Transcripts For CSPAN Government Agency Representatives Discuss Fraud Waste And Mismanagement 20170827

Familiar with the academy, we are a nonpartisan, nonprofit congressionally chartered organization, charged with identifying emerging issues of governance to help state and local governments improve their performance. The academys mission is to provide trusted advice, advice it is timely, actionable, and objective on Public Management issues. The source of our expert ceases or membership who are current and former cabinet officials, members of congress, governors, mayors, legislators, jurists, business executives, public managers, and scholars. They are elected fellows because of the distinguished conservation to the field through scholarship, activism and government service. This year, we are celebrating a 50th anniversary. Since our establishment in 1967, the academy has responded to a multitude of risk a request from agencies across the government and has undertaken numerous studies on issues of interest to congress, administration and stakeholders in general. We are in the business of making government work. We have a great partner in that effort in the government accounting office. I have to confess, when i was in the government, i always did not see it that way. And you might not either. Publicationannual generates a powerful tool for improving government at the federal level. The dreaded higher high risk list has often been portrayed as a room at the hotel california. You can check in, but you can never leave. It is a personally addressed invitation for leaders of suspended agencies to spend time with their friends in congress. So a reaction to being on the high risk list is often defensive. We want to hunker down. We want to defend our agency and help and hope you have funds go away quickly. But there is a different approach that is possible and usefull. And theres no time at the present when agencies are polishing the reform plans that are due to on be at the end of september to examine the Lessons Learned by those agencies who responded positively to their appearance on the high risk list and the issues raised by gao, who have embraced the challenge. We can learn lessons from them about how to address that, how to get off, and had to stay off the list. Thats why i am so pleased today that we have a great event that can ring both insight and action to that objective. In that way, i think our conversation can be of great use to each of you as you work to improve your agencys operation, to him be, as they consider the strategy and tactics for government wide reform, and to members of congress and citizens who want government to work better. I think you will find todays discussion and presentations informative and challenging. We also provided you with a copy of the 2016 report from the ivf center for the business of government called managing risk, improving results, lessons for improving government management. Report was written by a nap fellow and a professor and a former dean at the university maryland. We will close todays session with a facilitated conversation with an opportunity to cement your ideas of the day. I hope you will continue to work andugh these issues within across your circles of collaboration so that, together, we can make government work and work for all, which is the vision of the academy. Andk you for being here spending your morning with us. I will be followed by barbara ron zack, who is currently on sabbatical and joining us, having recently stepped down after serving five years as the dean of the school of Public Administration at American University. [applause] thank you, terry. I am pleased to be here. That the pleased American University of public andirs has partnered cosponsored with George Washington university. I have a personal interest in this as well as a professional interest. A scholar of accountability. This is for me a great morning breakfast. I look forward to the conversation and i want to learn a lot. I am also dedicated to the notion that Public Management is the way to address some of the important problems we have got in the world. So these kind of discussions for how to improve government in these days is particularly important. We know the state of federal Government Agencies and the challenges of operating at high levels of effectiveness have been much in the news of late. But these are frenulum issues and the work of gao shows that. Have perennial issues affected sustained attention. Our keynote speaker is someone who is able to lead in that direction. He is able to lead the discussion about what agencies can do to become more effective in their operations, not to not telling them what their operations are, but if they break their missions, how they might be able to address it in a more effective way. To introduceure mr. Gene dodaro, but in the stream i think he needs probably very little introduction. Many of you know his work and most of you will know the work of the Government Accountability office. Gene is our eighth comptroller general and as head of the u. S. Officer Government Accountability he was confirmed to the position in 2010, though he started earlier than that in an interim position. They liked his work so much they kept them. In the Government Accountability office, gene works with the congress and the administration on Major Management reform initiatives. With the agency he helps oversee the development and issuance of hundreds of reports and testimonies each year the coded various congressional committees and individual members of congress. This is an exacting group of individuals. They have clear expectations and they do not always get what they want in their reports. It is a delicate act to speak truth to power. That is one of the things the office can do. These reports on the testimonies that are given to congress are part of the products that gao produces to help save money, saving billions of dollars in taxpayer expenditures, contributing to improvements in Government Operations and a wide range of government services. Gene has testified before Congress Dozens of times on important issues. These include the nations fiscal outlook, as well as efforts to reduce and eliminate overlap and duplication across the federal government. For example, he has led efforts to fulfill gaos new audit responsibilities under the dodd frank wall street reform and the Consumer Protection act. A longterm project of gao has been a development of the high risk list. It focuses on agencies that face challenges such as reducing improper payments under medicare or medicaid, or improving the pentagons business practices. Those are bookends of the range of complicated issues. Nobody knows the high risk list better than gene. What causes agencies to be listed on it, how agencies can get off it, and what it takes to stay off it. More importantly, no one has more insight into the positive change that can happen when Agency Leaders commit to implementing the kind of Management Practices and process control that can mitigate risk, knowing the problems gives you a chance to address the problems. The work of gao helps our agencies. It helps our congress, it helps our country. Please join me in welcoming me the leader of that agency, mr. Gene datoro. [applause] thank you very much, barbara, for that kind introduction. I want to thank you and kathy for helping sponsor this program. I am very pleased to be here. Good morning to all of you. I would like to talk about the genesis of the high risk list and efforts associated with helping agencies navigate their way off the list. When i was at my confirmation hearing and the Congress Asked me what my Top Priorities were, in addition to trying to get the government on a more sustainable longterm fiscal path, i mentioned the high risk list. It is not only to identify areas of high risk, but to help agencies appropriately, given our independence, help them get off the list. That is the way we view the success at gao, is up in the government operates better, more efficiently, and effectively by solving these problems. The High Risk Program had its genesis in the late 1980s in some scandals that occurred in the federal government. Congress became concerned that these major problems occurred with little warning. They asked gao to come up with a list of programs that had major problems and that were at risk of having major breakdowns, so that actions could be taken to avoid serious problems, and avoid crises. We began with a developing a list based on the work he had done at the gao. We identified 14 areas. We started to get into a routine where we updated the list with the beginning of each new congress, to allow congress to have this list, to help set its oversight agenda, and in doing that, it coincided with the beginnings of new administrations as they came in and took over their responsibilities. The list initially focused on fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government. Over time, we have added the areas in need of broad base transformation, because we felt it was very important to have the federal government be responsive to changes in the environment, both internationally and domestically, to prepare itself to meet contemporary challenges. And to those that are likely to be confronted in the future. It is not only solving management problems, it is preparing government for the future to make sure it meets its responsibilities. A good example of transformation area that we identified is protecting the public and medical product safety. Fda was set up to oversee Domestic Production of pharmaceuticals in the United States and medical devices, but most ingredients for pharmaceutical medicine, about 80 of the ingredients in about half of the drugs come from foreign manufacturers. Fda had to change its practices to look more in a Global Market space to make sure they are protecting public safety. In 2000, as the program evolved, we worked with the executive branch to clearly specify the criteria that gao uses and identifying which high risk areas to include on the list. We spelled those out. We included things such as Public Health and safety, National Security, Homeland Security, those issues that could have an economic effect on our country. And areas that were large dollar risk. Anything on the list has to be about 1 billion or more to be at risk. Importantly, in the document, is also the criteria that we use to take agencies off the list, or to reduce the area of risk. Those five criteria are leadership commitment, sustained leadership commitment is imperative and a prerequisite to attacking these problems at the agencies. Agencies have to have the capability. This is the resources and the people and the skills necessary to address the problems at hand. Thirdly, they have to have an action plan. I need a specific plan with goals and measures and milestones to track progress. These are among the most significant problems the federal government is facing. They do not get solved overnight. You need to have a good plan to get there and measure your progress along the way. You have to have fourthly, a monetary effort to make sure you are staying on top of this, making refinements and necessary adjustments as things proceed. Finally, you have to demonstrate progress. You do not have to have the risk completely solved on the zero. But you have to have it under management as much as possible. You have to demonstrate you are actually fixing some of the problems, the root causes of the high risk areas, and demonstrating that you are making necessary improvements. Then, we decide to do this, the focus of the agencys attention on what actions are needed, we have developed a couple other techniques over the years. One is that we have had for the last several administrations and give their meetings between omb, the Deputy Director for management is usually the convener of the meetings, with gao and with the agencies on the high risk list. In addition to bilateral discussions between gao in the agencies, omb has become involved. It is helpful from a resource allocation standpoint and also since many of the high risk areas involve multiple agencies, not just the Single Agency on the list, to have omb involved. Congress recognized the importance of this last year and 216. They passed the Program Management improvement accountability act and that basically requires the deputy at omb to do a portfolio review of any area that gao identifies as a high risk area and create a government wide counsel to focus on improving Product Management and to review the areas that gao has identified as high risk and make recommendations to omb as part of this process. That is very important. The other part of the evolution we started in 2015 was to give a greater level of specificity to the agencies as to what their progress was as they proceeded in the high risk area. We developed a rating criteria for each of the five areas. We decided that either they met, partially met, or did not meet each of the five criterias to give them a more specific scorecard and roadmap to follow. In our discussions with them, individually, and with omb, we talk about what specifically remains to be done in each of those five criteria areas that i mentioned earlier in order to get off the list. Some agencies we have identified a very specific things they need to do. For example, the department of Homeland Security, in terms of transforming and managing the department, since it was created in 2003, it had been on the high risk list. We identified 31 different actions that needed to be taken. The department of Homeland Security reports on those actions every six months in terms of their selfassessment on how well they are doing since the criteria. We evaluate their selfassessment and provide our views. That area has been narrowed over time. Right now it is focused on management immigration functions, particularly Acquisition Management and financial management. As well as Human Resource management at the department. It has been a significant way to achieve progress over time by getting greater specificity and greater clarity on how well the agencies are implementing those programs. Our latest update was in february of this year as the new congress was convening and we had a new administration. There had been 32 areas on the high risk list coming off of 2015. We reported that 23 of the 32 areas had either met or partially met all five criteria for coming off the list. This was a significant amount of progress over a two year period. During that time, Congress Passed 12 laws directed at helping agencies address the high risk areas. A couple of examples would be one area on the list is assessing and managing toxic chemicals at epa. Congress gave epa Greater Authority to get information from Chemical Companies but with them in a better position in order to make those determinations to better protect Public Health and safety from toxic chemicals. That was a significant move. Congress also created a couple of councils in the Property Management area which has been on the list for a wild because we believe the government had much unneeded excess property. They needed to manage that area better. Those laws gave additional and that is to give Property Management. The laws that were passed that address to this, we designate also for each high risk area where Congress Needs to act as well as the executive branch agencies. It is very clear. Part of this effort involves discussions, not only with the administration, but with congress, to make sure they understand every time we update the high risk list, we have testimonies before the senate, Homeland Security, and governmental a set government affair committee. They have sponsored the High Risk Program over the years. It has become one of the longestrunning Good Government bipartisan supported efforts in our federal governments history. It has also been embraced by various administrations as part of their management agenda for improving the federal governments operations. Among the areas of progress that we have cited in our 2017 report, we took one area off the list completely. That is information sharing regarding terrorist related information. Obviously, after 9 11, this was a big concern. It was a National Security issue that needed to be dealt with. We added it to the high risk list. We have been working the director of National Intelligence operations and all the agencies on this list. This was a complicated area because it involved multiple agencies, it involved local communities as well, the private sector, and various sectors of our economy. Congress passed legislation requiring information sharing environment to be created, and the dni lead that effort and really made a lot of progress over the years. Here we identified by 2013, 9 specific things that needed to be done. Over the years, each of those areas were addressed successfully to our satisfaction to take them off the list. Does that mean there is zero risk . Of course not. What it means is they have a process on how to manage the list to share information appropriately to protect us against terrorism related incidents. I am pleased that they are part of the panel. You can get their perspective on how we Work Together with them to have them make progress to achieve that end result to be off the list. When we take something off the list, i always mention to the agency and congress, big just because it is awfully list does not mean it is out of sight. We keep an eye on some of these areas over time. Some have been added back to the high risk list if they slip in terms of their progress over time. The sustained attention is an underpinning of this issue, not only within the administration but across administrations. I view the high risk list as a good way to ensure sustained attention across administrations and across congresses. We also have narrowed high risk areas, terry mentioned in her comments about the high risk list, the urban met urban legend is one to get off on you never get off. That is not true. We have narrowed areas. One area you will hear from in the panel today is a supply Chain Management at dod, which was one of the charter members back in 1990 that was on the list along with medicare. They are still on the list but they are making great progress. We took the inventory component off the list. In addition, they have a good corrective action land and congress got involved and supported the need for the corrective action plan. They have been reducing access inventories over there. We felt we needed to narrow that area to demonstrate and recognize the progress they have made in that area. We identify new high risk areas. We have identified three this past year. One was the 2020 census which we believe has a number of risks that are not managed appropriately. The last census in 2010 caused over 10 billion. The current 2020 census does not have effective cost estimate in place. There is a number of new areas that they are thinking about using. These risks are not manageable yet. Secondly, Environmental Liabilities are due to the Nuclear Weapons cleanup activities. Also, cleaning up military activities are now approaching half 1 trillion. We believe that number is probably understated. The federal Government Spending tens of billions of dollars to clean up these activities. The liability keeps growing. We are we really do not have a costeffective way to manage this enormous and growing challenge. Third, we saw a pattern of federal programs that are supposed to help Indian Tribes and their members were falling way short, both in the education area and deterioration of some of the schools, staffing problems, hospitals did not have Quality Assurance standards in place, and also it was taking a long time to get approval from federal Government Agencies to allow Indian Tribes to exploit resources on their own lands. Thus, depriving them of some of the resources and capabilities to help solve their own problems. These are the areas we have identified on the list. I am committed at gao to this effort. I mentioned in the last administration, if they got the agency head or deputy or senior officials from the department at the meeting with the omb Deputy Director, i personally would attend those meetings to focus on this and bring all gao resources to bear. I personally participated on meetings in these highrisk areas over the years. I plan to continue to do that as well. We have a responsibility under the Program Management improvement accountability act to evaluate ombs efforts to address these high risk areas as well. I am determined to do this. I have eight and a half years left on my 15 year term. So i plan to stay focused on this as one of our Top Priorities. I would be happy to take any questions at this point before we get into the panel discussion, if time permits. Yes . We just need to get you a microphone. Thanks. I am meredith. Thank you for your time. How do you think the government reorganization will affect the high risk list in the coming years . One of the areas that we have pointed out is the number of highrisk areas we have identified in the later years, in more recent years have involved multiple agencies working on an issue. I would be interested to see to what extent those areas will be addressed in the government reorganization effort to aid the government reorganization effort from gao standpoint. I have sent letters to all major heads of all major departments and agencies in the federal government, outlining open gao recommendations, not only from our high risk list, but from the recommendations we have from overlap, duplication, in the federal government and prioritize what i think were key issues that the agency had to identify on. At any one time, even though 77 of our recommendations are implemented, there would probably be four or 5000 oh open recommendations. I wanted to get that to them so they could consider that in their reorganization effort. It is the perfect opportunity for them to look at open gao recommendations and see if they want to embrace that as part of their reorganization effort. We will see. We have done our part. We have given them the information to help them make informed decisions. I am in the process of meeting with all the new heads of departments and agencies and their leadership teams. I am about halfway through that process. Thank you very much. One of the things that has always amazed me is how some of the programs stay on year after year. I am wondering, many times and government, we have used the shame game. For example with the red light, green light, yellow light under the president s management agenda. I am wondering, how du get the intention how do you get the intention . I was just wondering, are you coordinating its all with the offices of Inspector General, maybe holding them accountable to say, what are you doing here . Are you helping fix these problems . One of the areas that we look at to help inform us about the high risk areas is the igs are required by law to produce Major Management challenges for each of their departments and agencies. That area that list they developed is a important is an important subject. Many agencies overlap with our high risk areas. The are working on that. One really important area that is in Cyber Security. I became concerned back in 1990s about Cyber Security. We designated Cyber Security as a high risk area across the federal government in 1997. This year is the 20 Year Anniversary of designating that. No one can say we did not warn people that this was a problem. We have made thousands of recommendations over the years. We have worked with the igs and congress to get the federal Information System act, so a lot of the Cyber Security work right now is done by the igs as part of as part of that legislation. A are involved in helping the agencies solve the high risk areas. We designated 2003 Critical Infrastructure protection as well. These are important areas. The igs are partners with us in addressing these high risk areas, of through their own designation of management challenges and working with us on governmentwide issues. I am not going to take anything off the highrisk list until it is appropriate to take it off the list. And so, some things, you know, weve picked some of the biggest management problems in the federal government and some of the problems are issues change over time. One good example is the Medicaid Program. Weve added the Medicaid Program after we added medicare, but the Medicaid Programs now through the expansion and through the Affordable Care act and other areas, changed over time, and medicare, medicaid, are among the Fastest Growing federal programs, so theyre having difficulty managing improper payments in those areas. The last estimate of improper payments by the federal agency governmentwide in 2016 was 144 billion dollars. And 60 billion was medicare and 36 billion was medicaid. And enforcement of our tax laws was another area, we added in 1990. Thats still an issue. We most recently added Identity Theft. You know, when we first put it on in 1990, there was no Identity Theft where people were stealing other peoples identities and filing fraudulent tax returns. So, the problems change. Some of these programs that have been on a long time have inherent risk issues, but its made more difficult by not having Good Management processes in place. A lot of the contract Management Areas have been on for a number of years. We had an interagency contracting area that we eventually removed that was managed properly, and changes were put in place, but the Contracting Management issues at nasa, dod, and doe have been on a list for long time and theyre just difficult Management Issues for them to do. We put together a cost guide to help them do better cost estimating of these major projects, thats making some headway and so theres been some progress in these areas, but not enough yet. Yes. [indiscernible] Charlie Clark with government executive. Theres a high number of vacancies that the Trump Administration is struggling to fill. Im wondering if gao noticed any slowdown in reporting to you at all or progress in some of these Program Reforms reforms . Not yet. We have very effective working relationships with the agencies, charlie. We and our liaisons have been working with us over time, so, you know, we havent really noticed any major issues at this point. Were still working through the process with the agencies under our normal kind of procedures. But that is one reason i am having the meetings with the new leadership of the departments and agencies. Is to firmly establish a constructive working relationship with gao, where we get the information that we need as quickly as possible. And that we get responses to our reports in a timely manner so that we can keep our commitments to congress to publish our reports on time. So, nothing out of the ordinary yet, but something to keep an eye on as we go forward. Yes. Hi, im julie crump, with omb. At your hearing for both the high risk and duplication when it came out this year i was there and i heard a few senators making a commitment to writing legislation on areas that made sense to them, that were not so political. So i am wondering, in this congress, if they have actually done that. Yes, we have supplied a number of committees, including those that held the hearings on the highrisk list, with our recommendations for legislative actions and the overlap duplication and fragmenttation area, we had a list, appendix to my testimony of 63 different recommendations that we have for the congress for legislative actions, and they are considering those going forward. Im hopeful they will be embraced. So far in the first six years, our overlap duplication and fragmentation works, they have been implemented. And so far, the federal government will save 136 billion and a lot of that was through legislative actions by the congress to implement our recommendations, some of which were included in the bipartisan budget acts for 2014 and 2015 and 2016 and 2017 as well. Its been one of the ways that congress has been staying under the caps, the discretionary caps and budget control act in order to avoid sequestration, and im hopeful there will be additional action on our recommendations. Yes . I think this will have to be my last. No . In the distinction between the underlying natural riskiness of an activity like Cyber Security and management, it must difficult to distinguish the overlying risk from the underlying. How do you do that . Maybe the answer is that it is obvious from all of the cases he have looks at. It is always important for it is important for us to focus on, from a fundamental fairness issue, lets take Cyber Security where you mentioned, most of the attacks involving areas of known weakness that havent been patched or havent been fixed and so while there is an inherent problem, there are known things that could be done to reduce agencies vulnerability. I am still concerned, despite all the intrusions in the federal systems, you know, inappropriate accessing to those systems, that federal agencies are not moving with enough urgency to address known problems. We have 1000 open recommendations to the agencies right now, just in the Cyber Security sphere alone. I think in that area, you cant eliminate and none of those areas we ask for zero risk, thats impossible, but there are things that can be done and weve offered very specific ways that that risk could be reduced in vulnerability and also, when there is an incident, you know, that the agencies respond appropriately and well to reduce their visibility. So, its an important distinction. We never identify an area thats just based on, you know, inherent risk. We always feel that there are management actions, things we put on the list, there are management actions that could be taken by the agencies to mitigate the risk going forward. Thats really the focus of this, is mitigating your risk, reducing your risk to the lowest possible activity, down to the inherent risk part that you mentioned and doing as best as you can and try to identify how the risk will morph over time. Obviously, the Cyber Security challenges today are a lot more dramatic than they were in 1997. So you need to continue to evolve, through the risk, and the only will you do that is having a management attention to the risk to begin with. You cannot just say, well, that is the way it is, nothing we do will have an effect. That is not Good Management approach. Hi, im Carden Cordell from fed scoop, talking about cyber again, and while we have legislation in the senate to address monetization. Weve seen a number of cios either leave or be reassigned to other agencies. Can you talk about what the impact may be and your monitoring of that . Ive been noticing that myself and thats an area to be concerned about. I was involved in the original legislation working with the congress in the klinger cowan bill to establish chief Information Officers in the federal government and also, most recently, the federal reform act, has strengthened the role of cios. We need strong cios and cfos in the government. The investment that the federal government has made every year, is about 80 billion or 90 billion and we feel that the federal government does not get an adequate return on that investment. In fact, in 2013 or 2015, i cannot remember which year, we designated Information Technology acquisitions and operations across the federal government as a high risk area. So it is on our high risk list. So, if people are not in place in the near management positions to manage that risk, that is of concern to me. So, well be watching that and see, you know, what impact that thats going to have. Both in terms of the vacancies, but also in terms of what it will do to the pace of implementing the reforms under fatar to give the cios more authority. That is an area to Pay Attention to, and we will. Chase gunner with federal computer week. On the Cyber Security front, in addition to fulfilling the open recommendations for agencies, what steps can Congress Take or can the administration take to increase the urgency you spoke about. Secondly, do you have any early takeaways on the federal hiring freeze . In terms of the Cyber Security area, in the last several years, congress has passed at least five different pieces of legislation that address the Cyber Security issue. I know theyre focused on it and a number of committees, ive had a number of conversations with members about it. And theyll stay focused on implementing, but theyve taken a lot of legislative action, both in terms of the work force issues, they required a number of reports, and so i dont expect attention in the congress to wane with regard to Cyber Security issues. With regard to the hiring freeze, we have ongoing effort right now to look at what impact that it had, you know, during that period of time that was in effect. We looked at the hiring freezes in Prior Administrations, and obviously, we judged that they were not an effective tool for managing government. It was better to manage based upon having a good work force and Strategic Plan in place and then deciding what you have. You know, the other area on the high risk list that we designated in 2001 was strategic Human Capital management across the federal government. Its still on the list now because of already existing critical skill gaps in departments and agencies across the federal government. So, to the extent to which that might be compounded by hiring freezes, now, they made some exception, it wasnt for a long period of time so, well have to wait and see. But ill see what the facts are based on the work that weve done and we should come out with a report later this year. Leadership commitment is the number one item on the list for agencies to get themselves off the high risk list and you just touched on an area that has been of interest of mine, which is Senior Leader development in our federal agencies. Im wondering though, the complementary leadership component of that which is the political appointees and turnover of appointees. How do you keep sustained improvement in place when you have sometimes very frequent turnover of appointees in some of the agencies that have some of the most significant challenges . Yes, the real anecdote to that turnover, which is going to be inevitable, all right . Given our system of government, is to have a well defined plan in place, thats written, a written plan with written measures, written goals, written milestones that people can be held accountable for that will transcend administrations. I try to work with the administration if theres a plan in place. One of the reasons i designated health care at the Veterans Administration as a high risk area and 2015, is that the problems there in my opinion were not going to be solved in the remaining years of the last administration, they were going to be in the next administration. So were working really hard with the new administration. Fortunately, the new head secretary was in the Prior Administration as well, so that helps, but what were working with va right now, on a written plan in place. If you have a good written plan and good institutional commitment throughout the organization, that plan is then shared with the congress and you have stability there in terms of the Committee Structures as well. Some of the members, that can help transcend changes in leadership in the departments and agencies. I continually meet with new leaders in the executive departments and agencies. It is one of the great advantages i have with the 15 year term in government, is to have continuity, and i take that continuity very seriously in terms of trying to make sure that i use that perspective that i have to help new leaders as they come in to the federal government. Maintain continuity for things that are being done well that should be continued as well as things that havent been done so well and need attention and need a fresh perspective and new ideas. To me, those are the tools that you use in order to make sure that the efforts by the federal government continue, despite whoever is in charge. Okay. Well, thank you very much for your time and attention. [applause] gene, thank you so much for spending so much time with us this morning. Theres nothing like hearing from the source directly to get fundamental insight and ideas about how to solve these problems. As our panel is getting set, were going to continue that trend and expose you directly to the folks in three agencies who are dealing with their agencie challenges on the high risk list and id like to introduce our panel chair to you. Sally ann harper is the president for association for federal enterprise risk management. So she knows about which shes about to speak. She was also previously the chief Financial Officer and chief Administrative Officer for gao. Most important to me, shes an academy fellow and vicechair of our board. So sally ann, thank you so much for joining us today and all of our panelists. I think youre going to find this exciting. We will have a q a time at the end so be prepared as you listen to their remarks. Thank you. Thank you, terry. Good morning, everybody, we have a distinguished panel here and the format that we are going to use this morning will be, i will introduce one panel member at a time. They will tell their story about where they are on the high risk list, the progress they have made and how they have done that. When each of the panelists has had a chance to do that, i have a few questions for them, but most importantly, maybe, we also would appreciate the questions that you may have about the progress that they have made. So i am going to start by talking about the department of defense. They manage about 4. 9 million secondary inventory items such as spare parts, with a value of well over 92 billion. Effective and efficient supply Chain Management is critical for supporting the readiness and capability of the force and helping to ensure that dod avoids spending resources on unneeded inventory that could bet are be applied to defense and other national priorities. So speaking to dods progress in supply Chain Management is kristen french. She assumed her current position as the Principal Deputy assistant secretary in july of 2016, and is concurrently serving as acting assistant secretary of defense for logistics and material readiness. She is a graduate of the u. S. Military academy at west point, and she retired from military service as a Brigadier General in november of 2015. Kristen . Kristen thank you, sally ann. Thank you all for having me here today. And i really enjoyed any opportunity to tell the story of how we are doing in the department of defense. Before i start though, i want to explain to you a little about who i am in the pecking order of the dod. As you know, its a Large Organization and we do have some new Senior Leaders that have come in over the last few months to react first of all, of course, secretary mattis is the secretary of defense and his deputy secretary is mr. Pat shanahan who has been on board about a month. He was an executive so he comes in with a lot of business experience and helping us on defense reform. Under secretary mattis, he has five undersecretaries of defense, one for policy, one for intelligence, one for personnel and readiness, one for comptroller and the last one is Acquisition Technology and logistics. I am under that undersecretary of Defenses Office and thats miss ellen lord, who has been on board about two weeks now, and her position is she recently comes from textron systems as the ceo of textron system. And our part is atl, the logistics part. You probably know that were going through a restructure as we look at acquisition reform. Our job is to be the advisor from all things logistics. We work with everything from from supply chain to transportation and maintenance and operational contract support and logistics for Weapons Systems. So, we, as was said, we are some of the initial areas that they looked at in 1990. The area im going to talk about specifically is supply Chain Management. So, i have a little bit of our history here to tell you about our story. So, in 1990, 25 plus years ago, we were called out as having high risk in supply Chain Management. We knew it was a problem, and, of course, you remember desert is storm, there were a lot of talks about all the material that was all over the battlefield and how we didnt have good accountability of our supply chain. So we really looked at it as an area that we knew we had problems in, but it was almost too hard to solve. So, over the, really, the two decades we kind of looked at the problem and knew it was a problem and didnt do a whole lot about it. So, we realized that it was a big elephant and we didnt know where we were going to go. So, in, basically 2010, the agency helped us with that and congress that, they wanted us to develop a plan on how to get off the high risk list. And, if you think about it, we had already hit 9 11 and we had been told over and over and also talked to congress about our problems with inventory but we did not get at it. So we needed to find ways to get at the problem and how we were going to solve it and one of those, it was easy one, gao and congress ordered us to put together a Inventory Management plan, on how we would get after supply chain. One thing i want to tell you though, we decided we had to have some best practices in place and i will go over some of those. The five areas mentioned that really helped us. Helped us focus how we were going to get at the high risk area and take a look at how we would get off the list in the future. Some. Best practices, ill talk about on and on over the course of my discussion today is to be collaborative and to be open and honest about where our problem areas are. Have a plan and commit resources to it, continue to measure, continue to measure, continue to measure our issues, and our ways and then also engaging Senior Leadership. So, we focused on those five areas and i want to tell you a little about what we did. So, 2010 is when we started looking at knowing that we had to get on it. We didnt have, like i said, a really good plan, but the first thing was, was to get leadership commitment. The leadership started working with gao regularly. I think in the past we looked at gao as being the enemy, we didnt want to talk to them. We felt they were going to report on us and it wasnt worth the time to talk to them oneonone and talk to their leaders about how to get at the problems. But our leadership was committed and again, i arrived in 2016. I had been in the department as an army colonel from 2009 to 2011, and i knew that around the ten time frame we were getting at, we had to get at the issue, we hadnt really committed to its. So, as i was leaving the department and going onto other jobs, i saw that we started that engagement with gao. I would tell you that thats a very good Success Story now. We have Senior Executives, we have Senior Leaders across all the services that are involved and committed on trying to get at inventory. I do want to tell you though that the supply chain, or Inventory Management has been split up into three separate areas and we are focusing on all three of them individually so we have different action plans for all three. I will talk about the other two, they are still on the high risk list. So, overall, supply Chain Management inventory is the part that we were able to get off the list in february. We had a small celebration when we got off the list there, but two others were still working on. So the leadership commitment was big, but the action plan was even bigger and that was what i mentioned a minute ago, which was the comprehensive Inventory Management Improvement Plan which provided us a road map we started it in around 2010, and we really got at it over the last couple of years, and it included 83 milestone actions. Thats a heck of a lot of milestones we had to meet and im proud to say that we completed all of them. Our mantra was dont buy what is not needed and dont keep what is not used. It sounds easy, but as you look at the inventory that we have in the military, we have Weapons Systems that are 40, 50, 60, 70 years old. We have b52 bombers, i think the last was built in the 60s and we are still flying them today. So we have to keep inventory that is available to support our Weapons Systems. But we want to make sure we dont buy what is not needed and dont keep what is not used and it takes a lot of effort. So, what we found was the action plan really has worked and weve continued to work at making a commitment to not just do those 83 areas, but look at where we need to improve even further. So in 2015 we expanded the focus. We really looked at inventory levels, and not just not by what is not needed, that also how are we managing our inventory. And weve added 25 more milestones to our list, and so far, seven of those have been completed and the rest are underway. So, we are doing a work in progress. And as gao just mentioned we know they can come back and put us back on the high risk list, we dont want that so we have to find ways to work through it. Weve institutionalized best practices. We have completed a new department of defense manual, 40. 01 volumes one through 12, on dod supply chain material management procedures. Continually updating and putting together not just a plan, but actually documenting and codifying what weve done and what we need to continue to do. The other thing, third area that was mentioned was capacity and continuing to support it. Weve found that we are a limited work force so we have to look at other outside agencies to help us with some studies and analysis. Weve done that and thats helped us get some best practices with business and look at how we can take inventory and decrease our amount. And what we did was we put together three working groups that were meeting monthly to work through the way ahead, and again, theyre all, with regards to inventory, ar forecasting demand planning is one group. Inventory retention is another and supply chain metrics was the third. We brought in subject Matter Experts from gsa, from the defense agency. From u. S. Transportation command and the military services. We worked through a monthly battle rhythm. We also upped it to a quarterly event with our Senior Executives and its called a supply Chain Executive Steering Committee and that has members from all those agencies working together quarterly and making sure were going over the actions and working through the way ahead. And in the fourth area, the gao mentioned was monitoring. We monitor regularly and we did that by setting up standard across the department of defense measurements and metrics. That was really hard to do. Every service measures things differently. It had to take a collaborative effort across the department of defense to agree on metrics we were going to use. We have 23 enterprise level metrics that we measure and that we used, again, some third party folks to come in and help us build those metrics. Things like the excess on hand, due in potential future excess, forecast error biases, on and on. Metrics that are used across industry and now in dod. I would tell you thats a good news story. Were not there in other parts of department of defense and we want to get standardized metrics across all of our different logistics functions. It will help us maintain oversight and better perform some of our efficiency goals and our way ahead. But the monitoring is critical. And we continue to do it. And how do we do it . We have a semiannual review with each Service Coming in to brief us on their own metrics, to review how theyre doing and make sure theyre meeting the standards. And if not, we bump it up a level and theyll come to the next level and brief out what the levels are. Usually its something theyve planned to do, if theyve had a bump in their metrics and they know theyve got to get at it and improve for the next time. Its a semiannual review. We call tt Inventory Management review and its a fullup event every six months with the services and my office in atnl. And then the fifth area is demonstrated progress. So im going to give you some numbers just to tell you, so dod has about 145 billion dollars we spend in logistics every year, about a 600 billion Dollar Department of defense budget. Over 25 of the budget is spent on logistic services, well, im proud to say that our inventory has gone down over the past several years. Right now, 97 billion dollars in inventory, but its 7. 5 billion down from over 105 billion in 2012. In the last four years, weve improved over 7 billion of decreased inventory. Weve also been able to take a look at contract managed government owned inventory. Inventory we have that we have either let contractors use for performance based logistic contracts or they have in their sights that we know are going on government equipment. We have been able to have better visibility. We had previously reported 9 billion that wasnt previously reported is now being reported that were managing and holding the contractors accountable for inventory that federal government owns. And we have also decreased excess 3. 5 billion dollars. Reduced on hand excess since a high point in march of 2012. So a lot of good news story as we look at inventory going down, having better visibility of inventory and managing inventory across the department of defense. Also, another key number that we have is due in potential future excess. Weve dropped over 1 billion since fy 09. So, really, a lot of good news stories in inventory. Communication, collaboration and commitment have all brought us success, like i said in february we got a great new story where we pulled inventory off the high risk list. Saying that though, we have two other areas that are a part of our supply chain that are currently on it. One is asset visibility. It was added in 2005. And if you think about 2005, we had been at war for a couple of years in iraq and afghanistan, and people were complaining they had no in transit visibility and no ability to see their cargo en route. So, what happened is gao pulled that as separate item under supply chain. We showed them right away things we were doing across the department to improve our numbers and visibility of assets. What weve agreed upon with the gao is we have put together a strategy, not an action plan, but a strategy of improving dod asset visibility. Because we have so many good news things weve done over the past decade, they were comfortable with us doing a strategy instead of a formal plan. Congress helped us in fy 15 telling us to get at it. Weve been working on dodwide enterprise metrics. I know that our team is working hard to make sure we can get that area off the high risk list. The third area is supply is distribution. In 2005 that was added to the list and they directed in 2015, part of the mdaa that we work on that. A material and distribution plan. And theyre happy with our progress and theyll continue to let us march and relook at in 2018, and make sure that we continue to work towards similar efforts that weve done for our inventory area. The fourth area though, thats in my area of responsibility, that is part of the dod high risk, is you would see that in 2012, theres a dod contract management high risk and thats what gets tough with gao. They break down into a subarea, subtask as part of that overarching high risk area. And my office is responsible for operational contract support. So, we have the operational contract support, ocs part of the dod contract management high risk on our part of the high risk list. We are proud to say that two of the five criteria we have met and three areas that weve partially met and thats capacity, monitoring, and demonstrated progress. But we really are bringing gao into our discussions about ocs. Weve done a lot of improvement the last few years and one of the examples of how weve learned to work with gao on a closer basis, weve asked them to attend some of our sessions, some of our meetings and in fact, in june, we had an operational contract support summit where they attended with us and sat in and were very happy with the results. So, a lot of good news stories, we are guarantee that we will be going off into a 19 for those three areas, that is our goal. We are working through a lot of ways ahead. The biggest thing, well talk about it during the q a, we had to overcome was the thought that they were not part of our regular discussion throughout the two years. That we wait until the reports about to come out and then get blindsided. We need to have a regular conversation with the gao and make sure that they understand some of our concerns, that we understand their concerns. We sincerely appreciate the five areas theyre focused on for us to get off the list. We just dont do well if we dont have a way to track our improvement, and track our metrics to make sure that were moving towards success of getting off the list. So, again, a real good news story for inventory, the other three areas were working on and he think that well have a good news story in the future. Thank you. Thank you, kristin. We are going to turn we can clap for kristin. [applause] were going to turn from our attention to dod and their place on the high risk list and look at va, veterans affairs. Veterans Health Administration operates one of the Largest Health care Delivery Systems in the nation. With 168 medical centers and more than a thousand patient facilities organized into regional networks. They have faced a growing demand by veterans for its health care services, due in part to Service Members returning from the United States military operations in afghanistan and in iraq. And also in the aging veterans population. That trend is expected to continue. The total number of veteran enrollees rose from 7. 9 million to almost 9 million, from fiscal year 2006 through fiscal year 2016. Over that same period, vas bugetary resources have increased substantial i from 37. 8 billion in 2006 to 91. 2 billion in fiscal year 2016. Id like to introduce dr. Carolyn clancy, who is the deputy undersecretary for health for Organizational Excellence at the department of veterans affairs. She has oversight of the departments quality performance, safety, systems engineering, ethics accreditation programs. Prior to her current position she served as the interim and are secretary for health, overseeing the nations largest integrated Health System as well as the director for Emergency Agency for Health Care Research and quality. She will give you her story on where the agency is under progress to come off the gao high risk list. Thank you very much. Good morning everyone. It is a pleasure to be here and i want to have a shout out for napa. When we were first put on the high risk list 2015, the first thing we did when we heard about shortly thereafter an napa workshop was to send a whole lot of people over here and it was hugely helpful to us. So, please keep up the good work. So, probably late january, early february before the official announcement, gao leaders came over and told us they might put us on the high risk list. I figured it was pretty much a done deal, but didnt want to be official until there was actually an announcement and indeed, they did. I will say just in terms of criteria for getting off the list, leadership commitment has not been an issue since this happened. Then secretary bob mcdonald and now secretary David Shulkin have been very supportive of our efforts to try to get this right. Which does not mean it has been really, really easy. Understand that we are both a Government Organization and a Health Care Organization. You heard sally ann say how large and farflung it is. What that means is that we have all of the regulations of the private sector and then a whole lot more with the gao, the ig and so on, so forth, but we also have the joint Commission Accreditation and on and on. A lot of convergence, but not 100 across all of those entities. So in the spring of 2014 we had a big access crisis. Phoenix, arizona was the facility where it works, and it was clear we had a systemwide problem. I want to say, about a dozen years ago, napa did a study for us or helping us look at how much care we buy out of the network. Like the canadian system buying some services out of the United States because it makes more sense. It was clear that the future for us is actually not being a closed integrated delivery system, but rather being part of a high performing network. Focusing on our Foundational Services that we do exceptionally well and responding and addressing to the unique needs of the veterans we serve, but also taking advantage of estimates from private Sector Health facilities in the community. That itself is a very big shift and i think the work getting off the high risk list will position us well to actually step up to that challenge. So, gao identified five areas of risk for us, inconsistent policies and procedures, fragmented oversight and accountability. Information technology challenges. I would dare you to find a Health Care Organization anywhere, certainly in this country and probably around the globe in the developed nation, anyway, who wouldnt recognize i. T. As a big challenge. Training that was siloed and not necessarily strategically linked to priorities for the Health Care System and bugetary resources and allocation of budget. Other than that, we were in great shape. [laughter] so, these are really symptoms of core problems that we have to address if were going to respond to all of our challenges and most importantly, make sure that wherever veterans seek our assistance they get safe, timely, high quality care. Notice how those words just rolled off my tongue. There is no problem in the va Health Care System that doesnt exist almost everywhere else in health care, at least somewhere. What we have is a whole lot more transparency, which is a gift, but its also a doubleedged sword. The more transparent we are the more, the Higher Expectations go and so forth. At the time of the crisis, in addition to the gao placing us on their high risk list, the congress was also very helpful. They passed a bill giving us a new, Brand New Program in Additional Resources to buy care in the community, to relieve the burdens on access. And in addition to that, they gave us resources to enhance our own internal infrastructure and put in motion a variety of oversight mechanisms. Very, very robust and comprehensive set of independent assessments, as well as a commission on care, which actually gave us a lot of good advice and so forth. So, were not suffering from lack of input for sure. What the gao really, really wanted us to do. We got partial credit after the first two years for leadership commitment and for submitting an action plan in the area where we did the best was actually addressing some of the shortfalls in policy, inconsistencies and ambu guty. Ambiguity. I that when we are writing our policies for health care, our policies range from some of the most sophisticated in the country often paired with academic affiliates because were affiliateed with 130 of the nations medical schools, this goes back to just after world war ii to much, much smaller facility in highly rural areas. One of our challenges in terms of access is that roughly one in five americans lives in a rural area. For the veterans we serve, thats one in three. So, in some of the communities, capacity for providing health care anywhere, whether its va or in the community, is highly variable. We have some logical advantages to that end as well, and in terms of telehealth because we have the largest footprint in the country, but nonetheless, a tall order to pull all of this together. One of the challenges we have with policies just to make this concrete was writing policies that would fit both our most sophisticated complex facilities as well as those located in smaller areas of the country that were smaller and less complex than those paired with Academic Centers and so forth. I will say there had been work begun on that before, so having this high on the list gave the internal work a huge boost. With the assistance of gao, and they have been very helpful, even when sometimes they feel theyre being too helpful, to be quite honest, they challenged us to develop a root cause assessment, how did we develop these underlying risks or symptoms of our problems . And what we did was to actually use an organizational frame work that integrated findings from the independent assessments, Inspector General reports. And previous gao reports. To come up with a list of six short root causes and were working rapidly to develop more robust action plans. By way of getting started, for those of you who might be new to this or might be new to it in the near future, the first thing we did with Bob Mcdonalds very enthusiastic blessing was to convene a crossdepartmental work group to develop action plans to address the root causes. We took advantage of omb sir lahr 1722 and ongoing modernization efforts that all departments are working through to ensure the Sustainable Solutions are developed and implemented across the enterprise. Dr. Shulkin, who you may have heard mr. Dodaro refer to as someone who was then leading the Health Administration is now our secretary. So we have the advantage of that continuity, and he is quite committed not only to trace addressing the underlying risks, but high level challenge areas. Access, no surprise, Community Care, and through congress, we have other ways of addressing care in the community. Some of them come out of our core budget and some out of a separate budget and were working with the congress to consolidate those and make it easier. Weve used this as an opportunity to engage employees across the organization. It probably will not be a shock to know that when we issue policies from headquarters, they are sometimes not met with instantaneous enthusiasm and so we took the opportunity to actually have some listening tours and thats ongoing, to find out, you know, what are we doing thats driving you nuts and how can we make sure that were getting your input earlier and in a way that makes the policies more effective. I am feeling more optimistic for two reasons. One is there is a very clear i on this as far as our overall strategy. Dr. Shulkin is taking the effort very, very seriously. In addition to that, i noticed a difference in the v. A. About how people react to gao reports. One recent example, we had a report done by the gao on challenges faced by veterans who served in the original persian gulf war deployment. Many of whom are suffering from a condition or a cluster of conditions that we have had struggles to identify the cause for, the best treatment for them. Of course there are benefits to this as well. Right now youre talking about two administrations in the same department which does not always go very well. One of my colleagues said listen, we are doing our work. It is those guys. I am sure all of you who have worked in government have never, never heard this before. I kept pushing back on that yogurt and he said, you are right. We actually have to do a lot that are. The gao is right, and were going to up our game. I had never seen that before we were put on the high risk list. The secretary identified as i said four areas, and i said this is with a lot of input from the gao. Access and Community Care worker right at the top of the list. Getting off of the list was important. And of course we had an amazing ambitions for how rapidly we could do that. But what really motivates people is the notion that these are underlying challenges, that are barriers to our sense of mission and i cannot really overstate the sense of Mission People have at the v. A. I have been there for years this week, and it was a huge treasure to me. I had worked out hhs for a lot of years before that. The sense of the mission is palpable. In and the notion that the activities we are pursuing with the best of intentions are misguided or getting in the way is a very powerful motivator to the difficult work of change. We are focusing a great deal on shifting from a reactive mode of dealing with problems. As i mentioned earlier, we have a lot of input and there is always something to react to to get ahead of the curve and be proactive. What is very interesting about this in the context of our modernization effort is that invariably modernization expert focus on you just heard from my colleague at the dod, we need the right analytics and metrics and so forth. Our experience as part of the v. A. , 90 of the department is that yes we need terrific analytics and we have some great people, but it has to be tightly tied to action and has to be oriented so that we can get proactive information rather than waiting for crises and problems to emerge. We have also struggled a lot, but are continuing to work on making sure that our data are reliable, because we were the first Health Systems to really become immersed in an electronic records. We have an amazing amount of electronic data. Choosing the right metrics, the pressure seems as some people would refer to it, continues to be a challenge. I think we are getting a lot closer. We have to be much, much smarter about how we are using our budget and getting ahead of the curve. I think that this is a very powerful force. I must say sometimes its a little bit like the recent researcher that i had. The Technology Available if you freely shattered the bone bones in your wrist, changed quite dramatically. Not so long ago i would have gone home with hardware on the outside and i wouldve been casting a shadow on the sunlight and much, much more prolonged convalescence. You know, it has been about three weeks and i can move my wrist a lot, which feels almost miraculous. And at the same time, spots have appeared in the day when i think this will be over. So, i dont want to suggest that every moment of this experience is one joyful journey. But i think more and more people are starting to see this is a hugely helpful tool in our journey forward. Again, what motivates us is that it will help us close the gap between our aspirations and the reality that veterans experience. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. [applause] thank you carolyn. We are now going to turn our attention to the office of Personnel Management. In 2001, Human Capital management strategic Capital Management was added to the gao highrisk list and specifically Critical Skills are part of what is at issue here. Agencies have they can have skill gaps for a number of different reasons, in sufficient numbers of people insufficient numbers of people, in the right place with the right skills to do the work, the need for new skills. I am very honored to have veronica who is the Principal Deputy associate director for the u. S. Office of Personnel Management and Employee Services division and she will be talking about what opm is doing to remove this particular item from the high risk list. Her current responsibilities include formulating and implementing Human Capital Management Strategies and policies to support federal agencies as they accomplish their missions. She has earned her law degree in washington d. C. And is also a a member of both the maryland and the michigan bar associations. Veronica thank you. Good morning, everyone. If my voice coming through ok . A little better . A little louder, ok. Im going to talk with you about the challenges come a little bit about the history where we are and weve been on the gao list in the future probably come off of the gao list. One question i have for the group is how many of you all are hiring managers . Any of you executives . Have you ever been hiring managers . How many of those if you have been hiring managers think strategic Human Capital was her responsibility at that time . That is a good ratio given the number of people in the room. The reality is when you talk about Human Capital management, strategic Human Capital, everyone always thinks the same thing. That it is someone elses responsibility. That belongs to the Human Capital officers in the building, and maybe the h. R. Directors. The hr specialists are supposed to enable me to do my job, but im not directly responsible how that looks within my agency. And there in there in lies the problem. We must all be responsible for how Human Capital functions. Within the organization. Be it the executives who help identify the skills needed, what kind of talent is needed, the managers who help implement that, the line supervisor whos helping engage employees so they dont want to leave and fellow coworkers who see themselves as Leaders Within the organization to help achieve the mission of the agency. As was stated earlier, back in 2001, this area of strategic Human Capital management was placed on the gao high risk list. We remained there for 10 years. We were able to apply some strategies that made some differences, that it was that time that the gao asked us to begin focusing on closing the skills gap, especially looking at missioncritical occupations. In 2011, opm engaged very closely to figure out how we could Work Together to identify those missioncritical occupations and addressing skill gaps throughout government. In 2014 what we found was we were not making as much progress as he wanted to, and we developed a datadriven repeatable process that would allow agencies to figure out where do i have some real skill gaps within my organization, in a missioncritical occupation of figuring out what we can do from a government perspective. We looks at twoyear retention, retirement rates, applicant quality. If you think about what is happening during these years, we had everything from sequestration, we had agencies continuing from a couple of quarters in different years, and we also had a hiring freeze. As you can imagine, that has an impact how people are able to retain talent as well as how they are able to hire. We have been seeing the repercussions of those larger policy issues facing us. We issued a memorandum about a year and a half ago asking each of the agencies to conduct real root cause analysis and develop an action plan on how they were going to address those causes in missioncritical occupations. The agencies reviewed all of their data and we found that all of them have been working with us to address those missioncriticaloccupations in skill gaps. The interest does wayne. It is very difficult the interest wanes. It is very difficult to continuously work on the areas and put attention on them, not being able to see the metrics change. Not seeing those improvements as quickly as you would like because of the very nature of Human Capital. While we did also do is identify government skills gap areas including acquisition, economists, auditors and hr. We also had done some work on i. T. And specifically cybersecurity. I know that its been a large topic of what we talk about today, especially with the gao director. Because of all the work we had done over the prior 15 years when we got to developing the cybersecurity work for strategy, workforce strategy, we were able to do some very interesting analysis and look at enterprisewide solutions. We see ourselves inching towards improvements. When we issued that strategy for cybersecurity back in june or july of 2016, we set a goal of how many people we would hire by january. We exceeded that goal by 20 governmentwide. I bring this up to say that it is this kind of careful analysis that will get us there, but it also means having the whale and the coordination across all of the agencies. In 2017 the gao issued an update to the high risk report and we were labeled to show that we met our leadership commitments. In some of our other areas with we were labeled as partially met but ultimately we do know that more work needs to be done to show the demonstrated progress. I am starting to see the glimmers across government. I was most excited when i was involved in the Strategic Planning for opm and i started hearing our cfo and cio and all the different organizations talk about a skills gap area. How are we going to address the skills gap areas within our workforce . It rolled off their tongue, how they thought about strategic thinking. And i thought, we are making progress. If you had use that terminology for five years ago, people would shake their heads and say i am not really sure what that means, i am not connected to this concept. We are also seeing across the government what skills gap areas, there has been excellent strategy employed. I will not go as far as to say the data is proving effectiveness, i will say we are employing excellent strategies that are being shared across the different groups. We see the agencies within their own Mission Critical occupations applying some of those same strategies to see results. This will be a long time coming. One of the things we are noticing is or some of the agents these the analysis required on a quarterly basis to give us update is a challenge. We are looking at this at vi tools. How can these tools assist agencies as they do this work so that it doesnt become a data pool and exercise of what might seem like futility . Rather, so it can become an exercise of where they see success and how they can improve its in other areas within the workforce. I know we are running short on time, so i will say let us get started with questions. Thank you, veronica. [applause] each of our panelists has discussed their journey with how they are moving forward to take their weaknesses off of the high risk list. I think a couple of the areas have come up that are consistent across the areas. One has been with the Relationship Building that has been necessary in order to be able to make progress. Another has been the use of Data Analytics and metrics as something important in order to show progress. The Action Planning or Strategic Planning that helps tell people where you are going. All are important. What i havent heard and would like to hear is if you had to address one major obstacle that has been something you have had to work pretty hard to overcome, what would you say that major obstacle would be . Veronica, what dont we start with you . One area for us that has been a challenge is a common understanding of what these metrics should look like. When we talk about this work with the agencies, they have a clear idea of how they need to did into those metrics within their own workforce. We have heard from gao that they wish to see more of a dashboard style where agencies are comparing to each other. What we find is the different occupations and needs are so different from one another that we would like to give them the flexibility to do the kind of analysis that will work given their workforce. Under our 250 regulations that were issued in january, what we have done is asked the agencies to conduct quarterly reviews looking at the data. Some of this will be around missioncritical or other areas of concern for Human Capital. We find that is a very effective way for the agencies to on this issue. The challenge has been, how do we come to the same understanding of what the metrics should be and how we pursue that change management moving forward with the agencies . Carolyn i think i was a challenge for us and i am optimistic we will get there, but it is difficult when veterans cannot get here today, you do something today to fix their problem. You are not waiting for a fullyblown strategy or a formal document that has been circulated and been informed and enhanced by feedback and so forth. There are actions that have to be taken very rapidly. Sometimes because inability to get care can lead to delays that will actually have a pretty important impact on veterans. On the one hand, we have this whole effort gathering steam and traction to address the underlying causes of how do we get there. At the same time, we have to be fixing problems right now. Integrating those has, at times, been a little challenging, because people will look at the expectations from our colleagues in terms of how they present the work they have been doing. It looks great to them. It looks like some of the facilities with different occupations. At the same time, i say to them, you have been doing all this, right . You have been doing rapid assessments about what are the best techniques used. You are doing that with a different little but trying to find that convergence path will continue to be a problem. Our secretary particularly because he comes fresh out of running the Health Care System, which is the biggest part of the department i would say is a very excellent, oriented, make change now person. We will get there, but it is a little bit of a pyongyang a yin yang on occasion. I will do an internal than an external challenge. The internal challenge is getting the services to agree to the common metrics that were going to be used at the enterprise level. As i said earlier, we have each service has a service way of doing tracking and managing and spending money on their Service Areas of expertise. Therefore, they have had over the course of decades built Information Systems of how they track inventory and manage inventory. Sometimes we have metrics where 80 is a good news story, other times it is 90 . How did you get all the services to agree on the one metric that everyone would use . It took a lot of persistence and dedication by senior supply leaders to make the services a great agree to a standard set of metrics. Once they of what they were agreed upon, they had Services Come on in and say that is the standard metrics. It is great that they agreed upon them and set of instead of being forced upon them. We can really measure how we are doing across the board. I want to continue that work distribution and other with a portfolio. It helps our Senior Leadership, along with our understanding of what is happening across the enterprise. The external challenge we had is gaos team of auditors. Reality is just like any organization you have change. You have people constantly coming and going. We have been on this list since 1990. There is no way to fame team has been with us for 25 years. As you get new auditors on board, no matter what you are dealing with, you are dealing with someone who might not have been around our business and our area, our lexicon, our acronyms. We have to take time to teach them how we do business, explain to them how the government operation in the department of how the government operates in the department of defense. We had one team there is a complete changeover of the Audit Team Members for one of our areas on our highrisk list. That cost of a delay. We had to explain to the team how we are doing things and how we think it will interact with us on a regular basis. We were blessed to have a team from 2015 on for the inventory work with us. That helped us really get the next really get through the next hurdle. We have challenges and were working through them. That is a Lesson Learned brought us have that constant communication with gaos so we dont change of teams holistically but maybe individual members. Let me build on that point because in each of your discussions, the issue of relationships management has come up. Kristen, you talked about managing the relationship with gao, but if you end up on a high risk list you find others pile on. The Inspector General develops a new interest of what youre doing in that area than other people develop a new interest and you have the congressional oversight. Can you talk a little bit more about oversight for managing those strategies . Kristen you know we would have gao looking at a subject. Before you know it, you have been you have other agencies looking at that topic. How do we manage it all is we have to have a change agent, a Senior Leader managing and editing all the study points to make sure they are consistent in the message and working through the different organizations as they look through our areas. It is all about the back and communication. You have to have that feedback loop and regular communication. Again, having a Senior Leader dependent on so to pin it on. We have the same phenomenon. Sometimes depending on timing of the reports, people will have internal confusion where someone is talking about the ig report that they call it which he 08 report because it is all the same topic. Usually, it is a slightly different slice or perspective. One of the strategies we used this year was to share our root cause investments. They used these strategies for every department. In a funny way, the risk areas identified for us by the gao are almost a mirror image of the Major Management challenges. In both instances, you have to figure out what is the logic model that connects them. We figured having testified at several hearings, i felt like the human sandwich that it actually made sense if we were more transparent rather than less. I will leave it at that. Were still working on it. Veronica our challenge is a little different. Although the ig will sometimes adjust some of these issues. They may be under gao reports that have a tangential relationship to this area. We find yourself going into other meetings, talking about skills gaps when they are related to some other in Human Capital. What is most interesting is opm is here to be the ambassador for all 24 agencies. They do not see this as something under gao list or ig list. In some cases, we are lucky enough to have some company with our misery, like in Cyber Security were where all the agencies are getting the same questions we are getting and there are studies happening across government. Those help us because we can find agencies were willing to partner and apply some pressure where needed to make these changes. In many instances, it feels like opm is the one making the requirements. It seems to some agencies we are the ones instituting the burden, not understanding this is part of all of our work, this is how we are not trying to close skills gaps, i am not sure we are doing Human Capital at the agencies. Our challenge is slightly different. Far more gao studies that are related and the challenge with the agency. We have some time for questions from the audience. We will grab the mic for you and adam will come around. I think there is one in the middle of the room. Good morning. I feel your experiences mirror my teams experience that homeland. My name is annemarie. Dr. Clancy, you talked a little about your issues pushing down policy from a Headquarters Level two different types of organizations my question is how do you successfully perform vertical integration . Is it a matter of looking at the organization at different tears and making different requirements . You talk about your listening tour. If it making sure you build everything and so the policy relates to everyone . Have you do that successfully when you have different cultures in one organization . Piece of cake. No, i am kidding. What we talking about is the headquarters who have 18 regional networks. Below that, any number. 10 facilities with clinics and other facilities. Again, if you know much about health care or anything about it, health care looks kind of different in montana than it does in downtown manhattan. It is what makes it interesting. We had a lot to do to clean up our policies. First, the number had expired. We made changes to the overall formats. As well as the process of getting implants. We are still chipping away at how did we get input from people on the ground. Will we have been astonished by is how much people want to provide that inputs. I am told out one of these listening i am told at one of the listening tours some of that you can go back and finish. He had a lot he wanted to share about policies and so forth. The lines of authority and efficient right between headquarters and the regional level isnt something we are still working through in a number of areas. Probably a more challenging problem is overlapping policies at the Headquarters Level where it has been known to occur some policies appear to contradict each other. Some policies are extremely broad. For example, patient safety. Others focus on a specific condition or situation. I would say 99 of the time, this is not intentional. The other 1 , people are aware but cannot figure out how to resolve their differences. That is going to take more work, but it is squarely within our sites to address. Does that help . Other questions. Yes . Hi, i am Gary Chappell with the census bureau. We are a new member of the club, so to speak. [laughter] i heard a couple of reflections on real cost analysis. Reached cost analysis root cost analysis. How did you resolve the pitfalls . What i will tell you is, before we instituted the basis by which agencies were to conduct that route root cause analysis, people were identifying without the analysis. We did training for 140 different folks at the agencies. We walked them through that process. I think was over the course of about six months where we met with them, i went to say bimonthly. Is that right . And then we met with them individually. What we also did is those eight eight appoints we talked about, we pulled that for the agencies ourselves and distributed it to them and said, based on what you believe to be your root cause issues, take a look at this data and talk to us as you have questions. We started helping them formulate their action plan. Our folks held her hand throughout the process and give them the tools they needed to be able to do the Analysis Group we did not expect the agencies to be able to do it out the gate with just a guidance and some direction. I think that is the most important thing we did. The agencies need to put enough effort into executing against those action plans. The regular work can get in the way. I would add that after you do that work and they have the action plans, you will have to find friendly ways to allow them to review what progress has been made, review what work has been done. I will give you a quick example. We had always had the governmentwide areas come together on a quarterly basis and come together to see what they are noticing in their data. That was effective, but we noticed interest was not as high as it used to be an the discussions were not as robust trade will we decided to not as robust. What we decided to do is have meetings over the phone and a quick sequence of questions allowing them to share the information. Sometimes my point being, you get stuck on the analysis and people dont get into the actions. One of our speakers about earlier. We have to keep doing our work as we are doing our analysis. We have a twopronged approach. One is to do this through cause assessment. In addition to that, each risk area is doing their own. We havent quite gotten to the phase, although i can see it over the horizon, where we are going to find issues to reconcile. What i liked about starting at the enterpriselevel first is on a definition it incorporates areas of interdependence. For example, i can write a brilliant policy, but if i dont know if people are reading it or following it, it wont be all that helpful. In risk areas, that is like a big u. S. Policies here and fragmented oversight there. There has been internal competition. The policy people think their root cause assessment is the best and i will grant that 100 . Again, integrating all of that up is going to be a little bit challenging because of the areas of interdependence, which i would argue are going to be a challenge for any large government departments. Government department. Were working through it, but there is no way we will get rid of it altogether. A quick addon. For us, this analysis was difficult because we did not have standard data to look at. If you dont have standard data, you dont know were the issues are. It started in 2010 when we were directed to do an inventory Improvement Plan and get at where our issues were. That started us on the road of standardizing metrics and finding a way to be able to, i hate to say great our services on how they were doing the business and Holding People accountable. David from the professional services council. I was in a position in 1990 with the first high risk list came out. If you look at the internal communications we have, my opinion was, we will never be off this list as long as theres a gao. [laughter] that is not the point of my question, however. If you look at the history of these highrisk lists, there are two categories. Some of dr. Clancys very much of the objective of the agency is builtin. Inventory management, those are not the end themselves. Those are the means to the end. I would suggest the general hinted at this, it would behoove us and my question to you is, does this make sense . That we look more on two the end result rather than perfecting the process. That might be a better bath for gao and for the agencies to focus on. This was like a long lecture. Really, it is a question of, what do you think about that . Does that make sense . Had you approach the . How do you approach that . Thank you for that. We talk about how were achieving each of the five areas in terms of what gao set forth and how we get off the high risk list. We are doing all of us to make sure we have the right talent in government to achieve our mission. We are able to step back, stop worrying about the reporting piece, thinking about the metrics more strategically, looking at entire occupations and how were going to address the specific issues. We are able to do that. We are able to remember why we do Human Capital. We are able to think more strategically about what areas we need to focus on. I would agree with you. We need to do that most frequently. Often times, we get involved in the minutia of making the process work and forget what it is. Cyber security is a great example. We have done good work because we looked at the true objective. I dont want to overstate that every person i have interacted with at the a intuitively sees the direct connection to the end goal. I will say having served as the interim undersecretary during the year of our big crisis, when i had to testify on this, it seemed self evident to me and it was easy for me to be persuasive that we have to get veterans care right now but putting in a place where we are not back doing this again. I think many people get that. I tend to get more traction in dealing with people that way. I am not quite sure if it is as old as as bold, but it is a great question. I concur it is a great comment because we need a process to get at the end results. We cannot magically say this is going to the fixed. We change out leadership and we have to have a plan in place to stabilize the way ahead. This definitely is important for us to get to our end state, which is getting off the highrisk list. Do not buy what is not needed and do not keep what is not used. We have to know our end state is to be more efficient in a better manager of the taxpayer money. And do not keep what is not used. We are really proud of being pulled off the list this year, because we believe we have done that, but we have continuous process of improvement. It is critical that we understand it is for the longterm and that we dont just afford things. I will add one more thing. I get asked why were not like industry like walmart or amazon or other companies that are just in time and do things a little differently. I would tell you, the reality is that we have to manage older systems and look at how we do business to be able to search whenever the crisis comes our way. There are some things we learn from industry but also things the government has to do in terms of our mission to do whatever to sustain it. It is a great question and we have to remind people we are doing this for the greater good of our support for our security of our nation. Any other questions . Yes. Hi. Also with census. As we are starting, i am wondering if you can speak more about your engagement with gao, like when you engage them did you feel it was early enough . Thank you. I can start out by saying we have some of our staffers that talk weekly to the staffers on the gao team. Sometimes, several times a week. The leadership meets on a regular basis, whether it be monthly, quarterly, depending on the availability of the leadership. It is a constant communication and i will continue to stress that we want to have that open door back and forth. I would agree that the frequent communication is very helpful. I will say there are times when we held off having formal meetings. We had our own issues to resolve internally. I think will be an ongoing question and i will guess youll find this senses, as well. Is it a valuable investment of time to schedule a meeting when, in fact, we are not on the same page altogether . I do not mean we are at work or anything, but i think we may have had too high a bar thinking we would all have to be committed to get feedback. Were just about to start stepping it up on a new more regular basis. I cant imagine theres ever a week when we are not in touch with gao on a regular basis. We communicate regularly. We also invite them to some of our trainings. When we did the root cause analysis, we would invite them. Those were very effective meetings for us because people saw the commitment from gao. Could we have time for one more question. My one final question for you, we have new entrants and we have some veterans. Do you have one final piece of advice you would also like to share . First of all, thank you for having me here today. It was great to be able to talk about our successes and our way ahead. I have to say you have to be committed. It is no small undertaking. It is leadership involvement, and action plan, getting at root causes of issues and following through and continuing tort all of the areas on a regular basis. We started this for inventory in 2010 on a full throttle, and it took us six plus years to get off the list. I would like, it is not going to happen overnight, but it is no small task, but it can be done. My first advice would be to not get on the list. [laughter] one of the comments that was made when we were put on it a couple years ago was, you know, there is a certain amount of stickiness to getting on this list, meaning you dont get off rapidly. Based in number of forms, we have already seen statistics on that, which are hugely helpful. The gao gives you a terrific framework for what you need to do and if there is any advice, dont let that get in the way of trying things. It does not have to be perfect before we launch. We will have to try a number of things before we go to the definitive path forward. Remember where does remember why you are doing it. Sometimes we forget the longterm goal. What is the agencys mission and how will they achieve that with the people they have . Keep going back to that girl to get caught up into, having met all the problems. Could you please join me in thanking our panel . [applause] , live, your calls and comments on washington journal. Then, newsmakers with neil radley. Trumpsat, president speech at a rally in phoenix, arizona. Human a come of Winston Churchill and george orwell. Met, for example, but the hero was named winston. Churchill read it twice and love it. Interestingly, orwell, though a socialist, was a left this all of his life was a leftist all of his life. He was the only conservative that he admired. 8 00 eastern, on cspans q a. Morning, a roundtable discussion on u. S. Foreignpolicy and President Trumps speech on afghanistan. Thepresentative from institute for policy studies. Later, former Navy Commander brian mcgrath, with the hudson it to two with the hudson it did to. As always, we will take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. Washington journal close vote is next. Host good morning on this sunday, august 27, 2017. As Tropical Storm harvey, which slammed on to texas shoreline as a cat gore four hurricane on friday night, continues to dump massive amounts of rain in texas. Residents are braced for days of rainfall, and the threat of catastrophic flooding in houston and other communities throughout the southern part of the state. At least two deaths have been attributed to the Tropical Storm, and President Trump declared areas affected by wind, rain, and flood damage as disaster areas to spfe