Posted on 01/27/2005 8:51:21 PM PST by RWR8189
White House Wants All Agencies to Have Option of Setting Own Personnel Policies
The Bush administration unveiled a new personnel system for the Department of Homeland Security yesterday that will dramatically change the way workers are paid, promoted, deployed and disciplined -- and soon the White House will ask Congress to grant all federal agencies similar authority to rewrite civil service rules governing their employees.
The new system will replace the half-century-old General Schedule, with its familiar 15 pay grades and raises based on time in a job, and install a system that more directly bases pay on occupation and annual performance evaluations, officials said. The new system has taken two years to develop and will require at least four more to implement, they said.
Under the new plan, employees will be grouped into eight to 12 clusters based on occupation. Salary ranges will be based, in part, on geographic location and annual market surveys by a new compensation committee of what similar employees earn in the private sector and other government entities. Within each occupational cluster, workers will be assigned to one of four salary ranges, or "pay bands," based on their skill level and experience.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Denny Crane: "I want two things: First God and then Fox News."
Some government agencies already have pay-banding. I work for the Navy in San Diego...there is a major command out here that has been using pay banding forquite awhile. My command is already set to switch over.
I wonder if this means that Civil Servants will no longer have the privilege of lifetime employment.
Excellent. This system has been an uncontrolled major drain on the U.S. Treasury for far too long. Running it like a real business will do wonders and clean up the politics and extortionist protections of the unions (hopefully).
BTTT
It's going to take decades to clean it up. My boss who's been at DOT for 30+ years says that no matter what, the bureaucrats will find a way to game the system. The biggest problem is that management is not willing to follow the rules or do the work necessary to get rid of the dead wood. Those that follow the rules and try get punished.
It's going to take decades to clean it up. My boss who's been at DOT for 30+ years says that no matter what, the bureaucrats will find a way to game the system. The biggest problem is that management is not willing to follow the rules or do the work necessary to get rid of the dead wood. Those that follow the rules and try get punished.
GS-seriesPING!
Can we use this new system to simply fire all the radical queer DoJ attorneys who persecuted the "Philadelphia Four"?
Bingo.
WOW!!
The rats will fight this tooth and nail. Their patronage pig-sties are under attack! I cna hardly imagine what kind of spasms they're going to have at commie-infested pisspots like State and Education. This should be fun. Bush is on a roll and it is little wonder that the scumbags were so scared to death of a second Bush term.
By the way, I didn't realize that Christopher Lee had taken up reporting for the Washington Post. He is quite the Renaissance Man!
The Pendleton Act was fine in the 1870s, but is entirely counterproductive today. When bureaucrats have NO fear of their jobs -- witness the acrobatics necessary to fire some incompetent ''civil service'' ''worker'' today -- their productivity goes straightaway to zero AND they use their position to further feather their own nest...not to mention the notable and general lack of any sort of competent ''service'' they provide.
Not tarring ALL ''civil servants'' with this brush, merely 3/4ths or so. Or 7/8ths. Or 95%.
I've wrestled with these cretins (in the specific case of the Missouri Department of Revenue) for upwards of two decades, besides also having gone a few rounds with their ''senior'' putzes in DoD.
I wasn't around for Andrew Jackson's famed 'spoils system', no idea of the results of that (probably rotten, but who knows), but the notion of effectively lifetime guaranteed employment for ANYONE who can screw over the average citizen at will, just by being an arrogant incompetent and being unable to be fired, is horrific.
Interestingly, there's SOME possibility that the new governor of Missouri, Mr. Blunt, intends to thin out the ranks of this timeserving and self-serving lot: he's already proposed, just less than 2 weeks after inauguration, reducing Revenue's staff by upwards of 1,000 (WAY overdue, btw), and even going after the wildly featherbedded, and so-called, Department of Mental Health (don't get me started on THAT one...). The only thing that said latter dep't has to do with ''mental health'' is that you'll go nuts if you try to deal with them in any rational fashion.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.