The
Washington Post reports that the Bush Administration proposes reforming the way the Department of Homeland Security hires, promotes, and fires employees, effectively ending long-standing Civil Service criteria and introducing a "pay-for-performance" program.
Significantly, the WaPo states that the Administration plans to extend such reform to other Federal agencies. Neoconsolidation, anyone?
Performance management techniques have been used by the US government for decades, with VP Al Gore's National Performance Review being one of the most recent and highly publicized examples. The crucial question now is whether the Bush Administration's performance reform is not only aimed at reducing the power of labor unions and decreasing workers' rights (as the WaPo article suggests--see below), but also at instituting a top-to-bottom ideological overhaul of the Federal government.
WaPo's Christopher Lee reports:
Union officials have long contended that the administration's goal was to limit the influence of organized labor rather than to improve homeland security. They said yesterday that the new restrictions on collective bargaining go beyond legal bounds set by Congress in the 2002 law.
Yesterday, union leaders decried provisions that would curtail the power of labor unions by no longer requiring DHS officials to negotiate over such matters as where employees will be deployed, the type of work they will do and the equipment they will use. They also object to provisions that would limit the role of the independent Federal Labor Relations Authority and hand the job of settling labor-management disputes to an internal labor relations board controlled by the DHS secretary.
Again, my concern is that such reforms will be extended throughout the Federal government and that the new performance criteria may include ideological criteria, stated or unstated. In short, with the ending of the traditional Civil Service, the small cult Seymour Hersh describes may grow into a full-blown governing culture, if not religion. Neoconsolidation, everyone--or else!