Pay-for-Performance: The 110th & 111th Congress - Hearings & Legislation, CONGRESS & LAW blogspot.com - January 30 & 31, 2010
110th Hearings: Committees in both congressional chambers continued to hold hearings on performance-based-pay systems, with a focus on NSPS. Some common themes throughout the hearings were DOD employees’ mistrust of the system and concerns over how much time the agency would need to fully implement NSPS…
110th Legislation: On January 28, 2008, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 was enacted (P.L. 110-181). The statute modified certain elements of NSPS, requiring DOD to award every NSPS employee who received a satisfactory rating at least 60% of the pay increase given to GS employees…

111th Hearings: On April 1, 2009, the House Committee on Armed Services held a hearing to discuss the future of NSPS.
111th Legislation: Both the House and Senate included language to eliminate NSPS in their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (H.R. 2647, introduced on June 2, 2009; S. 1390, introduced on July 2, 2009). The defense authorization act’s conference report (H.R. 2647, H.Rept. 111-288), in Section 1113, also included these provisions. Pursuant to the legislation, NSPS will be eliminated by 2012, and DOD would begin removing employees from the pay system six months after the October 28, 2009, enactment of the bill. DOD employees currently in NSPS will be returned to the GS or to whichever pay scale they were on prior to their transition into NSPS. Moreover, the bill required DOD to ensure that no employee’s pay would be reduced as a result of the elimination of NSPS. The bill also afforded the Secretary of Defense the authority to establish a “Department of Defense Civilian Workforce Incentive Fund,” from which agency officials could provide additional pay incentives to individual employees or employee teams “for purposes of the employment and retention as employees of qualified individuals with particular competencies or qualifications.”
On October 7, 2009, House and Senate conferees reported a version of the National Defense Authorization Bill for Fiscal Year 2010 that included language to terminate NSPS. On October 8, 2009, the House agreed to the conference report. The Senate agreed to the conference report on October 22, 2009. On October 28, 2009, the President signed the bill into law.