Comments:

General: I believe the proposed NSPS will undermine the Civil Service and hurt the mission of the DoD employees.

Subpart C Pay, Sections 9901.301 to 9901.373: The employees in DoD should not continue to receive the same annual pay across-the-board adjustment that other GS/FWS workers receive.

The individual pay increases for performance should include guaranteed percentages in the regulations so that employees will understand the pay system and what their pay increase will be depending on their performance.

Subpart D Performance Management – 9901.401 to 9901.409: In order to insure fairness and accuracy, DoD employees should be able to appeal any performance rating to an independent grievance and arbitration process like they can do now.

Subpart F Workforce Shaping – 9901.6012 to 9901.611: DoD should not change the current layoff/RIF rules which give balanced credit to performance and the employees valuable years of committed service to DoD.

Subpart G Adverse Actions- 9901.701 to 9901.810: Due process and fairness demand that the independent body reviewing a major suspension as termination be allowed to alter the proposed penalty if they deem it to be unreasonable. The current standards approved by the courts to guide such bodies should continue to be used.

Subpart I Labor-Management Relations 9901.901 to 9901.929: The labor management law that has governed the employees’ right to organize and engage in collective bargaining has worked well since 1978. There is no compelling reason to take away most of the collective bargaining rights or grievance rights.

DoD should not create a “company dominated dispute board”. Any dispute board must be “jointly selected” by management and the Union.

Sincerely

We are a group of tax payers that stand together united and as individual United States citizens opposed to the proposed National Security Personnel System (NSPS). We are tax payers demand better service from our Government than this system has to offer. Our family and close friends that are employed by the DoD should be outraged by this proposal.

There are a few among this group who had aspirations of being a civil servant employee, though, these aspirations are null under such a system is put into place. Wrong were we to believe our Government was for the good of the people.

NSPS should stand for “Not So Pleasing System”. NSPS will place competition among employees that would otherwise be working together as team. Doors will be opened for managers to exercise unfair practices with no recourse offered for the victim’s defense. The definition of “good performance” is totally at the discretion of the manager. Good performance…sounds like the window is wide open for a stronger buddy system to form. There are not any constraints in place to stop the supervisor from regularly rewarding his buddy vs. the dedicated loyal employee.

The plans are to allow “tax paying supervisors” to basically have full authority over “tax paying employees”, while structuring the Government agencies as if they are privately owned by the supervisor. The supervisor has no more at stake than the employee, yet will be given throne rights under this system.

We request the proposed NSPS ruling to be overturned in its entirety. There is nothing fair about this new human resources management system for DoD. The regulations are vague in areas…not clear, leaving Government employees wide open for any hard balls thrown at them. NSPS is a bureaucratic tool, full of bluff and fluff, used to ruse tax payers.

As tax payers, we are very angry and disgusted about an article we read (News Update / NAGE Communications / Feb 1, 2005) which states “DoD’s plan to spend $3 billion on NSPS was irresponsible considering the $500 billion federal deficit, and the cuts being made to various defense programs that are much more important to the nation’s defense than a new personnel program”.  We strictly oppose such a bias system. We demand our voice be heard.

CC: Senator Richard Shelby

Honorable Bud Carmer.