GovernmentExecutive.com

Even with governmentwide pay-for-performance legislation stalled, federal agencies are trudging ahead with efforts to shed the General Schedule personnel system.

More than a year after the Bush administration floated the Working for America Act, which would extend personnel reforms that are being implemented in the Homeland Security and Defense departments to the rest of government, the bill has yet to pick up support in Congress.

Office of Personnel Management Director Linda Springer told federal employees at the National Treasury Employees Union legislative conference this spring that the administration would begin to push the legislation again after the fall elections, according to NTEU President Colleen Kelley.

But don't be fooled into thinking the Bush team is sitting on its hands until November. This week, the Commerce Department announced it would add 3,500 more employees in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to its pay-for-performance demonstration project.

And since Congress has extended the project indefinitely, it is less of an experiment and more of a permanent system -- taking 11,000 of the department's 39,000 employees off the General Schedule.

Now, the Veterans Affairs Department -- one of the government's largest operations, with 230,000 employees -- is working on its own pay-for-performance pilot project, according to VA Chief Human Capital Officer R. Allen Pittman.

"We have to ensure we have the... culture, the environment, that the private sector employee is used to," said Pittman, a Vietnam veteran who was appointed to his position after high-level jobs at several private health care companies, and who wants to recruit more VA workers from the private sector. "I come from a pay-for-performance environment, and that's absolutely essential to our success in the future."

About 1,000 employees, likely in the Veterans Health Administration, will enter the system in three or four months, Pittman said. He strongly backs the Working for America Act, and thinks more pilot projects will help it get passed.

"It helps when you have experience to get feedback to Congress," Pittman said. "Here's the good, or here's the bad, or here's how it works or didn't work. Then hopefully legislation will be forthcoming."

According to an OPM spokesman, every agency already has the authority to place up to 5,000 employees in pay-for-performance demonstration projects.

"Such approaches have already been used successfully in other more elaborate demonstration projects and alternative personnel systems," the spokesman said. "OPM supports agencies when they want to pursue pay-for-performance."

VA already is implementing a five-tiered performance management system, instead of the pass-fail systems many agencies use, so Pittman said his agency is halfway to a performance-based culture. Now VA just needs to tie pay to the ratings to give them meaning.

In addition to the demonstration projects, this summer every agency was required to set up a "beta site" of employees to test a new performance management system that could eventually be spread to all employees and then tied to pay.

One of the basic arguments for postponing governmentwide personnel reform is that Congress should wait to see the results of DHS and Defense's efforts. Springer and other advocates argue that the government, through demonstration projects and now these beta sites, already has seen results. Clearly, they're not waiting around.