| Comment Number: | OL-10506021 |
| Received: | 3/11/2005 10:27:03 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:
Subject: Comments on Proposed NSPS Regulations—RIN 3206-AK76/0790-AH82 I am a current DoD civilian and a member of the Air Force Reserve. The NSPS seems to combine the worst of civilian work rules with the worst of the military. In my work area we are concerned mainly with the NSPS pay system and the ability to deploy us as civilians. We believe these are just two of the most important NSPS issues that will cause problems in the civil servant system in the future. Pay banding and pay for performance work fine in the civil sector where salaries are higher than we have here as civil servants. We are already making less money than we could make outside of the DoD. If we are shuffled in wide pay bands and not given our meager step increases, the pay gap between civil sector and civil servant will grow even wider. The government can only rely on our patriotic call to duty for so long before the pay gap forces us to work elsewhere. Civilian deployments will also cause concerns in my work area. Nearly all of my coworkers have spent some time in the Active Duty military. Most of us joined the Air Force Reserve and took DoD civilian jobs to provide stability for our families while still giving us the opportunity to fly and fight for our country. The stability allowed us to raise our families in one area without the constant threat of deployment or transfer that we had on active duty. You can see what the cycles of deployment have done to recruiting in both the Active Duty military and the Reserves. Military recruiters are now failing to meet their goals and the same will happen in the DoD civilian ranks. With the current system we have an effective corps of DoD civilians. We are more efficient with a handful of civil servants than our Active Duty military counterparts are with an entire squadron of bodies. The proposed changes to the DoD civilian personnel system would thin the ranks of highly experienced employees who had once thought of this as a stable career. The changes would destroy the continuity and corporate knowledge that DoD civilians provide throughout the Department of Defense. The best defense for the DoD is to stop the NSPS before the changes take effect. Thank you for your time.