Federal Daily - March 1, 2010
New Day About to Dawn for Postal Service?
With a future characterized by more financial losses and ever-dwindling volume, changes were bound to come to the Postal Service. And at a three-hour session scheduled for March 2, Postmaster General John Potter is slated to tell America what those changes will be.
According to USPS, after “four months of intense discussion,” the Postal Service “has decided on a future path that calls for greater business model flexibility and changes to the way it does business.” Potter and other session participants also will outline “a number of steps necessary to close a substantial gap by the year 2020.”
Exactly what those changes are have not yet been released. But one clue may lie in the participation of Thomas Dohrmann, a principal at the McKinsey & Co. consulting group, who is scheduled to address “options for a changing environment” at the session.
Dohrmann, a member of President Obama’s transition team and co-founder of McKinsey’s public sector practice, co-authored a widely quoted July 2006 white paper titled “How Can American Government Meet its Productivity Challenge?” (http://tinyurl.com/yeuozj3)
Among its recommendations, the paper called for government to set ambitious productivity targets to match those in the private sector, to provide managers with incentives to meet productivity goals, to introduce chief operating officers with corporate skills into agencies, and to ramp up the management function of the Office of Management and Budget.
In addition to Dohrmann and Potter, who serves as CEO of USPS, others slated to make presentations at the session include Louis Giuliano, chairman of the USPS Board of Governors; and Meldon Wolfgang, a partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group. After those presentations, Potter, Giuliano and a number of other top postal officials will conduct a panel discussion.
While postal unions are sitting tight at this point, postal employees and managers are not. To get a feel for the tone out there, see the blog at www.postalreporter.com.
Yeesh.
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FMA Raps Pay Caps for Ex-NSPS Workers
The transition out of DoD’s soon-to-be abandoned National Security Personnel System may be tougher for some employees than others, according to the Federal Managers Association.
FMA last week criticized a DoD plan to cap the future pay raises of some of the 200,000 NSPS workers who are being transitioned back to the General Schedule. The FY 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, which abolished NSPS, requires all employees to be converted by Jan. 1, 2012.
While all NSPS employees must be converted without pay loss, FMA said the NDAA does not prevent DoD officials from the freezing future pay of top performers.
The group said the transition problem has to do with the pay raise gap that existed between NSPS and the GS system. During the time NSPS has been in place, average pay raises under the system exceeded GS raises, FMA said, leaving many employees a GS level above where they were when they entered NSPS in terms of salary. If these employees return to the same GS grade they occupied prior to the conversion into NSPS, it is possible their salaries may exceed the step 10 level. Under current pay retention rules, future pay raises for these employees would be capped at half of the annual rate until the GS system “catches up” with them, FMA said.
Pay retention would not only affect the current pay received by these employees, but could also negatively affect their high-three average salary, which is used to calculate retirement benefits, said FMA, which posted a detailed position paper on the matter on its Web site on Feb. 25.
FMA suggested DoD use pay raise flexibility and reward converted employees on the basis of performance, regardless of the GS pay caps.
“No employee should lose current or future pay as a result of an arbitrary pay cap when converting back to their previous personnel systems,” the paper said. “Capping the pay of these top performers serves only as a disincentive for outstanding employees to continue their exceptional performance working for DoD.”
To see more, go to: www.fedmanagers.org/public/pdfs/2010%20NSPS%20One%20Pager.pdf
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Feds Get Their Turn, With OPM ‘Viewpoint Survey’
Feds will get their chance to grade their organizations on a “new and improved” version of Federal Human Capital Survey.
The Office of Personnel Management will distribute the new “2010 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey” government-wide through mid-March to more than a half-million federal employees—approximately 100,000 more than the previous survey reached, OPM said.
The new survey aims to measure employees’ perceptions of whether, and to what extent, conditions that characterize successful organizations are present in their agencies. The survey responses will provide general indicators of how well the agencies are running their human resources management systems, according to OPM. New items on the enhanced survey address employee engagement and work/life issues, a priority of the new administration. Responses will remain confidential, OPM said.
“In these times of unprecedented change, it is more important than ever to maintain a focus on the federal government's most valuable asset—its employees,” said OPM Director John Berry. “Every federal employee plays a role in fulfilling the mission of each federal agency or department.”
To see more, go to: www.opm.gov/news/us-office-of-personnel-management-begins-rollout-of-2010-federal-employee-viewpoint-survey,1549.aspx.
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House Votes to Tighten Conflict-of-Interest Rules for Intelligence Employees
Alarmed by the moonlighting activities of some federal intelligence agency workers, the House unanimously approved a measure that would—if signed into law—tighten conflict-of-interest rules for those employees.
The conflict-of-interest measure was adopted as an amendment to H.R. 2701, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., came in response to reports that members of the Intelligence Community started and ran a company to sell “deception detection” services to hedge funds while they were federal employees.
Eshoo said that the amendment was needed because existing rules do not prevent intelligence employees from moonlighting their services outside the federal workplace.
“I discovered, to my great surprise, that this activity had been approved by their agencies,” Eshoo said. “Clearly, we need to tighten up that process. Government employees, and especially those in the Intelligence Community, should adhere to the highest ethical standards.”
The amendment requires the Director of National Intelligence to establish an Intelligence Community-wide conflict-of -interest regulation, create a community-wide process for checking outside employment for conflicts of interest, and submit an annual report to congressional intelligence committees on all outside employment. The amendment also prohibits those employees from owning companies that sell skills that are related to their government service.
To see more, go to: http://eshoo.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content
&task=view&id=719&Itemid=79.
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