture, whistleblower protections and interagency collaboration. Ms. Czyz holds a BA from Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, and an MA from American University. Today, she'll be presenting Leading Practices and Considerations for Workforce Diversity. As I mentioned, this is a just slam-dunk group of panelists. I want to thank everybody for agreeing to speak today and with that, I will it hand it over to Dean Wilkins. Dean Wilkins, if you could camera and unmute.

[Dr. Vicky Wilkins:] Hi, everyone. Thank you, Steven. Thanks so much for the introduction, and my thanks also to Brody and Amanda for their leadership in creating this series of webinars. It's truly an honor to be part of the celebration of 100 years of GAO. I'm also grateful to be included on this esteemed panel today. I'm always that student, I was always that student who wanted to go first when doing presentations, sometimes to get it over with of course, but often because I wanted to be able to focus and hear, and that's the case today. I'm excited to hear from my fellow panelists. I also am excited because I think with my remarks, I can lay sort of a foundation that we can start from in these conversations and hopefully build on and take a little deeper dive in what we can expect in these areas going forward. So that's my work ahead. Now I want to say that this webinar and the topics we're talking about really feature the hard work of leadership. We know that diversity in and of itself in our workforces are is not easy to obtain. It's something we work for. We something we put effort into and we also know that it can be a challenge to manage, and so it's important us together on this topic and understand that even though things that we recognize to be a good, operationally can be a challenge to us and a place that really tests our leadership and requires us to lean in and I'm excited to be part of this both as my practice of leadership and as my practice as a researcher. So I'm going to kind of start with the beginning discussion of why we think diversifying the workforce is a good strategy, and I'm going to go very high level here, because I know you're going to hear from analysts on this, but to gain some understanding, we expect that diversifying our workforces will expand the creativity, help us in problem solving by bringing different perspectives in, in a similar way in decision making we'll be able to hear more ideas, enhanced engagement from those in our workforce already, employee retention, and the reputation of those organizations. I also would like to say that I'm going to suggest that there's another strategy -- reason to diversify our workforce and that's going to be about representation and I'm going to talk about how representation can matter not only for those who are clients of our agencies and institutions but also for how we're viewed in the world and how others see us an engage with us, but we know that managing diversity is the key and that is a challenge and something we have to be ready for and prepared for. We know that sometimes diversity brings with it especially, in the short term, cultural misunderstandings, can increase discrimination, especially through stereotypes and prejudice that we see in our workforce. We know that trust is something that often needs to be built no matter what changes come in our workforce, so diversifying is part of that. That means that we need to allow time for groups to get to know each other, to work together. We know that ultimately diversity leads to the great challenge of building inclusion, right? -- that notion that having diversity in our workforce is at its best when we move to a place of inclusion where everyone is there and feeling an active participant who belongs, and we also know that this work is going to challenge us to use a frame of equity. I know in my own journey in the study and understanding, I'm now at that point where I feel in decision making, I'm often saying am I using an equity frame here? Is that perspective and lens that I'm using when I see these issues? But back to that notion that another benefit of diversifying our workforce --

[ Silence ]

[Steven Putansu:] Hi, everyone. It looks like we're having a little screen freeze, technical difficulties. Dean Wilkins, can you hear us? Are you there? Oh, she just dropped off. All right. Well, it wouldn't be an online event if we didn't have a technical issue, right? What I will do is I will go ahead and while she tries to get in, advance to our next speaker which is Zina Merritt. Zina, if you're on, could you turn on your video and unmute? And I think the order of these two presentations won't dramatically impact things, so Zina, if you could go ahead.

[Zina Merritt:] Greetings, everyone. Actually, the preface that was just made is an excellent tie-in to what I'm going to talk about from a GAO perspective. I want to thank Steven, and the other organizers and those who had a role behind the scenes in putting this together because it is very timely and very critical and important to federal agencies. So as GAO celebrates its centennial year, it is a perfect milestone to reflect on some key aspects of how the agency evolved to its most recent number one ranking by the Partnership for Public Service for best places to work among midsized federal agencies. Additionally, as Steven noted, we have also been ranked number one for our support for diversity for nine consecutive years. While widely known for our financial and legislative impacts, our reputation as a leading employer depends on more than just professional expertise. GAO has a long history of promoting and implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion actions that dates back to the 1960s when we became one of the first federal agencies to establish an equal opportunity program. GAO is an agency that has been on a continual journey to inclusion. It's a journey with notable successes and challenges, but we have made significant gains in sustaining our diversity. As an agency, we are committed to ensuring that our entire workforce plays a role in supporting our journey to creating an even more inclusive environment. Having nearly 3,200 diverse, highly professional, motivated, multidisciplinary employees helps GAO fulfil its mission to support the Congress and help improve the performance and accountability of government for the benefit of the American people. Each person's skills, talents, experiences, and characteristics broaden the range of perspectives and in approaches to GAO's work. One of the key contributing factors to GAO's success is our diversity management which is supported through the organization's commitment and high emphasis on what we refer to our as our people values of valuing, respecting, and treating all employees fairly. In November 2017, GAO expanded its mission core values of accountability, integrity, and reliability to include these people values. The underlying tenets of these people values factor into, among other things, diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility considerations in our outreach and recruitment of new employees, training and development, advancement, and retention of our employees. Additionally, our DE&I efforts are guided by a five-year diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic implementation plan that is anchored in the objectives of our agency's strategic plan. It includes priorities that reflect areas that we believe will help GAO achieve its strategic goals and policy objectives. Just as we added equity to our lexicon noted in our strategic document, we will add accessibility in the next iteration, although in practice, it's always been a consideration. In my view, our diversity management positively effects individual employee performance and the agency as a whole in accomplishing its mission. Specifically, our diversity management efforts complement our merit-based principles and practices to enhance organizational effectiveness. GAO's merit-based performance system and accompanying policies are implemented through processes that incorporate tenets of diversity, equity, and inclusion. For example, in implementing our merit-based performance policy, our human capital office, our office of opportunity and inclusiveness which is the equivalent of an EEO office in other organizations, and myself, conduct a review of results of yearly appraisals to provide reasonable assurance that he performance appraisal process is operating fairly across all employee demographic categories. We examine trends over time and identify to the extent possible any inconsistencies in the application of assessment processes and implement mitigating actions if they are required. This is a key point of intersectionality with our DE&I strategic implementation plan and our working definition of equity which is the fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all GAO employees, while at the same time, striving to identify and eliminate any barriers that could prevent the full participation of any employee. We help to ensure in collaboration with our executives and managers that during pre- and post-assessment periods, employees are provided meaningful and constructive feedback, as well as pathways to development opportunities. To complement the latter, our diversity management initiatives have adopted a more active and broad-based approach focusing on employee development initiatives such as mentoring, coaching, and training opportunities that help employees excel and the competencies outlined in our merit-based performance process guidance. We also go an extra mile in promoting fairness and equity in human resource management. For example, unconscious bias training is offered to our managers who are responsible for employee development and assessing their performance. Additionally, employee groups have contributed by developing toolkits to assist employees and managers with career development. For example, one of the groups developed and launched a career action plan toolkit, which is a set of performance competency-based one-pagers that cover specific skills which may help GAO employees carry out their day-to-day work and perhaps assist them with their long-term career goals. I'd like to end on this note. Our organizational efforts on diversity management will not translate into high performance and an inclusive work environment without the support of our top-level leadership. The Comptroller General, Gene Dodaro, has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to our DE&I efforts. We have also witnessed the same unwavering spirit among GAO employees at all levels of the organization to include our employee advisory groups and our employee organizations even in these challenging times that we have experienced in an almost virtual environment totally. Our journey continues and we continue to implement actions regarding, among other things, proactively broadening the outreach of our diversity recruitment efforts and our succession pipeline. I could emphatically go on and on about all of the great things that we've done and efforts. However, I too want to hear from our other esteemed panelists, so I appreciate this opportunity to share information on GAO's DE&I efforts during this centennial event. Thank you.

[Steven Putansu:] Thank you so much, Zina. And now I believe we have Dean Wilkins back. So Zina told us a little bit about what GAO is doing with merit and with diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we're going to turn back to Dean Wilkins who's going to show us some the reasons and the research why it's important for that to be happening, so feel free to take over.

[Dr. Vicky Wilkins:] Thanks, everyone. Sorry about that. Nothing gets the heart pounding and the blood flowing like you're whole system going down and the electricity going off in the middle of remarks, but I'm glad to be back. It's the first week of classes, so who knows what's going on on campus? But as I was saying, I wanted to share with you what I think is another important reason to think through the diversity of our workforce and that comes to the issue of representation. I work in a field of study under the theory of representative bureaucracy, which generally concerns how demographic characteristics of someone working in a public agency affect the distribution and services provided by that organizations to clients who might share demographic characteristics with the bureaucrat, and as I mentioned, this was adopted from a frame put forward by Hanna Pitkin dealing with legislative bodies and Frederick Mosher started to think about two forms of representation we might see within a bureaucratic organization, and he called those passive and active representation. A bureaucracy is passively representative if, to the extent it employees minorities and women and individuals from underrepresented groups, to the extent it employees them to the proportion of their share of the population, or at least in proportion to the share of the population with the qualifications necessary for employment, and you might think back to the language that Bill Clinton used around building a cabinet that looked like America, and this is really thinking about how organizations can build a workforce that looks like the population or at least like the population they serve. The second type of representation specified by Mosher occurs when actually we see public employees pressing for the interests and desires of folks that they are presumed to represent, so through the shared demographic characteristics there may be an initiative to take up and be active in their representation, and it suggests that bureaucrats will act to see that the interests of individuals with whom they share an identity are appropriately considered at decisions affecting public policies and programs are made, and we often mark this with an understand that this representation comes with a identification and understanding of past discrimination that this group has met in dealing with these organizations. So we have passive representation and active representation that we think about and his research tried to study and understand, and of course, passive representation really goes to the sharing of characteristics. We know that they, you know, characteristics that we've studied and understand include gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, education, occupation, the other identity -- you know, not limited in any way to other identities, and we know that through having passive representation just through this act of having folks that look like the people they serve, we get the gains of role models, legitimization of the institution. It can yield changes in the organizational culture. It can be cues about participation for others outside the organization or even for those inside the organization. It can change the behavior of constituents and we'll talk a little about that, and it can increase the probability that by having public employees that look like the clients they serve, you might actually see them take up active representation, and as I mentioned, this involves some advocacy of the constituents' interests, making policy decisions that benefit a given group, and it involves action that can influence outputs and often in recognition of these past disparities that the group has met with in the organization or the policy or program, and the basic assumption of course is that active representatives will use their discretion to advocate for the interests of these groups, and they'll do so in hopes to eliminate discrimination and to influence outcomes, and we've spent a lot of time studying this link between when passive representation may become active representation, or as we like to say, what are the conditions under which we'll see this happen? And to let you some context that we've studied, original study came from EEOC in looking at the benefits of having racial representation in the claims unit there. Farm loans was considered. Education's been heavily studied, both K-12 and higher ed, child support enforcement, VA rehabilitation counseling, leasing, and many more. As I mentioned, we've studied several identities and I think the list could go on from here, but we've seen studies of gender, race, veteran status, profession, language, immigrant status, all come from this literature, and of course, some of the outcomes that have been tested are test scores, graduation rates, claim handling, awards, traffic stops and searches, and even pregnancy rates. So I say this because this lays the foundation for the work we do, and I think most important to guiding practice comes in the way in which we think about the mechanisms that underlie the effect we fine, so we understand that we find these associations between the presence of minority bureaucrats and these outcomes, but what we really need to understand is how this happens and what the mechanisms are, and as I mentioned, here's where I think we gain the greatest understanding of how we might change and shape our organizations for the future. First, there's growing evidence that representation can influence outputs directly by inducing changes in the attitudes or behavior of a citizen rather than any action by the public employee, and here's a study that kind of highlights this. Meier and Nicholson-Crotty in 2006 found that the presence of women on a police force increases the reporting of rapes in that area, so the understanding is by seeing a work -- a police force that is representative of women, women may be more comfortable coming forward and reporting the rapes they are victims of. A second possible mechanism is that the bureaucrat serves as a role model for the client and stimulates productive changes in these clients. In the studies on education, this is one of the strongest findings that we have and that is that teachers serve as role models for students. Having a teacher that looks like you is a powerful signal about what you can do and what you can become in your life and that that's an important aspect of diversity and representation that we need to pay special attention to. Third, the presence of minority bureaucrats may lead to changes in the behavior of a majority bureaucrat. Here I bring an example from some work I've done with Danielle Atkins where we look at the presence of African-American female teachers in Georgia school districts and what how that might influence pregnancy rates among African-Americans in those school districts, and we've found this positive relationship, but when we dug under and looked at this, we also found through interviews that we had several majority bureaucrats, in this case, many of them were white men, teaching in these schools who talked about how they went to the women, the black women teachers in their school for guidance, for support, for understanding how they might deal with issues around dress code or around questions that their students were having over being sexually active, and we found this real understanding that the black teachers, black women teachers in these schools became a resource to their majority bureaucrats. And finally, the increase in representation may lead to a shift in policy or priorities for the organization. I think there's been a long-held understanding about who's at the table and that through changing those that have a seat at the table, you can actually lead to changes in the organization both structural and organizational changes, policy changes, but also in the culture of the organization. So we understand that representation there may be -- would be important to overall changing the policies. When I think about what we might look forward to in the future and along the lines of these studies, not only in the areas that we as researchers need to challenge ourselves and dig into, but also as those in practice and how we think of representation in our organizations. One, I think we have to understand that as diversity and representation grows and it will, given the demographic shifts in our country, we have to be ready for what might follow it. We've seen all too often that the, you know, the frame of white supremacy is strong and that folks will push back against that and as we see more diversity in our organizations and as people become representative there, there may be pushback and we'll need to be willing -- ready to deal with that conflict and manage through that. We also know that intersectionality is going to play a big role. We often do not come with a single identity into our workplace and how those -- all of our identities are represented in the workplace is going to be important and leaders are going to have understand that. We also take heart in the notion that, you know, one of the questions I always get when I present my research is are you saying that a, you know, it's always the DeKalb Housing Office in Georgia that people use to reference since their clients are overwhelmingly black citizens in Atlanta, am I saying that those should only be black public employees working there? And I think that there is always a call for representation, but given what we've understood about the role that representation can have in the training and understanding of majority bureaucrats, I think it's important to think there how we are building into our training programs, our socialization programs, how we think through supporting majority bureaucrats in the understanding of how they can represent better all of their clients and calling an expectation and accountability around that will be an important thing as we go forward in the future and now. And then also that we know that there's this link to past discrimination or treatment and that we always have to as leaders be very mindful of what our clients, what folks are facing and they bring with them into their engagement in our organizations and how we might best serve them in through that cultural competency and understanding. So I look forward to the questions. I appreciate you allowing me to come back on after my technical snafu, and I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you, Steven.

[Steven Putansu:] Thank you so much, Dean Wilkins. Our next speaker is going to be James Tsugawa. I thought it would really good, you know, for Dean Wilkins to talk about representative bureaucracy a bit and for Zina to show how GAO thinks about diversity, equity, and inclusion and how we build that into our system of merit and performance, but I also thought it would be really important to provide more context on the merit system and how it relates to performance, and so James Tsugawa from MSPB- is going to do that. James, if you could turn on your video and unmute, and would you like me to put your slide up right now or would you like me to wait until you give the word?

[James J. Tsugawa:] I think its fine to put it up now and Steven, just confirm that my audio has adequate volume and clarity.

[Steven Putansu:] Yes, I hear you well.

[James J. Tsugawa:] Great, thank you. Anyway, the topic that Steven suggested was the merit system in federal employment, and at first I said well, surely part of being a panelist is to modify that title, but I left it as-is because it's an excellent one. The merit system or merit systems in federal employment and in fact, American government more broadly. It's a timely topic because I think those systems are underappreciated and at the same time, often taken for granted both by advocates for those systems and people who challenge or question them, so I'll -- this will try to provide a drive-by of the purpose and evolution of merit systems focusing on federal employment and then provide a little perspective on their proven state drawing on MSPBs, studies, and particular surveys we administer to federal employees and managers, but also put merit systems and perhaps some things around their future evolution in a broader context, looking at some of the trends or changes in American society, although those changes are very visible in countries across the world. So briefly, why a merit system? In the federal government, the merit system as we know it got its official start back in 1883 with the Pendleton Act, and the Pendleton Act was occasioned by both some existing concerns around continuity and competence in government as well as the assassination of President James Garfield by an individual who thought he should have received an appointment to federal office but did not. So at that time, the Pendleton Act established a requirement for examination to enter the federal service but its coverage was fairly narrow, a small fraction of what we would now consider federal employees, and it really addressed entering into the service only, but if you fast forward to the current day, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 as you see here really viewed a merit system much more broadly. It covers the full range of the employee lifecycle, so not only recruitment and selection but pay and performance management, some of the aspects that Zina talked about and it also addresses retention, development, and some aspects of managing employees that are somewhat distinctive to government. And I'll also note that although the principle is paraphrased here, the merit principle does also establish an expectation that might be viewed as representative bureaucracy although it's not phrased that way. The principle says that recruitment shall be from qualified individuals in an endeavor to achieve a workforce representative of all segments of society, so although Congress might not have read Mosher, you can certain see in that through a contemporary lens the idea that government should understand, look like, and be responsive to the public that it serves, and you'll also see that Congress established some prohibited practices, and there you see very explicit recognition of some things that are distinctive in public service. Certainly they, Congress, understood that administrations are expected to change following elections and that public officials have both particular authority because government has the power to compel but also perhaps incentives in the moment that might not serve the public and government as an institution well, so you do see some prohibitions here against things like nepotism, reprisal for whistleblowing that recognize that although public officials have particular responsibilities and authorities, there are also some checks on that authority, and also the merit principles and prohibited practices are supported by other provisions, so there are requirements for ethics in government designed to ensure that employees act without improper fiscal motivations or incentives, and similarly the Hatch Act is designed to create both the appearance and belief that public servants do not carry out their duties with regard to partisan political affiliation and that also ensures -- there's also an intent to ensure that public employees are not themselves agents who advance the interest of a particular party. So we have these fundamental values and they have served us remarkably well. That said, the principles were codified in 1978 and many of the practices and understandings in federal HR reflect the CSRA or in fact, earlier beliefs about how work could be organized, about how it should be managed, so although the principles I think have served us well and can continue to do so, there were certainly questioning of whether we have interpreted or implemented them in a way that creates and sustains a workforce for the future. So for example, if you think about training, you can view that very narrowly which is, you know, we should train you to improve performance and performance is how you carry out this particular task described in your position description today, or you could view it more broadly which is yes, you know, doing today's work is important but we should also train you to be prepared for the work that is to come and to Professor Wilkins's point, to also think about not only today's work but are we delivering? Have we defined our services, our understanding of citizens' and clients' interests properly? And if you have that understanding, then that gets you toward training with an eye to the future, of viewing performance and performance management as not only how well did you carry out an assigned task, but are we preparing you for tomorrow's work and to not only think about what you do today, but think about not only are we doing the work the way we said we should, but is that vision or understanding proper? And a lot of our personnel systems were really designed around the idea that you could define and understand work and having done that, that would serve you for months, years beyond, and the nature of what government does and the nature of work perhaps is fluid and changing in a way that our systems don't quite pick up, but to move on, in terms of where we are, there's a lot of success that should be celebrated. If you think about dealings with government, by and large, if you go to the airport and you're traveling, you take it for granted that the agent who gets you through security in fact is focused on security. They're not going to treat you differently because you have a particular appearance of political affiliation. Now do we do those -- that or other things perfectly? No, and there is room for improvement, and I think we are all increasingly aware that even if we strive to be nonpartisan -- objective, fair, equitable, that our practices, policies, and how we implement them may in fact be less equitable than we might have once thought, but still, a great deal goes right and we should not lose sight of that and that is a testament to many successes, to the -- to our ability to attract and select people who are capable of doing the job, who want to and do try to do a good job, often under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, so that's an achievement and it's not one to be take -- underestimated or undervalued. Now that said, when MSPB has surveyed employees on how are we doing at adhering merit -- to merit principles and avoiding prohibited practices, we do see some patterns and the first one is that over time, a small percentage of employees, but rather consistent one, do think that they have personally experienced or observed an official engaging in a prohibited personnel practice, so something like discrimination on a protected basis, reprisal for whistleblowing or exercising a right. Now those numbers are small but of course, our hope and aspiration is that this doesn't happen and that employees believe that, and we're not there, but if you look at the other side of the coin, now when we've asked employees how are we doing adhering to the principles you see on your screen? There, what we've seen consistently is that the picture is somewhat mixed. On the one hand, for example, in 2010, over 60% of employees agreed that my organization recruits a diverse pool of applicants for job vacancies. Now that's a majority so this is good. Yes, there are substantial percentages of employees who were unsure or rather doubted that, so there is that, but over and above that, although a majority said oh yes, we recruited a diverse pool, when we went on to ask them okay, does your organization select the best qualified candidates when it fills jobs, and there we got less than half, and that highlights, I think, a number of things that are both opportunities and challenges going forward. First, it's easy to post a job announcement and to accept applications in a neutral way. Selecting a good person for the job is harder. You have to want to make an equitable decision and over and above that, you have to have good tools, personnel processes, and decision support to do that, and there, what we have found is that the government often does less well than it could or should. What Zina described in terms of, you know, after we do the evaluations, we look at the results. We try to see if we did this equitably. We step back and if there's evidence we didn't, we then talk about what do we need to do differently or better? And what we've seen often is that federal agencies often say they lack the resources or capacity to design good systems, to support managers in trying to use those systems and to evaluate the outcomes of their systems. What often emerges is that people say we are so hard pressed to deal with the task immediately in front of us that we don't do what we could or should to step back and look at the results, and in a world in which management is getting harder, work is more diverse and more challenging, it's an issue and we need to get better and looking ahead, we're going to have to try to get better in an environment where money is going to be tight, we're going to be competing for talent and when you think about recruiting and retaining public employees, there is a lot of questioning out there in terms of what government should do, how it should do it, whether it has the capacity to do it, and so if we want to recruit and retain people over and above having good systems and managers who are capable of making good decisions, we're probably going to have to try to recruit and retain employees who are serving a public that does, as a whole, wonder whether government understands the challenges that society and individuals are facing and whether the merit system in government has the capability to find and manage people to do it, so there's much to build on. What Zina and Vicky describe are some very clear hands where we can better become more diverse and make more of that diversity but for those who are observing, the policy proposals in Congress and debate, we're going to have to try to improve at a time of concern that incremental improvement of what we have is not adequate to the nation as it exists today, so with that, I've run well over time and I'll stop and I'll let Shannon and Alissa pick up and move further and fast.

[Steven Putansu:] Great. Thank you so much, James. That was a great presentation. Really appreciate it, and you laid out some of the challenges about policy, processes, and implementation that I was going to use as a transition to Dr. Portillo's work, so Dr. Portillo, if you'd like to, you're unmuted on the screen. Can you share your slide?

[Dr. Shannon Portillo:] Yes, hopefully everybody can see this?

[Steven Putansu:] Yes, we can. Thank you so much.

[Dr. Shannon Portillo:] Fantastic. I do just want to start by saying thank you so much for having me today. I really appreciate the group that you've pulled together, Steven, and I think that you've laid these presentations out really well, because a lot of what I'll be talking about really does speak back to the last presentation, but before getting started, I do just want to acknowledge that this is part of a collaborative project and part of a much larger project that I'm working on with Drs. Domonic Bearfield, and Nicole Humphrey, and as with all collaborative work, everything that's good about it comes from my team, and everything that you disagree with is mine and mine alone. I want to share a bit of ongoing work this afternoon, but as I mentioned, this is part of a larger project, so I'll mostly be giving a broad overview, but I'm always happy to talk more in depth after the presentation about any piece of this work, but I want to give a little bit of the history of our field so we can really situate this conversation and how we're talking about these big ideas of merit, neutrality, and representation, and then a suggestion for how we might move forward with a new framework to really think through merit through a more equitable lens that we're arguing would be a historically grounded positionality. So to start with, I just want to talk a bit about the origin story of public administration and how we think about public service. As some of the previous speakers have talked about, we trace a lot of our roots back to the Progressive Era, and a big part of that is that we saw patronage and corruption at the turn of the 20th century, and we really talk about public service as we understand it today as a technocratic, apolitical response to a lot of what was happening politically at the time. So here, public administration is really seen as something that takes the politics out of what we do day to day, and by taking the politics out of the work of government, we're becoming neutral and we're able to serve more citizens, but there's really a more complicated history in that particular time and as we were building this field. Not only was it a time where we did need to see some push back to political corruption of the time, it was also a time of increased immigration and immigration from countries that weren't seen at the time as white, Eastern European countries, Italy, and there was intense xenophobia and pushback against this immigration that was coming into our country. It was also a time of increased urbanization and migration of southern black communities to northern urban centers, so we saw a shift in concentrations of political power, and this pushback to the politics of the time was not just a pushback to corruption. It was also a pushback to the growing political power of communities that were traditionally seen as other, and communities that weren't at the time, seen as white, and so when we hear calls against patronage, we're also hearing calls against immigrant power and increasing political power of black communities at the time. So when we think about where this idea of bureaucratic neutrality came from and how we started talking about the idea of bureaucratic neutrality, it was at a time where we had a very idealized understanding of who public servants were and what public service really meant in our country, and so while we have this kind of apolitical understanding, it was also a history that really thought about the concept of a bureaucratic man and was really connected to a normative understanding of a U.S.-born, white, straight-presenting male as a public servant. So we saw this idea of the idealized technocrat coming about but more recently, and what we heard from Dean Wilkins's discussion is this idea of the normative nature of government and how identity can shape what happens in communities. So we talk about this idea as a rationalized myth within this field, and the term rationalized myth comes from institutionalism and argues that a norm or behavior can become so engrained as to become taken for granted and largely disconnected from the decisions that originated it or the history that originated it. So we argue in our work that this is the case with bureaucratic neutrality, that there's important -- an important anti-corruption origin to the field and to public service, but there is also a deeply racist and misogynistic element that we've largely disconnected from our understanding of how neutrality came to be so important to our field and a foundation to how we think about hiring within public administration, within public service. So as a previous speaker talked about, practitioners began to really think about this idea of civil service reform with the Pendleton Act of 1883 and this was at the federal level but we saw a lot of these reforms make their way into local government as well, and really cement these ideas of testing and competitive testing as a way to make sure that we find the objective best employee but really thinking about taking that political pressure out of federal employment and out of public service altogether, and so we saw this push towards city manager forms of government where we had nonpolitical managers who are making a lot of these decisions, but what we argue in our work is that this lack of acknowledgment for how bureaucratic neutrality was embedded at the time in whiteness and in masculinity really means that when we talk about neutrality today, we don't think that it has ties to race or gender, but there are still clear ways that we talk about this in a racialized and gendered -- with racialized and gendered norms throughout our field. And so we talk about this first and foremost as the idea of the myth of merit, and we argue that the goal of merit is definitely a laudable one. This is something that we want to promote within public service, but merit itself continues to be difficult to define and even as we heard from previous speakers, there is certainly merit in thinking about diverse workforces, because we have new ideas coming about. We may even have different outcomes based on identity categories, but when we talk about merit from a hiring perspective, we're often talking about the individual and an individual decision about hiring that often focuses on this ideal type of the bureaucratic man that is very much a race and gendered understanding of what we mean when it comes to public service, and we argue that a lot of this is still very much embedded within our current hiring processes and our current understanding of what it means to be a public servant. There's a parallel myth with this and that's the myth of representation and this really speaks back to a lot of what Dean Wilkins presented. Representation is certainly a normative good, particularly in a democratic society. We want to see public servants who represent the communities that they serve. We want to see that mirroring of communities in positions of power in particular, but when we talk about the ways in which representative bureaucracy theory has developed within our field, there's been an implicit assumption that the norm or who we're judging representation against, is this kind of neutral white male bureaucrat, so when we talk about that idea of representation, we're often reinforcing the concept of a person of color, a woman, a person with sexual orientation other than heterosexual as being other and as representing something different than the norm of what we expect in a bureaucracy, so in a big way, this really encourages us to think about the silences in our work and how we haven't really considered the way that the field has been racialized and gendered in a very white and masculine-presenting way, and what does this mean for how identities have been represented throughout our history, but it's been a singular identity that has had a very particular focus on power in the field. So as we start talking about the idea of representation with people of color, with the increasingly diverse workforce that we see, we're often reinforcing this idea of othering of marginalized groups, and how do we think about representation in a way that also distributes power in meaningful ways, so the focus is often on individual hiring decisions, but that may mask broader institutional policies and practices that continue to need our attention. Another implicit discussion in representation is how we think about what it means to have that active representation. If we know that people of color, women, people with other traditionally marginalized identities bring a unique perspective and bring a unique set of skills to particular work within public service, is that something that we have to think about as merit within that work? Is there something unique to being able to serve communities of color with increased outcomes and how do we think about that from a solution perspective? We tend to think about all people being able to serve all people and that should be a goal that we hold up, but if we're also seeing that we have improved outcomes when we have people of different identities, then is there a knowledge or, as Dean Wilkins talked about, what are these mechanisms that increase outcomes and are those skills that we need to make sure that we're compensating or considering as employers? Ultimately, the myth of merit, the myth of representation, and the myth of bureaucratic neutrality, these are concepts that we consider from a historical standpoint. What does this mean for the identities of people who work with us today that history does influence our future and our present? And so we argue that we need to understand identity in a more complex way, that as a field, we often discuss identity as a static concept, overlooking how people interpret and perform their identities because that's constantly evolving, so how identity is understood by individuals, organizations, and cultures changes over time. Looking specifically at gender, when public administration was established as a field, many thought that gender was a binary category, associated biological characteristics, but now we know that gender refers to range of socially constructed characteristics related to femininity and masculinity and a whole range of understandings in between, and some even without thinking of femininity and masculinity. So while individuals may identify with a particular feminine or masculine understanding of their own gender, they may also fall somewhere more fluidly between these, and these may move -- these may adapt depending on particular situations. So we can think about the evolving ways that identity has been understood. We heard one of our panelists talk about intersectionality, a term that was originally coined by Kimberly Crenshaw to provide a more nuanced way to understand how multiple oppressions operate within a social context. This is more recently been criticized as a static view of identity, that yes we can have these multiple marginalizations but those may present differently in different ways, so feminist scholar and theorists talked about translocational positionality, arguing that identity shows up in different locations in different ways. She looked at this when looking at researchers who did work internationally. So when black women from the United States were doing research in other countries, they were seen first as American and not necessarily first as black or as women, so where they were showing up triggered which of their identities were seen as the primary identity. We argue that there's not only a locational aspect to this but a temporal aspect to this. Identities change over time, and so the ways that we think about our identity and the ways that our identity shows up in the workplace may be different based on community understandings and historical understandings as well as modern and evolving understandings of identity. Ultimately, we argue that we can debunk these myths by knowing our history, and that the inequalities that shape the workplace of today come from deep social structures that won't be easily dismantled but in order to understand them and work past them, we really have to understand how they came to be and how they continue to influence our day-to-day decisions both at that individual hiring level as well as the broader norms and policy expectations within the workplace. Ultimately, social equity work is ongoing and it continues to evolve. As I mentioned, this is part of a broader project that builds off an article that I worked on with Drs. Domonic Bearfield and Nicole Humphrey, and we're working on a book out of this, so I look forward to the conversation at the end of this panel. Thank you.

[Steven Putansu:] Thank you so much, Dr. Portillo. And with that, what I'm going to do is turn it over to Alissa Czyz from our Strategic Issues team. Alissa, I'm going to pull up your slides. I've got to find them first, and I should be able to click through them for you, I think, so go ahead. Take it over.

[Alissa Czyz:] Okay, great. Thanks, Steven, and I'll just let you know when to move on. Can you hear me okay?

[Steven Putansu:] Yes, I can.

[Alissa Czyz:] Okay, great. Well, first of all, thank you very much. I want to thank Steven. I was really honored that he reached out to me to participate on this panel today with such an esteemed group of colleagues. I've learned a lot from the discussion already and I will be mindful of the time too, because I know we're ending at 3:30 here, but I do appreciate Steven's efforts and everyone's remarks today. I think this has been a great set of issues to kind of spark a lot of discussion and thought. So Steven, you can go to the next slide please. So Steven mentioned in my introduction, I've spent most of my career auditing the Department of Defense and it wouldn't be a PowerPoint presentation from DoD without a cartoon, so I stole that kind of trademark from DoD, so this was kind of a diversity touch of humor with diversity but the next slide please. I think in reality though, I mean, these are complex issues that we're discussing here today with no easy solutions, and really I think that's a thread that has been kind of throughout each of the presenters' remarks here today. It's hard, right? -- to create a diverse workforce but it's necessary and in the end, it benefits all of us, so this is a description of GAO's workforce diversity goal that we reported on way back in 2005 and I think it holds true today, so really the goal here is to create and maintain a positive work environment where the similarities and differences of individuals are valued so that they can reach their potential and maximize their contributions to an organization's strategic goals and objectives, and it wouldn't be a GAO sentence without being four lines long, because we write long sentences, but the point here is that -- and I think Zina underscored this in her remarks -- diversity and an organization's mission strategy goals and objectives are intrinsically linked, you know, and the more that we can understand that, the more we can move to create a more diverse federal workforce, so next slide please. So I'm briefly going to talk about GAO's work identifying leading practices for workforce diversity. I'll run through those pretty quickly. I'm being mindful of the time. I'll touch on some of GAO's efforts to incorporate DEIA in its audit work and then a little bit on GAO's recent work and then a nod to looking at the future of issues to examine with DEIA and the federal government, so next slide please. So our first of these GAO leading practices that we first identified in 2005 but we validated these in many GAO reports since, and they're still very relevant today. That's not to say that we don't have -- we don't need to update them, because we do, and I'll talk more about that at the end of my presentation, but the first one here is, you know, top leadership commitment. So and we're not going to advance diversity in the federal government and the federal workforce without a commitment from top agency leadership and Zina touched on our Comptroller General's commitment to diversity at GAO and really, that's at the -- it's at the root of any complex issue for an organization. It's a success, you know, it's consistent with successful human capital and good government practices but words really matter. A leader really must commit the visibility, the time, and the resources to DEIA initiatives to have any chance of success. Next slide, please. I think we're on the part of this it should be on slide six. There we go. And then as I mentioned before, right? -- you really can't separate DEIA and an organization's strategy and plans, so the DEIA must be embedded into an organization's strategic plan and implementation plan and aligning with the organization's mission and overall strategy. Next slide. And then you've got to link it performance, right? So studies show that, you know, a diverse and inclusive environment can increase individual and organizational performance, and some of the other speakers talked about this too, but more diversity within a workforce can generate more ideas, can increase services to a customer base for example. It can reduce turnover. It can improve morale, and improve retention within the workforce itself. And we're on slide seven to slide eight then is -- yeah, measurement. So measurement is important too, so taking stock of any efforts to increase diversity in an organization's workforce both quantitative and qualitative measure are really important, so having data. That's difficult to have but it's really important to show how DEIA initiatives within an organization are making progress toward their goals and then also qualitative really so listening to employees, so through employee interviews, through focus groups, through surveys, getting that information is key to kind of adjust course and to address areas of concern. Next slide, please. Great. And accountability, so that's our middle name at GAO, right? But we have to hold agency leaders accountable. I mean, they're responsible for diversity and for linking performance assessments and compensation of senior leaders to progress and diversity initiatives, so this is really important. I mean, there is a responsibility of the federal senior executive service to contribute to DEIA initiatives, to enforce EEO requirements, to -- and these are essential to attract and develop and retain a highly qualified and diverse workforce and so we have to hold leaders accountable. Next slide, please. And then kind of going hand in hand with that and we talked a little bit about -- James talked about recruitment too, right? So succession planning, thinking about a strategy for bringing in a diverse pool of talent for an organization moving forward, so thinking beyond kind of the traditional schools that agencies recruit from to broader, you know, more diverse selection of schools, looking at multicultural organizations and other organizations to widen that pool as well, and then not only looking at entry level employees within the federal government, but looking at mid-career and senior level employees and how to bring those in in a diverse way is important as well. Next slide, please. Recruitment too goes hand in hand with that, you know? It's a first step toward establishing a diverse workforce and goes -- you know, it's really hand in hand with succession planning. Next slide, please. And then employee involvement, I think this is something that GAO does particularly well. So you know, involving employees in really driving diversity throughout an organization, so involving them in initiatives, identifying issues, recommending actions that agencies take, having advisory groups, having coaching and mentoring programs, are all important vehicles for promoting DEIA. Next slide, please. And then training, obviously very important as well to increase both management and staff's understanding of DEIA and helping them develop concrete skills to assist them in communicating and increasing productivity, so training can really help with an awareness of differences and perspectives in how diversity can help drive an organization's performance. I think it's -- it can be somewhat of a culture change for the federal government mindset of not assimilating employees into an organizational culture but really valuing the differences that employees have and bring and those different perspectives and how that enhances an organization's ability to meet their mission. So next slide, please. So GAO has issued over a dozen reports on diversity and inclusion workplace issues over the past three years, with many more ongoing reviews that we have right now. Just to give you kind of a sampling, we've looked at the Department of State, USAID, looked at gender issues in the military. We've looked at workforce diversity in the intelligence community, in the technology sector, and we've got a lot of ongoing work at State, USAID, FEMA, DoD civilians, enforcing EEOC requirements, healthcare inequities, NOAA, and the list goes on and on, and I think this really underscores the importance of the work and strong Congressional interest in trying to promote a diverse federal workforce going forward. Next slide, please. And so GAO internally too, we try to lead by example and we're taking a lot of steps to try to incorporate DEIA considerations into our audit work, so we -- recently we made some technical updates to our government auditing standards, the Yellow Book, to acknowledge the equity piece of that that had not been so prominent in the past, and we have teams around GAO looking at developing resources and tools to help our analysts consider DEIA issues through all phases of the audit, particularly at the design of an audit, but also when we get to our making decisions about analysis, right? If we exclude a certain dataset, what implications does that have? Looking at our message development and message agreement, making sure that we are considering DEIA, and then in drafting our reports, we're also looking at the way we write our reports. We're looking at language considerations. We are looking at using gender neutral language and pronouns. We look at -- we're considering how we talk about persons with disabilities in our reports or immigration or migration-related issues, so we are taking a hard look at those things within our reports as well. Next slide, please. And I'm going to run through this really quickly. And then we're often seeing DEIA issues come up in audits even when that wasn't the focus of the review, and I just wanted to provide a couple quick examples. This is from a GAO report in 2020 that was looking at how senior executives were being reassigned, and so it really didn't have a DEIA component, but when the team was starting to present their data, it was very striking, and they looked at the time period from 2007 to 2018, and this chart shows gender, that the federal government has not really moved the needle in terms of increasing gender equality in the federal government over this time period, so there's definitely work to be done there, and next slide. And similarly, on race too, so this compares white career SES in the top line and then non-white career SES is the bottom line there too, and really very stagnant over this period from 2007 to 2018, so it was very striking even though it wasn't a focus of the review, it was one of the key things that came out of that as well, and of course, there's different ways to look at race here as well. Next slide, please. So going forward quickly, you know, we -- as I mentioned, we have a lot of ongoing work at GAO looking at federal workforce diversity in specific agencies. We'll be looking at the implementation of agencies with the two recent DEIA executive orders. We're going to be looking at how agencies organize themselves, because that's important to where the accountability sits within federal agencies for DEIA. We'll be looking at federal government, kind of an overall process for recruitment and retention there, and then with telework and remote work. That really introduces a whole new set of DEIA issues of how employees that work differently, right? -- from different locations are being treated and looking at the performance assessment process and equity there, and then looking at tools, assessments, and updating those workforce practices. So those nine practices that I ran through, while those really are foundational, we expect a lot of those will stay with us during our reviews. It is time for GAO to update those practices as well, so we'll be doing that in the near future here, and Steven, I believe that's it for me, and we've got two minutes to spare, so I'll turn it back to you.

[Steven Putansu:] Perfect. So we only have two minutes. We'll have an avalanche of folks of signing off shortly, but if all the panelists could please turn on your videos and unmute, and please indulge me on just one question for round robin that I'd like you all to answer as we switch into a gallery view so you can see everybody. From the list of ones that I thought of and what we've received, the one I'm going to choose to ask is many of you talked about how tempting it is to focus on merit at the point of hiring and promotion or to think of DEI&A as kind of this passive representation, right? -- how many people of which categories are around, but looking forward for the next 100 years, what are some of the things that agencies, auditors, Congress, the American people could or should be looking for to know whether we're doing well and, you know, upholding merit and upholding DEI&A, you know? And Alissa, this speaks to, you know, GAO updating the tools. Blue sky, what would you all think are the kind of key more -- most important things we should be looking for over the next 100 years? And I'll start in the same order that we went through, Dean Wilkins, if you don't mind me putting you on the spot.

[Dr. Vicky Wilkins:] No, I don't mind at all. It's a great question. So if we want to know that we've done it well, what will it look like in 100 years? And I think that, you know, we need to come up with metrics of inclusion and understanding of what we are likely to see in our organization and how we might measure and be held accountable for those things. I think we talk about it a lot, you know, but what does it look like in practice? And I think we -- once we develop those, we can hope that in 100 years, we have obtained some level of inclusion where people feel like they belong, there's less complaints in the workforce, people are having their ideas heard and having a seat at the table. That's off the top of my head. Good question.

[Steven Putansu:] Thank you, and Zina, I mean you're very familiar with what we're already measuring. Is there something in there that's already important or something you'd really like to add?

[Zina Merritt:] I just think that it's got to be a partnership with all agencies and we have to work together on this as a federal goal as a whole, so within GAO, yes, we have metrics that we're constantly updating as the workforce evolves and changes as our practices change and the nature of our work change, but for me, the takeaway for the next 100 years is I hope we have a more collaborative process to share leading practices across government.

[Steven Putansu:] Thank you, Zina. And James, do you have any outcomes or things we should be looking for in the next 100 years?

[James J. Tsugawa:] Drawing on the point that Vicky made, I know OPM is working on measures of inclusion for employees. I suppose it would be very helpful if we could have something parallel from the public or citizens. You know, if we're really equitable or inclusive, do the people we serve think that what we do and how we do it is inclusive and equitable? So if we can get measures there, that would be perhaps get us a little closer to outcome.

[Steven Putansu:] Thank you. And Dr. Portillo?

[Dr. Shannon Portillo:] I think this is a great question, and I will bring in an answer from one of my co-authors. Dr. Bearfield often talks about how we -- we're still talking about merit and diversity as two dichotomous concepts, and I hope that in 100 years, we won't be talking in that way anymore, that we've really shifted the narrative, so the data tells the story about how far we've come or how far we haven't come, but it's also how do we shift the narrative of how we talk about public service, and who's considered a public servant? What are our norms and what are our expectations?

[Steven Putansu:] Thank you so much, and Alissa, last but not least.

[Alissa Czyz:] Right, so I mentioned in the presentation needing to update our practices too, and I think just drawing upon some of the other comments too, I think we as a federal government, you know, we can actively implement DEIA initiatives and try to increase the pool that we're recruiting from but I think we want folks to come to us too. We want them to work for the federal government. We want a diverse group of candidates to come and understand the importance, and so really, diversity and the mission of a particular agency of the federal government really go hand in hand and can't be separated, so I hope in 100 years, that everybody will want to work for the federal government and some of this will not always, you know, happen organically, but we can move the needle there as well.

[Steven Putansu:] Great. Thank you so much, and just once again, thanks to all five of you for coming and participating in the webinar today. Really great discussion, really a great dialogue. Hopefully, this was something that GAO will take and continue when thinking about federal workforce issues, and I'd like to invite everyone who attended today to be on the lookout for our other webinars in the series as Gene mentioned on the other topics. I believe the next one is September 8th, so mark your calendars. Thanks a lot, and with that, we'll close out. Have a great afternoon, everyone.

[Alissa Czyz:] Thank you.

[James J. Tsugawa:] Thank --