May 27, 2008
A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the
Partnership for Public Service.
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New Bill Would Provide Grad Student Scholarships for Service
Government ExecutiveBy Alyssa Rosenberg
Lawmakers introduced a bill on Thursday to create a scholarship program for graduate students in fields related to mission-critical operations,
offering them help with tuition and living expenses in exchange for three to five years of government service.
"What we're dealing with is a crisis of capacity -- the government's capacity to continue providing the services that Americans depend upon," said
Rep. David Price, D-N.C., who co-chairs the Congressional Service Caucus, and introduced the legislation along with Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn.
"In the face of a dwindling professional workforce, we must act now to recruit the scientists, engineers and other high-level experts who make our
government work."
The Roosevelt Scholars Act would provide eligible graduate students up to $60,000 for as many as five years of graduate study. The students would
be required to complete at least one federal internship and to act as ambassadors for federal service on their campuses by serving as information
resources for interested students and career programs.
Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, said he thought the bill integrated many of the elements necessary
both to promote public service and make it accessible to promising college graduates. The Partnership proposed a graduate student scholarship program
in July 2007, and provided Price and Shays with research assistance and suggestions while writing the legislation.
"Here the effort is to create a brand that will rival the Rhodes and Marshall and other scholarships that are out there," said Stier, comparing
the program, if enacted, to the Reserve Officers Training Corps. "It leverages the talent so they are helpful before they complete their degrees."
Shays said he couldn't "think of a better investment the federal government could make than in training and invigorating its future leaders."
In addition to assisting students, the bill would allow agencies to make noncompetitive two-year appointments of Roosevelt Scholars who complete
their academic programs, and to convert them to career positions if they are successful in their initial appointments.
Stier said awarding the scholarships could help agencies plan their hiring strategies several years in advance.
"It kind of helps government think more strategically about where those talent needs are going to be," he said.
New Rules, New Boss for Defense Personnel System
The Washington
Post
By Stephen Barr
Senior Defense Department officials describe the roll out of the National Security Personnel System as "event driven," a way of saying that it
evolves as lessons are learned and fixes are made.
This month, the NSPS, one of the largest pay and personnel projects ever undertaken by the government, recorded two more events in its four-year
history.
The first was the departure of Mary Lacey, the program executive officer for the NSPS, on May 11. Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England named
Brad Bunn, the program's deputy and director of the Defense Civilian Personnel Management Service, to succeed her.
The second was the publication of new proposed regulations for the NSPS just before Memorial Day weekend. The regulations modify key features of
the system, as ordered by Congress after a couple of years of controversy, including litigation by federal unions that represent Defense Department
civilians.
The proposed regulations bring the NSPS back under government-wide rules that permit collective bargaining and ensure that employees can continue
to appeal major disciplinary actions to the independent Merit Systems Protection Board.
The centerpiece of the NSPS, "pay for performance," remains despite objections from unions and some employees. Congress, as part of a defense bill
authorizing weapons and other programs, decided to let the Pentagon continue moving Defense Department civilians from the General Schedule, the
government's primary pay system, into the NSPS, which features broader salary ranges than the General Schedule.
But Congress placed a limit on how much of an employee's pay raise can hinge on job performance ratings. Except for those employees deemed
"unacceptable," NSPS-covered workers will receive at least 60 percent of the annual government-wide pay raise, with the balance allocated to employees
based on their job performance.
Union representatives and some Defense Department employees were concerned that all pay raises would be linked to job ratings or that the raises
might not keep pace with the GS raises elsewhere in the government. The 60-40 split ensures that almost all NSPS employees will automatically get a
raise every year, while permitting the Pentagon to claim that the NSPS remains true to its original goal of putting bigger raises in the pockets of
the best workers.
The Defense Department has converted about 181,000 employees to the NSPS and will probably add 25,000 more to the system this fall. Congress
exempted blue-collar employees from the system, so it seems unlikely that the Pentagon will reach its initial goal of converting almost 700,000
employees.
Many department employees remain wary of the NSPS, not convinced that it can be fairly administered and fearful that it could end up making for
more, not less, cronyism.
But numerous complaints are based on misinformation or come from employees who have not had their training on NSPS, Lacey said in a recent
interview.
"There is confusion about the terminology, and I think there is confusion about how the process works," Lacey said. "By the same token, management
always has had a certain amount of flexibility on the bonus side -- how much do you put in -- and that hasn't changed. I don't think people realized
those were management decisions prior to NSPS. Some people did, but a lot didn't."
Training and leadership are important, in part because they help build trust in the system as employees learn how it works and feel they can trust
it, she said.
"Any change is difficult, and unfortunately many leaders still don't pay enough attention to that human side of the change process," she said.
"It is not unusual to find some of them approach it as a one-and-done. In other words, we ran up to this, we did the training we had to do. We
trained and we implemented. And therefore it is, and it is all done, and I don't have to continue to pay a lot of attention."
That attitude among Defense Department managers, Lacey said, is "the exception, but even if we've got a handful of them not paying attention, it
is problematic."
In announcing Lacey's departure, England said she "has led the most significant transformation of the civil service in a generation." Lacey, he
said, "will now return to her roots, in engineering," as deputy program director for the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, in the Missile Defense
Agency.
Lacey, a member of the Senior Executive Service since 1996, has spent most of her career working for the Navy. Before her selection as NSPS chief,
she was the technical director of the Naval Surface Warfare Center at the Washington Navy Yard. Her four years at the NSPS gave her a chance to work
with other agencies, such as the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget, and with members of Congress and their key
aides, she said.
Although some personnel officials at the Pentagon wanted a relatively quick implementation of the NSPS, England decided the system would be what
he called "event driven," with Defense Department agencies and components converting when training had been completed or when they were ready to make
the transition.
"Would I have liked to see more [agencies brought] in faster? Yes," Lacey said.
But, she added, the NSPS is not the only change confronting Defense Department employees. "We are a department at war. People are busy. People are
stressed. People are working at a tempo that is pretty fast-paced. And this required some thought, some leadership time."
Border Agents, Lured by the Other Side
The New York TimesBy Randal C. Archibold and Andrew Becker
The smuggler in the public service announcement sat handcuffed in prison garb, full of bravado and shrugging off the danger of bringing illegal
immigrants across the border.
"Sometimes they die in the desert, or the cars crash, or they drown," he said. "But it's not my fault."
The smuggler in the commercial, produced by the Mexican government several years ago, was played by an American named Raul Villarreal, who at the
time was a United States Border Patrol agent and a spokesman for the agency here.
Now, federal investigators are asking: Was he really acting?
Mr. Villarreal and a brother, Fidel, also a former Border Patrol agent, are suspected of helping to smuggle an untold number of illegal immigrants
from Mexico and Brazil across the border. The brothers quit the Border Patrol two years ago and are believed to have fled to Mexico.
The Villarreal investigation is among scores of corruption cases in recent years that have alarmed officials in the Homeland Security Department
just as it is hiring thousands of border agents to stem the flow of illegal immigration.
The pattern has become familiar: Customs officers wave in vehicles filled with illegal immigrants, drugs or other contraband. A Border Patrol
agent acts as a scout for smugglers. Trusted officers fall prey to temptation and begin taking bribes.
Increased corruption is linked, in part, to tougher enforcement, driving smugglers to recruit federal employees as accomplices. It has grown so
worrisome that job applicants will soon be subject to lie detector tests to ensure that they are not already working for smuggling organizations. In
addition, homeland security officials have reconstituted an internal affairs unit at Customs and Border Protection, one of the largest federal law
enforcement agencies, overseeing both border agents and customs officers.
When the Homeland Security Department was created in 2003, the internal affairs unit was dissolved and its functions spread among other agencies.
Since the unit was reborn last year, it has grown from five investigators to a projected 200 by the end of the year.
Altogether, there are about 200 open cases pending against law enforcement employees who work the border. In the latest arrests, four employees in
Arizona, Texas and California were charged this month with helping to smuggle illegal immigrants into the country.
While the corruption investigations involve a small fraction of the overall security workforce on the border, the numbers are growing. In the 2007
fiscal year, the Homeland Security Department's main anticorruption arm, the inspector general's office, had 79 investigations under way in the four
states bordering Mexico, compared with 31 in 2003. Officials at other federal law enforcement agencies investigating border corruption also said their
caseloads had risen.
Some of the recent cases involve border guards who had worked for their agencies for a short time, including the arrest this month of a recruit at
the Border Patrol academy in New Mexico on gun smuggling charges.
The federal government says it carefully screens applicants, but some internal affairs investigators say they have been unable to keep up with the
increased workload.
"It's going to get worse before it gets better," said James Wong, an internal affairs agent with Customs and Border Protection. "It's very
difficult for us to get out and vet each and every one of the applicants as well as we should."
The Border Patrol alone is expected to grow to more than 20,000 agents by the end of 2009, more than double from 2001, when the agency began to
expand in response to concerns about national security. There has also been a large increase in the number of customs officers.
James Tomsheck, the assistant commissioner for internal affairs at Customs and Border Protection, said the agency was “deeply
concerned” that smugglers were sending operatives to take jobs with the Border Patrol and at ports.
To read the entire article, click here.
OPM Reports Reductions in Clearance Backlog
Federal Daily
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has significantly reduced the backlog and improved the timeliness of the security clearance process for
federal employees, OPM officials told lawmakers on May 22. Kathy Dillaman, OPM associate director for Federal Investigative Services, testified before
a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee about improvements in the process for providing security clearances for federal
employees. "Not only have we met the initial goals outlined by Congress in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 [IRTPA], we
have exceeded those goals and substantially reduced the inventory of pending investigations," Dillaman said. About 80 percent of all initial clearance
investigations are being completed in an average of 60 days—a seven-day improvement over 2007, and 30 days better than the standard mandated by
IRTPA. Eighty percent of initial Top Secret investigations are being completed in an average of 84 days, an eight-day improvement over last year; and
a corresponding percentage of Secret/Confidential investigations are being completed in an average of 56 days, a seven-day improvement over 2007. OPM
has reduced the backlog of the applications that are 180 days old, from a peak of 98,000 such cases in October 2006 to just 3,728 today, she
said.
