The Pentagon plans a thorough overhaul of personnel policies for its civilian employees, affecting everything from how they are recruited through how they are paid and advanced — and disciplined.

While certain changes likely would take many months or years to put in place — many of them requiring changes in law — some are within the department’s existing authority and could get started soon.

The “pre-decisional” document was released Tuesday by the American Federation of Government Employees, one of several unions that received it at a recent routine meeting with Defense Department officials to discuss labor-management issues. The changes it seeks would be anything but routine, however, and would represent the most significant attempt to change federal personnel practices since early in the George W. Bush administration.

At that time, Congress enacted the National Security Personnel System, which carved out a separate set of policies for DoD in many of the same areas, in particular by more strongly emphasizing performance in pay, advancement and retention, and by giving management more leeway in taking discipline. The NSPS system took several years to set up but was repealed in 2009, largely due to opposition from unions.

The new plan is “nothing more than a bad flashback,” American Federation of Government Employees National President J. David Cox Sr. said in a statement.

“NSPS was so discriminatory and harmful to the workforce that it was repealed by Congress less than two years after taking effect,” Cox said. “This was one of the most spectacular failures in personnel management, and we object to these proposals being repackaged and sold to us again.”

DoD is the largest single employer of federal employees, accounting for about 750,000 of the 2.1 million apart from the self-funding U.S. Postal Service. Changes to personnel policies there can set precedent for expansion to the rest of the government.

When the NSPS law was repealed, Congress ordered DoD to explore less contentious ways of meeting some of those same goals. That process is continuing, with one idea to be tested soon being to use a standard three-level rating system, AFGE said. However, it added, the latest proposal is separate from that process and will be the subject of further labor-management meetings soon.

One effort that the document anticipates to begin Oct. 1 would be to assess how several alternative systems still operating in the department that feature “increased flexibility to compensate and promote talented employees” could be applied more widely. Carrying that out would require a change in law, though, as would related plans to pay higher salaries in the medical, science, technical and math fields, and to double the maximum amount of retention allowances to 50 percent of salary.

Also, DoD said it will support legislation to make performance the first factor in deciding who stays or goes when jobs are being cut through a process called reduction in force. Currently, performance is the last factor, behind the type of appointment, veterans’ preference and length of service. A similar proposal is pending in the Senate version of the DoD budget.

Meanwhile, the maximum that could be paid in buyouts to encourage employees to retire or quit voluntarily would rise from $25,000 to $40,000, and managers would have more leeway in offering those incentives.

The plan also supports changing the law governing employees’ appeal rights when disciplined, which the document calls “time consuming, labor intensive, procedurally complex, and emotionally draining.”

Under the proposal, management could immediately suspend an employee without pay if it believes the employee’s performance or conduct might merit demotion or firing. The employee would have only seven days to respond, and if management carries out the discipline the employee then would have only seven more days to file an appeal. A new office would be created to advise management on how to take disciplinary actions that would stand up on appeal.

In addition, the standard probationary period — during which employees generally lack any appeal rights — would increase from one year to two.

Another provision that would require a change in law would move all employees who are not eligible to be in union bargaining units — about a fifth of the workforce, including supervisors and managers — into what is called the “excepted service.” That would give the department more freedom in pay setting based on the market value of the job, and allow for advancement only due to the person’s qualifications and performance, rather than on longevity.

The plan also calls for creating 18 weeks of paid parental leave for birth mothers, and 12 for their spouses and partners, as well as for adoption. Parents also would be entitled to work part-time for the first year afterward.

The proposal describes that change as achievable through a rewrite of rules, which would be within an agency’s powers. However, all proposals for creating paid parental leave for federal workers have arisen through proposed legislation — including in a Senate bill offered Tuesday to authorize six weeks for all categories.

Several planned changes to hiring practices also would be within the department’s existing authority. These include greater outreach to the private sector and academia in seek of candidates; shortcut procedures for hiring those especially well qualified; and breaking off from the central hiring portal run by the Office of Personnel Management.