White House, Union Meetings to Signal Changes in Homeland Security Workplace

Washington Post ^ | 10/20/03 | Stephen Barr

[anymouse]

Are the 180,000 civil service employees at the Department of Homeland Security facing dramatic changes in how they are paid, promoted and disciplined? Or will they end up in a personnel system not that much different from their current ones?

The first glimpse of possible answers will begin to play out today as Bush administration officials and federal union leaders start sorting through 52 options affecting pay rates, job classifications, performance appraisals, disciplinary actions, appeal rights and labor/management relations.

(snip)

The meetings grew out of a directive from Congress that the department, a mega-merger of 22 agencies, consult with employee groups and allow for public comment before overhauling management systems. The record produced by the meetings will be used by Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security secretary, and Kay Coles James, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, to make one of the biggest personnel decisions in the government since passage of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

According to a roster prepared for the meetings, Ridge will be represented by six homeland officials. They are Janet Hale, undersecretary for management; Robert Bonner, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection; James Loy, director of the Transportation Security Administration; Eduardo Aguirre Jr., director of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services; Michael Dorsey, director of administration; and Ralph Basham, director of the Secret Service.

Four OPM officials will serve as James's representatives. They are Steven R. Cohen, senior adviser for homeland security ; Doris Hausser, senior policy adviser to James; Ronald P. Sanders, associate director for strategic human resources policy; and Marta Brito Perez, associate director for human capital leadership and merit system accountability.

Employees will be represented by three union leaders: John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees; Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union; and Michael Randall, president of the National Association of Agricultural Employees.

Five outsiders also have been recruited to serve as advisers. They are Bernard Rosen, a fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration and executive director of the old Civil Service Commission; Maurice McTigue, a visiting scholar at George Mason University who has studied how agencies develop strategic plans and measure their performance; Pete Smith, the head of the Private Sector Council, who recently went to Baghdad to help U.S. officials develop a pay system for Iraq's civil service and military; Robert M. Tobias, director of the Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation at American University and former NTEU president; and Patricia W. Ingraham, a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, a leading expert on civil service reform and agency performance management.

[anymouse]

Let's see if this bears fruit or just sour grapes.