Reforming Bureaucracy
Say Goodbye to the GS System
By D.W.

Federal government employees outside of the military and law enforcement have a reputation as being lazy unmotivated bureaucrats. In all fairness, most federal employees are hard working dedicated civil servants but let’s be honest here, the General Schedule (GS) system is also a great place for slackers to hide out, collect a paycheck, and never get fired. The government has a lot of these people and I know a few of them myself. And this problem matters to you as the average taxpayer because you pay for the services these people are supposed to be providing.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Government’s lethargic personnel system has helped to perpetuate this problem. They have failed to attract and retain top talent who can easily get a better deal in the performance oriented private sector. In addition, the Government’s Stone Age personnel policies have made it very difficult to eliminate slackers.

Millions of your tax dollars are wasted every year by underperforming bureaucrats who are needlessly squandering resources. They do this in an active way by undertaking unnecessary travel and having unwarranted breaks. And this waste can also be accomplished in a passive manner by doing the minimal amount of work necessary or just by ignoring problems. Of course, these situations do exist in the private sector but they are far less common because bosses are not so lenient in a competitive business environment.

However, the Bush Administration has begun a serious attempt to reform the bureaucracy’s performance and image and bring the GS pay scale and evaluation system into the 21st century. The new system is not a cure all but it will hopefully stimulate federal employees to perform at a higher level.

The old General Schedule pay system, based largely upon seniority, is now being phased out to be replaced by a new performance system. The antiquated GS system had standardized pay levels with steps from one to ten which granted more pay. If an employee wasn’t promoted to a higher GS level, they would advance to another step after about three or so years. GS workers also receive locality pay to compensate for the differences in cost of living for different areas. Promotions however were not that difficult to obtain depending on the occupation you were in and whether or not your boss liked you.

New pay bands have now consolidated numerous GS levels. There are three pay bands for most Federal Employees but technical specialists now have a fourth to account for highly specific and valuable employees. Pay band one employees are generally low skill or entry level personnel such as secretaries but they can include more skilled people like mechanics. Pay band two employees have generally more skilled and educated workers like nurses and accountants. Pay band three includes higher level managers or other specialists. And in the new system a promotion technically means being promoted to the next higher pay band as movements within the pay band are just classified as transfers.

Promotions involve pay raises, but raises will now be given more frequently without promotions and they will be based upon performance. Bonuses can also be given instead of pay raises and their size is also based upon performance. The key to this system is that a centralized board outside of the person’s rating chain determines who gets an increase in compensation based upon that person’s performance record. These boards are held on a yearly basis and by all accounts should be far more objective. However, this is the U.S. government we are talking about and I highly suspect that political correctness will manage to infect part of the process.

Each government agency is given an allotment of money to draw from to provide these raises and bonuses. The pool of money available to an agency is considered as a pool of shares. Each employee is assigned a certain number of shares based upon their performance evaluation. But the bottom line is that pay raises are more political on the macro level as different agencies vie for monetary resources. What is likely to happen is that more powerful agencies will be in a better position to compensate their employees.

However, the linchpin to this updated pay scale is that the new evaluation system is supposed to be more objective. The evaluations rely upon very clear performance objectives arranged in the SMART format. This acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Aligned, Realistic, and Timed, which ultimately translates to objective and quantifiable performance measurements. Each performance objective is weighted numerically by a value determined by the rater.

This evaluation system specifies that all evaluations are reviewed and approved by the pay pool panel that recommends pay raises and bonuses. If the pay pool panel believes that an evaluation is inflated they can return it to the rater for revision. However, I seriously doubt that this will ever happen unless the rater and senior rater are incompetent. At least the government is trying to improve this system and you know how much politicians like to see shiny programs.

As with everything, there is a review process that can hear appeals and make adjustments. I imagine that some of these disputes will be legitimate but imagine how many will not. A person who doesn’t get their way may end up filing an Equal Opportunity complaint and an agency which doesn’t want to face scandal may cave in to the demands and grant the raise.

However, one of the best innovations of the new system is that underperforming employees can actually lose up to 10% of their base pay. Imagine that, slackers losing pay; as if that will actually happen!

I doubt that the new system will dramatically improve the quality of work done by federal employees as the hiring process is still lethargic and it is still more difficult to eliminate underperforming workers than in the private sector. And hey, it’s the government we are talking about, Congressmen just love to score points with the bureaucracy so agencies won’t push the envelope too much.

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