George Voinovich

In other words, if we went the route of, say, Safeway or other companies that are out there that are really getting into this, Proctor and Gamble and so forth, that if we wanted to do an experiment, we would have to change the law in…

I look forward to finalizing that bill and to learning about other ways Congress can support work-life programs.

The wages we pay our Federal employees are not subject to collective bargaining. We set that by the statute and that is what it is.

During his confirmation process, I challenged Director John Berry to lead by example and make the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) an employer of choice among Federal agencies.

Senator Voinovich, I think you, as usual, hit the nail on the head in terms of the lens through which we need to be viewing this.

The Federal Hiring Process Improvement Act, I think, will help agencies and job applicants by eliminating the barriers for applying for Federal employment.

The Federal Government spends, on average, $100,571 per employee for salary and benefits.

I would like to have a written document from you and from John Berry about how you are going to handle this situation.

One of the things that you need is a set of tools to attract people to come to the Federal Government.

Doesn't designating an internship program as a diversity tool provide a vehicle for some of that to take place?

Well, I think that we ought to call it for what it is and maybe it is a better system than the one we got by using USAJOBS.

It seems to me that the problem basically is in terms of oversight as to whether or not they are following the rules that have been laid out for them and not using it, as you mention, to try to get around something that they find to be…

Is there any recruiting going on that you know of where diversity is the target?

We went from a cap of $40,000 to $60,000 and from $6,000 a year to $10,000 a year.

Well, isn't that something that Jeffrey Zients and John Berry could get together and try to identify training spending?

In their evaluation, do you look at whether or not they are paying attention to the issue of diversity in terms of their hiring practices?

They brought in over 1,000 people there.

Why in the devil do you think we wanted to go to the system for in the first place?

I worked my head off to get NSPS established and worked with Gordon England.

But we intend to do so, and are doing so actually.

I can tell you that it is amazing. I think all of us Senators have internship programs...

Because I am getting toward the end of this job that I have, I want to find out whether or not any of those flexibilities that we got them improved employee satisfaction.

How can OPM work to encourage Federal agencies to make greater use of internship programs as recruitment tools?

Some of the complaints that we had is it takes a lot of time to do performance evaluation.

Do you think you are going to be able to retain those people?