Bush team may drop labor part of civil service overhaul

Bush administration officials may shed the labor relations portion of their plan to spread personnel reforms already in progress at the Defense and Homeland Security departments to the rest of government, a top official told lawmakers Tuesday.

The Office of Personnel Management is considering removing the labor relations provisions from its draft legislative proposal to implement pay for performance in domestic agencies, said Linda Springer, director of the personnel agency, at a hearing held by the House Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce and Agency Organization.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., asked Springer how recent rulings from two federal judges rendering the labor portion of personnel overhauls at the Defense and Homeland Security departments illegal might affect the proposed Working for America Act. Those two departments house more than half the federal workforce.

Springer replied that her agency is examining an idea "to focus on the pay parts rather than on the labor management parts" of the bill.

The answer marks a shift from the OPM director's earlier attitude toward splitting the bill. When Comptroller General David M. Walker proposed the idea in an October hearing before the same subcommittee, Springer was lukewarm about the option.

"I think we have drafted the bill with the thought that the two pieces do go together," the OPM director said at the time. "We think they both could be accommodated in a much, much reduced way from DHS."

Walker, head of the Government Accountability Office, said in October that the government does not have enough experience with labor reforms to move ahead with a new scheme.

"I would divide this bill into two parts," Walker told the committee. "We believe that it may be prudent for the Congress to consider what happens with DHS and DoD before we move forward on [the labor relations] part."

A federal judge overturned the Defense Department's labor relations overhaul in February, drawing heavily on an August ruling against that aspect of DHS reforms. The government continues to fight for the labor changes in those departments, however, and has oral arguments in front of an appeals court April 6 for the DHS case. Government lawyers have not yet filed an appeal in the Defense case, though officials have made it clear that they will push forward.

The Working for America Act proposal never sought a change in labor rules as dramatic as the ones Defense and DHS are pushing. The proposal did include changes, however, such as lifting requirements for agencies to bargain with unions during emergency situations. "Emergency" was undefined, which concerned some union leaders.

Also, while the draft did not adopt DHS' and Defense's stringent standards for appealing disciplinary actions by management to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which required the board to find an employee's penalty to be "wholly without justification" in order to mitigate it, it did fine-tune MSPB rules.

Under the proposal, MSPB could "mitigate [the] penalty, but must give impact on agency mission primary consideration."

Springer was testifying about her agency's fiscal 2007 budget plan when she made the comments.