Agencies would get buyout authority under Senate homeland security bill

Federal employees throughout the government would be eligible for $25,000 buyouts and early retirement incentives under the Senate bill creating the new Homeland Security Department. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, sponsored the governmentwide buyout measure, which the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee added to the homeland security legislation last week. The committee adopted several provisions from Voinovich's Federal Workforce Management Improvement Act-legislation aimed at overhauling federal hiring practices-during markup of the homeland security bill. The Voinovich provisions would create chief human capital officers at agencies and give them personnel flexibilities such as buyout authority. Attaching these measures to the homeland security legislation-which observers expect will pass in some form-makes it more likely that they will actually become law, according to John Palguta, vice president for policy and research at the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington-based think-tank. "It remains to be seen what kind of compromise is worked out between the House and Senate, but I'm hopeful that the Voinovich language is retained and that we in fact get these things adopted governmentwide," he said. None of the Voinovich measures would be prohibited under the House version of the homeland security legislation, which gives the administration complete flexibility to design a new personnel system for the department. The White House also proposed some of the measures, including buyout authority, in its Managerial Flexibility Act last fall. The full Senate will not consider the homeland security bill until after the August congressional recess, which runs through Labor Day. Another Voinovich provision would repeal the so-called "rule of three," which requires federal managers to hire employees from a list of three pre-selected candidates. Instead, managers would use categorical ranking, where job applicants are lumped into several categories, such as "most qualified," and "qualified" and ranked using predetermined criteria. The Agriculture Department's Forest Service has used categorical ranking to hire thousands of firefighters, while the IRS used it last year to hire hundreds of revenue agents. A chief human capital officer could be particularly useful at the Homeland Security Department, where officials will have to reconcile dozens of different personnel systems and oversee massive hiring campaigns that some homeland security agencies will conduct over the next few years. For example, the Immigration and Naturalization Service plans to hire 20,000 Border Patrol agents, immigration inspectors and other law enforcement personnel over the next two years. The Department of Homeland Security's human capital "czar" could also try to keep homeland security agencies from raiding each other for new hires, noted Palguta. An analysis in the August issue of Government Executive found that federal agencies lost more than 1,400 law enforcement officers and support personnel to the Transportation Security Administration between September and June.