A LEG UP FOR COAST GUARD CIVILIANS The new Civilian Career Management Team BY CRAIG COLLINS
It didn’t take long for Dana Tulis to become a leader. With a degree in environmental engineering, she began her career with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1987, and her superiors immediately recognized her gift for managing and directing. Within five years, she was overseeing the work of others. After the 9/11 attacks, Tulis, a native New Yorker, was tapped to lead the sampling and analysis work involved in the World Trade Center response, and her performance there eventually led to her elevation into the Senior Executive Service (SES): the upper echelon of civilian government leadership, a classification equivalent to the general or flag officer ranks of the armed services. The SES was formed in 1979 to be a corps of executives, selected for their leadership abilities, to serve in key positions just below the top presidential appointees. Tulis rose to the level of senior executive in 2004, and as both deputy office director and acting director of the EPA’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM), she managed a $250 million budget, oversaw a staff of 75 people, and chaired the 15-agency National Response Team. In 2010, when the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded, caught fire, and caused a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, she was EPA’s National Incident Coordinator, working closely with the Federal On-Scene Coordinator (FOSC) for the response: the Coast Guard. During these high-stakes interactions, she and the Coast Guard developed a mutual respect, and soon after Deepwater Horizon, the Coast Guard formed its own high-level position, a single individual in charge of coordinating emergency response and preparedness. Since 2016, that position has been held by Tulis, director of the Coast Guard’s Incident Management and Preparedness Policy. “I love the Coast Guard mission,” she said. “It’s what attracted me to the job. I’ve learned so much and I get to pursue my passion, environmental response, at a new agency while protecting the oceans. It seemed like a natural transition.” While she was pursuing the same mission in the Coast Guard, Tulis learned that the uniformed service, formed in 1790 at the urging of Alexander Hamilton, had an institutional culture driven largely by the service’s
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Coast Guard OUTLOOK
41,000 active-duty members, rich in tradition and heritage – and remarkably different from the culture of the EPA, a civilian agency established in 1970 by order of Richard Nixon. As one of the highest-ranking of the Coast Guard’s 8,500 civilian personnel, Tulis sensed that career opportunities, paths to development and promotion into the leadership ranks, were far less clearly defined for civilians – or at least far less clearly publicized and made available – than for the service’s active-duty personnel. But Tulis also knew she had joined an organization committed to becoming a welcoming, inclusive, and rewarding place to work, for civilian and uniformed personnel alike. Both Coast Guard commandants for whom she has served – Adm. Karl Schultz and his predecessor, Adm. Paul Zukunft – have explicitly stated a desire to make the service an “employer of choice” for the nation’s most talented people. The Coast Guard did hire the best people, Tulis thought – people so good at their jobs that their performance sometimes didn’t match to their station within the General Schedule. “I had international experts working for me who were at a GS-13 level,” she said, “and I thought they would be GS-15s at EPA, with that level of technical expertise.” She and other civilian executives also wanted to create a pathway for supporting and encouraging SES candidates from within the Coast Guard’s own workforce. Knowing the service’s leaders were open to hearing from and responding to civilian employees, Tulis teamed with SES civilians in the service’s Force Readiness Command (FORCECOM) and the International Office to form a civilian advisory council that met periodically with Coast Guard flag officers. “We got civilians to start talking about their experiences,” she said, “and I think it really started to hit home.” The issue of civilian career development certainly had the attention of the new commandant, Schultz, when he began his tenure and outlined his guiding principles in June 2019. With service readiness a top priority, Schultz announced a series of “Early Action Items” he wanted achieved within the first months of his tenure. One of these items was the formation of a distinct
