Ensuring Consistent and Safe Guidance for Federal Managers
The Professional Managers Association (PMA) has been actively engaging with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) leadership, the Department of Treasury, and central management offices like OPM and OMB to support our members as they navigate working through the pandemic. As the Biden-Harris Administration works to mandate vaccinations for all federal employees, PMA has worked independently and alongside coalitions to ensure the unique perspectives and concerns of managers are heard.
President Biden’s executive order mandating COVID-19 vaccination for all federal employees was a welcome departure from the Administration’s still unrealized plan to test unvaccinated employees. The testing plan exacerbated resource constraints, lacked effective coordination between central management offices and agency leaders, and exposed managers to potential liability.
Still, the new order elevated several existing concerns for PMA. In a statement on the order, Executive Director Chad Hooper explained, “Given that a portion of the workforce may still not be able to get vaccinated, this order will not resolve PMA's outstanding concerns on implementing routine testing. Currently, no plan is in place to test the Civil Service and the IRS still lacks a coherent contact tracing protocol.”
In a Government Managers Coalition (GMC) letter co-signed by PMA, management associations critiqued the administration for failing to ensure agency leaders had the proper guidance and clear lines of communication to ensure policies related to COVID-19 testing could be practically implemented.
The letter explained that, as a result of staffing and safety requirements for COVID-19, many of our members have spent the past 18 months performing duties far outside the scope of their typical employment – and often far below their grade level. With staff unable to enter the workplace, some managers are devoting 10–12-hour workdays where they must perform clerical duties such as opening mail and scanning documents. This is in addition to the management jobs they are still expected to perform, because other employees are unable or unwilling to enter the workspace.
PMA also explained that despite the clear guidance from the Administration for agencies to use the CDC transmission tracker to guide local safety protocols, the IRS created their own IRS Transmission Report, which is only updated weekly, because the Service concluded that the CDC tracker was updated too frequently and too burdensome to monitor. These inconsistencies in policies have real impacts on the health and safety of our workforce and the federal government’s central management offices seem unaware of the implementation concerns.
As focus shifts to mandating vaccination, PMA has already reached out to OPM and OMB about allowing Federal Occupational Health (FOH) Centers to carry a COVID-19 vaccine supply. Many IRS workers rely on FOH Centers to get their annual flu vaccine and may feel more comfortable obtaining this type of care from someone they already trust.
PMA is working closely with the GMC and other coalition partners to ensure reasonable accommodations are respected and all federal employees feel confident and comfortable getting the vaccine.
In the statement following the Order’s release, Hooper concluded, “We insist that the White House COVID Response Team proactively engage Federal management associations to hear and address our specific concerns relating to implementing this first-of-its-kind mandate. No vaccine has ever been mandated across the Civil Service as a condition of employment and career Federal managers face personal civil liability arising from inevitable claims of medical, religious, and political discrimination. PMA feels that its legitimate legal concerns are minimized and brushed aside by members of the current administration who seem concerned solely with issuing guidance from DC absent the perspective of career managers working in hundreds of posts-of-duty throughout our nation and around the world.”
The column from PMA is part of the FEDforum, an initiative to unite voices across the federal community. The FEDforum is a space for federal employee groups to share their organizations’ initiatives and activities with the FEDmanager audience.
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