All the talk about the need to transform the civil service has Doris Hausser, senior policy adviser to the director of the Office of Personnel Management, a bit perplexed.

The civil-service system is built on enduring core values, Hausser said, which are in no need of transformation. “When you read the wording of the merit system principles, they make sense for the 21st century,” Hausser said.

It’s what Hausser called the mechanics—the nuts and bolts such as pay schedules—of the civil-service system that need to be updated for this century. For example, the design of the General Schedule pay system was right for 1950, but it’s out of sync with 2006, she said.

Yet the abiding principles of the civil-service system, such as fairness and service, are timeless, Hausser said.

And Hausser knows a thing or two about service. “I come from a long line of clergy people, so I’ve always been comfortable with the notion of service,” she said.

Hausser earned a Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, where she did research on organizational behavior and survey methodology.

Her first foray into government service was a research project on organizational development for the Social Security Administration. Now in her 30th year at OPM, Hausser has seen management trends come and go.

According to Hausser, OPM is heeding the lessons of the past by applying them to the Working for America Act, the merit-based pay system proposed by the Bush administration. Often when Hausser raises the issue of pay for performance, people say, “Haven’t we done this before and it failed?” Usually they are referring to discarded personnel systems such as the Performance Management and Recognition System, a merit pay system for mid-level managers, which lasted less than a decade.

“There are features in the Working for America Act that directly respond to the dilemmas and mistakes of the past,” Hausser said. “We’re in a very different place now.”

There’s no doubt that federal service needs to become more flexible, Hausser said. But flexibility does not mean chaos. On the contrary, “flexible systems actually have lots of rules and rigor,” she said. People worry “that if you allow flexibility, then everything will be all willy-nilly. But that’s not so.”