Report - Government Executive

programs applicable to the intelligence community…” 15 President George W. Bush signed the
IRTPA into law in December 2004.
Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission
In February 2004, President Bush signed an Executive Order creating the Commission on the
Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, more
widely known as the WMD Commission. 16 The commission studied the intelligence failures that
led to the IC’s conclusions prior to the March 2003 initiation of Operation Iraqi Freedom that
Iraq had been developing WMDs.
The WMD Commission recommended that the DNI establish a central HR authority for the IC;
create a uniform system for performance evaluations and compensation; develop a more
comprehensive and creative set of performance incentives; direct a “joint” personnel rotation
system; and establish a National Intelligence University. 17
National Intelligence Civilian Compensation Program
Based on guidance provided by the 9/11 and WMD Commissions, the ODNI developed a
Strategic Human Capital Plan in 2006 that identified the major challenges to building a strong IC
human resources program. These challenges included:
• Hyper-competition in the war for talented employees’
• Insufficient diversity as the IC did not keep pace with the nation’s increasingly diverse
civilian labor force;
• An imbalanced workforce where years of tight budgets and constrained hiring resulted in
disproportionate concentrations of employees within two groups: relatively new (post-
9/11) recruits and retirement-eligible employees;
• Generation gaps with new hires seeking a different balance between work and family, job
and career; and
• Competition with contractors that recruit IC employees, then “lease” them back to the
federal government at considerably greater expense.
ODNI officials concluded that the GS pay system, created in the 1940s, was inadequate to meet
the challenges that the IC now faced. Among other things, ODNI believed that the IC workforce
had changed significantly since the system did not align with modern notions of performancebased
compensation. Clerks who rarely changed jobs or positions had been replaced by highly
skilled and specialized knowledge workers who were more mobile. Further, the GS system
15
Ibid.
16 Executive Order 13328, Feb. 6, 2004.
17 The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Report to the President of the United States, Mar. 31, 2005, p. 321,.
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