NASA does not distinguish between term and career and career-conditional appointees in any policies regarding employee-working conditions, GAO has said.
Since passage of the NASA Flexibility Act of 2004, the agency has increased the use of term appointments as well as the rate at which they are converted to career or career-conditional appointments.
As of September term appointments made up 8 percent of NASA’s workforce and the agency wants to get to at least 15 percent by 2013.
That’s provoked some interest in Congress as to how that these appointments might fare differently. In response to follow-up questions from the committee regarding an earlier report, GAO said NASA does not have any policies designed specifically to protect the independence of term-appointed scientists and engineers.
However, it noted that federal whistleblower laws and NASA policies that protect the independence of career and career-conditional appointees also apply to term appointees.
There’s no guarantee that term appointees will be converted and NASA said it tells them as much when they sign up. To date, two-thirds of all term appointments made across NASA in fiscal 2005 that have been converted to career or career-conditional left NASA, and 5 percent were re-hired under a new term appointment, according to GAO-09-356R.
It said that of the 539 term appointments made agency-wide in 2006, 62 percent have been converted to career or career-conditional appointments to date, and of those made in 2007 and 2008, 14 percent and 2 percent have been converted respectively.
