Return to Pointer View home page March 4,  2005

It's now or never

Employees get 30 days to comment on new personnel system 

By Irene Brown
Editor

Department of Defense officials are accepting comments on the National Security Personnel System.

The Office of Personnel Management published the rules for the new system Feb. 14 in the Federal Register.

DOD will take comments from the public for 30 days and then confer with employee unions about those comments for another 30 days. Employees can view the rules, make comments and read submitted comments by going to http://www.cpms.osd.mil/nsps.

“After the comment period, OPM will review the submissions and meet with the unions,” said West Point civilian personnel director, Carol McQuinn.

Civilian Personnel Advisory Center personnel here are scheduled to move to the NSPS sometime in July, as part of “Spiral One,” she explained. What that will mean to those employees is not yet clear.

“After the comment period and after OPM reviews the submissions, they will issue implementation guidance,” McQuinn explained.

That guidance, she said, would clarify how everything from pay bands to hiring will work.

Navy Secretary Gordon England, who has overseen developing the National Security Personnel System, said the department decided to phase in the new system so they could catch and correct any problems that arise. Spiral One will last about 18 months and include three phases. At its conclusion, about 300,000 Defense civilians will fall under the new rules.

A second spiral will follow during which the rest of the Defense civilian workforce will shift to the new system, but DOD officials have yet to announce a time frame for Spiral Two. Officials have said they expect to fully implement NSPS by 2008.

Although DOD will move employees into the new pay system in shifts, they will move the entire Defense Department to a new labor relations system in July. That led ten federal unions to file a lawsuit Feb. 23 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit states that DOD failed to include the unions in “meaningful discussions” while the rules were being developed, as required by the 2004 National Defense Authorization Act.

“They were supposed to set up a system through a collaborative process,” said Mark Roth, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees. “DOD officials only discussed broad ideas with the unions, not the specifics.”