The National Security Personnel System is long gone, but now there's a new House bill that would prohibit annual pay and locality adjustment increases for Defense Department employees rated as unacceptable.
The bill (H.R. 1248), sponsored by Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., would curb annual pay and locality increases to Defense employees whose performance is ranked below satisfactory. West estimates that the legislation would generate some $21 million in short-term savings while increasing workforce productivity.
As employees are incentivized to improve their performance in future years as a result of the bill, the future savings would be about $80 billion through fiscal 2016, West estimates.
The bill, along with two others aimed at cutting Pentagon spending, are the latest round of proposals to be voted on by the public via House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's YouCut program. The YouCut website estimates that about 2 percent of the Defense workforce, or about 14,000 employees, are currently unsatisfactory.
Defense employs the largest number of IT workers in the federal government, including more than 30,000 IT specialists, according to the Net Generation report.
What are your thoughts on the West bill? Is making more distinctions in employee performance good or bad for generating better performance and retaining top employees?
Brittany Ballenstedt
Brittany Ballenstedt writes Nextgov's Wired Workplace blog, which delves into the issues facing employees who work in the federal information technology sector. Before joining Nextgov, Brittany covered federal pay and benefits issues as a staff correspondent for Government Executive and served as an associate editor for National Journal's Technology Daily. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Mansfield University and originally hails from Pennsylvania. She currently lives near Travis Air Force Base, Calif., where her husband is stationed.
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