Many of us may remember the 1970s era commercial for the vegetable juice V8 where people bonk themselves on the head and say, “Wow, I could’ve had a V8!”
Well, for many of us in this community, we’ve had a stark reminder that — bonk — wow, government pay matters!
The issue of pay has been simmering for years and occasionally bubbling to the surface. Yet the issue always has been important for government information technology workers, where the disparity between public- and private-sector pay is particularly egregious.
The pay issue has reached a boiling point in recent years with the Bush administration’s initiative to link pay and performance. That effort has focused on the Defense and Homeland Security departments. The administration has tried to switch DOD and DHS employees from the government’s General Schedule pay scale to new systems that link pay to performance.
The pay-for-performance systems have produced a flood of debate on the subject. Many interested parties have been making their voices heard on the issue. House lawmakers, before leaving steamy Washington for their summer recess, passed a provision that would essentially cut funding for DOD’s National Security Personnel System. Meanwhile, federal employee unions, which aren’t fans of the pay changes, have turned to the courts, whose judges have largely determined that the Bush administration did not play nice with employees.
FCW readers have also been speaking out.
“The first priority should be to get good management, then focus on employee performance, not the other way around,” one reader said.
Another said, “I take issue with the notion that the General Schedule pay scale is fair and a pay-for-performance system is inherently discriminatory…. In fact, I believe the opposite to be true...the GS scale is certain to be unfair to top performers.”
There is no easy solution, but there is lots of room for good ideas and proposals. After all, pay does matter!
THE BUZZ CONTENDERS
#2 America Competes Act President Bush signed bipartisan legislation last week that authorizes $33.6 billion in spending on engineering, math, science and technology education. And the measure creates a new agency at the Energy Department for advanced research projects focused on achieving greater energy efficiency and independence. The America Competes Act authorizes a lot of money to be spent on competitiveness in the next three years. But will lawmakers appropriate that money to put American competitiveness back on track? The law gained bipartisan support after a 2005 National Academies report recommended that the United States get cracking on engineering, math, science and technology education or risk losing its leadership in the world economy. #3 Paper or touch-screen? California could be voting on paper ballots in many precincts when the state holds its presidential primary election in February 2008. The secretary of state there decertified the electronic touch-screen voting machines used in 39 counties after learning they were susceptible to hacking. That Aug. 3 decision could affect as many as 5 million California voters. Bruce Schneier, a well-known computer security expert, noted on his blog that the secretary of state provided too little time for security experts to do a thorough code review. Nevertheless, the number of vulnerabilities that the experts found in a short time convinced them that election officials could not ensure the integrity of votes cast on those systems.
#4 Bloggers need not request fee waivers Open government advocates were busy delighting last week over the Senate’s passage of legislation that would make the Freedom of Information Act more responsive to public requests for information. The House passed a similar FOIA bill in March, making it likely that legislation will be sent to the president. But will Bush sign a bill that would waive FOIA processing fees for bloggers? Some think probably not. In a recent policy statement, the president said he opposed expanding the FOIA law’s definition of news media representative to include bloggers. Officials welcomed bloggers to the White House in September 2006, but apparently there’s there a limit to how much the administration likes them.
