Federal Personnel Management

The National Performance Review (NPR), the Administration's major management reform initiative, seeks to make government work better and cost less. Legislation enacted in response to NPR recommendations calls for cutting nearly 273,000 federal jobs during fiscal years 1994-99. Most of this workforce reduction is expected to come from administrative functions, such as human resources. Some of NPR's recommendations involve delegating authority for personnel decisions from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to individual agencies. For example. NPR recommends that OPM abolish its central hiring registers and authorized agencies to establish their own recruitment and examining programs. Concerns have been raised about whether human resource offices in federal agencies could handle more responsibilities from OPM, especially when those offices may be facing staff cuts. Concerns had also been raised about additional flexibility leading to more violations of civil service laws. This report discusses (1) whether human resource officials favor the recommendations, (2) if these officials believed that they have the capacity to assume the additional responsibility envisioned by NPR, and (3) what oversight is anticipated by OPM and agencies to ensure accountability for merit system principles.

GAO found that: (1) although human resource officials generally favor the flexibility that decentralization would give them and their agency managers, they believe that NPR recommendations would add to their overall workload; (2) NPR has recommended that OPM develop a new oversight process to ensure compliance with the merit principles within a deregulated and flexible environment; (3) most human resource officials believe that their agencies could adequately oversee their own human resource operations, but some federal agencies do not have a performance measurement system to judge the outcomes of their operations; and (4) OPM is working with agency human resource offices to develop a set of performance indicators to assist them in monitoring their activities.