As fate hangs in balance, NSPS gets key endorsement

Posted by admin in News You Can Use on July 21, 2009
By STEPHEN LOSEY
July 20, 2009
Source: Federaltimes.com
 
The Defense Department’s controversial pay-for-performance system received a stay of execution last week, when an independent review board said the program needs major “reconstruction” but did not recommend abolishing it.
 
The board concluded the process of linking pay to performance is deeply flawed, but it found the performance management system — where supervisors set their employees’ goals and evaluate how well they do their jobs — appears to be improving, board member Robert Tobias told Federal Times. The board’s final report — to be released in a few months — will likely say the National Security Personnel System’s performance management “is critically important” and justifies saving at least part of the system. Tobias said.
 
“The NSPS performance management portion seems to be headed in the right direction, as opposed to how the pay is linked to performance management,” he said.
 
But the portions of NSPS that need revision should be torn out by the roots and completely refashioned, the board said.
“We’re not suggesting anything other than a start-from-scratch approach,” Tobias said.
 
The board did not spell out what reforms NSPS should adopt, but drew some broad conclusions about NSPS’ shortcomings. The pay pool process, where performance ratings are finalized and raises are handed out, is too complex and lacks transparency, it said. Formulas for deciding how many pay pool shares employees receive and whether they should receive salary increases or one-time bonuses are also confusing, the board said.
 
The board also found pay bands and employee-supervisor relationships under NSPS were flawed. The second pay band under NSPS — which covers the bulk of NSPS employees — is too broad and promotion opportunities under it are limited, the board said. And while department supervisors and employees generally trust each other when it comes to accomplishing the agency’s mission, that trust evaporates when it comes to NSPS and must be rebuilt, the board said.
 
Advisory panel chairman Rudy deLeon told reporters at the Pentagon that the board will continue to study the program and issue more detailed recommendations in a few months.
 
Even with its harsh criticism, the board threw the program a lifeline by not completely condemning it. President Barack Obama criticized NSPS during last year’s campaign as unfair, not transparent and potentially discriminatory. He pledged to review the system and possibly repeal it if it were found to be fatally flawed. Some expected the review board would pave the way for a total repeal of NSPS.
 
In recent weeks, NSPS had seemed all but doomed — lawmakers tried to shut NSPS down in Defense authorization bills, reports detailed its flaws, and even its program executive officer acknowledged it had problems when testifying before the board.
 
The White House urged lawmakers not to kill NSPS before the review board issued its recommendations. If the board said the system was beyond redemption, NSPS’ chances for survival would have been nil.
Federal unions — the harshest critics of NSPS — were dismayed and bewildered that the board did not end the system after finding it so defective.
 
“This thing is like Dracula — you can’t kill it,” American Federation of Government Employees National President John Gage said. “We’re very sorry to see the final stake wasn’t driven into it. [The review board] diagnosed the disease, but they didn’t prescribe the cure.”
 
Gage worries that union members could eventually be placed under NSPS if it is only modified and not repealed, he said. Gage also worries that the White House could incorporate some elements of NSPS as it tries to create a governmentwide pay-for-performance system.
 
Darryl Perkinson, president of the Federal Managers Association, said that Defense managers will likely be split over the board’s recommendation not to kill NSPS.
 
“Half of my members are going to be happy, and half are going to be sad,” Perkinson said. “There’s a lot of people calling for its immediate repeal. They want to go back” to the General Schedule.
 
John Palguta, vice president of policy at the Partnership for Public Service, an advocacy group that encourages people to pursue public service careers, said he hopes the board’s recommendations will encourage Congress to give Defense more time to get NSPS right. He hopes the Senate’s version of the Defense authorization bill — which would give Defense Secretary Robert Gates more leeway to decide NSPS’ fate than the House version does — ends up becoming law, he said. Both versions call for ending NSPS within a year.
 
The Pentagon plans to use the board’s final recommendations to overhaul NSPS’ process and structure. Defense’s own ongoing review of how employees in different demographic groups are evaluated and paid by the system and an internal report released in June — which concluded that the system does not do a good job disciplining or correcting poor performers — will also factor into the Pentagon’s overhaul. Program executive officer Brad Bunn expects those changes to come to NSPS in early 2010.
 
The board’s initial report, for now, will not mean any changes for the 205,000 employees under the system.
 
The moratorium on adding more employees to NSPS should continue until the system is fixed, the board said. Congress in 2007 excluded about 148,000 Wage Grade employees from the system, and Bunn announced last fall that the Pentagon would not try to transfer 225,000 bargaining unit employees to the system. Roughly 2,000 employees at the Navy, Defense Commissary Agency and Defense Information Systems Agency were scheduled to be the last transferred to NSPS, but the Pentagon in March agreed to halt those transfers until the White House completed its review of the system.