The Defense Department is holding a fresh round of meetings,
starting today, with federal unions over creating the
“national security personnel system,” the first draft of
which provoked a firestorm of criticism from the unions that
some on Capitol Hill picked up as well.
The meetings will be led by Mary E. Lacey, who starts today
as the head of the NSPS “program executive office,” an
organization created by DoD that is taking over responsibility
for crafting NSPS. The meeting, with some 40 unions, promises
to be an all-day affair that also will feature input from the
Office of Personnel Management.
According to a DoD memo, the Pentagon hopes “to create a
framework for succeeding meetings, including how the unions
would like to participate at each session and the manner in
which their feedback and input can be obtained both during
and after each session. We will also discuss what we see as
the overall process with OPM to get the draft regulations and
then the formal statutory collaboration process once the
draft regulations are released.”
While DoD is terming the session as a “first meeting,” there
previously were meetings between OSD officials and unions over
what DoD termed a “discussion draft” of changes in union and
employee appeal rights. Unions and some in Congress criticized
that document as going beyond the mandate to reform the DoD
personnel system that Congress enacted last year and also
criticized OPM for not playing an active-enough role in
developing policies that ultimately could affect nearly half
of the federal workforce.
DoD responded by putting Navy Secretary Gordon England in
charge overall, creating the program office, disavowing the
discussion draft, formally involving OPM, slowing down the
process, announcing that the policies will be issued as formal
rule-making rather than internal guidance, and starting the
new meetings with unions.
The DoD memo states that the design strategy “also includes
plans to seek input from DoD managers and employees as we
work to finalize the NSPS design over the next few months
… as currently planned, we are working toward release of
the draft NSPS regulations by late calendar year 2004.”
