As a resident of the Midwest, I have a dog in this fight, because moving government jobs here would be a huge boon for a region that is in dire need of jobs. I’m thrilled to see federal investment in Kansas City. And if you believe that climate change is a real and pressing issue, you should support government policies that might spur growth and reinvestment in the Midwest, too.

The Midwest is depopulating, despite having tons of infrastructure and the capacity for the kinds of dense, resilient cities I’m told we need to weather the coming climate apocalypse. We have irreplaceable strategic assets that are currently crumbling because decades of federal disinvestment and policies have favored coastal areas at our expense.

So with that caveat about my personal bias, let’s get down to my hot takes:

The culture in Washington, D.C. is toxic and contributes to administrative bloat.

Specifically: there are many highly paid feds who should retire but don’t because they are paid above market wages in positions that are very cushy.

I have worked in four government agencies and all were either overstaffed or had dead weight on staff that should have been cut. In my experience, most federal agencies in Washington are full of useless managers who pawn their work onto subordinates and/or contractors (the contracting racket is a rant for another day).

These managers refuse to retire, because their subordinates are doing their work, and the managers are often “teleworking” while their peons do the jobs of the absentee manager. (Of course, they’re not doing any work while they’re in the office, either, and most of their employees are probably more productive when the bad managers are at home and staying out of their way. But maybe some of them would retire if they had to go into the office…)

These managers have ruined and squandered a generation of talent. They have enabled our bureacracy to grow far larger than it needs to be by lying about how overworked they are. They have failed again and again to perform the most basic aspects of their jobs. But they’re allowed to continue in their roles because of a fundamentally broken culture in Washington.

These are the people who will finally leave government service if we move their jobs to the heartland. Every American should toast their departure.

There is no accountability in Washington.  Every time one of these managers fails to deliver, they claim their failure is because their agency is understaffed and underfunded. Then they receive more money to hire other people to do the jobs they’ve failed to do. I have personally seen this happen over and over, and it’s not limited to the federal government.

My husband worked at a semi-governmental agency before we moved to Chicago. When he left his job (because of an awful manager that HR refused to fire because they claimed it would be age discrimination), they didn’t just backfill his position. They created two new managerial positions (each of which pays over $120,000) and there were plans afoot to hire fifteen contractors to do his job.

My husband may ultimately be replaced by seventeen additional people (in addition to the person who got his old job), and the work he was hired to do still hasn’t been completed. We don’t know how many people were eventually hired: but the fact that replacing him with eighteen people was even a possibility is completely insane.

Of course, his former employer is constantly asking for more money from the federal government, and one of the awful managers he fled recently requested $80 million for an “artificial intelligence” project. (The project is not actually an artificial intelligence project.)

The managers who oversee these clusterfucks in Washington are paid handsomely. And it’s not just the managers who are well-compensated: mid-level bureaucrats in Washington outearn most managers in the civil service in the rest of the country (and, in fact, the world), thanks to bonkers salary inflation that I personally believe is a result of D.C.’s uniquely toxic culture.

Before I dig into this, a little context. Federal employees are paid according to a salary table called the “General Schedule.” This schedule provides for location adjustments (i.e., an employee in New York makes more than one in Colorado.)

The lowest paid federal employee in Washington is a GS-1 (“Grade 1″), Step 1. They make $25,458 annually. The highest paid employee is a GS-15, Step 10 ($166,500.)

In theory, a GS-1 might be a mail clerk (in practice, few positions are ever posted at a GS1 – many entry level positions are a GS3 or higher). A GS-15 should have significant responsibilities, since they are among the most highly compensated professionals in the United States government.

In practice, many of the GS-15 employees I met in Washington were doing less work than their counterparts in the private sector, and being paid more for it. There are additional employment categories for employees with specialized skills: employees in the “Senior Executive Service (SES)” and “Senior Level (SL)” or “Scientific or Professional (ST)” make even more than GS-15s. (You can likely guess about whether most of the SESs I met had any actual skills.)

But let’s get back to the big picture.

The rampant grade inflation in Washington-based federal jobs is proof that the civil service there is unmoored from basic economic reality.

The average federal employee in Washington, D.C. is a GS-12. (The lowest-paid GS-12 in D.C. makes $74,596.)

The average federal employee in the rest of the country is a GS-10. (A GS-10 in Pittsburgh makes $58,209.)

You might suspect that this is because there are more senior jobs in D.C., but you’d be dead wrong. There are more highly graded jobs in Washington, but the pay level does not remotely correlate to the work many civil servants are actually doing (this cuts both ways, and I’ll get into that in another post).

I would bet my life that the average GS-10 in Pittsburgh works far harder than the average GS-12 in Washington. I looked at federal jobs daily in Washington and in Chicago for over a year: the Chicago jobs overwhelmingly had more responsibility at lower pay grades. My year-long job search led me to conclude that there is significant grade inflation in the D.C. area.

Let me give two anecdotal examples of grade inflation:

I worked at an agency’s headquarters in Washington, and interviewed last year for a job at their field office in south Chicago. The contrast between the field office and HQ in DC could not be starker: my position here would have been a GS-5 with more responsibility than I had as a GS-11 in DC, and the hiring manager was a GS-13 with over 300 employees across two states in his chain of command. There are managers in Chicago that are a GS-7. I can’t begin to count the number of useless, nonsupervisory GS-12s back at headquarters. (You don’t have to take my word for it that managers in the government are rarely held accountable: there are tons of federal employee surveys that you can review at your leisure.)

My job search left me with the impression that federal employees in Chicago were more competent, despite having significantly lower salaries than their counterparts in Washington. This impression is supported by the personal experience of another family member who works regularly with regional employees from the Department of Transportation. This family member has said many times (and I’ve heard it repeated by their professional peers) that the caliber of employees in the midwest regional offices was much higher, and that the D.C.-based employees were generally incompetent (and especially so in comparison to the midwest-based employees). Of course, the ones in D.C. were being paid more for similar work.

Here’s another fun anecdote about overpaid employees. A friend writes:

I was a GS-11 working at an *agency* and was essentially a secretary. No real big responsibility, non-supervisory, etc. I worked in a marketing office with roughly 14 employees. They were ALL GS-14s, many of them in their 20s. Non-supervisory, not super significant. The 14 was just something you got if you stayed for a few years.

The managers were all GS-15s and the managers above them were all SES. When I took my current job I took a downgrade to a GS-9…I am now an assistant director with a TON of high level responsibilities. My director is a GS-11. Supervisory.

Some managers are GS-12s (there’s only one for each facility) and they are so fancy that we call them Mr. and Mrs.

There is a GS-14 (ONE of them on the whole entire base, the largest military base in the region) and he is the deputy director of the whole base. This is mind-boggling to me.

In short, while I would love to have my cushy GS-11 that would have eventually led to a 14 without much effort, it just didn’t feel right. And I would be happy to see some of these jobs move out of DC…the government needs a broader pool.

My friend is right: these jobs should be relocated. The rest of the country has never recovered from the recession, while D.C. has continued to boom. Compensation in the federal sector is completely divorced from prevailing wages in the private sector in the region. And compensation in the civil service in Washington is divorced from the compensation civil servants receive in other geographic locations.

Here’s the visual proof:

These two lines would almost certainly be closer together if D.C. salaries were excluded.

Not one journalist reporting on this issue has ever made a compelling argument that there is a benefit to taxpayers from having these jobs in Washington, which forces me to ask the obvious question: Why should the economic benefit of these jobs be concentrated in one of the most affluent parts of the country?

And, a bigger question: why should D.C. remain uniquely insulated from our country’s economic downturn simply by virtue of its status as a historical federal employment center?

In my opinion, the culture in Washington (and the overpayment of civil servants there is a symptom, not the cause) means that continuing to locate these jobs there is a detriment to taxpayers.

Seriously, D.C.’s culture is messed up.

It’s unfortunate that an honest criticism of the culture in Washington is missing from the discourse. I hope my blog can do its small part to shed light on the culture I left. I love living in the Midwest, and I think more jobs should move here, both for the obvious climate and logistical advantages, but also because D.C. is objectively bad and working in that kind of institutional culture damages people on a deep and fundamental level that is rarely discussed.

In my experience, the average professional in Washington is simply not as skilled as the average professional in Chicago, because most people haven’t ever had to truly work (much less work in a functional or high-performing organization). This isn’t just limited to the federal government: it was also clear in my last area of work (public libraries). The District of Columbia Public Library system is swimming in money, but my former employer (Prince George’s County Memorial Library System) consistently delivered better and more innovative services with a fraction of the budget.  So does the tiny one-branch library in my 22,000-person Chicago suburb.

I have examples from my husband’s line of work, too. If you look at the District of Columbia government’s budget for road maintenance, and consider the temperate weather there, you’d would quite reasonably expect the District to have the nicest roads in the country. It doesn’t.

There are roads in Southeast D.C. that are worse than the roads in my broke-ass town in the Chicago Southland. The fact that no one in the District is embarrassed about their failure to deliver basic services via a transportation department with one of the highest budgets in the country just goes to show how broken the city truly is. (Of course, roads in Virginia, where taxes are lower, are much better. It’s almost like having infinite fake money makes bureacracies worse…)

Culture matters, and Washington’s is terrible.

In my opinion, Amazon made a big mistake in choosing a market where they’re going to overpay for people who are used to working in less-than-challenging conditions. Working for a bad boss and not having enough work to do can really mess you up. If I had stayed in Washington any longer, I surely would not have been able to recover my wits. I escaped a year ago, and I’m still not as sharp as I was before I started working for the government.

We all pay the price when a generation of civil servants rots because they work in a fundamentally broken place.

Our government should move these USDA jobs to Kansas City. It should probably move many more jobs away from Washington.

And it should move them to the Midwest.

People in the Midwest are used to working harder for less money: we’re a bargain for taxpayers. We have great universities. Our cities are underpopulated, have tremendous infrastructure, and have baked-in climate resilience.

Give us those sweet federal jobs.

We need them.

In my next post:

I’ll explain career ladders, how federal hiring is terrible, and more (including a brief history of the idea of moving government jobs out of Washington, which predates the current administration). At some point, I’ll also respond to some of the frequent criticism lobbed at these plans, and engage specifically with the matter of the climate scientists whose jobs are moving to Kansas City.

Thanks for reading!

(Quick note: I don’t post my CV online, but I think this worked pretty well in conjunction with it. If you’re applying to Emerging Leaders, I’ll send you all my materials and look over your work if you’d like.)

Thanks to everyone who looked this over for me, especially my professors David Shumaker and Nathan Putnam (Emerged Leader), and to the fine folks who helped round out my package with what I’m sure were stellar recommendations (shout out to my boss for supporting me in this endeavor after knowing me for about 2 weeks). Thanks also to the ALATT people who have been ridiculously supportive in helping me brainstorm how I’m going to get the money to pay for my airfare to Chicago and San Francisco. It was exciting to hear from 2 other Emerging Leaders so far on twitter/FB, can’t wait to meet the rest of our cohort!

By the way, the divisions I applied to for sponsorship were: ALCTS, ALSC, LLAMA, LITA, PLA, RUSA, YALSA. If you’re involved with any of these and can tell me about other potential sources of funding, I’d appreciate it. Because I’m a serial complainer, here is a quick outline of my downer thoughts: I’m less than pleased that we’re being charged for registration to the meetings – it seems like ALA should waive the registration fee as a courtesy to applicants who didn’t receive $1000 from a division. The notification should also be done sooner – we applied in July and an earlier announcement would have given me time to apply to other funding sources without feeling like I was potentially taking an opportunity from someone else. Also, I think ALA needs to revisit how people are selected: I’m inclined to think that all sponsored slots should be reserved for minorities, or that people who are located in the city where a meeting is happening that year should only be eligible for a partial financial award. And, I think when practicable, applicants from an institution that hasn’t had an Emerging Leader sponsored recently should take precedence. I feel kind of unwanted by the sections that I applied to for sponsorship – maybe a solution would be to make the award amount to sponsor an Emerging Leader smaller so that everyone can receive the same financial benefit?

On a more positive note: RUSA gives out free student memberships, and that’s pretty cool. I encourage people to take advantage of this – it’s really painless and I’m really digging the MARS reviews of reference tracking software. It meant a lot to me to feel supported in this small way and I’ll definitely pay it forward when I graduate and have some money again!

Anyway, here goes:

Please describe your leadership, community, civic, and volunteer experiences:

I was an active Girl Scout from ages 6-15, so that should tell you a little bit about my propensity for do-gooderism. I’ve taught Sunday school nearly every year since 9^th grade, and have likewise been a regular volunteer at food pantries. In high school, I was on yearbook and was president of the student body. I don’t generally talk about high school on professional applications, but my experience in student government is directly related to my current career path and illustrates my long-term engagement with creating learning communities. There are two accomplishments that give a snapshot of my leadership approach. First, I created a school-wide Blackboard course that we used to gather student feedback using Blackboard’s Discussion Board feature. The success of this initiative was such that the student government continued to use Blackboard after my graduation, and I’m currently in discussions with my university’s Special Libraries Association chapter and the dean of the library science department to create a Blackboard course for all students in our department. My second initiative was to award surplus student government money to student groups in a competitive “grant” process. I created a form that students used to propose special programs or equipment, and assembled a panel of student reviewers. This panel invited promising proposal writers to present their projects, and subsequently voted on which projects to fund. We also brought particularly innovative projects to the Parent Teacher Association and were able to secure matching funds on several occasions. This program has continued for nearly 10 years and continues to provide students with opportunities to practice grantwriting and public speaking.

I’ve stayed involved with my high school after graduating. As an alumni, I volunteered to plan my class’s 5-year reunion. I worked with a close friend from across the country, collaborating over email and Google spreadsheets to organize the most successful 5-year reunion to date. We had over 150 people out of a class of just over 400 attend, managed to raise several thousand dollars (enough to pay for a private venue that allowed us to bring in our own liquor to stock an open bar) and made a $500 profit.  I think this experience would translate closely to the kinds of remote projects that Emerging Leaders work on.

I worked to put myself through college, so my extracurricular activities were limited to the student newspaper, where I was a paid contributor and eventually, the first in-house staff researcher. I’ve continued to explore my journalistic bent as a staff writer for Asian Fortune, a magazine focusing on DC’s pan-Asian community and I’ve built on my fundraising skills through volunteer work for various community organizations.

I have consistently demonstrated my leadership skills on the job. During my 2 years on staff at a church in Portland’s most diverse neighborhood, I organized focus groups and conducted research to identify the needs of young families at my church. Because of my focused listening sessions, I was able to receive a line item in the parish budget to hire a childcare provider during our most attended service. Next, I raised money and coordinated volunteers build a brand-new Montessori classroom. In the process, I doubled the number of volunteers active with our program and recruited several new families into the church. This included generating in-kind donations as well as formal grants. While I was a staff member, I also completed 20 hours of training for community organizers through the Industrial Areas Foundation. The IAF is a national community organizing network that is notable for its work with congregations. Although the network does not provide direct services, it provides an opportunity for community leaders from different organizations to work with one another to identify common goals. The organization has supported the creation of workforce development and affordable housing programs. Through this training, I learned how to conduct “relational meetings” with people. These are one-on-one conversations that build rapport between leaders and members of their communities. This formal training has taught me how to listen without an agenda, and how to tap into the passions and interests of individuals to forge a stronger community.

My biggest achievement as an undergraduate was receiving a fellowship from the National Science Foundation to conduct applied social science research at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. To my knowledge, I’m among the first recipients of a social science fellowship. I stepped into a leadership role on this project, taking responsibility for the IRB process and independently designing and training staff to conduct surveys. I also put together a proposal for a Hispanic community advisory panel, and modeled new statistics techniques for the department.

I am demonstrating my leadership capabilities now as the youngest person on the administrative staff of a major urban library system. As the “Data Analyst” for the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System, I’m creating a new position from scratch (this seems to be a recurring theme in my career) that blends my analytic and grantwriting skills.

Please describe your philosophy of effective leadership:

My philosophy of effective leadership has been influenced by my leadership training with the Industrial Areas Foundation. This training, and my subsequent readings of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, has helped me to understand that an effective leader ultimately empowers others. The other lesson I took from Alinsky is that leadership is ultimately about building relationships. In a nutshell, I believe that effective leadership boils down to creating effective relationships with a variety of people in order to motivate them towards contributing to a shared goal. This training helped me organize young parents at my church to advocate for a nursery and for changes to the format of our religious education programs (see my discussion of my Montessori classroom project under my “Leadership, community, civic, and volunteer experiences” section).

[paragraph about my observations of the culture at my current job – all positive things, natch, but I don’t like putting things about current jobs in writing. My system is hiring! Check out our opportunities here and please contact me if you are interested so that I can help you apply!]

This kind of strategic planning addresses another facet of my philosophy of effective leadership: vision. Effective leaders have a plan, are able to clearly articulate how each person in their line of responsibility fits into the plan, and persuade their employees of the value and sense of the chosen course.

Good leaders have plans and visions based on the needs of the people they are ultimately serving. I think this is accomplished by creating a culture of feedback by employees and patrons, and by ensuring that there is enough diversity among staff to prevent an echo chamber.

My personal leadership style is based on consistent evaluation. I think that clear, measurable outcomes need to be built into each new initiative. Because of my work as a museum evaluator, I’ve seen opportunities to measure learner outcomes in many settings. I’m particularly sensitive to how the emerging field of evaluating “informal learning” can be used to make a case for the continued value of public libraries in promoting literacy and lifelong learning.

At the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, my focus groups and surveys informed my proposal for the museum to create a formal “beta tester” program specifically for Hispanic families. The museum was able to continue a long-term relationship with families that I recruited for a short-term study, turning them into “OMSI Ambassadors” within their respective communities. It’s not enough to use data to drive programming: instead, responsive programming like the OMSI Ambassadors program should move our institutions towards being more culturally inclusive gathering places. As an emerging professional with a knack for grantwriting, I always see initiatives like these as potential stories to present to grantmakers. I know how to use data to move an organization towards its ultimate goals, and I know how to structure new activities in order to generate data for external funders.

How would you bring diversity to the next class of Emerging Leaders? You may consider any form of diversity:

[Snarky aside: I hope someone actually wrote ‘white male’ on here, because I’m pretty disappointed that I wasn’t sponsored and someone seeing that as ‘diversity’ is really the only explanation I can think of if there were ANY white people who were sponsored. Fortunately, most of the folks I’ve seen on twitter who are sponsored seem to be fellow POC, so I can’t hate.] Anyway, I don’t want to share my personal diversity statement here, but if you want to read more about my own diversity, you can read an op-ed I wrote about my experiences as a “twice exceptional” minority here. Here’s the rest of my essay:

My professional background in statistics and formal research should bring a diverse skill set to the cohort. I don’t know anyone else in my program who has applied for Emerging Leaders while still in library school, so I think the fact that I am still completing my coursework is another form of diversity. If I am selected, I think it would encourage other young professionals from my region to apply – I was surprised to see that there were no Emerging Leaders from DC or Maryland in last year’s class. I work in a majority African-American county and I’m proud to be a person of color serving such a diverse constituency.

A past participant told me that many applicants for the Emerging Leaders program work in public services, so I want to stress my technical services background. I have a broad background due to my work experience in special libraries and the National Archives, where I focused largely on digital projects.

How do you think participation in the Emerging Leaders program will affect your leadership abilities?

I’ve been interested in ALA since my first library job as a page. I read Public Libraries religiously and follow all the annual meetings on Twitter. There is no funding at my system for me to attend ALA, and this seems like the best way for me to enter the Association since I will have a structured cohort to prepare me for committee work in the future. ALA is huge and the structures are difficult to navigate – I’m a positive investment for the program because once I understand the various hierarchies of ALA, I’ll be able to shepherd my peers into the organization (I’ve already recruited a library school classmate to serve on a DC chapter committee with me).

I think serving on an ALA committee will absolutely help me develop my leadership abilities. [more stuff about my job] I think working within ALA will help me get perspective that I might otherwise lack because of my immediate transition from library school to library administration.

This will help me achieve my philosophy of effective leadership by ensuring that I have the perspective I need to chart a course of action based on the needs of public services staff.