Vice President Al Gore Thursday announced a civil service reform plan that would tie federal workers' pay more closely to their job performance.
Under Gore's proposal, federal managers and executives would have their performance evaluated in part on the results of customer and employee satisfaction surveys, much like a system the IRS has proposed for its managers. The surveys would help decide managers' pay and bonuses.
"Our civil service reform will be based on an insight that is common in private industry: you pay for performance," Gore said at his "Global Forum on Reinventing Government" at the State Department in Washington. "Instead of providing automatic pay increases based on seniority, managers in the federal government would have a significant portion of their pay determined by how well they do their jobs and meet the people's needs."
Gore also endorsed proposals to give agency managers more control over how employees are paid and evaluated, and to expand the use of broad-band classification systems to simplify the structure of the civil service. The Office of Personnel Management will propose streamlined hiring rules and make it easier for agencies to hire temporary employees. Agencies would also be able to make immediate job offers in critical areas such as information technology, rather than go through the traditional competitive process for such positions, Gore said.
The civil service reform proposals would require congressional approval, because many of the government's personnel rules are established in statute.
Clinton administration officials said they would ask federal labor unions to help work out the details of the civil service reform package. A similar Clinton administration effort in 1994 crumbled under opposition from unions and members of Congress. A package of 40 personnel rule changes pushed by members of Congress met a similar fate last year, amid opposition from the unions and the administration.
Bobby Harnage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said he is hopeful but skeptical about the administration's plans.
"I'm not necessarily critical of what they want to do," Harnage said. "They just don't seem to be able to make it happen."
Harnage is also skeptical of the administration's commitment to involving the unions in drafting changes.
"Nobody has sat down at the table with us yet," Harnage said. "I'm hoping this is a new beginning. If it isn't, I'm tired of playing."
Gore's proposal would shift more authority over pay, classification and other personnel issues to individual agencies. Each agency could create personnel systems that meet their needs within a set of governmentwide standards. The administration said management and labor representatives would have to agree upon new systems before they could take effect.
Senior Executives Association President Carol Bonosaro expressed guarded support of Gore's civil service initiative, saying the association supports linking pay to performance. But she said upping the importance of customer and employee satisfaction surveys in executive job performance evaluations would be difficult.
"For such a system to be fair, it would have to provide a process for identifying those aspects of satisfaction over which a manager or executive has control. SEA does not believe this will be an easy task," Bonosaro said, adding that giving each agency the ability to develop its own personnel system was a bad idea. "The proliferation of a crazy quilt of agency systems threatens to further fragment federal human resources management."
Morley Winograd, director of Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government, said the administration does not have a specific time frame in mind, but he said civil service reform legislation would have a better chance of making it through Congress this year than during 2000, which will be an election year. Proposals should start taking shape in the next few months, Winograd said.
Winograd also said civil service reform has a better chance of passing now than it did five years ago.
"We have a slightly different approach. There are different players," Winograd said.
The Office of Personnel Management began work on a civil service reform package last year, but OPM Director Janice Lachance didn't expect to introduce any legislative proposals until the 2002 budget cycle. Gore's announcement dramatically speeds up OPM's timeline.
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