Public Service Under Pressure with Kimberly Walton, Michael Jacobson, Tanisha Briley and Vince Micone

Welcome to Management Matters. I'm James Christian Blockwood. This week we're including some key selections from a recent Academy standing panel meeting, public service under pressure. Former government executive and Academy fellow Kimberly Walton moderated the conversation with some of our fellows from the federal, city, and county levels who explored the challenges facing government administration during these times of uncertainty and dramatic and often sudden change. Former acting secretary of labor, Vince McCone, reflected on decades of disruption from 9/11 to sequestration to today's workforce ships and how public administrators can build resilience amid constant transformation. Then, Gathersburg, Maryland City Manager, Tanisha Brieley and Deputy Director of King County Washington Office of Performance Strategy and Budget, Michael Jacobson discussed how federal changes ripple downstream to local communities and everyday services. The conversation starts off with Vince. My entire time in government, I cannot remember a time when the federal government was not under pressure. So I started in the 1990s and I remember full well what we had with the hammer awards and the first go at reinventing government and the loss of the talent through that entire process and the shifts and changes. Then, I like many of you experience 9/11 and again, a shift in government operations in entire structures of how we work together as many government entities. Then, of course, we had the financial collapse and sequestration which had other impacts on the federal government and our ability to grow and meet mission requirements the way that we wanted. Again, we're in a shutdown. I was in every shutdown since 1990 and they have a debilitating impact on the morale of your workforce even if they know that they will be paid. People who are in public service want to work and when they're not able to execute their mission and when there's uncertainty, it creates challenges for workforces to meet on those. And of course, all of that combined sort of reflects what we've been through with the dose changes during the past year to the status of the federal government. And look, I will tell you changing the size of one of the portions of our government is something that legislators and executives do and what we do is public administrators is respond to that. But the path of change that we've experienced this year with the significant increase in the time of how that's happening is having huge impacts that we're all very well aware of and that are being documented. The question that I've been asked to is where we go from here. But I did want to first lay out the scenario that at least during my time in the federal government, it feels like there have been fewer times when it's not been rapidly changing in ways that created unique challenges for leadership and for our workforces. And one thing I will also point to is that I think that what we're experiencing now is not going to change. And I think the AI and how that's going to transform how we provide services is going to create even more destabilizing risk for how we meet the public's needs through our service at the federal state local levels. I think from the federal sector, what we're seeing is a lot of two general change in how people viewed their careers. Traditionally, you would look to the federal government as a safe, stable way to have an entire career. Perhaps working at one agency. I think those days were waning and I think they're over at this point. And so that's going to have consequences for how we prepare people who are coming into government service because the expectation sets are going to be very different. I believe in in many circumstances, the protections that were relied upon for generations and employees are going to be changed. We can talk about whether that's good or bad. I'm just reflecting on what I really think is going to be happening and how we need to prepare for that. So what we need to do, I think, in some of the coping strategies that have been successful in the past that may be useful at this time, is to think about resilience in how we deliver on what we do deliver. And resilience involves working in an intergovernmental framework. So if you work, for example, in emergency response, more than ever before, there's going to be intergovernmental dependencies that we need to, as public administrators, focus on in trying to meet those delivered services to our citizens. I think within the federal government with the reductions, we need to look at how we do the business of government more effectively. It is now time with the numbers of people who have taken the DRP or otherwise left government. For mission support activities, we need to look more to enterprise management, more to shared services so that we can support frontline missions and support those people who are doing the day-to-day work by doing what we do more efficiently. And this is something I've fought for in my entire career. Why do we have in one agency four or five different HR shops when we could have one and use then the frontline employees more effectively and have less back-end activity that we're doing, taking FTEs away from those critical roles when we're in a declining state of budget for how we're going to meet our mission, particularly on the federal level. And we need to continue to have flexible workforce strategies to the extent we can to take care of our workforces with every tool that we have available to us. If remote work is not possible for some employees, what are the other things that we can do to expose them to opportunities for growth through rotations, through temporary details, to really provide them different opportunities to grow and develop? So in some, you know, what we're seeing now to me is not even the end of the beginning of the changes that we're going to see in governance. What concerns me most right now is a someone with federal experience and time is that the nature of our community and our nation is that we are so fragmented that we're not gathering the information that we need to understand to be healthy participants in democracy. All of us to make a democracy work need to understand some fundamental points about what we want our government to be and what's going on and what the impacts are. And so our challenges public administrators also is to feed facts when and where we can within the environments that we have and look to academia and researchers to help us think through and communicate more effectively with the public. I don't think we got to this position in a vacuum. For some reason, many people in our country don't believe government is serving them the way it should. And if that is the case, we need to understand the perception because I don't believe that's all the reality period. In fact, I think government does a noble job of doing things that people don't understand that we do every single day to make their lives better. So it's on us to figure out how we can better articulate the impact of what we're doing through the tools you've heard about through panels like this and through other opportunities. Thank you. I will turn it back to you, Kim, for colleagues on the state and local levels. Thank you so much. So as we move to city, county, state level, that's really where, as I say, the rubber meets the road and the impacts are real. And when I think about their capacity and the downstream effects of this shift and the disruption. So I'm going to start off with Tanisha Brady, who is at the city level to speak. Thank you, Kim. And and thanks to the other distinguished panelists, we are all in this boat rowing together since we're sticking with the stream analogy. Certainly, there's nothing more downstream than the city, right? We're at the end and we're going to catch all of it. And one of the things that I'm concerned about, we've discussed it as a panel is our residents, as Vince just said, right, civic education isn't at the top of the list anymore. Most most Americans don't understand the true impacts of the shift at the federal level and how that's going to change service delivery at every level of government. And what we want to start to talk about and think about is, yes, in the moment, resilience is needed, but going forward, right, this feels different than some of the other shifts that we've experienced. There are unique elements here that feel more permanent. And if that's the case, as government service delivery shifts at the at the federal level, how do we then respond at the local level? And so thinking about the services that we're responsible for and what's most important to residents, like any crisis, right, revenue starts to suffer right at the same time that the demand for services are going to increase. The other thing that we often experience at the local level is that shared revenue that we all depend on so desperately for infrastructure, for public health services, for social services. It's gone away or it's been redirected, but it doesn't appear that it's coming coming back our way. And those are the on the ground day to day needs that we're going to encounter. And we won't have the revenue for it. I talked about in the past, the tools that we had at the local level, particularly as city managers and finance and budget folks. If it were temporary, you could maybe have a discussion with your community about the need for a small tax increase so that you can take on, raise some revenue that may be disappearing at the state level, right? So typically, states share revenue with cities to take care of certain services. And you might get away with that for a bit. It's an easier, easier argument to frame that, you know, the state has made this shift because their budget was tight and they're not giving us those dollars any longer. And therefore, you know, we need to increase taxes a bit on our end so that we can take care of these things. That doesn't feel like an adequate tool or approach for the time that we're in for lots of reasons. One, you know, the fairness of it, we could debate until we're blue in the face. Those tax dollars have left our community. And some portion of them used to come back. Now, none of them may come back. And is it fair? Does it make sense to raise rates on residents at this time? Can you even raise rates on residents at this time? So I'm in Gathersburg, Maryland. I'm in the capital region where 12% of our workforce are federal employees or contractors. The closer you get to DC, the higher that percentage is for local communities and and counties surrounding the district, raising taxes to have additional revenue, raising fees for additional revenue is not really going to be a good option at all. So we've got increased needs. We'll have a lot less revenue, and we'll have, I think, more services that were responsible for that we've never been before. And I think we have temporarily been able to meet that moment. This is sort of a political pandemic, if you will. And the difference there, though, is during the pandemic, I see local governments were able to rise to the occasion, take on some of the services that we perhaps didn't do before. But we had the resources to do it, right? We did receive resources from the federal government to step into those gaps. So, you know, what, how do we re-tool to do that? And I think there are going to be some very challenging discussions as we go forward with our communities around what services won't happen, right? And maybe permanently so. And then what happens to that, that need? Did the need doesn't go away? What happens in those situations? I think you'll hear more from Michael on the county level, obviously, county being much more responsible for social service delivery. And those are the real needs that you see day in and day out. But there are, you know, Gathersburg is fortunate. We aren't that reliant on federal resources. But some of my colleagues and cities across the country are making really hard choices, signing on the dotted line for grant dollars, trading values that their communities hold dearly so that they can get runways repaired at their airports, right? So that these major infrastructure project that's already underway that they had dollars promised for can go forward. And I think as difficult as it may be initially for residents to understand this trickle down impact, this sort of downstream impact, I don't think we'll come out of this thing less civically engaged or educated than we weren't going in because we're going to have to find ways to better explain that in partner in new ways that we haven't before to try and really isolate what are we going to focus on and how are we going to deal with the services that we can actually just no longer provide because the resources just aren't there. So preserving service delivery, you know, it's just not it's not possible for us to take everything on. And I think that we haven't whether you're talking about NPA programs to our training programs and how we even talk about local government service delivery. We've always talked about doing more with less and I think maybe we've done ourselves a disservice over the years with that. We're going to have to have true conversations around doing less with less. And really from community community, I think the prioritization of what those services are going to be is going to depend on the needs of that community. And those may even shift over time, but I think we all have to prepare for those kinds of discussions with the community and with our governing bodies so that we can do our best to meet this moment. Thank you, Tunisia. And also pointing out that there's almost a double impact for your community in Gathasburg as you have a large number of federal employees at the same time coming out of the workforce for various reasons while you're still dealing with all of the impact. So now let's move it to the west coast where Michael Jacobson at the county level will speak to the downstream impacts of this shift. Thanks Kimberly and thanks to everyone for setting up this this topic. I feel like I'm supposed to be batting clean up now and trying to take us home. I'm here representing all county. I'm not even representing the county. I've got my logo up and I've been here for 23 years. So I have some county perspective, but I think one county over could be quite different even from where where I am. I think I guess I just want to I want to focus on people. The people that are actually going to be most affected are our residents. I'm a proud bureaucrat. I have great sympathy for people losing their government positions, but it'd be one thing if we're losing those positions and improving services. If you want, if we're losing those positions, those redundant HR positions that Vince talked about, for example, so that we were putting more dollars into services that people were to receive. But that's not what's happening. We are losing services that are affecting people directly. We're losing AIDS programs. We're losing snap programs. We're losing money for homeless people. So the impact, even though we're far away, we're not as far as Guam and Hawaii, but we're, you know, a lot of people in my county don't think about the federal government all that much. Although we have a lot of federal employment as well. We have military bases and regional headquarters of EPA and things like that. They tend to think of the other Washington, the Beltway Washington, as not really affecting them. But the reality is a tremendous amount of money that comes from our residents in the form of taxes goes to DC, goes through the process and has historically come back to us. That's not the case. Abby's map makes, we're a hotspot. We're not as hot as Tanisha, but in terms of how many dots are on our map, but we have quite a few dots. And entire programs have been reliant on these federal dollars. The other thing that I've learned over the years working in the budget office, but not on the budget is that our budget is not a sink pot of money, like a household budget is. Our budget is made up of 110 different funds. We have levees for the parks division. We have levees for mental health services. We have levees for veterans. We have levees for best arts for kids. Those are our safe zone. Those are specific additional taxes. We've asked our community to support and we live in a wealthy, highly educated community. And so people have generally said yes to those things. The part of our funds that are most vulnerable are there are general funds. Those are the ones that are flexible. And right now something like 85% of our general fund budget is going to feed the criminal legal system, prosecutors, defenders, judges, the jail, the sheriff. That's where 85% of our money that we have flexibility is going to. So when the federal government says you don't have money for an age program, we're not always able to come back and say, oh, we have a lot of flexibility to cover that. That program is basically gone. The budget, the county executive's proposed budget did just get sent over to our county council. And there was a commitment to maintain some essential services that are losing federal funding. Basic things that everyone would assume the federal government has interest in, things like emergency management. We're having to fund 11 positions in our emergency management office. There is money to nonprofits that are working on youth and adult homeless prevention. And there's workforce, workforce, innovation, opportunity, act, funds that support people to getting GEDs and maintaining work experience and gaining work experience. We're also using some resources to backfill one-time COVID funding. A lot of that's around homelessness services and also gun violence prevention. Again, these are things that there's historically been strong federal government support for. And then that support increased dramatically under COVID. This niche was highlighting, we were able to do amazing things, really proud of what we did during COVID. But nonetheless, if using a federal money made many of those things possible. One strategy that our executive has been taking and a budget office has been taking is basically to establish reserves. So we put $31 million into a reserve to safeguard, to give money to our Harbor View Medical Center for people that are going to just basically walk off the street because they don't have health insurance anymore. We also put $8 million into a mental health and drug dependency fund as contingency against federal cuts to behavioral health services. There's also additional shelter services that we're supporting. So that's this year. That's this biennium. We have a approximately $20 billion by any budget. So it's not small. But it's also not sustainable. Yes, it's balanced this year. We have a state requirement that we have to always do a balanced budget here. But I would say that the cost pressures continue to go up. The service demand is niche highlighted or continuing to go up. So those are some of the front line things that we're feeling here. And we're a relatively wealthy county with what I would call as sort of far a strategic county executive and leadership. So there's been support for that kind of thing. But literally a couple counties away. The money is not the same. The leadership is different. And the impact are going to be felt by real people in our community. The first thing I just wanted to point out, I very much appreciate what Michael and Tanisha shared. So when you see these big disruptions, where large sectors or portions of one part of our national government framework changes, it has downstream impacts, which means that there are some things that may not be able to be done at the state and local level, that because it's through their funding streams, that Abby and the team may not even be collecting right now because that's focusing on federal sector. So there are going to be given takes in the services that we need to figure out how to handle. And how we work with legislators and executives to do that that make those difficult recommendations so that hopefully they can do their role, which is make decisions on behalf of the electorate, that's going to be, I think, one of the greatest challenges that we all have is public administrators, how we articulate that, how we inform those sort of decision-making because it is not going to be fun and it is not going to be easy. But I really, so in talking with the prep, we had talked to Michael and Tanisha about, okay, we can talk about this other stuff, but you need to help people understand the pressures on state and local government because there are far more state and local government employees, far more state and local government programs than there are at the federal level. A lot of what we do is funding you deal with the day-to-day in many respects. I mean, historically, you know, there would be ball-up grants or there'd be, you know, here's the chunk of money you figure it out, but there was also a bucket full of unfunded mandates. We never had the, I think from a county city perspective, we never had adequate resources to do with what the laws were being passed and the policies being passed and what we were being expected to do. There's got to be a silver lining. We're in the shock and awe phase of reacting to this right now. Never waste a budget crisis, right, as the old mantra. At some level, yes, maybe we are going to be reassessing, do we need all those public health services? Do we need as many judges? Do we need the criminal caseload to be reduced? Those are the impacts that are going to happen, right? You know, they aren't all going to be good news for the community. We'll be able to balance our budget, but I think there will be, we're going to start seeing more disgruntlement. Does more disgruntlement turn into civic engagement? Does more disgruntlement turn into civic activism and political will? That would be a very optimistic logic model in my mind, but it's possible. Pitchforks are still being sold at hardware stores. They can be buried, you know, in the street. I don't know that that's the civic engagement we're looking for, but I think people are going to get to a breaking point. They're going to see the impacts to themselves. I'm not a politician, just to be clear. I mean, the reason that to me, the Democrats are fixating on the medical care is that's going to hit people very soon and very immediately. And in their pocketbook, and when they go see their doctor, or if they can go see their doctor. So that's going to be a very immediate impact. Some of these impacts are going to be able to update our bridge infrastructure, not at the same degree. Do people notice that until we close the bridge? They don't notice that it's gone from a 90 rating to a 70 rating to a 60 rating. Now we have to close it. So, but we're talking about closing bridges in King County, King County, Washington, where we have had Bill Gates and all these other wealthy people and big companies. The idea of closing a bridge in a rural area is mind boggling, but that's the reality of the funding situation. I just want to ask this question, and it really is a Tanisha and a Michael question. Who gets the blame when the services are there at the local level? We definitely get the blame. We get everything because we're closest to the people. There's not a my community where we're 70,000. Anyone can show up to a council meeting anytime they want and talk to us about whatever they're feeling. A lot of times, looking at my buddy Tom, a lot of times folks are airing their grievances with the federal government at a city council meeting because they can touch us. They can access us. There's no complicated registration process to testify and get called upon. I can only imagine how that will increase. As I said in my remarks to your other question, can I hopefully not pitch for Michael, but I do think this is an opportunity for us to try and engage in better education around these things. The cuts are going to be difficult. The conversations are going to be difficult. What's easy is that there will be bad guys to blame. The politicians will do a good job of pointing out who those folks are, but what that does is knit together some better understanding of how intergovernmental relationships work, of how these things and these services that we've relied upon actually connect to the state as a pass-through or direct from the federal government. None of us have done a good job of helping our communities to understand where those resources come from. Just say it doesn't make me happy to be answering a question about blame because that seems to be driving a lot of policy. It upsets me at a visceral level that seems to be the currency rather than what's best for our community, what's best for our country. It's about who the sublime is going to get pinned on. We put forth a veteran in human services levy and I understand why we did it and I think it's a good thing. We're compassionate and we want to support our veterans, but in county didn't create veterans. The federal government created veterans. Why is King County paying the bill for mental health, physical health, housing services for veterans created by the federal government? That's before Trump, right? That has nothing to do with the current administration. That's a structural problem that the federal government creates veterans for our collective benefit and I support our veterans, but King County is picking up a lot of their bills for issues that they have when they come back from engagement. That's a pre-existing considered normal. Does every county have a veterans and human services levy? They do not. Are you better off being a veteran in King County? You are, but it's also hard to live here with costs and things like that. That's just an example where the existing federal relationship, picking up on Vince's comment, we didn't, this didn't just happen. That was a pre-existing problem of intergovernmental connection and unfunded mandates. We're doing that and I'm proud that we're doing it because veterans and other people need help and we're able to provide that, but that's because it's not a uniform service provided across the country than the quality of service varies and the impacts and the negative impacts vary as well. You know, Michael, it doesn't help that on the federal level we have not had authorization bills for agencies or programs. Frankly, maybe only one time in the last how many decades and we have yet to have a regular order budget process where our legislators elected by the people debate what the size of the federal government should be and you're right. Budget is policy. Your budget dictates the policy of any government agency or frankly any organization where you put your investments and that is a deep problem. That's a very deep problem. It makes it hard for all of us who are invested in providing what the public needs to understand where the different roles are or really plan into the future and make those smart investments to make what we do more effective or more efficient. Stay in locals if they don't know what dollars may be coming from them on the federal level, then it helps to figure out, well, do we invest in these sort of programs that may address a program or frankly do we invest in technology to make us more efficient if we don't know where those funding streams are coming. Thanks to our standing panel guests, Vince McCone, Tanisha Briley, Michael Jacobson, and Kimberly Walt for participating in our public service under pressure of it. In the full panel, we were also joined by Abby Andre, Executive Director of the Impact Project, and Chris Caliba, Distinguished Professor of Public Administration, Policy and Governance at the University of Kansas. It is so important for the academy to demonstrate how national policy ships reverberate through every level of government and every community. Management matters as a presentation of the National Academy of Public Administration, produced by Lizzie Allon and Matt Hampton, and edited by Matt Hampton.