DoD Personnel Reforms Also Left Hanging

Also left unresolved before Congress took its recess was the extent to which the Defense Department will be allowed to revise its personnel practices, mostly involving its general schedule employees. The House and Senate remain in a conference over the DoD authorization bill (HR-1588) that would allow Defense to create its own internal disciplinary system, bargain over certain issues nationally rather than locally and replace the GS system with a pay banding and pay-for-performance arrangement, among other changes. The Defense Department has compiled an internal position paper suggesting that the agency will continue pushing for the broader authorities reflected in the House version rather than accepting the more limited ones in the Senate version. The paper says the House version “gave us about 75 percent of what we wanted. They took away some flexibility, added some criteria, added more process, and introduced some constraints.”