The Early Years of the Federal Executive Institute

This book describes the first years of a quite dramatic, thoroughly ambitious effort. Its basic goal was to endow the career leadership levels of the Federal government with the capacity and motivation to bring proactive change to a huge enterprise. The undertaking was assigned the name Federal Executive Institute, a label not particularly descriptive of its exalted intentions. But it may have been as good as could have been contrived. At least it was broad enough to house a wide variety of activities. The second word, executive, was thought to convey a focus on the very top people in the Federal structure. All this began in 1968, in the waning days of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidency. In 2010, more than 40 years later, the Federal Executive Institute was very much a going operation, still quartered in the building where the first executives were greeted in September, 1968. Except for the name and physical similarities, however, the current undertaking is far different from its namesake of 40 years ago. Today it is a very large Federal training operation, with a wide variety of residential courses that range in length from three days to four weeks. It still employs the word, executive, freely; but its focus is on upper middle management people in the GS-14 and 15 ranks. To the extent that it claims a relationship with the more senior career executives, those in the Senior Executive Service, it is largely in terms of preparing people for this later, higher responsibility. As a training activity, its linkage with the career people at the top, whose ranks have been greatly decimated through years of politicization, is at best very weak. How did the original concept vary from the current FEI? Why is the institutional history of roughly the first 10 years of its existence worth recording? If the case can be made that something different was contemplated in 1968 and disappeared in ensuing years, we do have an historical event of some possible importance.