The Brief, Eventful History of the National Security Personnel System

Abstract

In early 2003 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attempted to transform civilian management in the Department of Defense by replacing the General Schedule (GS) system, the federal pay scale system that had governed most civil servants since 1949, with the new National Security Personnel System (NSPS). NSPS was a pay-for-performance system that established new regulations for civilian personnel compensation, promotion, discipline, reassignment, labor relations, and hiring. The system's creators within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) intended to give managers greater latitude to reward top performers with larger pay increases and bonuses than they had under the GS system. Because the Department of Defense employed about a third of all non-postal federal civilian personnel (roughly 660,000 civilians worked for DoD in 2003), NSPS was a significant challenge to the GS system that had implications far beyond the Defense Department. Rumsfeld's OSD successfully pushed the system through Congress but struggled to implement it effectively. At the system's zenith in 2009 over 200,000 civilians, less than one third of the total DoD workforce, were working under NSPS. After becoming a subject of great controversy, DoD wound down the system in the first years of Barack Obama's presidency.