Defense Department official in announcing details of the civilian personnel reform plan recently sent to Congress, have indicated that they favor going to a pay banding system for all of the agency’s general schedule employees, in effect eliminating the traditional GS grade and step system for its roughly 470,000 current GS employees. Instead, the proposal seeks to build on pay banding models tested at the agency in recent years by creating five “career groups”: science and engineering research; professional and administrative management; engineering, scientific and medical support; business and administrative support; and college cooperative education program. Since the latter category effectively includes only a small number of college students, the vast majority of employees would be in one of the other four. The scientific and engineering research professional category would have three pay bands, while the others would have four, with managers having greater leeway in setting employee salaries than under the current system, taking into account factors including demand for skills at that level in the local marketplace. The tops of each pay band would rise with the general federal pay raise each year. For the initial period, at least, DoD is not proposing pay banding for its roughly 150,000 blue-collar employees under the wage grade system.