Toward “Flexible Uniformity”? Civil Service Reform, “Big Government Conservatism,” and the Promise of the Intelligence Community Model

Date01 December 2010
Published date01 December 2010
DOI10.1177/0734371X10381485
AuthorJames R. Thompson
Subject MatterArticles
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5ROPOP38148
Review of Public Personnel Administration
30(4) 423 –444
Toward “Flexible
© 2010 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Uniformity”? Civil
DOI: 10.1177/0734371X10381485
http://roppa.sagepub.com
Service Reform,
“Big Government
Conservatism,”
and the Promise
of the Intelligence
Community Model

James R. Thompson1
Abstract
As the Obama administration pieces together its own civil service reform program, it
may find solutions to key reform challenges in an oft-overlooked Bush administration
human resource management initiative in the national security arena. While press
and scholarly attention focused largely on the administration’s reform efforts at the
Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, discussed at length in the article
by Kellough, Nigro, and Brewer in this symposium, the development of a common
personnel framework across the U.S. Intelligence Community went relatively
unnoticed. The author argues that human resource management changes made
pursuant to the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 provide
a potential model for the Obama administration as it addresses three key reform
challenges that have long plagued policymakers: replacing the General Schedule
with a modernized approach to compensation and classification, achieving a balance
between uniformity at the executive branch level and flexibility at the agency level,
and reconfiguring the Senior Executive Service.
1University of Illinois, Chicago
Corresponding Author:
James R. Thompson, Department of Public Administration, University of Illinois, 412 S. Peoria Street, Rm
133, Urban Planning and Public Admin (MC278), Chicago, IL 60607-7064
Email: jthomp@uic.edu

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Review of Public Personnel Administration 30(4)
Keywords
civil service reform, strategic human capital management, Intelligence Reform and
Terrorism Prevention Act, broadbanding, performance-based pay
As the editors note in the introduction to this symposium, a key component of President
Bush’s “big government conservative” agenda for the United States came packaged as
a more assertive international presence. This came in the wake of 9/11, the Iraq invasion,
and the subsequent war on terrorism. And at the heart of these efforts was the need for
a robust intelligence effort to attenuate the stovepiping, lack of coordination, and fail
ures to communicate among national intelligence agencies that the 9/11 Commission
identified in its postmortem of the causes of the tragic events of that day (Zegart, 2009).1
In short order, a balkanized human resource management (HRM) system also was
identified as an obstacle to integration within the Intelligence Community (IC) and an
effort was launched in 2006 to create a common set of personnel rules across the com
munity. This initiative received much less attention, however, than did the HRM
reform efforts at the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and at
the Department of Defense (DoD) that Ed Kellough, Lloyd Nigro, and Gene Brewer
discuss in their article in this symposium. With the broad scope of change incorporated
in both the MaxHR system at DHS and the National Security Personnel System
(NSPS) at DoD, the numbers of federal employees affected, and the public contro
versy that surrounded both, MaxHR and NSPS came to represent the Bush administra
tion’s signature approach to civil service reform.
Thus, when in October 2009 President Obama signed the National Defense Auth
orization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, thereby repealing NSPS, and with the preceding
demise of the MaxHR system at DHS, the Bush administration’s civil service reform
legacy appeared to be one of “ashes.”2 However, just as David Rosenbloom suggests
in his article in this symposium that President Bush’s Supreme Court nominees and
their subsequent rulings will constitute an HRM legacy for the Bush administration, I
argue that the reform initiative within the IC may yet provide a more positive legacy
of the Bush years. Specifically, the promise of the Bush administration’s HRM effort to
fashion big government conservatism in the national security arena lies in its potential for
extending to the executive branch the IC’s federated approach to reconciling three key
challenges confronting wouldbe reformers of the civil service system: (a) replacing the
General Schedule (GS) with new rules for compensating and classifying federal employ
ees, (b) balancing the need for the standardization of pay and classification policies across
the government and a simultaneous need for the customization of those same policies at the
agency level, and (c) reconfiguring the Senior Executive Service (SES) to fulfill the origi
nal vision of a corps of generalists whose careers would span agency lines.
The article begins with an overview of the primary HRM challenges facing any new
administration in Washington. It then reviews the logic and tactics of the Bush admin
istration’s efforts to address these issues and summarizes why, according to conventional
wisdom, it failed. The article concludes by reviewing how and why specific efforts

Thompson
425
taken in the national security arena—in particular, the common personnel framework
developed within the IC subsequent to the passage of the Intelligence Reform and
Terrorism Prevention Act—provide a model for addressing the three key reform chal
lenges: replacing the GS, achieving a balance between uniformity and flexibility, and
reconfiguring the SES.
Civil Service Reform Challenges
A central challenge in reforming the federal civil service is that of deciding how pay
increases for federal employees should be apportioned, whether on the basis of lon
gevity, performance, or the market. A number of key oversight groups have argued
that individual performance be given greater weight in pay setting and that the tradi
tional GS should therefore be abandoned in favor of broadbanding. A second chal
lenge, related to the first, is that of the “balkanization” of the federal personnel
system. This occurred as individual agencies opted out of various Title 5 rules, includ
ing those governing compensation and classification, which have resulted in a patch
work of personnel systems across the government. A third challenge is to foster
greater cooperation and collaboration among members of the SES across agency lines.
The following dissects these three challenges and reviews and critiques several com
mon remedies that reform advocates have offered over the years.
The Obsolescence of the GS
The GS has long been criticized as an obsolete approach to classification and pay.
Problems with the GS most often cited by critics include: (a) the classification stan
dards at the heart of the system are outdated; (b) the 15grade system is overly com
plex, allowing technicians a disproportionate impact on personnel decisions; (c) the
system is relatively insensitive to the market; (d) the rigidities inherent in the system
are an impediment to change; and (e) the system leads to insufficient distinctions in
the pay levels of high and low performers.
In a 2002 report, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) identified the GS as
a “system whose time has come, and gone” (p. i). In the report, OPM noted that the GS
system is anchored in the Classification Act of 1949 and that at the time the law was
passed, “Over 70 percent of Federal whitecollar jobs consisted of clerical work . . . ”
(p. i). OPM added that although the GS worked well in a workforce that was predomi
nantly clerical, it is not well suited for a workforce in which “knowledge work” domi
nates and in which jobs are less well defined and distinguished (p. i).
A second argument for replacing the GS is that the excessive number of rules relat
ing to classification and paysetting leaves key management decisions in the hands of
staff personnel. A 1993 report on Reinventing Human Resource Management issued
by the National Performance Review concluded that the GS results in “fragmented
accountability”: “The GS classification system is difficult to understand and to use.

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Review of Public Personnel Administration 30(4)
This prevents managers—who actually best know the work being classified and its value
to the organization—from assuming the primary role in classifying jobs” (para. 12).
A third area of concern is that the rulebound and, hence, rigid nature of the GS
system becomes an impediment as organizations attempt structural change. Broadbanding
is more flexible in this regard. In its 1995 report, Modernizing Federal Classification:
Operational Broadbanding Systems Alternatives
, the National Academy of Public
Administration noted that, “Broader bands allow managers to shift their workforce to
new roles more easily. In the current rightsizing and downsizing mode, such flexibility
would be of great benefit” (p. 1). Broadbanding as an approach to classification and
compensation was first introduced as part of the “China Lake” demonstration project
in 1980.3 With broadbanding, multiple grades are combined into a single band, thus
expanding the range of salaries associated with any one position. Thus, whereas within
the GS a grade has a 30% range (i.e., a GS grade’s maximum rate equals 130% of its
minimum rate), bands often are as wide as 50%. Broadbanding obviates the need to
make fine distinctions in levels of job difficulty and responsibility, and as a result,
managers can play a larger role in classification decisions. Broadbanding...

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