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Last week I wrote a considerable bit of opinion on events without news report copy. This week I plan to do just the opposite.
The White House has inexplicably announced vast and far reaching pay “overhauls” which they intend to apply nearly government wide. Seeing as how apparently Congress wasn’t even aware this was coming, I am having a bit of difficulty ferreting out the fine details of the plan. To say this may have a huge impact on all of us would be the week’s best understatement.
Also the FAA should be announcing the results of the A-76 outsourcing of the Flight Service folks tomorrow. A member said it best with, “there but for the NATCA PAC go I”.
So with that I’ll let these next two articles on the pay proposal speak for themselves leaving me the opportunity to report back later when the “devil in the details” of this grand plan become more apparent. Are you giving to the NATCA PAC yet?
Have fun this week,
Grant Anderson
Government Executive: Congress not in loop on administration's reform plans By Paul Singer, CongressDailyPM White House officials are planning a major overhaul of the way Congress oversees federal agencies, but they seem to have briefed the press before they briefed lawmakers. Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Clay Johnson briefed a handful of reporters Wednesday afternoon on a series of proposals that will be included in the president's fiscal 2006 budget, including legislation to create two new commissions to oversee the shutdown or overhaul of government programs that have outlived their usefulness. Under one proposal, federal programs would be presumed to expire after 10 years unless a commission voted to extend them. Under the other plan, a commission would propose major overhauls of federal programs on a particular subject, and Congress would be bound to fast-track consideration of the proposals. Johnson said he hopes Congress will see the wisdom of the plans, but he admitted that the White House had not briefed Capitol Hill on the ideas. "We've run it by largely former members of Congress," Johnson said. "We have not run it by current leaders in Congress. We have apprised leadership that this is going to be in the budget and we will be ready to sit down and talk to them about the details prior to the time that it is ready to submit legislation." A spokesman in the offic of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said the leader's staff has not yet been briefed, and a spokesman for the House Government Reform Committee said only, "We're still reviewing OMB's proposals." But House Government Reform ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said what little he has heard of the plan indicates that it would "be a field day for corporate lobbyists and put our most important health and safety programs in jeopardy."
Washington Post: Hill Urges Caution in Civil Service Changes The Bush administration should wait and see how well new personnel systems work at two of the largest federal departments before trying to rewrite civil service rules government-wide, several key members of Congress said yesterday. The lawmakers weighed in a day after the administration unveiled a new personnel system at the Department of Homeland Security that officials say will make the bureaucracy nimbler and able to quickly respond to security threats in an era of global terrorism. A similar plan is under construction at the Defense Department. Congress authorized the civil service reorganization at Homeland Security and Defense within the past three years after administration officials argued that decades-old federal work rules were overly restrictive and rewarded employees more for the longevity of their service than for the quality of their work. Bush administration officials said Wednesday that they will ask Congress to extend the new "flexibility" to all agencies to more strongly tie pay to performance and to ease the transfer of employees and money to where they can be most effective. But some lawmakers contacted yesterday said there should be no rush. "The personnel systems at DOD and DHS are experiments in creating flexible personnel systems," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which would have to approve any legislation. "I think it is prudent to see how these systems fare before deciding whether to expand the reforms to other federal agencies." Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the panel, agreed, saying in a statement: "We should see how it works before we consider whether it would be appropriate for agencies without critical national security responsibilities." Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, expressed similar concerns. "Congress granted DOD and DHS personnel flexibilities in recognition of their particular national security mission. That rationale doesn't apply to the rest of the government," he said in a statement. The new DHS system took two years to develop and will require four more to implement. Internal working groups are crafting the still-secret DOD plan, which would apply to more than 700,000 civilian workers. Together, the new systems will affect nearly half of the government's 1.8 million civilian employees, moving large chunks of the federal workforce off the General Schedule and its familiar 15 pay grades. Clay Johnson III, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, said this week that other agencies could develop new systems more quickly "because we've learned a lot from the DHS and DOD rules." Smaller-scale experiments with changing pay systems at the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Aviation Administration have produced mixed results. Managers at both agencies have said that it is easier to recruit talented workers at higher salaries than before, but it has also been difficult to create new pay systems that rank-and-file employees view as fair. The current civil service system dates to the Pendleton Act of 1883, which replaced the "spoils system" of distributing jobs through political patronage with a merit-based system. Presidents and most lawmakers in recent years have shown little interest in spending political capital on such arcane issues as personnel rules. But President Bush made the revision of civil service rules at DHS a key condition for the creation of the department after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The DOD and DHS plans have drawn significant criticism from federal employee unions, which contend that they erode workers' rights and make pay raises dependent on winning favor with the boss. "They've been after the General Schedule system for a while, and this is just an easy excuse to dismantle it government-wide," said Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union. Kelley's union and three others filed a lawsuit in federal District Court yesterday to block new DHS restrictions on collective bargaining and employee appeals, saying the changes go further than Congress permitted in the legislation creating the department. John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said 800 union activists from around the country will visit their representatives on Capitol Hill on Feb. 8 to voice concerns about the civil service changes. "This is not modern management," Gage said. "This is going back in time. This system is cronyism. It's throwing politics again into the civil service." |
