Although much of the attention on the VA’s proposal to reform personnel practices for its SES corps has focused on appeal rights, the proposal also outlines steps that departmental leadership believes are needed to make the VA more business-like—a common theme of government management improvement proposals for many years.
The proposal seeks to move SES members into “Title 38”, a body of law applying to medical personnel there, which allows only for review of discipline by internal boards, not by the MSPB or another outside entity. Leaders of the congressional Veterans Affairs committees have said they are supportive of that change and may even seek to expand limits on appeals to other levels.
However, that was presented in the context of an argument that the VA “needs business-oriented employment authorities to recruit and retain leaders who can transform VA’s business practices to better serve veterans . . . The VA Secretary needs greater flexibility than current authorities afford him in terms of recruiting, compensating, appraising and – where necessary – disciplining career leaders to ensure that VA can operate as a values-based high performance organization rather than a compliance-focused underperforming bureaucracy.”
The department said it also must “revamp its systems for assessing and rewarding performance to ensure executive-level leaders’ performance ratings accurately reflect the performance of the enterprise. This requires both that we set meaningfully outcome-oriented performance goals and that we discipline ourselves in assigning ratings so that only the most outstanding and transformational leaders receive the highest marks.”
“VA proposes to establish by regulation an executive performance management system that ensures meaningful differentiation between satisfactory and extraordinary leadership, and that rationally links executives’ performance awards to demonstrably improved care and services for veterans . . . The Secretary would appraise executives’ performance, and approve any performance-based awards and/or pay increases, based on outcome-oriented and business-related factors such as customer satisfaction, employee feedback, and organization deliverables,” it says.
