Despite genuine efforts at deregulation, there's a sense among many human resources officials and managers that the benefit brought by the FPM's elimination has been at least partially offset by new requirements. For example, as OPM noted in its July report, they complain about regulations related to the Interagency Career Transition Assistance Plan, a program designed to help displaced federal workers find new government jobs. Some also say new family-oriented policies have brought more complexity to the system. An even greater complaint involves new requirements created by union-management partnership agreements forged under a 1993 executive order. Woolner says managers are not adequately represented at the partnership negotiating table.
New requirements are especially burdensome at agencies that have resisted change altogether.
According to Lachance, some agencies simply have kept their versions of the FPM, in effect holding on to the old bureaucracy. More than 20 percent of human resources directors surveyed by OPM said their agencies had added rules, policies and practices since the FPM was abolished. But not until the dawn of the reinvention era did OPM make it a priority to urge agencies, especially those that had never delegated personnel authority, to pass more control down the chain of command. Still, of the more than 100 possible general delegations, most have been for things such as staffing, training and performance management, with relatively little for classification or disciplinary actions. In other words, managers still don't have as much control as they'd like over staff salaries or poor performers.