Center for a New American Security

Actually, as I look at the

Actually, as I look at the list, you DO have a point: it's all degrees in social work, public policy types, and lawyers. Hey, is that how you get the types in public life that look all wide-eyed at quantitative literature and think it represents "science" because it's got numbers in it? (Relax, dear friends, just a little Abu M blog in-joke... .)

How many of those types understand that what you write down on paper, however pretty and nice and diagram-y, is gonna fall apart the minute it hits real life? Okay, I know this crowd gets it - for obvious reasons - but goodness!

Ignore all that.

Part of the problem, I

Part of the problem, I think, is that the PMF program is rather limited as to the pay grade that someone can be brought in at, and good engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, or others so inclined are likely to find a much higher paycheck in the private sector. There are plenty of service-oriented individuals out there, without a doubt, but the PMF system doesn't really make it easy to even come close to offering them what they are worth.

Yeah I clicked on the link,

Yeah I clicked on the link, and saw what I knew I would: Law, Law, Law.....

Why work hard at math when you can make fabulous bucks bullsh*tting?

I know, lets offer the scholarship to "community organization" majors....you can rise to the very top!!

and sure as sh*te I found one

Watch and see if they don't join the PMF list soon!

As someone who just went

As someone who just went through the pmf process, I can make a few observations:
1. The process is geared towards lawyers, a few years ago they "redesigned" the exam, seemingly in emulation of the LSATs. I bet if you looked at the year this switched happened you'd pinpoint when this trend began. There was actually a question on the exam that said, "if you had to write a legal opinion"
2. School's no longer have to vet their nominees, it's optional - this has resulted in a spike in applications which, I believe, leads to a watered down pool of initial applicants
3. The program is very poorly managed - from the software design of the actual test (crashing computers and other mishaps during the exam were common), to the opaque selection process (you aren't actually given the results of your test and since its not entirely based upon your exam results, you get no explanation for the final selection), to the notifications (each of the last two years they have incorrectly notified large batches of people of acceptance to the program).

All in all, its still a great way to get into the gov't but its heavily slanted towards a narrow range of applicants and done through a process that doesn't meet minimal standards of transparency - but hey, I'm not bitter

Guys.....what type of

Guys.....what type of engineers are you talking about? There is a broad spectrum. Civil Engineers have a future. It is hard to offshore bridge and road building, but the number of civil engineering openings are limited and you have to be certified. City and States will need Civil Engineers on staff to approve building plans. Engineering types that come to mind are Material, Aviation, Electrical, Computer, Nuclear, Ceramics, General, and Mechanical. The largest groups are Electrical, Mechanical, and Computer Engineering. They are also the most off shored these days. Consider this. One of the top five Electrical Engineering schools in America is telling its freshman to expect 18 to 20 careers in their life time. It is because of the off shoring in the industry. They hit the freshman with it so they can change their majors. At the same college, parents were changing their kids majors from Electrical to Mechanical in protest of off shoring which resulted in the Electrical Engineering class size shrinking by 10%. Not sure that industry told the parents that Mechanical Engineers are beening offshore just as fast as the Electrical Engneers. Why off shore? Salaries are a 10:1 ratio. I have had high level managers look me in the eye and tell me that they can get ten of me in India and they did. We got to train the new staff in India. Opened a design center in India and staffed it with 200 engineers, then closed operations in the US of A. That is what is happening commercially. Military is harder to offshore and depends on military spending to keep the jobs. A lot of military went offshore with the acceptance of COTS. What happened with the Presidential Management Fellowship? Think you need to look at who applied. With starting industry salaries in engineering at $60K these days for a BS (more for MS), the grads walk by the tables of the federal job recruiters. The grads want the cash. Maybe it has something to do with the $40 to $50k in school loans they rack up to pay for college. In the heady days of the "dot com boom" companies were giving electrical engineers BMW two seat sports cars as a signing bonus.

Being an lawyer sounds pretty good these days. It is about feeding and putting your children through college. As an engineer, you need about four major contracts to get to retirement at a place like Boeing or Lockheed. Defence spending is going to drop like a rock after A'san. It has to, the boomers are going to retire and medical and social security is going to take a bite out of the budget in ten years. Some guys at the military job shoppers might get stuck between the second to third contract...then what?

I know guys that put $65M dollars in their pockets and a lot more that put over $10M dollars in the piggy bank by off shoring American engineering jobs. It is nuts. If America is attacked....maybe we can pay the agressors not to hurt us. Personally, I would like to put the "new millionares" out front to use as cannon foder while the engineers can flank bad guys and have a chance to do our jobs.

Making it sound worse than it is. Just have to be flexible and be willing to move. It is still about intellectual property generation, but even that is going offshore. Loyality and corportate knowledge is out the door and "what have you done for me lately" is the rule. Law, medical, and social work are some of the jobs that are stable these days. I would have to agree, why go through all the headaches and learn the science of engineering to get kicked in the head by a guy that sticks $65M in his pocket and does not even thank you for it. I told people that in 1998, I stopped making Intergrated Circuits and started making millionares. Made a bunch of millionares. Gave away what was considered "company proprietary" information to Asian subcontractors. Christ, we put them in business and showed them how to do it by act of upper management! Told my boss that in 2005, and after blinking a couple times agreed. From 1990 to 2005 we downsized from 12, 000 to 1500 employees while increasing sales to about $900M /yr. The business unit sales (to our new Asian rim sub-contractors) resulted in $850M revenue in the corporate bank. Took all the retirement liabilities off the company and desolved any agreements made to the employees. Margins were better than 50%. For every dollar spent, two came in the door......enough money to pay off the old management and have them look the other way (making millionares not IC's). I can supply you with a business model that will absolutely screw your American employees and make you more money than your next sixteen generations of your family can spend.....and we will do it with the retirement money of the American employees. Laugh? Private equity firms do it every day with high tech companies! Leverage on retirement funds to buy out a high tech company to take private and sell off pieces and employees. Reorganize, give stock options to key employees, then have an IPO. The IPO money buys out the old management. It is happening with General Motors as we speak with federal tax dollars rather than PE and leveraged retirement money.

Visitor@22mar..7:39am Those Chinese you mention are more concerned with developing their transportation grid and less interested in their military than we. Don't let the Chinese fool you. All the Chinese people we did business with were all Chinese military. That was telecomunications. Another small business person that I know was involved with American private aircraft, kit planes. The Chinese were looking at the planes as military trainers.....they also make good UAV's!

David Sutton@8:33am. Tom Barnett has a WPR piece about the Camp Atterbury-Muscatatuck Center for Complex Operations a center for disaster training, MOUT, CT etc etc. Yup, a lot of fun stuff happens at Camp Atterbury. Even more fun stuff happens at China Lake in California. Had a chance to go to China Lake to work, but California law and taxes are so screwed up I could not bring myself to it.

Abu M: That's the tip of the

Abu M:

That's the tip of the iceberg. As one of your other commenters noted, the list is overwhelmingly dominated by just three specializations - JDs, MP/IAs, and MBAs. What those three degrees share in common is that they offer training in bureaucracy - how to read and write rules, how to run government, and how to run private businesses. Not one of the leading specializations offers training in any body of actual knowledge.

So there are only ten engineers. There are also just four historians. Three anthropologists. Three sociologists. Four in area studies. Four chemists. Three phsyical scientists. Ten in economics. Five in education. And the statistic that just blows my mind - eleven political scientists. Even the academic discipline devoted to studying government, in other words, isn't producing public servants for this program.

The notable exception is in the environment and public health. Even there, there are 39 in the environmental sciences or policy and 33 in public health compared to just 16 in biology. There are no doctors - not one - on the entire list. No nurses. One pharmacist. But there are fifteen social workers.

That's what's wrong with our government bureaucracy. It hires lots of subject-area experts. But at its top ranks, the professional bureaucrats who run our key agencies and departments are overwhelmingly trained as bureaucrats. They have no particular body of knowledge. They're not grounded in a methodology or epistemology. They passed through relatively brief credentialing programs, and into top-level roles.

So it's not just engineering. What I'd like to see is a Presidential Management Fellows program purged of lawyers, except in those slots (Counsel's offices, IGs, Justice, legislative liaisons) where their degree is a relevant qualification and not merely a credential. I'd like to see a far smaller number of MP/IAs and MBAs. In their place, agencies should be granting fellowships to people with relevant expertise. The whole point of the program is "to attract to the Federal service outstanding men and women from a variety of academic disciplines and career paths who have a clear interest in, and commitment to, excellence in the leadership and management of public policies and programs." Well, if that's the goal, it's a catastrophic failure. Overwhelmingly, it's used as a quick ramp to the top by people who were already intent on government service, instead of serving to attract a class of individuals who might otherwise have done something else. And I think it's excruciatingly clear that it's not attracting "a variety of academic disciplines and career paths."

The promise of the PMF lies in its ability to slot people into management positions who might not otherwise have pursued them, and to give both the fellows and the agencies the chance to evaluate their performance and abilities. Management can be learned on the job. The rest cannot. If this is how the program is going to work, we'd be much better off hiring people through conventional processes, and then ripping a page out of the Military's book - sending mid-career bureaucrats back to graduate school to acquire specialized training in something relevant.

"...This is really

"...This is really reprehensible. Responsible Republicans like my two senators should denounce this stuff: "

[Summary - Tea Partier's told to drop by Yes vote Rep's house to express their thanks on Health Care]

We're proud you are emulating our Community Organizer methods (now in point of fact that's what the Tea partiers are sometimes calling their job titles). If these methods are good enough for Saul Alinsky and our glorious POTUS, it should be good enuf for everyone.

BTW - ACORN is now declaring bankruptcy..can we come by with job apps?

You need engineers in

You need engineers in decision-making positions to avoid things like the Challenger disaster, when low-ranking engineers on the work detail said hey! these o-ring seals might have some low temp issues, whaddaya say?

Some bureaucrat then goes, "Ah, the schedule here is really important, there are a lot of people pushing for a timely launch, there are some Congressional budget issues involved, so, just push it forward, okay?"

Otherwise, you get lawyers kowtowing to "scientists" who tell them whatever sounds good - sure, you can shoot down MIRV'd nuclear warheads coming in on ballistic missiles, just give us $100 billion!

Or even, "Hey! it's a good idea to make biological weapons for "threat assessment" purposes, and no, they'd never escape from the labs, either deliberately or intentionally - we're the "good scientists", yup! How about $5 billion per year?"

More banally, you get some neocon lawyer's nephew overseeing water engineering construction contracts in Iraq... yeah, that worked out great.

AbuM hit the nail squarely on the head with this post.

Andrew - I agree that the US

Andrew - I agree that the US sorely needs more engineers and other "hard" scientists. But the point of the PMF program is not to introduce certain disciplines into federal service. The point of the PMF is to groom the next generation of Senior Executive Service (SES) folks that will lead the federal bureaucracy. If you are looking for statistics on how the government is doing attracting engineers, I suggest looking at another prestigious fellowship program – the American Association of Academic Scientists (AAS). Full disclosure: I am a proud alum of the PMF program.

Elf, @Zak - Why TF would

Elf,
@Zak - Why TF would business want to stay here?

A lot of what his happening is the business cycle is maturing and you can buy technology/manufacturing capacity. Wages and benefits are a large part of the overhead, internet opened the door to offshoring and taking advantage of the lower paid workers. Two reasons business will stay here....the size of the American market and America is still the center of IP creation. There is a lot of research still happening in our univeristies and business wants a share. You should see the companies compete for engineering grads. There is a lot of money paid to colleges for access.

As far as outsourcing our government. ....Intel is building a new $2.5B wafer fab in China. Semiconductors are very capital intensive, but the returns are huge ( a lot of processor chips on a 12 inch wafer). Between the capital investment and the $800B debt that we owe China, I think we can at least say that our government are partners. Really I hate to see the US that connected to any other power. I still think the US is a special place. Shining city on a hill. Just hope we don't muck it up.

Really, we need everyone, not just engineers. It takes a lot of people to make a country great. One day we might miss not being able to flex our manufacturing power like we did in WW2. We are forgetting how to do things. Heck, it is hard to find anyone that still works on their own cars!......I do. Had to explain that to an engineering student, he could not figure out why I would want to do it. I looked at him and said, "simple, if I did not get my car working I did not make it to my college classes". DING, lightbulb lit....It was a matter of need, I had no choice. My father asked if I wanted to got to college....I said gee, yes Dad.....he looked at me and said....Enjoy paying for it! I did, if I was not in class I was working.

I chuckled when I heard the Federal Gov Transport guys talking about Toyota quality problems. They exclaimed, "there is electronics in those cars....we will have to hire someone that understands them!". Gosh, there has been electronics in cars for what 25 years????? Application of the electronics has changed, but the process really has not. It is still a close loop system that monitors Exhaust oxygen, Fuel, and Location of moving parts(ie engine timing)

......folks make too much money and take the easy way out.

Tucker, You hit the nail on

Tucker,
You hit the nail on the head. The Senior PMF program that Bush created in 2003(!) was meant to solve that problem, but I guess it was never funded since they never created the actual program - no application process, nothing. I cant tell you how many times I e-mailed the PMF program asking how I apply to the Senior PMF program & got the same answer.

Here's the last one I got, in 2007 - 4 years after the executive order! - "Hello and thank you for your recent inquiry. The SPMF Program policies and procedural guidance are still under review and development. At this time the application process for the Senior Presidential Management Fellows Program has not yet been established. Thank you for your interest in the Senior Presidential Management Fellows Program and please check back periodically at www.pmf.opm.gov for updates."

Someone recently told me "they decided" the White House Fellows program met the requirements of the Senior PMF program, so it was quietly ignored...

Neil

Engineers, lawyers,

Engineers, lawyers, humanities experts aside, the problem is the US was so quick to de-industrialize that it never thought about what would come after. This is unsurprising considering the relative lack of long-term planning that characterizes US leadership since Reagan. But hey we feel good about ourselves! No wait, not anymore we don't. So what we have in the US is a bloated public sector, a small professional class, the investment/pirate class, a few farmers, a few intellectuals, entertainers, a smallish "maintenance" class of mechanics/plumbers/teachers(?), and a majority of................burger flippers/cashiers? You can't sustain an economy as large as ours on doctorates and minimum wage. As Bill Maher pointed out, for all people scream at Hollywood, they are still creating a money making product, can't say the same for much of the rest of America. And recall, we might send expertise abroad, but we don't get much tax revenue back from those engineers who decamp. Indeed, brain drain might become an increasing issue.

Hello. That would mean that

Hello.
That would mean that you have only backed up one movie correct? These files aren't automatically deleted...are you using Nero Recode by any chance or strictly DVD Shrink?

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