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While Defense Department officials continued to fend off criticism of the recently unveiled proposal to overhaul the civilian personnel system, smaller scale proposals at NASA and the Securities and Exchange Commission drew few questions from lawmakers Tuesday.

"The Civil Service and National Security Personnel Improvement Act"(H.R.1836) introduced last week by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, would give NASA and SEC hiring and pay flexibilities to better shape their workforce and prepare for looming retirements, agency officials explained on Tuesday.

"One of the greatest challenges before the agency today is having the people - the human capital - available to forge ahead and make . . . future breakthroughs tomorrow's everyday reality," NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe told members of the House Government Reform Committee.

According to O'Keefe, the waning interest in science and engineering studies is drying up the pool of specialized applicants needed at the agency and warrants the use of such recruitment and retention flexibilities as student loan forgiveness, relocation bonuses, special pay authority, term appointment authority, a science and technology scholarship program and recruitment bonuses. Before taking over at NASA in January 2002, O'Keefe served as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and helped craft the president's management agenda.

"This is not a crisis today," O'Keefe told legislators, but "it will be . . . in short order."

O'Keefe's counterpart at the SEC, Chairman William Donaldson, told lawmakers that he needed flexible hiring authorities to hire more than 800 accountants, economists and securities compliance examiners. The extra staffers are needed to help the SEC police Wall Street, Donaldson said. The House Financial Services Committee passed similar legislation in March.

"Given our task of implementing the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, our mission in overseeing our financial markets, and our role in restoring investor confidence during these difficult times, putting additional 'cops on the beat' more quickly to accomplish our goals is absolutely vital," said Donaldson, who was founding dean of the Yale School of Management; ran Aetna, an insurance company; and was head of the New York Stock Exchange before taking over the SEC.

The House Government Reform Committee will vote on the legislation Wednesday, but several committee members voiced concern about the Defense Department portion of the bill, which aims to scrap the General Schedule pay system in exchange for a pay-banding system, implement a separate pay structure for managers and modify job classifications, hiring authorities, pay administration and reduction-in-force procedures. The proposal would also eliminate automatic annual pay increases and instead create a pay-for-performance fund for salary boosts.

"To be sure, there are problems in the federal personnel system, including inadequate performance appraisal systems and inflexibilities in hiring, paying and disciplining employees, which must be addressed," said Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md. "But this bill is even more objectionable for what it does than for how it came to be. This proposal will have the chilling effect of undoing decades of some of the most important worker protections enacted by Congress."

Several legislators voiced objections to the bill's provision to reduce union bargaining powers and give the Defense secretary more power in making administrative decisions. Homeland Security Department officials were given similar authority in the law creating the department.

"Now that the Defense Department has marched through Iraq in three weeks, it intends to do the same with Congress," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said. "Over and over you've said, 'well, we want what the Homeland Security Department has,' but what they have is an experiment. Tell us what you need and we will try to accommodate that."

COMMENTS

• I think Dr. Paul Light's editorial in the Washington Post on Friday, June 9th said it all very well. However, regarding these personnel changes, Dr. Light asked an interesting question. He stated that no amount of reform will work if agencies do not have the dollars for better training and if the President is to move ahead with reform, the administration needs to provide the dollars to make it work. He asked, why bother otherwise? Everyone assumes that the goal of all of this reform is to actually improve the federal civil service. I have an entirely different theory. I remember very well the time when I first moved over from being a union official to being a Labor Relations Specialist for the federal government. It was very soon after that newly elected President Bush withdrew President Clinton's Executive Order on Partnership. Why bother? Because on March 2, 2004 all the Collective Bargaining Rights for thousands of former Customs, Border Patrol, INS Agents, Aphis agents and thousands more employees end. If the current legislation passes through Congress, the Secretary of Defense, and heads of NASA and SEC will follow NIMA's example (eliminiate collective bargaining rights) for the hundreds of thousands of DoD civilian employees and others. President Bush exhibits all the workplace personality characteristics of an extreme Driver type. He will succeed in his primary, number one goal of destroying (or seriously damaging) the federal sector public service unions regardless of the consequences. To disenfranchise federal sector employees seems of little concern to this administration. So Dr. Light and others ask why bother to reform without resources? Because it meets the major goal of wiping out the Unions and for that you need to add no resources to these agencies. As the federal public sector unions and Congress sleep, this Administration is hard at work to reach the goal of at will employment without unions. Mike GovExec.com reader Posted May 13, 2003 7:30 AM
• Is it possible that the DoD sees this as its only opportunity to make such a radical move/change? Maybe it is expecting that the current administration will not be in power after the next election. Considering the current state of the economy and many other factors that have a majority of the American public upset with the apparent inaction of this administration within our own nation, it is possible that this president may only be a one term president, as was his father. Now that we may have kicked Saddam out of Iraq and there appears to be no new opportunities looming in the near future for another conventional war, for which a majority of the American people seem to continue to support this administration, these same people will begin to look at our own sorry state of affairs here in our homeland and decided that this president is a failure when it comes to helping his own people. GovExec.com reader Posted May 7, 2003 8:15 AM