42 U.S.C. § 237 — Silvio O. Conte Senior Biomedical Research and Biomedical Product Assessment Service

(a) Creation; number of members: The Public Health Service gets a "Silvio O. Conte Senior Biomedical Research and Biomedical Product Assessment Service" (called "the Service"), capped at 2,000 members, meant to recruit and keep top experts in biomedical research, clinical research evaluation, and biomedical product assessment. Creating the Service does not force the Secretary to cut jobs elsewhere to make room for it. The Secretary assigns Service members to agencies based on where their expertise is needed. (b) Appointments; qualifications; provisions inapplicable to members: The Secretary appoints Service members without following the normal Title 5 federal-hiring rules. Members must be outstanding in their field, and must hold either a doctoral degree in biomedicine or a related field, or a doctoral or master's degree in engineering, bioinformatics, or a related emerging field, and must meet the qualification standards for a GS-15 position. Several normal federal-employee protections and rules - on retention preference, performance actions, job classification, General Schedule pay rates, and adverse actions - do not apply to Service members. (c) Performance appraisal system: The Secretary must create a system to regularly review members' performance and encourage them to excel. (d) Pay of members: The Secretary sets each member's pay, but it cannot be less than the minimum GS-15 rate, and cannot exceed the executive pay cap set in section 102 of title 3. (e) Career and noncareer appointment of certain individuals: If a member is separated from the Service involuntarily and without cause, the Secretary can appoint that person to a GS-15 competitive civil-service job, which counts as a career appointment. But if that person was not already a career or Senior Executive Service employee before joining the Service, the new appointment is in the excepted service and can last no more than two years. (f) Rules and regulations: The Secretary can issue any rules needed to efficiently run the Service, as long as they do not conflict with this section.