Mike Causey

NSPS Who Wins, Who Loses?

More than 27,000 Defense Department civilians are going to the half pay raises for the near future. Senior Correspondent Mike Causey explains what\'s happening ...

Federal News Network Staff

August 3, 2010 4:00 am

3 min read

When Defense’s dead-but-not-quite-buried National Security Personnel System is finally put to rest, more than 20 percent of the survivors will be limited to half pay raises for the next couple of years.

When Congress set up the program, Army, Navy and Air Force moved 226,000 non-union staffers into it. It was a massive task and lots of people were nervous.

Backers of NSPS said it would give the government a real merit pay system that would reward the best and send a financial message to poor performers.

Opponents said that NSPS, at best, would institutionalize the buddy system and could become a tool to permit supervisors and agency heads to run a political patronage system.

Federal unions, successfully, tossed stink bombs at the NSPS from the beginning. In a concession to unions, Defense limited the forced conversions into the NSPS to civilians who had supervisory or managerial jobs or who were outside union jurisdiction. With the Democratic takeover of the House, Senate and White House, got it repealed. Leaving the “simple” details of moving 226,000 feds back from whence they had come three years earlier to career DoD officials and employees.

The NSPS Team tasked with deconstructing the program set a goal of moving 176,000 Defense civilians back to the regular civil service system by October 1.

As of early July the transition team said that 98,440 employees had been taken out of NSPS. About 72 percent (71,282) got pay raises in returning to GS pay system. About 28 percent were put in pay retention or matched-step status. That means that their NSPS pay raises pushed their salaries higher, in some cases much higher, than if they had stayed under the GS system.

One civilian who did well under NSPS described his pay situation as the equivalent of being a GS 14 step 15.

He and the others whose NSPS pay levels were or are higher than the GS slot they return to will get half of the January 2011 pay raise. They’ll continue to get half the annual raise until their GS colleagues in the same grade and step catch up to them.

Many who thrived under NSPS are confused or angry that they will be getting half raises. Jessica Klement, legislative director of the Federal Managers Association, said “jerking employees around every three years” into, then out of, the NSPS “means we are going to be dealing with an incredibly demoralized group of workers.” She said the NSPS rewarded the best and brightest and now they are going watch less productive colleagues get full raises each year until they catch up.

Unions contend that doing well under the NSPS isn’t a guarantee that they were outstanding performers or able to leap tall buildings. “They threw money at the NSPS, inflating pay raises to make it look good,” is the way one union observer sees it.

Many feds have commented that the NSPS people should be content because their pay raises were front-loaded.

Unions, particularly the American Federation of Government Employees, are watching carefully. They don’t want NSPS to disappear only to rise again as NSPS-Lite. Defense is working on an “enterprise-wide performance management system”. The Office of Personnel Management is in the process of crafting what could be a total revamp of the government’s personnel system.

To reach me: mcausey@federalnewsradio.com

Nearly Useless Factoid
by Suzanne Kubota

-40 degrees Fahrenheit and -40 degrees Celsius are the same temperature.

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