The exemption of the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense from key provisions of Title 5 of the United States Code in 2002–2003 was among the most radical changes to the civil service system in decades.1 The civil service has long been characterized by a relatively consistent set of employment rules across agencies.

The exemption of the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense from key provisions of Title 5 of the United States Code in 2002–2003 was among the most radical changes to the civil service system in decades.1 The civil service has long been characterized by a relatively consistent set of employment rules across agencies.
2 The intent was to create a sense of cohesion within the workforce and to counteract centrifugal tendencies. Although there had been occasional, small-scale exemptions to this policy over the decades, the creation of the MaxHR system at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002 and the National Security Personnel System at the Department of Defense (DoD) in 2003 represented exemptions of such magnitude as to represent a change in the system itself.
DHS and DoD include a combined 46% of all civilian federal employees (Congressional Research Service 2011). Thus, when these agencies were exempted from portions of the Title 5 rules relating to compensation, performance management, and labor-management relations, it appeared to signal the demise of the traditional civil service model and the triumph of a “strategic” approach to HRM in which each agency would be allowed to customize HRM policies to the agency’s specific mission and strategy (Thompson 2006). However, such predictions proved to be premature. A coalition of federal employee unions successfully challenged both programs in court, and Congress subsequently withdrew authorization, leaving the pre-2002 status quo substantially in place.
Union opposition to the National Security Personnel System (NSPS) and MaxHR was provoked primarily by the proposed labor-management relations provisions, which would have narrowed the scope of issues subject to collective bargaining and provided for agency-specific and management-controlled labor-relations boards to resolve collective bargaining disputes (Thompson 2007a). A coalition of federal employee unions sued to stop implementation of MaxHR on the grounds that those rules would deny employees their statutory right to bargain over working conditions. The courts sided with the unions and forced DHS back to the drawing board. By the time the court case was resolved in 2006, the political landscape had shifted. Members of both parties in Congress called upon the department to consult with the unions on the terms of a new system. The department instead decided to put the entire initiative on hold while retaining the traditional Title 5 personnel rules. The few HRM changes that have been made at DHS since have been incremental rather than radical in nature.

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