New department begins pay and personnel overhaul

The Homeland Security Department's 170,000 employees will have a say in a plan to replace federal civil service rules with new rules governing their pay, hiring, evaluation and union involvement, department officials announced Tuesday.

In a Tuesday morning e-mail to Homeland Security employees, Undersecretary for Management Janet Hale announced the start of a personnel system design process. She said a team of department employees, human resources experts from the Office of Personnel Management and representatives from employee unions met for the first time this week and began gathering ideas for a new human resources management system for the department.

"We want this process to be very inclusive, and we will seek out and listen to DHS employees and managers and experts both inside and outside of government," Hale wrote.

The launch of the design team signals a first step in one of the most significant developments in federal workforce management in decades. When Congress created the Homeland Security Department last year, lawmakers gave its leaders unprecedented freedom to develop new rules governing employee pay, hiring, job classification, labor-management relations, performance evaluation and workplace dispute resolution. Most agencies must follow strict rules in civil service law governing the management of employees. While the legislation granted Homeland Security leaders personnel freedom, it also required them to involve employees in the development of new rules.

The design process for a Homeland Security personnel system for will take at least until the beginning of 2004, department officials said Tuesday.

First, the design team of 60 employees, human resources specialists and union representatives will work through the summer, reviewing existing personnel rules, developing a laundry list of possible changes and gathering ideas from employees.

In May and June, representatives of the design team will hold outreach meetings in New York, Miami, Detroit, El Paso, Texas, Atlanta, Seattle and Salt Lake City. Employees in rural areas will either be brought to those cities or design team representatives will travel to Homeland Security outposts to conduct smaller employee sessions. Department officials are also setting up a Web site on which they plan to gather ideas from employees across the country.

At the end of the summer, the design team will present a list of options for new pay and personnel rules to a senior review committee, including Hale, other department executives, officials from OPM and major union leaders. A few academics and policy experts will sit on the panel as advisors, department officials said.

The review committee will then present a shorter list of personnel reform options to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and Office of Personnel Management Director Kay Coles James. Ridge and James will then issue proposed rules for a new personnel system.

Congress required the department to give employee groups up to 60 days to offer changes to the proposed rules. Even if employee groups continue to oppose the changes, the department can implement the new personnel system unilaterally after 60 days.

Department officials hope to have a new personnel system in place in 2004. Congress gave the department five years to develop and tweak a new system. "I hope there won't be a rush since there is no deadline," said Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.

The design team that began meeting Tuesday included Customs employees who are NTEU representatives, as well as representatives from the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Association of Agriculture Employees. Other unions have members in the new department, but will have to provide their ideas later.

Officials said Tuesday that they are open to all ideas for the personnel system. "There are no preconceived ideas of what this should be," said a Homeland Security official, speaking on background.

Though Congress gave the new department authority to change personnel rules, there is no requirement that any rules changes. But in her email to employees of the department, Hale suggested that at least some changes are in store. "Personnel systems created decades ago have not kept pace with the rate of change, have become overly complex and simply were not created with our unique missions in mind," Hale said.

Bush administration officials have said over the past two years that the government's pay system puts too much emphasis on tenure and does not sufficiently reward individual effort. Administration officials at NASA and the Defense Department are also pushing for less restrictive hiring rules than those currently in place.

A Homeland Security official said whistleblower protections and veterans preference would be protected under any new system that is developed.

Department officials hashed out the personnel system design process with union leaders over the last few weeks until they agreed on the numbers involved and the basic timeline. NTEU's Kelley credited the department's leaders for keeping their word to involve unions in the process.