| Comment Number: | OL-10501166 |
| Received: | 2/24/2005 7:01:49 AM |
| Subject: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| Title: | National Security Personnel System |
| CFR Citation: | 5 CFR Chapter XCIX and Part 9901 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
Mandatory Removal Offenses- "DoD has not yet identified a proposed list of such offenses. However, it is important to preserve the Secretary’s flexibility to carefully and narrowly determine the offenses that will fall into this category and to make changes over time." This section gives no boundaries within which the MROs must lie. If there are no specific MROs there should be at least some types of offenses that can be used as a test to verify that the MRO is not arbitrary, political or personal. At this level an MRO could be anything from being convicted of espionage to being in a committed monogamous legal marriage to a person of the same sex. To reiterate - there are no boundaries, only recourse to a painful MSPB appeal. It is not reassuring that the Secretary will "carefully and narrowly determine" the nature of these offenses. Does this mean that every Secretary from future administrations will come up with a different list based on different preferences and different personal criteria? Although the Secretary's flexibility may be slightly hampered, it would be better to put some (not self imposed) limits on this kind of sweeping judgement.