Homeland employees’ jobs, pay safe for at least a year

Homeland Security Department employees will be able to keep their jobs and current pay rates for at least a year after they transfer from their current agencies to the new department, Office of Personnel Management officials said Tuesday.

In a briefing with reporters, officials pointed out that the legislation creating the new department forbids the Bush administration from laying off employees as a result of their transfer to the new department for a year. Most employees from such agencies as the Transportation Security Administration, the Customs Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are expected to transfer to the new department on March 1, 2003, so their jobs would be safe until March 2004. The legislation also bars for one year any pay cuts or reductions in employees' grades.

OPM is conducting training sessions beginning Dec. 11 for human resources specialists at the agencies affected by the creation of the new department. The specialists will learn the complex back-end paperwork requirements for transferring an employee from the domain of one agency to another. Few human resources specialists outside the Defense Department, which has conducted significant restructuring efforts in recent years, have experience in such transfers.

Initially, OPM officials expect that employees' pay and personnel records will continue to be maintained in their current agencies. Until Homeland Security officials decide how they want to deal with employees' records, the Agriculture Department, for example, would likely continue to handle the records of Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service employees who are transferred to the new department.

The initial transfer of employees to Homeland Security will, for the most part, be a paper exercise, with employees seeing little real difference in their daily routines, at least at first. OPM officials said they didn't know how long it would take to work out the details of the department's personnel system.

The legislation creating the Homeland Security Department, signed into law by President Bush Monday, allows officials at the new department to design new rules for hiring, pay, promotions, job classification, collective bargaining, performance appraisals, discipline and firing. The granting of such power marks a significant moment in the history of the civil service, exempting the 170,000 employees of the new department from governmentwide civil service laws in those key areas.

Officials won't be able to make changes, however, without first consulting employee organizations, labor unions and managers' associations. The consultation process laid out in the legislation establishing the Homeland Security Department requires about two months of discussions between department leaders and employee groups from the time changes are proposed until those changes can be adopted. But such changes may take years to fully implement. The IRS was granted similar personnel powers in 1998, and the agency is still in the process of rolling out changes to its systems.

One key area that OPM is considering for change involves rules affecting law enforcement personnel. Federal law officers at such agencies as the Secret Service, Customs, Transportation Security Administration, the Border Patrol and the Federal Protective Service work under a wide variety of rules governing basic pay, premium pay, retirement and other personnel matters. Congress instructed OPM to submit a plan within 90 days of Bush's signing of the law that would ensure "the elimination of disparities in pay and benefits throughout the department, especially among law enforcement personnel, that are inconsistent with merit system principles."

While the homeland legislation gives the new department the authority to develop a standard basic pay system for law enforcement personnel and other employees, it does not give the new department the authority to tinker with premium pay or retirement. OPM officials hinted that the new department may need to seek additional legislation to standardize premium pay and retirement rules.

Earlier this year, generous pay and retirement packages at the Transportation Security Administration's air marshals program lured away at least 1,200 law enforcement officers from other federal agencies that had less generous pay and benefits.

OPM officials said one of their key goals is to create a unified personnel system for the new department, which is absorbing the employees of 22 agencies. That sentiment is at odds with the recent history of civil service law, in which more and more agencies have sought and obtained the freedom to create unique personnel systems. OPM officials said it is possible that a one-size-fits-all system won't be the most appropriate way to manage personnel at the new department.