Senior Executive Service

GSA Acting Administrator Dan Tangherlini announced this afternoon that the General Services Administration is instituting a hiring freeze and cutting senior executive performance awards this year by 85%.

The announcement reflected what Tangherlini described in a blog post as a comprehensive, top to bottom review of all agency operations, following the disclosure of abusive travel spending patterns that led to the resignation of former GSA Administrator Martha Johnson and the departure of several GSA executives. Keep reading →

Legislation intended to deter members of Congress from profiting from stock trades based on inside information is inadvertently forcing 28,000 federal employees to expose their personal financial information on the Internet.

The result, according to a trade group for senior government executives, is a number of unintended risks that federal employees must now bear, and another reason for talented executives to think twice about serving their country by taking a position in the federal government. Keep reading →

The past three weeks worth of news reports about GSA‘s lavish convention spending and indiscretions by Secret Service agents–and the inquisitions on Capitol Hill in response–could already fill a few hard drives.

So it always a bit baffling to see how little attention the media–and Congress–give federal agencies and government executives when they do get things right. Keep reading →

When it comes to carrying out the work of the federal government, few initiatives have held greater promise or importance than the Senior Executive Service.

Commissioned by Congress more than three decades ago, the SES program was envisioned as a way to attract and develop an elite corps of America’s highest caliber executives and deploy them across the federal government to address both immediate and longer term management needs within federal agencies. Keep reading →


When the Senior Executive Service was established by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the vision was as lofty as it was pragmatic.

The government of the United States needed to attract and employ a pool of the highest quality management executives available. And it needed a better system for holding those executives more uniformly accountable for their individual and organizational performance.
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This story was updated at midday to incorporate additional comments, analysis and links. For more news and insights on innovations at work in government, please sign up for the AOL Gov newsletter. For the quickest updates, follow us on Twitter @AOLgov
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When a government senior executive once showed up for a new job, he had to ask where his office was. “There was a name tag on my door but the office had an antiquated computer and no Blackberry,” the executive said. Not exactly a propitious start.

The Office of Personnel Management wants to put an end to that kind of inhospitable experience for new leaders from the Senior Executive Service. Keep reading →