Strengthening Senior Leadership in the U.S. Government

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 created the Senior Executive Service (SES) “to ensure that the executive management of the Government of the United States is responsive to the needs, policies, and goals of the nation and is otherwise of the highest quality.” The SES envisioned a corps of executive managers whose members were selected for their executive excellence and accountable for their organizations’ successes.

From the beginning, many questioned whether the SES was exclusively a corps of executive managers, or whether it also would include high-level, world-class professional and technical positions that exclude executive functions and responsibilities. The Grace Commission, Packard Panel, National Performance Review, and U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) have grappled with this issue. In 1998, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) raised the issue anew in conjunction with its broad-based review of the SES system.