| Comment Number: | OL-10507445 |
| Received: | 3/14/2005 11:08:37 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:
All Sections of NSPS: I keep hearing of how the government wants to be more like the private sector. How many companies in the private sector are still in business after running up a multi-trillion dollar deficit? Are we striving to put people like Ken Lay in federal service? The reality of NSPS is that it's just another example of the "think tank" coming up with another "out side of the box" means of creating an even more incompetent work force. Thanks to some of the brilliant ideas that have come from “outside the box thinking,” such as the Department of the Navy's contract with NMCI for all their computer needs, most Navy federal employees spend a great deal of time just waiting in aggravation for their computers to catch up to them, and that’s when the system is running at it’s peak. When the system is down the productivity gets even worse. Millions of good productive hours are wasted and unaccounted for just waiting for the system to work. The tax payers would baulk if they knew the real cost for this fiasco. Does anybody really know the true cost? How about the genius behind the mandatory government credit cards? 900,000 federal employees have been put at high risk for identity theft thanks to the incompetence of the DoD and Bank of America. The privacy act rights of these federal workers was violated. Now due the blunder of another great “think tank idea” these employees are required to spend a great deal of their time monitoring their personal accounts to protect their personal finances. More time taken away from performing the jobs we were hired to do. The DoD has already down sized to a point that most offices do not have administration personnel, budget personnel, travel personnel, and basically support personnel. But if we are trying to be more like the private sector, why are we down sizing? Every contract I have ever seen between DoD and private contractors contains production and administration support. In order to do the jobs we were hired for don't you think federal employees need support too? How can an Engineer perform Engineering duties when he/she is performing budget duties or taking care of administration functions? The sad part is that the government is wasting millions of dollars for this new personnel system when in fact the current system could do everything that the new system is supposed to do. The old system can reward hard working employees via quality step increases, on the spot awards and promotions for those that merit, thus the name Merit Promotion. The old system can penalize poor performers if the supervisors would take the time to do his/her job and document poor performance and counsel employees who are not working to a satisfactory level, which by definition is a primary responsibility of Supervision and Management. If any of the folks in Congress or in the DoD do not think that the "Good Ol Boy system" is alive and well in the federal government than they are death, dumb and blind. In a time when the federal budget is overspent and trillions of dollars in debt, I would think that it would be extremely more cost effective to fix the problems in the current system by changing the policies within DoD to demand more of its Managers and Supervisors to do their jobs and utilize the tools within the current system appropriately, rather than waste more money to enhance the Good Ol Boy network and further contribute the public perception that government employees are useless, over paid and lazy, which is exactly what will happen by implementing the NSPS. As the President of the United States said in his recent State of the Union Address: “ Taxpayer dollars must be spent wisely, or not at all”.