Shameless self-promotion time: I’ll be on News Channel 8’s Federal News Tonight program this evening at 7:30 to talk about a few controversial issues we’ve been covering lately. I’ll first talk about Federal Times’ exclusive look at an upcoming report on problems with the intelligence community’s pay-for-performance system. And then we’ll discuss the growing controversy about federal pay raises and the Republican push to cut them to help balance the budget.
Browsing: pay raise
Margaret Baptiste, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, just put out a statement urging senators to oppose a spending bill amendment that would freeze federal salaries. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., want to cover the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan war spending by eliminating expenses such as federal civilian raises and bonuses. Their proposal — as well as a House bill also targeting the 2011 raise — would not affect military service members. Baptiste said: We believe it is wrong to single out federal workers for cuts that others serving our country are not…
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz, and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., today filed amendments to the Iraq and Afghanistan war supplemental spending bills that seek to offset its costs by cutting spending elsewhere — and feds aren’t going to like what they’ve got in mind. McCain and Coburn want to save about $2.6 billion by freezing federal employees’ raises, bonuses and other salary increases for one year. This comes on the heels of their House counterparts’ move to put federal raises on the chopping block as part of their YouCut program. They also seek to eliminate non-essential government travel ($10 billion over 10…
The federal government is borrowing too much and costs too much to run. If it were a private company, it would have cut employee salaries a long time ago to make ends meet, say two economists in a column for Forbes magazine. And that’s what the federal government needs to do to show it’s serious about fiscal responsibility and reducing the deficit, write economists Robert Stein and Brian Wesbury. If private companies operated like the federal government, creditors and analysts would have serious concerns about the companies’ fiscal health and reconsider doing business with them, they write. And with unemployment…
President Barack Obama signed a 3.4 percent pay raise for service members into law Monday, making 2010 one of a handful of recent years where civil servants and members of the military won’t receive the same raises. A spending omnibus signed recently by Obama gives federal employees a 2 percent raise. Obama said earlier this year that the economy made giving civilian employees the same raises as the military prohibitive. Unions have pledged to return pay parity in 2011. The military raise was included in the fiscal 2010 Defense appropriations bill, HR 3326.
President Barack Obama today sent a letter to Congress reiterating his call for a 2.0 percent pay raise for federal employees in January. Obama said that the ailing economy, increasing demands on the federal government and the ongoing terrorist threat are straining the federal budget. And since the federal government’s attrition continues to be relatively low, Obama said it will be tough to justify a larger pay raise. The letter is something of a formality. In the unlikely event that Congress forgets to pass a federal pay raise, last year’s increase in the Employment Cost Index (which was 2.9 percent) would automatically become the…
If you’re one of the 187,000Â employees under the Defense Department’s performance-based pay system, figuring out how much your raise is going to be next year is sort of like doing your taxes — only worse. There’s no Turbo Tax equivalent for the National Security Personnel System. Luckily (we think), the helpful folks at the Pentagon have just come out with a fact sheet that attempts to bring clarity to the complex pay formula that’s used to determine raises.