The Pentagon last week unveiled its plans to push 65,000 civil service employees into the new performance-based pay system under the National Security Personnel System. Several unions immediately lined up to challenge the action in court. Members of a coalition led by the American Federation of Government Employees say they will file a lawsuit this month to block DOD’s plan for reorganizing labor and management relations, according to the Washington Post. The unions point to the fact that a federal judge has blocked implementation of similar rules at the Department of Homeland Security. The federal government developed the new personnel plan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when officials successfully argued that they needed to be able to manage the civilian work force according to mission requirements and not by bureaucratic imperatives.
The Air Force awarded a $13.08 billion contract to the Sierra Nevada Corporation on April 26 for its Survivable Airborne Operations Center aircraft, the successor to the service’s E-4B “Doomsday” plane. Like the E-4B, officially called the National Airborne Operations Center, the SAOC will be meant to withstand a nuclear attack and keep…