It's just telling that you've got an authoritarian playbook that sort of, at every pass, seems to be more focused on driving up corporate profits at the expense of the American people.
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Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy
responsibility and improved management. It is essential that political executives
build policy goals directly into employee appraisals both for mission success and
for employees to know what is expected. Indistinguishable from their coworkers
on paper, hard-working federal employees often go unrewarded for their efforts
and are often the system’s greatest critics. Federal workers who are performing
inadequately get neither the benefit of an honest appraisal nor clear guidance on
how to improve. Political executives should take an active role in supervising performance appraisals of career staff, not unduly delegate this responsibility to senior
career managers, and be willing to reward and support good performers.
Merit Pay. Performance appraisal means little to daily operations if it is not tied directly to real consequences for success as well as failure. According to asurvey of major U.S. private companies—which, unlike the federal government, also have a profit-and-loss evaluation—90 percent use a system of merit pay for performance based on some type of appraisal system. Despite early efforts to institute merit pay throughout the federal government, however, compensation is still based primarily on seniority rather than merit.
Merit pay for executives and managers was part of the Carter reforms and was implemented early in the Reagan presidency. Beginning in the summer of 1982, the Reagan OPM entered 18 months of negotiations with House and Senate staff on extending merit pay to the entire workforce. Long and detailed talks between the OPM and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress ensued, and a final agreement was reached in 1983 that supposedly ensured the passage of legislation creating anew Performance Management and Recognition System (PMRS) for all, (not just management) GS-13 through GS-15 employees.
Meanwhile, the OPM issued regulations to expand the role of performance related to pay throughout the entire workforce, but congressional allies of the employee unions, led by Representative Steny Hoyer (D) of government employeerich Maryland, stoutly resisted this extension of pay-for-performance and, with strong union support, used the congressional appropriations process to block OPM administrative pay reforms. Bonuses for SES career employees survived, but performance appraisals became so high and widely distributed that there was little relationship between performance and remuneration.
Ever since the original merit pay system for federal managers (GM-13 through GM-15 grade levels, just below the SES) was allowed to expire in September 1993, little to nothing has been done either to reinstate the federal merit pay program for managers or to distribute performance rating evaluations for the SES, much less to extend the program to the remainder of the workforce. A reform-friendly President and Congress might just provide the opportunity to create a more comprehensive performance plan; in the meantime, however, political executives should use existing pay and especially fiscal awards strategically to reward good performance to the degree allowed by law.