GovernmentExecutive.com

The Office of Personnel Management -- the agency responsible for guiding the management of federal employees -- released a five-year plan Thursday that, in a break from the past, sets simplified, tangible goals and deadlines for meeting them.

Many of the goals relate to decreasing the wait for OPM services. The agency wants to cut the wait for 50 percent of all hiring decisions to 45 days by the end of this fiscal year and accomplish that for 90 percent of hires by 2010.

Checks that often are delayed in the initial months of retirement will be paid in 30 days for 90 percent of retirees by Oct. 1, 2006. OPM, which handles investigations for many agencies' security clearances, said it aims to complete 80 percent of initial investigations within 90 days by the end of this year and 90 percent in 40 days by the close of 2009.

OPM Director Linda Springer, who took the agency's helm in June, said the direct style is intentional.

"We believe the American citizens and the federal civilian workforce expect us to get things done," Springer said in a statement. "That's what this plan is about. Its goals are straightforward and readily identifiable. Each is action-oriented and begins with a verb. Each has a date by which it will be accomplished. We will know when it has been achieved and so will you. That's true accountability. And that is the way we want it."

Some of the milestones involve smaller feats. OPM will publish a catalog of every professional development program offered by the federal government by Oct. 1, 2006. The agency will include the government's contributions to benefits, such as health insurance, on employee pay statements by Oct. 1, 2007.

Other parts of the plan, despite its brevity, tackle larger goals. One is to "expand and publicize [the] business case for introduction of reform legislations during 2006," an allusion to the draft legislative proposal, dubbed The Working for America Act, that OPM helped create last summer as part of efforts to implement a pay-for-performance system in the civilian agencies.

So far, the act has not attracted any sponsors on the Hill - many members of Congress have said they are waiting to see how similar systems in the Defense and Homeland Security departments work before committing the rest of the government to the changes. OPM, evidently, is not giving up the cause yet.

Also included in Springer's strategy is a goal to find common ground with the federal employee unions with which the agency often clashes: "Identify at least one initiative per year to partner [with unions] and implement beginning in 2006."

That common ground doesn't appear likely to come on the personnel reform proposal, however.

The National Treasury Employees Union "intends to continue strongly opposing the administration's proposed Working for America Act," said Colleen Kelley, the group's president, in a statement issued in response to OPM's continued push for the bill.

"It is a proposal that would severely restrict a variety of workplace rights critical to federal employees, and would replace the General Schedule pay system they know and trust with an untested, complex system that would, at the very least, be subjective and open to favoritism and cronyism," she said.