| Comment Number: | OL-10509518 |
| Received: | 3/15/2005 3:58:21 PM |
| 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:
As an Air Force Attorney-Advisor, I am concerned that the National Security Personnel System (NSPS) will have a serious negative result on my pay and legal career in the Department of Defense (DoD). Attorneys are legal professionals as determined by the Bar who have completed a three-year course of legal studies at a law school accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) and have earned a first professional degree (J.D. or L.L.B.). Many attorneys have a second professional degree (L.L.M.) and/or other post graduate degree such as an M.B.A. or M.P.A. Many attorneys have one or more (and often many) years of legal experience resolving highly complex issues involving legal analysis and argument of facts, regulations, statutes, and case law. Nevertheless, I fear under NSPS attorneys will be subject to the whims of non-attorneys who do not have the same expertise but hold the purse strings to distributing funding to pay attorneys under NSPS. While DoD likes to call civilians professional (adjective) and all civilians should act that way, most are not a professional (noun). I fear under NSPS attorneys will be lumped into pay bands with non-attorneys based on the idea that non-attorneys act professional while neglecting the critical point that non-attorneys are not legal professionals, whereas, attorneys are in fact legal professionals as determined by the Bar and therefore subject to professional rules of conduct and discipline by the Bar (such an argument neglects the fact that non-attorneys typically do not have the same legal expertise or training as attorneys). I fear that under NSPS, even though all attorneys are professionals (and in my experience most are exceptional performers), only a select few will be rated at the whim of management as exceptional and therefore get the big pay off while the rest will be lucky to keep their job but with little or no pay increase since NSPS is a zero sum game when it comes to total funding which will be paid as compensation. In other words, even if all of the attorneys (or for that matter other employees) are exceptional performers only a certain select group will get the significant pay increase because the pay increase is subject to limited funding. Furthermore, I fear that management may arbitrarily decide to call a specific employee a poor performer because that employee is disliked and therefore will not get any sort of pay increase and who know may even get less pay under NSPS. I fear under NSPS that especially for attorneys who deal with highly complex legal issues that evaluation criteria can not truly be objective but will simply be subjective and based on which attorney gets assigned the hot high profile case by management which will of course require that attorney to only work the hot high profile case (which will allow him to get the exceptional rating and therefore higher pay) while that attorney's other work load is dumped off by management onto other attorneys in the office who of course will get less pay because they are poor performers as determined by management which was in actuality caused by those poor attorneys now having the larger case load which originally came from the exceptional performing attorney as arbitrarily determined by management. I fear that attorneys who are currently at a higher GS level will be lumped together in a pay band with attorneys from a lower GS level that without the mandatory GS step system in place such attorneys will have little chance of progression in pay. In short, I fear NSPS will have a serious adverse impact on the morale of attorneys in DoD and that if the issues raised above (as well as others not mentioned above) concerning NSPS are not seriously considered and favorably and objectively resolved DoD civilian attorneys will begin leaving civilian employment in droves to be with their counterparts in private practice who based on objective and quantifiable figures make 2-4 times as much as civilian DoD attorneys.