Some Questions About the NSPS Review

Purely in the spirit of journalistic curiosity, here are some things I wonder about the three-man review board appointed to review the National Security Personnel System:

1. Is three people too small? Presumably they'll have a staff, but also, presumably, there is a lot of data to review and a lot of interviews to conduct. I'm surprised more people weren't included, both to handle the workload, and to represent more stakeholder groups.

2. What do these choices for the review team signal about how the administration views pay-for-performance in general? Bob Tobias, for example, is a former president of the National Treasury Employees Union, but he's also not a hard-line opponent of pay-for-performance. I spoke to him for a story last year on the state of federal labor relations, and he said at the time: ""I believe, for example, if the administration had really been serious about involving unions in creating a pay-for-performance system, there would be one in place today....But because they wanted to do it unilaterally and to diminish the scope of collective bargaining, unions fought back, and as a result of winning, created a very, very hostile environment."

3. Why wasn't one of the major federal management non-profits included? I'm surprised not to see a representative from the Partnership for Public Service, for example.