The Senior Executive Service (SES) was established by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA; P.L. 95-454 , 92 Stat. 1111). Congress created the SES to provide a government-wide, mobile corps of managers within federal agencies. The SES, comprising mostly career appointees who are chosen through a merit staffing process, is the link between the politically appointed heads of agencies and the career civil servants within those agencies. The creators of the SES envisioned a cadre of high-level managers in the government who would provide leadership for agencies across administrations and ensure productivity and efficiency within the government. The CSRA incentivized good performance among senior executives by basing their compensation on their performance. The CSRA tasked the creation and distribution of SES positions within the government to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which was also established by the CSRA. The SES was launched in July 1979 and includes most of the government's managerial and policy positions above the General Schedule (GS) grade 15. As one government official explained, "the SES is the backbone of Federal executive leadership and its members play a crucial role in addressing unprecedented challenges facing our nation." More than three decades after its existence, the SES still serves as the link between political appointees who run agencies and the career government workers in the agencies. Before the SES was established, a centralized cadre of senior leaders in the government did not exist. The creation of the SES was intended to bring a "measure of coherence" to an otherwise fragmented federal bureaucracy. Senior executives would be equipped with managerial skills that could allow them to move between agencies to "quell administrative brushfires" and to help fulfill agencies' leadership and management needs. Senior executives serve an important function in high-level government positions, overseeing the implementation of many government programs and providing leadership within agencies. However, some organizations and individuals have called for changes to the current SES. At a March 2011 hearing on the SES, for example, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs' Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia evaluated the current state of the SES. All three witnesses at the hearing identified areas they said were in need of improvement in the SES, including recruiting, career development, diversity, and the SES pay system. This report provides a history and background of the SES, examines the central features of the SES, and discusses some areas that SES reform advocates have identified as needing improvement. The development of the "higher civil service" in the United States throughout the mid-20 th century led to a class of civil servants in high-level agency positions sometimes referred to as the supergrades. Supergrades were civil servants who held GS-16, GS-17, and GS-18 positions. Congress created the GS scale, including the supergrade positions, in 1949. At that time, the number of supergrade positions was limited to 400. Individuals in supergrade positions earned salaries almost equivalent to those of political executives and Members of Congress. They generally held specialized positions within agencies that were technically specific and did not require broad leadership skills or mobility. It was these individuals who were converted into the Senior Executive Service under the Civil Service Reform Act, along with individuals in managerial positions in Executive Levels IV and V. Converting those high-level positions into a more centralized cadre of managers was intended to make the management of government more flexible and efficient. Although the SES was created during President Jimmy Carter's Administration, President Carter was not the first President to propose changes to the executive levels of the civil service. Three decades earlier, for example, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed a Senior Civil Service (which he later called the Career Executive Service). This proposal followed a series of recommendations made by the Second Hoover Commission, chaired by former President Herbert Hoover, which was created in part to identify needs of the U.S. federal personnel system. President John Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson also showed interest in reforming the higher civil service, tasking their administrations with reviewing the federal executive personnel system. Both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson introduced a new method for filling supergrade positions, but as some scholars have pointed out, reactions to and success of the programs were mixed. Soon after entering the White House, President Richard Nixon asked the Civil Service Commission to study and make recommendations on the state of the federal executive personnel system. The study concluded that there were a number of issues with the executive personnel system that needed to be addressed. Some recommendations made by the commission included improving executive management capabilities; fostering and recruiting from a talent pool of motivated individuals; centralizing executive resources across agency lines; and providing training for executives. These recommendations were incorporated into a proposal by President Nixon to establish the Federal Executive Service in 1971. Scholars have identified the political landscape surrounding the Nixon presidency and a controversial provision which would have required executives to enter three-year "employment agreements" as the main reasons why Congress did not pass Nixon's FES bill. One of the centerpieces of President Carter's campaign for the presidency in 1976 was his "Washington outsider" status, which he used as an asset to address what he considered to be problems in the federal government. During his campaign, he criticized the federal bureaucracy as being "wasteful" and "disorganized." After his election to the presidency, he created the Federal Personnel Management Project to address what he considered to be problems with the federal executive establishment. Led by the chair of the Civil Service Commission (now the Office of Personnel Management) and the associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Federal Personnel Management Project was divided into nine task forces, one of which dealt directly with issues relating to the senior executives in government. Sally Greenberg, a senior official at the Civil Service Commission, chaired this task force. In its written report, the task force identified the most critical problems as follows: 1. Neither the Congress nor the President has effective control over the total numbers of the executive cadre. 2. The numbers of executives authorized have little relationship to current needs and the system cannot adapt rapidly to program changes. 3. The multiplicity of hiring authorities with different requirements and provisions results in individuals with substantially similar responsibilities being employed and compensated under very different standards. It is susceptible to manipulation and fosters the use of questionable, albeit legal, maneuvers. 4. Individuals with little or no adequate managerial expertise can be placed in positions responsible for managing billion-dollar federal programs and for supervising thousands of employees. 5. Career employees have little opportunity to undertake positions of the highest responsibility without relinquishing their career tenure. 6. Whenever there is a change in political leadership, there is a period in many agencies during which the work of the Government is done at a minimum maintenance level. New initiatives are rare and even on-going programs operate in low gear. 7. There are critically important executive positions classified as "career" which new administrations would like to fill with executives of their own choosing, but reassignments of incumbents are very difficult to make, principally because of the existing protection of 'rank' and system inflexibilities. 8. It is commonly observed by both career and noncareer executives that some career managers are functioning in less than an optimum manner, in some instances because they are in positions which make greater demands on them than they are capable of meeting, in other cases because they have no incentive to do their best. It is difficult to remove such managers. 9. Compensation of executives has been a serious problem in recent years with most senior executives frozen in pay for long periods, while their subordinates' pay, compensation for comparable positions in the private sector, and the cost of living have all risen dramatically. 10. The present process for establishing and filling an executive position is time-consuming and inefficient. 11. Minorities and women have been virtually excluded from top management ranks." The task force's report described each problem in detail. The report concluded that "these problems in the staffing and management of senior managerial positions cannot be adequately resolved by revisions to the existing system…. Accordingly, we will recommend establishment of a new executive personnel system." The task force outlined several alternatives to the current system in its report stemming from the conclusions above, many of which ultimately became part of the new SES. One of the major goals of the SES was to strengthen the link between the civil service and the politically appointed heads of agencies. As Alan "Scotty" Campbell, then chairman of the Civil Service Commission who had an integral role in establishing the SES, stated, "we could see the dysfunctional effects of career/noncareer interface." The SES was intended to create a stronger and smoother link between political appointees and career civil servants, both during presidential transition periods and for the duration of administrations. As one former career executive reported, the pre-SES federal workforce often had poor relations between civil servants and political appointees because they had two different objectives: career employees were focused on technical programmatic details while political appointees were more focused on using executive and political skills to run the agency. This focus on different objectives sometimes led to a rift between the two groups. The SES was to be the solution, providing a shared resource to civil servants and political appointees alike and facilitating better relations between the two. In addition to smoothing over the interface between civil servants and political leadership, the creation of the SES was intended to ease the transition period for new Presidents and their political appointees. Prior to the establishment of the SES, a centralized corps of senior leaders providing consistent leadership across administrations and across agencies did not exist. During a presidential transition, which could last for several months, the new administration might not provide direction for civil servants. The SES was intended, in part, to provide stronger senior leadership during presidential transitions so as to avoid this lull between administrations.