Pay-for-performance warrior exits the battlefield

George Nesterczuk is a warrior, which may seem peculiar because of his soft face, round physique and easy laugh. The Ukrainian-American archconservative doesn't engage in red vs. blue political battles. Instead, he has spent his career as a strategist in a decidedly less glamorous campaign, struggling to reshape the civil service.

He is at the center of the Bush administration's personnel reforms, funneling years of observation and philosophy into a blueprint for new pay and management systems at the Defense and Homeland Security departments. Nesterczuk's decision to leave the Office of Personnel Management in July and head to the Ukraine to reform its bureaucracy means "we've lost one of the true warriors in civil service reform," says Ronald Sanders, the top personnel adviser to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. "He's been at this a long time," Sanders says. "He's sort of a Russian Don Quixote. He's been tilting at windmills since I first met him in the late '80s."

Before becoming DNI chief human capital officer, Sanders worked side by side with Nesterczuk at OPM, advising the Defense Department on how to make sweeping changes to the way it pays, hires, fires and bargains with 700,000 civilian workers. His allusion to the fabled 17th century chivalrous Spanish warrior and his uphill fight for a grandiose notion of right and wrong seems apt in Nesterczuk's case.

But in some circles, Nesterczuk is more likely to be compared to another literary figure: Harry Potter's nemesis, Lord Voldemort. When asked if he is federal workers' own Dark Lord, Nesterczuk laughs gently and simply says, no.

But many federal labor union officials see Nesterczuk as an ideologue who helped hatch an evil plan at a conservative Washington think thank, The Heritage Foundation, and then returned to government to impose it. The nefarious plan? Rid the country of an oversized bureaucracy and its pesky unions. Unions so far have sued both the Defense and Homeland Security departments successfully to halt twin labor relations systems that would have crippled their ability to bargain.

Last spring, in an update to members, the United Department of Defense Workers Coalition outed Nesterczuk as a key engineer of the personnel reform programs they oppose. The coalition, a group of 36 Defense labor unions that coalesced when the Pentagon began work on its new National Security Personnel System, pointed out a January 2001 Heritage report that Nesterczuk co-authored with his self-declared mentor, Donald Devine.

As Ronald Reagan's OPM chief, Devine won attention and enmity for his efforts to downsize government. In the report, the pair, along with Heritage fellow Robert E. Moffit, wrote, "Unions are, at best, responsible to their members. At worst, they represent the permanent government acting on its own self-interest rather than on the desires of the electorate."

In a July 2002 Heritage paper, Nesterczuk argued on his own for "a streamlined [Homeland Security Department] dispute resolution system, providing for internal agency appeals and reviews and ending with the secretary as final arbiter." Just such a system took shape at DHS and at the Pentagon; both were ruled illegal this year.