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Editor's Note: The full version of this article appears in the Sept. 1 issue of Government Executive. For information on subscribing to the magazine, click here.

George Nesterczuk is a warrior, which may seem peculiar because of his soft face, round physique and easy laugh. The Ukrainian-American archconservative doesn't engage in red vs. blue political battles. Instead, he has spent his career as a strategist in a decidedly less glamorous campaign, struggling to reshape the civil service.

He is at the center of the Bush administration's personnel reforms, funneling years of observation and philosophy into a blueprint for new pay and management systems at the Defense and Homeland Security departments. Nesterczuk's decision to leave the Office of Personnel Management in July and head to the Ukraine to reform its bureaucracy means "we've lost one of the true warriors in civil service reform," says Ronald Sanders, the top personnel adviser to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. "He's been at this a long time," Sanders says. "He's sort of a Russian Don Quixote. He's been tilting at windmills since I first met him in the late '80s."

Before becoming DNI chief human capital officer, Sanders worked side by side with Nesterczuk at OPM, advising the Defense Department on how to make sweeping changes to the way it pays, hires, fires and bargains with 700,000 civilian workers. His allusion to the fabled 17th century chivalrous Spanish warrior and his uphill fight for a grandiose notion of right and wrong seems apt in Nesterczuk's case.

But in some circles, Nesterczuk is more likely to be compared to another literary figure: Harry Potter's nemesis, Lord Voldemort. When asked if he is federal workers' own Dark Lord, Nesterczuk laughs gently and simply says, no.

But many federal labor union officials see Nesterczuk as an ideologue who helped hatch an evil plan at a conservative Washington think thank, The Heritage Foundation, and then returned to government to impose it. The nefarious plan? Rid the country of an oversized bureaucracy and its pesky unions. Unions so far have sued both the Defense and Homeland Security departments successfully to halt twin labor relations systems that would have crippled their ability to bargain.

Last spring, in an update to members, the United Department of Defense Workers Coalition outed Nesterczuk as a key engineer of the personnel reform programs they oppose. The coalition, a group of 36 Defense labor unions that coalesced when the Pentagon began work on its new National Security Personnel System, pointed out a January 2001 Heritage report that Nesterczuk co-authored with his self-declared mentor, Donald Devine.

As Ronald Reagan's OPM chief, Devine won attention and enmity for his efforts to downsize government. In the report, the pair, along with Heritage fellow Robert E. Moffit, wrote, "Unions are, at best, responsible to their members. At worst, they represent the permanent government acting on its own self-interest rather than on the desires of the electorate."

In a July 2002 Heritage paper, Nesterczuk argued on his own for "a streamlined [Homeland Security Department] dispute resolution system, providing for internal agency appeals and reviews and ending with the secretary as final arbiter." Just such a system took shape at DHS and at the Pentagon; both were ruled illegal this year.

COMMENTS

• As stated before, “Words are important.” While my 7,300-plus days of experience in the active duty tells me you are correct that this man did not qualify as a “warrior,” rest assured that if you are concerned about truly accomplishing something in your civilian career, you’d best try to emulate one. The words “mission,” “strategy,” “allies,” “alternatives” and “goals” are just a few of the concepts you will need to incorporate in your vocabulary, particularly in one of the largest bureaucracies in the world today. Now, the unfortunate flipside of that coin is those words are often used as catch phrases for sound bites. They become the tarnished penny instead of the gleaming gold they should be. Respect, whether singular, plural, or mutual, is yet another concept that seems to be losing its meaning, even possibly among this readership. There is a world of difference between a true soldier and a DoD employee and yet we do many of the same functions and jobs. Been there, done that, got the shirt and moved on. Like many of my fellow soldiers, now co-workers, I changed occupations. But ever a product of my youth, I carried my values with me. Still we both have our place and we can, perhaps, accomplish more by learning; one from the other. We might even survive the fiasco that is NSPS if the workers and managers can just talk. Always the dreamer, Tip off. Tip Posted September 14, 2006 3:58 PM
• Words are important. And it is highly inappropriate to refer to this fellow and obvious closed-minded ideologue as a so-called "warrior" and/or his air conditioned office space as a perceived "battlefield" when, on a daily basis, real, genuine American warriors are engaged in a real battlefield, not a make believe one, risking their lives and many times suffering grievous injuries and even death on a daily basis for all of us. Let's stop diluting and insulting genuine sacrifice and honor from our nation's real warriors, and especially during a time when real, not make believe, battlefields exist. This fellow was not and is not a warrior. And there was not and is not a "battlefield" in the nation's capital. Neither this fellow nor any of the other ideologues and sycophantic shills behind this obviously ideologically-driven dogma -- dogma that is nearly universally reviled among those not beholden to the current administration, dogma that has been recently and repeatedly eviscerated by the judiciary -- deserve to be referred to as “warriors." Stop it. Michael J. Smith Posted September 5, 2006 1:08 PM
• Here at DFAS, we have been BRAC'd nearly out of existence. More than 80 percent of our sites must close. While those proceedings go forward, we are also waiting for the results of the so-called "Lean6 initiative" which simply translates into more people losing their jobs. Management has been working on this for quite a while now but as usual no one seems to want to get off their butts and make a decision so those of us affected can make informed decisions about our futures. With the expectation of cutting the agency's positions in half, how could we possibly do the simplest A-76 procurement? What is left to outsource? What kind of idiots are running this circus? GovExec.com reader Posted September 11, 2006 1:52 PM