Intel Community Moves Towards Performance-Based Pay
The Director of National Intelligence last week issued several new Intelligence Community Directives (ICDs) that implement new community-wide personnel practices, including a performance-based compensation policy that rewards superior job performance.
The new payment policy “links performance-based pay increases and bonuses to individual accomplishments, demonstrated competencies, and contributions to organizational results.”
“Higher performance and greater contribution to mission should result in proportionally higher rewards for similarly-situated employees.”
The new payment and personnel policies, part of DNI J. Michael McConnell’s 100-day and 500-day plans, are intended to modernize the business practices of U.S. intelligence agencies and, implicitly, to make government service somewhat more competitive with intelligence contractors in the private sector.
The new personnel policies will also replace the standard government personnel grading system known as the General Schedule (GS) for all intelligence agency employees, except that senior officials at the GS-15 or higher grade are exempted.
The new IC Directives, all dated April 28, 2008, were released under the Freedom of Information Act. They include:
ICD 650, National Intelligence Civilian Compensation Program: Guiding Principles and Framework (pdf)
ICD 652, Occupational Structure for the Intelligence Community Civilian Workforce (pdf)
ICD 654, Performance-Based Pay for the Intelligence Community Civilian Workforce (pdf)
ICD 656, Performance Management System Requirements for Intelligence Community Senior Civilian Officers (pdf)
Copies of these and other IC Directives are available here.
The energy transition underway in the United States continues to present a unique set of opportunities to put Americans back to work through the deployment of new technologies, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and expansion of the electricity system to meet our carbon goals.
The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.
Despite an emerging awareness of the importance of state and local government innovation capacity, there is a shortage of plausible strategies to build that capacity.
Innovations in artificial intelligence and robotics will allow us to accelerate the search process using foundation AI models for science research and automate much of the experimentation with robotic, self-driving labs.