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Washington—The leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers today sharply criticized as “counter-productive and fatally flawed” an administration proposal to expand throughout the government elements of the personnel rules it is seeking to implement in both the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense (DoD).

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said the administration proposal has two major failings. The system fails to ensure a fair and objective compensation system and goes well beyond establishing a so-called pay for performance system to stripping collective bargaining rights and employee appeal rights.

The administration is seeking to move ahead despite the lack of any evidence that further changes to the country’s long-standing civil service system would be effective for federal agencies or taxpayers, Kelley said—and even as senior members of Congress are urging a go-slow approach in expanding to virtually all agencies policies that would significantly curtail employee collective bargaining, due process and appeal rights.

What’s more, Kelley noted that just last week DHS decided to delay by two weeks implementation of new DHS regulations until a legal challenge led by NTEU can be ruled on by a federal judge.

Kelley said that there is no basis for implementing such sweeping changes to the basic pay system and that federal agencies are ill-prepared to move to a new pay-for-performance system that requires their managers to evaluate employees fairly, make objective compensation decisions and holds them accountable for those decisions.

“The broad pay proposal the administration wants to impose would largely mimic that which has been suggested for DHS,” Kelley said even though the DHS system is still largely undefined. NTEU is strenuously opposed to expanding this still unproven system.

For example, she said, under the likely DHS system, an employee can do everything asked of him or her, and still find there is no guarantee of an annual pay adjustment of any kind if agency funding is not provided or the agency diverts funding for another purpose.

Further, the union leader said, a key requirement of any effective pay system is that it contains a mechanism to ensure its fairness. In the private sector, that is done by collective bargaining, she said, while the federal sector accomplishes that by statute. “We believe it has to be one or the other,” Kelley said.

“If basic federal pay is going to be changed, then unions need the right to bargain over pay,” the NTEU president said. NTEU has successfully bargained basic pay systems with federal employers that have the right to depart from Title 5 pay provisions.