Senator crafts bill focusing on performance now, pay later

A key senator involved in government reform issues announced Wednesday that he will introduce legislation that would require rigorous performance appraisals for every federal employee, but would hold off on linking those ratings to pay.

Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said his bill, still in draft form and not yet available for public review, is called the 2006 Federal Workforce Performance Appraisal and Management Improvement Act. It would retain the General Schedule pay ladder, require annual written performance reviews and abolish pass/fail rating systems.

The proposal offers an alternative to the Bush administration's draft Working for America Act, which was released publicly last July but has yet to make headway in Congress.

The administration's measure would have implemented pay for performance for domestic agencies at the outset. Voinovich's bill, however, leaves the door open for linking pay to performance later, but only after agencies prove they have a working appraisal system.

"If we're going to have pay for performance, then we've really got to make sure that we do it right," said Voinovich, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia, at an event sponsored by the Council for Excellence in Government and The Washington Post.

Voinovich's bill would require the Office of Personnel Management to approve each agency's evaluation system, much as it does for the Senior Executive Service pay-for-performance system. Voinovich stressed that training managers on how to properly assess employees would be mandatory under his bill.

Pay would come into play on a smaller scale in this proposal because employees would need a successful rating to receive the annual across-the-board pay raise or any within-grade increase. But agencies would have to successfully conduct appraisals for at least a year before the evaluations could be used to make any pay determinations.

Voinovich said he chose to develop his own bill instead of support the Working for America Act because the administration's proposal sought to replicate the personnel reforms under way in the Defense and Homeland Security departments too quickly. Those reforms feature pay for performance as well as broad paybands to replace the General Schedule.

"You crawl, then you walk, then you run," Voinovich said. "I believe they don't understand how difficult this is. Particularly when you've got a court case out there."

Portions of both the Defense and Homeland Security departments' personnel systems experienced setbacks in federal court after coalitions of federal employee unions sued the departments, claiming the systems illegally curtailed collective bargaining rights. The two cases are both in the midst of appeals.

Linda Springer, director of OPM and chief adviser to President Bush on federal workforce issues, attended the event and told the audience that OPM and the Bush administration will support Voinovich's bill. In March, Springer hinted that the administration was considering one step back from the proposal: dropping the labor relations reforms.

"I think it's great," Springer said. "I do think there's a lot of value in taking this first step. It's the right way to go."

But she also kept alive the administration's desire to eventually implement pay for performance in all government agencies, calling Voinovich's bill "a good foundation for anything else we could do beyond that."

And Voinovich himself said the bill is designed to ease an eventual implementation of pay for performance.

The senator has not lined up any co-sponsors yet, but he hopes to introduce the bill on a bipartisan basis and will hold a hearing on the proposal this summer, according to a spokeswoman for his office.

Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, the ranking member of Voinovich's committee, said he has not seen the proposal, but has a history of partnering with Voinovich on federal workforce issues. Akaka said he will look for transparency and training dollars in the proposal.

"I look forward to reviewing Senator Voinovich's proposal, when it's available, as well as the current use of similar authority in the government," Akaka said in a statement.

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement Wednesday she supports "efforts that increase the fair, credible and transparent nature of performance appraisals," but also wants Congress to push agencies to use personnel flexibilities already available to them.