Conflict is brewing at the
Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a Department of Defense component which
employs roughly 2,000 people and is charged with the task of eliminating weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) in the former Soviet Union, creating blast-proof
building designs, and developing new WMD early detection devices.
Employees at DTRA are upset over
the recent promotion of a safety officer to head the Agency's Environmental,
Safety, and Occupational Health (ESOH) Office. They contend that to lead
this group of scientists, engineers, and physicians, the Chief should have
knowledge of all subject areas - especially in the environmental sciences -
given the complexity of DTRA's programs.
Office politics seems to be
playing a heavy hand. The safety officer, who will remain unnamed, was
promoted from a GS-13 to the Office's Deputy Chief, a position that was created
six months prior to her promotion and appointment. After another six
months passed, the officer was promoted to the Office Chief position, a GS-15
slot. Interestingly, no one has been assigned to the Deputy Chief
position as of yet.
We've also been told both Chief
position descriptions failed to include an environmental requirement, which
both precluded the ESOH Environmental Branch Chief from being eligible for the
position and ensured environmental experience would not factor into the hiring
decision.
The ESOH Office Chief supervises
DTRA's Command Surgeon - the head physician in charge of medical aspects of the
Agency - as well as the assistant Command Surgeon, the Environmental Branch
Chief, the Chief of Staff, an environmental contractor, and a team of safety
and radiation health professionals. The background of the recently
promoted Office Chief includes only safety training.
Turnover among Officer Chiefs at
DTRA has been as high as 50% in two years. Rumors indicate
dissatisfaction with the senior leaders in the Business Enterprise as the
reason for the high turnover. Yet DTRA's Director seems content with the
situation, as information about the turnovers and conflicts behind them seem
never to make their way to top levels of the Agency.
DTRA was one of the first DoD
agencies to adopt the new pay-for-performance system, the National Security
Personnel System (NSPS), and many employees - including those who left the
agency - have expressed discontent with the abuse of new powers granted to
managers at DTRA under NSPS. A recent survey of the 950 employees at DTRA
who converted to the NSPS system revealed a "high level of dissatisfaction
with both NSPS and its implementation."
The survey's executive summary,
despite being thoroughly scrubbed of numbers indicating anything negative,
concluded the following:
Survey responses and comments
addressed a wide range of issues and concerns about NSPS and its implementation
at DTRA. Respondents expressed dissatisfaction with ratings, the pay pool
process, and the NSPS performance management system in general. Terms
such as “favoritism,” “mistrust,” “unfair,” “personality-driven,”
“unacceptable,” “inadequate,” “inefficient,” were used frequently to describe
and or characterize NSPS.
OhMyGov! is in the process of
obtaining the full survey - the executive summary reports only survey results
beginning with question number 39 - and will report more in the future.
For now, we redirect the
question to our audience: Is it appropriate for a safety professional with no
environmental background and no doctoral degree to head an ESOH office full of
doctors, scientists, and engineers?
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