Democrats encourage DHS to pay bonuses

When it comes to paying bonuses, DHS is not exactly Goldman Sachs. Or at least so say Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee, which in a recently issued departmental report card noted that DHS does not have in place a sufficient progrom of recognizing the contributions of front-line and nonsupevisory personnel. The solution, the Democrats suggested, is to delay bonuses for upper-level managers and Senior Executive Service employees and instead use that money to reward those closer to the bottom of the ladder. Not that DHS. “Given the department’s congressionally authorized flexibility in the personnel area,” they explained, “it has the opportunity to implement a novel approach to recognize and award front-line and other nonsupervisory employees.”

Not that DHS accepts the criticism. “I’m unclear what [the committee] is driving at there,” said DHS spokesman Russ Knocke. “We already have that” — referring to an employee compensation program. The House committee also noted a number of other personell problem, including a shortage of contracting staff,

the “lack of a financial management system that can give timely, critical insight into all levels of department expenditures,” and a recent attempt at department reorganization that deprived employees of their collective bargaining rights. (A court later struck down those provisions.) Considering all this, it is no wonder DHS ranked near the bottom in a 2006 Office of Personnel Management federal workforce survey.