The Limits of Cooperation

oming from the General Accounting Office, it was about the highest praise that an agency could receive. The Homeland Security Department, in designing a personnel system that replaces the General Schedule with a pay-for-performance plan, had reached out to all segments of its workforce and had run a truly collaborative process.

Even congressional Democrats such as Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.-no friend of the Bush administration-praised Homeland Security for "developing proposals in close consultation with employee unions." He touts the DHS process as a model for other agencies.

But ask union leaders what they think, and you hear a different story. To be sure, they acknowledge that starting April 2003, unions played a role in developing a list of proposals that was delivered to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and Office of Personnel Management Director Kay Coles James in November. But even after all the negotiation, consultation and debate, Ridge and James had the final say on what the pay system would look like. The pair were granted this privilege in 2002 when Congress passed legislation creating Homeland Security, and gave them the right to rewrite the department's personnel rules.

Now that Ridge and James have announced their pay-for-performance plan, union officials say the highly praised process yielded little compromise.

"I was surprised and disappointed," says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, after Ridge announced the department's plan in February. She and other union leaders have continued to lobby the department to rewrite the blueprint during a congressionally mandated mediation period. A final decision is expected in the next few weeks.

Kelley takes issue with plans to give Homeland Security management the right to deploy personnel, set work schedules and use new technology without union consultation. She objects to provisions that would allow managers to fire employees for certain as-yet-undefined misconduct, and to limit the authority of the Merit Systems Protection Board-the independent agency that reviews most agency disciplinary decisions-to reduce the department's disciplinary penalties in other cases. Most troubling, she says, is the proposal to drop the General Schedule and replace it with a pay-for-performance system that would give managers discretion in how much employees are paid.

John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, tries to be more conciliatory, apparently hoping to still influence the final decision. But in testimony before a joint House-Senate hearing in February, Gage pointed out that the six-month process of collaboration was ignored in formulating the proposal. "We are deeply disappointed with the outcome of this process," he said.

Other union advocates are breathing fire. "Even though the law said that the department and the Office of Personnel Management would decide this, that's not where it was decided," says T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council. "The final product was influenced by the White House, and it is disastrous." Border patrol agents across the country came to Washington in March to lobby Congress to block the proposal.

Federal managers, who agency leaders say will benefit most from the flexibilities in setting pay and discipline, are split on the proposal and have stayed out of the fray. Many agree that current procedures for disciplining poor performers are excessively time-consuming and cumbersome, and acknowledge that General Schedule pay scales are too rigid.

But many, like their union counterparts, are torn. They fear that the merit system principles governing the civil service could be tarnished. Many say they would be loath to see employees stripped of their rights to appeal disciplinary actions, and fear that pay for performance will do more harm than good by undermining teamwork.

Finally, they note that the DHS proposal would do little to speed hiring at the department, something mid-level managers have long sought.

But the unions, it would seem, are going to have to live with DHS' decision for now because they haven't won enough support in Congress to challenge Ridge and James. Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, told Government Executive, "Even if the unions are unhappy with some of the final provisions, and they are, they can't fault the process. And their input resulted in a different product than otherwise would have come from the department."