DNI Directive Prescribes Evaluation of Employee Performance
The Director of National Intelligence has issued a new performance management policy (pdf) that will require regular evaluations of the performance of all U.S. intelligence community employees.
The new policy will include “the evaluation of IC employees on their results (in other words, ‘what’ they achieve)” as well as “the manner in which they achieved those results (in other words, ‘how’ they were accomplished).”
There will be “a clear linkage between an employee’s performance and compensation, rewards, promotion opportunities, and retention considerations. High performance will be recognized and reinforced. Substandard performance will be addressed and corrected. Employees who cannot or will not improve their performance to meet required expectations will be subject to appropriate action,” the DNI directive states.
See “Performance Management System Requirements for the Intelligence Community Civilian Workforce,” Intelligence Community Directive 651, November 28, 2007.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.