DoD Planning to Stick to NSPS Schedule

The Defense Department is expected to issue within the coming weeks the final version of rules to carry out its “national security personnel system.” That would be followed 30 days later—assuming Congress or the courts don’t intervene in the meantime–by the first phase of implementation, beginning with a department-wide rollout of the changes in labor-management relations, including scope of bargaining and other union rights. Changes in the human resources (including pay banding and pay for performance) and appeals systems (including new restrictions on appeals to the Merit Systems Protection Board) are set to be carried out in a series of steps beginning early in calendar year 2006, with the first facilities previously announced, under what DoD calls Spiral 1.1, involving about 60,000 employees spread among DoD components. The next group, Spiral 1.2, is to follow next spring and the third group, Spiral 1.3, about six months after that, with each involving about 100,000 employees. Most of the rest of the DoD workforce would follow later. The first performance-linked pay raises for the first group under NSPS are scheduled for January 2007.