President Barack Obama signed the Defense authorization bill into law Wednesday afternoon, marking the eventual end to the controversial National Security Personnel System. HR 2647 phases out the NSPS pay-for-performance system by Jan 1, 2012, and the Pentagon has six months from Wednesday to start transferring employees over to their original pay system. For many employees, that means a return to the General Schedule. The bill also contains a number of provisions long anticipated by federal employees: Federal Employment Retirement System (FERS) employees will be able to count unused sick leave toward their years of service, just as Civil Service…
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UPDATE: Full story now on FederalTimes.com. Click here. Embattled Defense Contract Audit Agency director April Stephenson was removed from her post earlier today, the Defense Department has announced. Stephenson, who was spent her entire career at DCAA, was reassigned to the staff of DoD Comptroller Robert Hale. Hale, who oversees DCAA, replaced her with Army Auditor General Patrick Fitzgerald, said Navy Cmdr. Darryn James, a Pentagon spokesman. Fitzgerald takes over Nov. 9. The move was announced during an internal teleconference at 2 p.m. today. Following the teleconference DCAA staff was notified via email, James said. Fitzgerald was chosen to take…
Two Defense Department agencies announced the release of their fiscal year 2008 contractor inventories in today’s Federal Register. The inventory for the Missle Defense Agency, which posted its headcount here, doesn’t appear to include much information about the number of contractors performing the work. In fact, that column appears to be blank for most of the contracts listed in the 210 page document. The Defense Contract Management Agency also posted a notice about its list, but at the time this is being posted, the list isn’t on the agency’s site. The notice says it has 30 days to post its…
The House just approved the 2010 Defense authorization bill, which would (among other things) kill the National Security Personnel System. The Senate won’t vote on the bill until Friday at the earliest, and could wait until next week to consider it. You can read more about the bill here, here and here.
It looks like the Defense Authorization Bill is going to throw a monkey wrench in the intelligence community’s pay for performance system as well. The bill (all 1,492 pages of which can be read here — skip to page 780 for the NSPS provisions) would suspend the Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System for everybody except employees at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, who have had that system for the last decade, until the end of 2010. And since the IC’s system is based in part on that system, that’s going to slow Chief Human Capital Officer Ron Sanders’ efforts to pay…
Here’s a few new details on the Defense Authorization Bill’s repeal of the National Security Personnel System that lawmakers on a House-Senate conference committee have agreed upon: All 205,000 employees currently under NSPS will be transferred back to their original pay system by Jan. 1, 2012, according to a statement from Rep. Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y. The bulk of NSPS employees were originally under the General Schedule system. American Federation of Government Employees President John Gage — who in June compared NSPS to Dracula — thinks the Defense Authorization Bill will be the final stake in the heart of the program. But…
Earlier today I previewed reports the Government Accountability Office and the Defense Department Inspector General will release tomorrow highlighting the depth of auditing problems at the Defense Contract Audit Agency. But these watchdogs are not the only ones with concerns about DCAA’s audit management. The Wartime Contracting Commission — a bipartisan, congressionally chartered panel tasked with making recommendations to improve contingency contracting — released this report today calling on DCAA to abandon the all-or-nothing approach it takes when rendering opinions on contractor business systems. In December, DCAA scrapped its opinion that allowed business systems with minor deficiencies to be deemed…
The federal government may be growing under President Barack Obama, but a just-released report shows the government is actually getting smaller. Confused? It turns out that while federal agencies are hiring more workers, they’re also getting rid of thousands of buildings they no longer need. The number of buildings in the federal inventory declined nearly 9 percent in 2008, or roughly 70 million square feet, according to a report posted today by the General Services Administration. GSA attributes the decrease to a reduction of 36,000 military housing units and 4,000 warehouses by the Air Force and Navy.
Reforming the Defense Contract Audit Agency will be the topic at a Sept. 23 Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing. The hearing will examine who is responsible for reforming the DCAA, which lawmakers have discussed relocating to ensure independence from the Defense Department’s comptroller. In a recent report, the Government Accountability Office found that DCAA managers pressured field auditors to change audit results to favor contractors and ignored basic auditing standards to expedite work and meet rigid performance standards. The hearing will be 10 a.m. in Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and the Federal Times will…
I paid a visit to the Washington-area cable program Federal News Tonight last evening to talk about the future of the National Security Personnel System. Take a look: I usually appear once a month on Federal News Tonight to discuss the latest in federal personnel matters, and from here on in, we’ll be posting my interviews the following morning. Keep checking back for more.