Pay

It's been an insane couple of days for those of us who cover federal pay, and for those of you who receive it. In my column today, I try to grapple with what the administration is trying to do as it sets a course for pay reform. But I want to draw a couple of other conclusions:

1) Just because the administration doesn't like Carol Shea-Porter's amendment doesn't mean it plans to continue with the National Security Personnel System: Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry has already said that whatever vision of pay reform he ultimately pursues, it's "not NSPS." Union leaders are understandably upset about Obama's opposition to the amendment, which they're backing. But Obama is genuinely a process guy: I think his belief that the amendment is premature is genuine, but also that the prematureness is all that he objects to. If the president decides he's going to get rid of NSPS, he'll need a mechanism to do it, given that one currently doesn't exist, and Shea-Porter's amendment, no matter how it was timed, provides an initial template for such a rollback.

2. The administration is genuinely undecided about what kind of pay system it would like to advance: And that seems like a good thing. If they were sure all pay-for-performance systems were dismal failures, they'd have had no problem suspending them, which budget chief Peter Orszag has declined to do. The conference Berry has planned for fall is intriguing, especially because the inclusion of Google and Harvard people will bring in voices that don't typically dominate the Washington debate over pay. I have no idea what solutions will emerge out of the debate, but I'm looking forward to sitting in on it.