DoD Weighs New Job System

THE DAILY FED

DoD Weighs New Job System

In response to ever-increasing budget pressures, the Defense Department is exploring ways to place civilian employees into a new personnel organization outside the standard civil service system, internal documents show.

In a department memorandum dated August 11, Diane Disney, deputy assistant secretary for civilian personnel policy, initiated a departmentwide planning process for a new Defense personnel system.

The new organization under consideration would bind civilian workers more closely to the military, simplify job classifications and create new pay and benefits systems. The system would be built around the concept of a three-tiered workforce, which would include a top cadre of permanent career employees, a second group comprised of "non-permanent" employees and a third segment of government contractor employees.

Permanent employees would be comprised of current employees and those hired under the new personnel system. This group, the memo states, would continue to perform those functions not considered candidates for outsourcing.

Non-permanent employees would be hired for up to five years and would also be immediately eligible for health and life insurance benefits and Thrift Savings Plan coverage. This workforce would have the potential to be converted to permanent status non-competitively or could be released to avoid layoffs in the permanent workforce.

The contractor-based segment of the DoD workforce would perform non-governmental work deemed to be more cost effective when outsourced.

A Defense Department working group has been formed to study various options and is scheduled to meet Friday in the Pentagon, according to the memo.

Disney told The Washington Post that the department has yet to develop specific proposals for personnel reform. "We have not drafted any changes," she said. "We are nowhere near doing anything on specifics."

Congress must approve any changes to the Defense Department's personnel procedures.

Governmentwide civil service reform was pushed early in the Clinton administration by the National Performance Review, but the administration's efforts failed to produce any major changes.

Small-scale demonstration projects testing new personnel systems have been cropping up around the federal bureaucracy for years, several of them within the Defense Department. Two Navy installations began experimenting with alternative personnel systems in the early 1980s. The Defense Commissary Agency has developed an alternative personnel system, which would include broad pay bands and faster hiring procedures, as part of its push to become a performance-based organization. A demonstration project for up to 50,000 of DoD's procurement personnel is slated to launch next year.

DoD is pushing a departmentwide civil service reform effort in part to standardize the personnel system reinvention initiatives already underway.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 300,000 defense workers, expressed disappointment that they were not consulted as the new personnel plans were developed.