OPM chief renews push for electronic pension system

The Bush administration's top personnel adviser made a public push Tuesday for Congress to reverse itself and fund an electronic processing system for federal employee pensions, at a cost of about $27 million.

Linda Springer, director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the House's denial of a budget request to modernize the retirement system as part of a 2007 spending bill was a big mistake.

"We're using a paper-based, vintage 1950s system, and it's just shocking," Springer told a crowd of federal executives at the Excellence in Government conference in Washington, which is sponsored in part by Government Executive. "That's not fair, that's not right, and that's an embarrassment."

Springer, who has been in her position at OPM for just more than a year, began her tenure by pointing out the delays that many federal employees experience before receiving their full retirement checks. There are 144,000 file drawers filled with federal employee paperwork used to calculate the pensions, she said.

But the Bush budget request for $27 million to house those records electronically was denied in the House fiscal 2007 Transportation-Treasury appropriations bill.

"I don't think it was zeroed out on the merits," Springer said in an interview after the speech. "It was zeroed out because it was viewed as a new initiative … and there was a broad-brush approach that was against funding new initiatives."

Springer said she is optimistic that the Senate will include the funding in its bill, which has yet to come up for a vote, and that House lawmakers will reverse themselves in conference negotiations.

"We had a little trouble in the House," Springer said in the speech. "I don't understand that, because it's [also] their pension." Legislative branch employees, including members of Congress, are on the same paper-based system as the executive branch.

In her talk, Springer also continued to strongly back administration efforts to move the government to a pay-for-performance system and off the General Schedule.

The Homeland Security Department recently lost a major legal battle when an appellate court said the department's new personnel system, which OPM helped create and was intended to act as a model for all government agencies, illegally eroded collective bargaining rights. That decision has indefinitely delayed DHS' reforms for bargaining unit employees.

"That doesn't mean we should back off from the performance aspects, the pay aspects," Springer said. "Whether it happens during my tenure or not, I don't know…mark my words, one way or another, it's going to have to change. I hope it's sooner rather than later."