The proposed human capital system is designed to be aligned with the department's mission requirements and is intended to protect the civil service rights of DHS employees. Many of the basic principles underlying the DHS regulations are consistent with proven approaches to strategic human capital management, including several approaches pioneered by GAO, and deserve serious consideration. However

GAO noted that: (1) the excepted service is not really a coherent "service" so much as a residual category covering all the many federal entities and groups of employees that are not part of the competitive service or the Senior Executive Service; (2) based on available data, this study portrays the distribution of excepted service employees across government, but with some significant omissions-

GAO discussed some of the issues surrounding the future of the federal civil service. GAO noted that: (1) Congress has periodically updated its provisions in response to changing conditions; (2) reforming the current civil service system involves creating a system that meets the requirements of the current workplace and is flexible enough to respond to future demands; (3) private-sector employers

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed whether the President's fiscal year (FY) 1996 budget complies with the workforce ceiling mandated by the Workforce Restructuring Act of 1994. GAO noted that: (1) in FY 1994, full time equivalent (FTE) civilian executive branch positions were below the target level; (2) in FY 1995, FTE positions will likely be fewer than the FY 1995 target; (3) the

GAO discussed the impact of the President's economic plan on federal employees. GAO noted that: (1) the government needs to attract and retain employees of high caliber to meet the challenges facing the government; (2) it has identified the importance of federal pay reform to attract and retain quality employees; (3) the President's proposals represent a reversal of positive steps taken to addres

GAO noted that: (1) to attract and retain a high-quality work force, the government must sustain the initiatives begun in the last 4 years and respond to other emerging issues; (2) federal managers do not always have the flexibility, systems, or processes they need to downsize the federal work force effectively; and (3) issues facing the federal government include modernizing employment practices

GAO found that: (1) a number of obstacles existed that would likely frustrate prospective applicants and perhaps discourage pursuit of federal employment; (2) multiple telephone calls were required to reach FJIC; (3) calls were connected on the first try in only 18 of 43 attempts, and in 6 cases calls never got through; (4) FJIC were clean and organized, but small, sparsely furnished, and uninvit

GAO found that: (1) OIG reasons for deleting the expert appointment references stemmed from concerns about premature reporting and misunderstandings among OIG staff; (2) the evidence did not indicate that OIG omitted the reference to deliberately conceal internal problems; (3) in the future, OIG plans to not include an assessment of its own operations when auditing State; (4) State's Bureau of Pe

GAO found that: (1) 8 of 10 agencies did not report 34 of 87 conversions; (2) the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Transportation had no unreported conversions; (3) the Department of Health and Human Services failed to report 16 conversions and the Department of Defense had 6 unreported conversions; and (4) the Environmental Protection Agency indicated that it reported one convers

GAO found that: (1) 38 agencies reported no appointments; (2) 22 agencies reported 77 conversions, with the Department of Education reporting 14, the largest number of conversions; and (3) 68 of the 77 conversions were competitive appointments and 9 were noncompetitive.