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Washington, D.C.—The head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today welcomed the decision by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to delay, until May 18, the effective date of a regulation abolishing the time-in-grade rule impacting promotions.

An OPM regulation had made elimination of the rule effective March 9, but last month NTEU submitted a formal request to OPM to delay that effective date.

“This delay, which will give the new director of OPM time to reexamine elimination of the time-in-grade rule, is a positive first step,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley. Earlier this week, President Obama nominated John Berry as director of OPM.

Under current time-in-grade rules, employees in competitive service General Schedule positions at grades 5 and above must serve 52 weeks in a grade before becoming eligible for promotion to the next grade level.

President Kelley reiterated her serious concerns, previously expressed to OPM under the Bush administration but ignored, that there is “the very real potential for abuse if promotions are made in an entirely subjective fashion.”

In a Feb. 6 letter to the acting head of OPM seeking a delay in line with an Office of Management and Budget directive the day after the Obama administration took office, the NTEU leader was sharply critical of a regulation “promulgated in the waning days of the Bush Administration.”

That move, she said, was nothing more than “a transparent final effort by the prior administration to impose pay banding and pay for performance on the civil service.”

Any such systemic change to civil service rules must be undertaken “in a more measured fashion,” and must be accompanied by appropriate guidance and safeguards against abuse. NTEU did not believe the OPM change contained appropriate and effective safeguards.

Kelley added: “The merit system is vulnerable to manipulation and abuse: many managers are not well-trained, and pay or promotion schemes instituted without training, objective criteria, and adequate oversight can lead—and have led—to favoritism, nepotism and actual illegal discrimination."

She added: “Protection against even the perception of a subjective and biased system is essential to winning the confidence of employees that they will be treated fairly. Where that perception becomes a reality, the entire civil service suffers irreparable damage.”

The NTEU leader noted that prior to this delay, the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, along with other agencies, had notified NTEU of their intent to move ahead with implementation of this change on March 9. The agencies will now have to roll back those plans, she said.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.