Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney yesterday said the path to saving a half-trillion each year lies with slashing federal jobs and pay, merging agencies, and cracking down on improper payments. Romney’s proposals largely reiterated planks in the platform the GOP adopted last month, and other proposals Romney and other Republicans have made in recent years. Romney, speaking to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles, said he wants to save $500 billion a year by: Cutting the federal workforce by 10 percent through attrition; Combining agencies and departments to reduce overhead; Stopping roughly $115 billion in improper payments made…
Browsing: pay gap
There’s been a slew of reports issued over the last three years comparing federal employees’ pay and benefits to private sector workers, and they’ve all come to some radically differing conclusions. Which one is right? Everyone, and no one, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office posted online Monday. GAO spent the last year digging into six reports on federal pay, and concluded that they “varied because they used different approaches, methods and data.” For example: The Congressional Budget Office, American Enterprise Institute, and Heritage Foundation all used a so-called “human capital approach” to compare federal and…
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s comment about “unfair” federal pay and benefits has raised the hackles of the two largest federal unions. The National Treasury Employees Union slammed Romney yesterday for going after middle-class federal workers. And today, American Federation of Government Employees President John Gage let loose with an even more cutting response: You know what’s really unfair? The specter of having a new boss who thinks so little about the work that you do that he can’t bother getting his facts straight before making the ridiculous and patently false claim that federal workers are “getting better pay and…
Now that Mitt Romney has all but locked up the GOP presidential nomination, he’s turning his focus to the general election against President Obama. And if his comments last night are any indication, your pay and benefits are going to be a hot topic between now and November: I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. […] This America is fundamentally fair. We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will…
The Heritage Foundation today hosted a panel discussion on the public-private pay gap that didn’t really touch on a whole lot that hasn’t already been hashed out over the last several months. But it did yield this interesting exchange in response to a reporter’s question about the Obama administration’s claims that stimulus dollars saved state and local government jobs: Chris Edwards, Cato Institute: ‘What’s wrong with layoffs of state and local government workers? … Recessions create a sort of weeding out in the private sector, where companies lay off the least efficient workers, and then they’re ready to grow again…
OPM Director John Berry earlier today, on the chances for resolving the ongoing brouhaha over federal pay: I’ve been in this business 25 years, and in 1985, the same ideological argument was drawn. I don’t expect any sort of kumbaya moment where suddenly this 25-year battle is drawn to a conclusion. I think we might have a better shot at Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton succeeding in the Middle East.
I’ve had the nagging feeling lately that this never-ending debate over federal salaries is, deep down, really just a Rorschach test for how someone feels about the government. And the Cato Institute’s latest blog on the subject has some interesting comments that lend credence to my theory. Cato budget analyst Tad DeHaven on Tuesday fired back at OPM Director John Berry’s recent assertions that Cato and other federal critics are playing fast and loose with the facts to support their political viewpoints. DeHaven goes over some familiar points — federal perks and benefits are much more generous than in the…
Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry released a statement last night disagreeing with recent stories that find federal employees are paid vastly more than employees in the private sector. Berry’s arguments largely track with points made by other OPM officials Friday afternoon. Here’s Berry’s full statement: Recent press stories regarding pay for Federal employees compared to private sector workers are unfair and untrue. Simply put, these stories have compared apples to oranges. Federal workers are not paid double the private sector. The Cato Institute and USA Today stories quoting Cato staff (and similar statements from the Heritage Foundation) look…
The Office of Personnel Management today refuted the findings of a recent USA Today story that found federal employees earn far more than employees in the private sector — and doubled down on the government’s current pay gap method that finds government employees earn 22 percent less on average than their private-sector counterparts. The points they laid out in this afternoon’s hastily-arranged press conference should be familiar to anyone who’s been following the issue in recent months. USA Today’s findings don’t compare like jobs, OPM pointed out, or people with equivalent skills and levels, in the same geographic areas –…
According to the Pay Agent — a top-level interagency council that advises the president on federal pay policy matters — federal employees earn anywhere between 27% and 69% less than their non-federal counterparts, depending on where they work. Each year, these pay gap figures, which are derived from Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys, are used to calculate the locality pay increases given to federal employees. But other studies indicate those pay gap figures are off the mark and that any pay gap is in favor of feds. This week, compensation expert Howard Risher writes in Federal Times that, in fact,…