Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of every intelligence reform effort is the quality of life the workforce must endure. With the vast majority of tasks executed in office space around the DC area, competition for safe and conveniently located housing, quality schools and important amenities is fierce and reflected in the prices and non-financial costs levied upon families.
A commute of 20 miles – a trifle in most cities not located near a coast – can easily turn into an hour-long ordeal under the best of circumstances (heaven forbid it rain or snow). Short commutes translate into expensive housing; too expensive for newcomers to afford. It is not unheard of for people to seek out housing in West Virginia or Richmond and it is worth noting that the longest-running IC vanpool (now into its second decade) starts in York, PA.
Set aside the trial that is just getting to the office and consider the daily grind of supporting activities one has to complete. Going to a meeting that is 10 miles away as the crow flies takes at least an hour in each direction when you consider traffic, finding parking, and dealing with security at the sister agency. Running any type of errand adds hours onto the day that are either taken away from work (read: pay) or family.
The issue of quality schools for the children of the workforce is beyond the scope of this effort; suffice it to say that if you can only afford to live in what is now a low-property-tax-based area, you children are likely to graduate before they are able to reap the benefits of gentrification or ex-urban sprawl.
In order to have a life and afford to adequately educate their children people in the community are – wait for it – jumping ship to high-paying contractor positions. The peril here is that when the largess associated with the war on terror subsides, so does the need for a contract workforce. This is not just an intelligence reform problem, it is an economic one.
The solution is diversification and dispersal.
Precious few tasks levied upon the community actually require a presence in our nation’s Capitol. Members of the Executive and Legislative branches need to be briefed (and/or lobbied), high-level policy issues need to be addressed with sister agencies, and that’s about it. Everything else that doesn’t involve collection is office work and in an age of near ubiquitous high-speed connectivity, why make things harder on the workforce than it needs to be?
Start by identifying the top dozen non-coastal metro areas, sorted by location and livability factors and announce that these are the community’s new regional operating centers. This is essentially an “FBI model,” with HQ dealing with high-level issues while the grunt work is done in the field. The obvious goal here is to increase livability and affordability without dramatically decreasing amenities, but there is a more subtle plan at work here too that I’ll address shortly.
For those whose jobs cannot be moved out of the Capitol area, consider subsidizing or outright paying for some key amenities that would make life in the big city more livable:
- A dry-cleaning allowance (a pre-paid system set up with vendors) to pay for the cleaning of essential work-related outfits. If the government insists that you wear a monkey suit – executives, senior-level briefer, and people going before Congress - they ought to at least pay for its maintenance. Enable further savings at a personal level by doing away with outmoded dress codes for everyone who is not required to put on a public face.
- Catered meals, including a 24/7 cold-line (sandwiches, cereal, snacks, etc.) for shift workers or those who can’t make regular meal times. Outsourcing food service to fast-food vendors is an unhealthy cop-out that will come back to bite you down the road. Outsource the work to someone who will make food people will want to eat and take note that the proliferation of all-you-can-eat restaurants suggests that no one is going broke following such a business model.
- Build a community-wide clearance system that actually works. “Community” badges are of little use if one still has to stop, sign-in, and be verified by the guard force. One badge and one access system at every facility (at least in CONUS) saves time and if configured properly, can provide all the tracking and metric data the bean counters might want.
- For security, technology and administrative issues establish help desks at each directorate level. Centralized offices for trouble-shooting might save money for the office that supports that mission, but it ends up costing every other office when their people can’t do their jobs.
- Streamlining the travel compensation process. Full per diem is a given, tickets and meals are paid for with an agency-provided credit card, all records are computerized: why the need for a paper travel voucher? The same goes for local travel. Use the new clearance system to automatically compensate people for mileage expenses, or absent such a system automate the voucher process to eliminate the paper, delays in handling, and potential errors.
Internally, consider changing the approach to common issues that plague even the most bureaucracy-savvy:
With regards to moving the workforce, consider that aside from the fiscal benefits and boost to the morale and welfare of the workforce, spreading the workforce across the nation makes the entire system more resilient to future attacks. The White House might be hard to pick out from the air, but CIA, DIA and NSA HQs buildings are not. Additionally, pushing people away from the politics and rhetoric of Washington provides them with the ability to renew a connection to those they are working so hard to protect. National security is no longer an abstraction or academic issue when you connect on a personal level with the reasons you go to work every day.
Subsidizing or paying for things that are really not all that “fringe” when you think about it is a cheaper and more direct way of telling the workforce that you understand that there is sacrifice involved in working for your Uncle and that that sacrifices is appreciated. To some this might seem like an excessive amount of hand holding for what is ostensibly a workforce of grown-ups, but what it is really doing is freeing people up to concentrate on the important, not the tangential.
