DoD has announced an expansion of its national security personnel system, along with a revision in the way pay raises for January 2008 will be handled for the roughly 114,000 employees currently in the system.
DoD has said it will add 90,000 employees to NSPS in fiscal 2008, with the first phase to be carried out this fall, apparently involving about 20,000 employees, and the next in the spring, apparently involving the remaining roughly 70,000. DoD has been putting only employees not eligible for union representation in NSPS, and appears on track to continue that pattern with what will be called Spiral 2.
The department recently announced that despite winning an appeals court decision in a case brought by federal unions against the labor relations, adverse action and appeals provisions of NSPS, it has no intention of carrying out those parts of the system "at this time." The case likely will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, potentially meaning a significant further delay.
The department also has said that it intends, for those already in NSPS, to fully carry out the pay system envisioned by NSPS rules, effective with the January raises. Only about 12,000 employees were in NSPS long enough last year to have their January 2007 raises affected, and because the department was not ready to carry out the market-based pay system under NSPS, in general they got the same raises as federal employees under the general schedule system; only a tiny percentage received no raise due to unacceptable performance ratings, and the large majority qualified for performance-based pay.
For 2008, "local market supplements" will increase in tandem with the locality increase for GS employees—probably on the order of 1 percent. DoD intends to allocate half of the remaining money available for raises—Congress likely will set the total increase at 3.5 percent—to rate range adjustments (that is, an increase to base pay), with the other half going into pay pools to be divided up according to performance ratings. Pay pools also contain funds that would have been spent on within-grade increases and other types of performance increases had the employees not been under NSPS.
