Moving Beyond NSPS

President Obama on Wednesday signed into law the fiscal 2010 Defense Authorization Act, a bill that includes several federal workforce provisions. One provision fully repeals the Defense's Department's controversial National Security Personnel System, meaning the thousands of employees who are currently hired, evaluated and paid based on the system will move back to the decades-old General Schedule by 2012.

In my time at Government Executive, NSPS was one of my favorite topics, and it was probably the most-read topic among my readers. NSPS was designed to provide Defense managers more flexibility in hiring, promoting and paying employees -- a concept that, on the surface, seems necessary to compete with the private sector and retain top-notch employees. But Defense civilian personnel had mixed perceptions of the system, and federal unions contended that the system was a failure. There's little doubt that reform of the General Schedule is still necessary, however, and I'm not convinced that a repeal of NSPS means that personnel reform is over for Defense or the government as a whole. I'm interested to hear from you all -- especially IT workers at Defense -- on how the government should pick up the lessons learned from NSPS and move forward on personnel reform. Recruiting, hiring and retaining information technology professionals is one of the most critical areas for government to focus on both now and in the future - can the General Schedule accomplish this goal?