On May 8, the House Armed Services Committee voted on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015 – about 15 minutes after midnight. The committee voted on hundreds of amendments and debated the legislation for more than 12 hours before finally passing it. You have probably heard some of the highlights of whats in the bill, but here is a longer list of stuff that made it in that you might not have heard about. Now remember, the bill still needs to be voted on by the full House and then by the Senate, so there are still changes that…
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Three years ago, the Defense Department set up a Civilian Expeditionary Workforce policy to help manage how it deploys civilians to war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Government Accountability Office said today that the CEW concept is still a long way from what the Pentagon envisioned. CEW was meant to create a cadre of Defense civilians with crucial skills that are willing, ready and trained to go to war and help support combat troops — quickly. CEW has had some success, GAO said, most notably by creating a database of thousands of resumes from volunteers and filling…
Well over half of the employees once under the Defense Department’s ill-fated National Security Personnel System are now back on the General Schedule. According to the latest data from the Pentagon’s NSPS Transition Office, 127,962 employees had been transitioned out of the pay-for-performance program as of Aug. 15 — more than 56 percent of the roughly 226,000 employees under the system at its peak. Of those who have transitioned, 20 percent — or 25,893 — have been placed on pay retention because they received larger raises under NSPS than they would have under GS, and their salaries fall above their…
(Technically it was hemp, the other variety of the cannabis sativa plant that can’t get you high. But that distinction is usually lost on all the annoying stoners who love to philosophize in college dorms about how legalizing hemp would renew our nation’s agriculture, fix our tax base, and, like, George Washington totally grew it, too. This one’s for them.) Hemp advocates, who feel that the government has wrongly banned the cultivation of their beloved plant, have a new patron saint: Agriculture Department botanist Lyster Dewey. The Washington Post reports that Dewey tended “Uncle Sam’s hemp farm” on a plot…
Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered a tough message earlier today for his department’s bureaucracy (not to mention its contractors): The spending spree is over. Read an account of his Kansas speech and some of his planned changes at our sister publication, Military Times, here. And the Washington Post’s article has this interesting detail on contracting: Among Gates’s apparent targets for major cuts are the private contractors the Pentagon has hired in large numbers over the past decade to take on administrative tasks that the military used to handle. The defense secretary estimated that this portion of the Pentagon budget has…
The Pentagon has less than two years to completely shut down its much-maligned National Security Personnel System, and it’s just set up a new office to do the job. The NSPS Transition Office will oversee efforts to transition roughly 220,000 employees from the pay-for-performance system to their old personnel systems. For most, that will be the General Schedule. John James Jr., previously the executive director for logistics, maintenance and industrial operations at the Naval Sea Systems Command, will head the new transition office. James will also oversee the design and implementation of a new department-wide performance management system that will likely resemble…
Federal Times wants to hear from employees and managers under the National Security Personnel System about how the program should be improved. Do you think it’s working or not? Where are its weaknesses? What can be done to fix those problems, now that the Pentagon and Office of Personnel Management are putting NSPS under the microscope? Or do you think the system is too flawed to repair, and that it’s time to return to the General Schedule? E-mail me at slosey@federaltimes.com if you’d like to talk. If you’d prefer that your name not be published, that would be fine.
The Senate voted 93-4 Wednesday afternoon to confirm William Lynn as deputy defense secretary. During his January confirmation hearing, several senators questioned Lynn’s past as a senior lobbyist for Raytheon Co. of Waltham, Mass., a top Pentagon contractor. President Barack Obama had initially taken a hard line against lobbyists, saying they would have no place in his administration, but later softened his position.