Why are my cpuspeed governor settings getting discarded?

Issue

The cpuspeed program can be used to forcefully set particular scaling governor on system cpus. This is accomplished by editing /etc/sysconfig/cpuspeed and setting the GOVERNOR option, i.e.:

GOVERNOR="performance"

Upon reboot, the setting is applied for a short while but then discarded. Following can be seen in the messages file:

2016-10-10T11:05:18.474871+02:00,myhost,cpuspeed:,user,info, Disabling performance cpu frequency scaling governor
2016-10-10T11:05:18.824057+02:00,myhost,cpuspeed:,user,info, Enabling performance cpu frequency scaling governor
2016-10-10T11:05:20.290944+02:00,myhost,RTCTL:,user,notice, turning cpuspeed off
2016-10-10T11:05:20.306634+02:00,myhost,cpuspeed:,user,info, Disabling performance cpu frequency scaling governor