Job tenure taken out of the equation in NSPS transition

The Office of Personnel Management has given the Defense Department permission to waive time-in-grade requirements for employees who are moving from the National Security Personnel System to the General Schedule, according to a letter included in Defense's new handbook on the NSPS transition.

"This waiver will avoid hardship to employees and DoD when an employee's converted NSPS position is classified at a GS grade that would otherwise subject the employee to the time-in-grade restriction," wrote Nancy Kichak, associate director for employee services at OPM, in a Feb. 18 letter to John James, director of the NSPS Transition Office.

The waiver applies only to employees who are moving to positions in Grade 5 of the General Schedule or higher. Such positions require employees to have one year of previous experience at a lower level, no matter their qualifications or job performance. OPM in August 2009 suspended the rulemaking process on a regulatory change that would have eliminated time-in-grade requirements governmentwide, arguing it made sense to include that rule as part of a more comprehensive review of federal personnel policy.

The waiver is one of several preparations Defense is making to find a place for NSPS employees in the General Schedule system. According to the handbook the NSPS transition office has prepared for human resources officials, the Pentagon will have an automated system in place by April 25 to help supervisors determine which GS grade and step their NSPS employees will fall into, and to assign those new classifications. Once determinations have been made, then employees will have an opportunity to appeal, among other decisions, the job title and the grade to which they're reassigned. Appeals will be resolved through an internal process, though the guidance encourages employees and human resources officers to try to settle disputes before they reach the level of an appeal.

The document also clarifies which categories of employees will be excluded from the transition back to the General Schedule. Some workers will be sent instead to Science and Technology Reinvention Laboratory programs, alternate personnel system demonstration projects at Defense laboratories authorized by the same law that repealed NSPS. And some workers will be moved back into the Acquisition Demonstration Project, an experimental personnel system that ended when its participants were moved into NSPS. Their transitions depend on a congressional extension of the original project, and standing up the policies and offices that governed the program. The guidance leaves open the possibility that other personnel demonstration projects will be reestablished, or new ones set up.

Randy Erwin, legislative director of the National Federation of Federal Employees, said the union had "serious concerns" about acquisition employees being returned to their old demonstration project. The union is awaiting a section of the handbook the transition office has not released yet, on performance management, he added.

"DoD might choose to mirror the governmentwide reforms that OPM is considering, or they might come up with something entirely different," he said. "We haven't been given any details on that yet."

The guidance made clear that many pay determinations, especially on issues such as rewarding employees for foreign language proficiency that helps them on the job, will be made on a case-by-case basis. Defense agencies will be given substantial latitude to decide whether to transfer all of their employees back to the General Schedule immediately or incrementally, and to do things such as issue moratoriums on processing personnel actions until the transition is complete.