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Washington, D.C.—The leader of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today strongly urged Congress to take a thorough and considered approach to currently fast-moving legislation proposed by the Department of Defense (DoD) that would make sweeping changes in the agency’s personnel system without adequate congressional oversight or input from the military or civilian DoD employees who will be subject to these changes.

In comprehensive testimony on personnel issues before the House Government Affairs Committee, NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley called the proposed Defense Transformation for the 21st Century Act “an unprecedented proposal that goes far beyond” even the untested flexibilities in legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“Giving unfettered authority to the Secretary of Defense to constantly alter personnel rules is ludicrous,” Kelley said. “It is nothing less than an abdication of congressional responsibility, and it turns a blind eye to the possible effects such sweeping authority may have on military or civilian Defense Department employees.” NTEU, she said, “is at a loss to understand exactly what problems DoD is attempting to fix.”

“I urge this committee to slow this train down and work with both DoD and the federal employee unions to determine exactly what flexibilities the department needs, why it requires those flexibilities, and how the agency, Congress and the unions involved can best reach agreement on those

changes,” she said.

The legislation seeks to allow the Defense Secretary “to sidestep” the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and most congressional oversight in instituting a new, untested personnel system for civilian DoD employees that includes moving to a pay-for-performance scheme, Kelley said.

“NTEU questions where in the federal government—or, for that matter, in the private sector—pay for performance is working,” she said, offering a number of public and private sector examples of such plans that have failed to live up to expectations, had destroyed team-based efforts or had been abandoned as soon as they began costing money.

President Kelley attacked the proposed DoD legislation on a variety of fronts, including its grant of virtually unbridled authority to a Defense Secretary to reclassify, discipline, suspend, demote or dismiss employees “outside the tested and constitutionally sound procedures set up under current law.”

“If the goal is ultimately to eliminate all federal employees and contract out the entire Defense Department,” she said, “this is certainly a good step down that road.”

“After all,” the NTEU leader asked, “what employees are going to be interested in accepting a job or staying in a job when the rules regarding pay, performance evaluations, downsizing and collective bargaining are permanently subject to change on a moment’s notice, and at the whim of whoever currently occupies the position of Secretary of Defense?”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 29 agencies and departments.