Getting Ready for the Retirement Tsunami: Linda Springer, Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Discusses What the Federal Government Needs to Do before Its Retirement Peak in 2008-10

Fillichio, Carl, The Public Manager

Forget brain drain, talent takeoff, or retirement wave when speaking of the future of federal human resources management. Those words don't adequately describe the situation anymore. The federal government is facing a retirement tsunami in the next few years, and new programs--and better ways of thinking--are required now to solve the problem.

That was the message from Linda M. Springer, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), at a standing-room-only forum on January 31, 2006, sponsored by the Council for Excellence in Government and The Washington Post. The session, part of an ongoing series, Taking the Leap: Innovation and Results for a New Public Service, featured top thinkers and doers from the federal sector's personnel policy and program arenas at an on-the-record discussion.

Springer was a logical and provocative guest for such a forum. Before she was unanimously confirmed by the Senate as the nation's eighth director of OPM, she served as controller at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and head of the Office of Federal Financial Management. During her tenure at OMB, the federal government's year-end financial reporting time was reduced from five months to forty-five days, and she established a Sarbanes-Oxley equivalent internal control assurance requirement for federal agencies, directed the development of an executive order to ensure efficient and effective management of federal real property assets, and oversaw the first comprehensive assessment of all federal government expenditures for risk of improper payment. Before joining the Bush administration, she spent more than twenty-five years in the private sector, primarily in the financial services industry.

According to Springer, 60 percent of the federal government's General Schedule employees--and 90 percent of the Senior Executive Service--will be eligible to retire in the next ten years. "That's not just normal turnover, that's pick it up and walk out the door." OPM projects that the "tsunami," as Springer describes it, will crest in 2008-10. In the future, she sees a very different federal workforce. "It will be much more diverse," she told Patricia McGinnis of the Council for Excellence in Government, who moderated the discussion at The Washington Post …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: Getting Ready for the Retirement Tsunami: Linda Springer, Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Discusses What the Federal Government Needs to Do before Its Retirement Peak in 2008-10. Contributors: Fillichio, Carl - Author. Journal title: The Public Manager. Volume: 35. Issue: 1 Publication date: Spring 2006. Page number: 3+. © 2009 Bureaucrat, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group.

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