House Tries to Block Obama’s Order to Raise Federal Salaries
WASHINGTON — When the Senate returns from the Presidents’ Day recess on Feb. 25, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will be eager to push through an Obama-approved solution to the March 1 sequestration and to surmount the block put on Chuck Hagel’s nomination for Defense secretary.
He won’t be eager to pick up a House bill passed Friday that would block an order by President Obama to give federal employees a pay hike — no matter where the budgetary chips may fall.
Civilian government workers have been under a pay freeze since 2011, but the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission recommended a three-year federal freeze as part of a comprehensive strategy to get the debt under control.
Never one to listen much to former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles or former Sen. Alan Simpson’s (R-Wyo.) recommendations, Obama ordered at the end of 2012 that federal workers be given a 0.5 percent raise on March 27, at the expiration of the current continuing resolution.
Freshman Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) responded with the pay-freeze extension that passed 261-154, including 43 Democrats.
“The bipartisan passage of this bill is a great step toward tackling our fiscal deficiencies and Obama’s overspending head-on,” said DeSantis. “This bill is not a reflection of the fine work done by many federal employees, but is simply a recognition of our current fiscal situation.”
Ten of the votes against the bill were from Republicans — four of those from Virginia, which has no shortage of federal workers.
“Whether fighting crime for the FBI, rooting out terrorism with the CIA, or providing medical care to our veterans at VA hospitals, the dedicated men and women of our federal civilian workforce have served this nation selflessly throughout our nation’s history,” said Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.). “Yet time and time again, these hardworking folks are being singled out during deficit reduction efforts, despite the fact that they have been under a pay freeze since January 1, 2011.”
“Congress charges these individuals with important duties and expects these duties to be performed with the highest caliber of expertise – but rather than being recognized for their service, these public servants see their salary and benefits continually used as a pawn in the game of politics,” he continued.
Wittman said he supports freezing pay for members of Congress, as did another GOP opponent of the federal-employee freeze, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah).
“I’ve had my pay frozen for many years and have supported the efforts to do so. In fact, members of Congress already have their pay frozen – whether or not this bill becomes law,” said Bishop.
“This bill freezes, for a third year, the salaries of federal workers including those at Hill Air Force Base who repair the equipment needed to maintain the safety of our war fighters and other essential defense systems. They make on average twenty thousand dollars less than the average Washington bureaucrat,” he continued. “They are also subject to a furlough, which could also cut up to twenty percent of their wages. This is unfair to them.”
Democrats charged Republicans were using the pay freeze as a distraction for sequestration, which is likely to have a greater impact on the Republican opponents’ districts than withholding a 0.5 percent hike.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said the impact of the freeze was being exaggerated by Democrats even as it would save the government $11 billion.
There is an influence case in Utah where dingy hairy is known as the go to guy if you have lots of money to give him and he can make federal cases dissappear. No investigation of dingy! Why?
this reminds me of the joke, where the husband is complaining to the wife that their check book is overdrawn, and she looks at him and blinks a few times, and says ,but we still have checks.
A pay freeze may well be justified, but even more important is the idea of a Federal hiring freeze. With the literally hundreds of agencies and/or programs that are either duplicative, or redundant, or simply irrelevant and unnecessary, a hiring freeze (or even Senator McCain’s modest suggestion of hiring only one new employee for every three who resign or retire) should be low-hanging fiscal fruit, which any responsible legislator would be eager to pick. That our Congressional leaders appear unwilling to do so is testimony to the fact that Washington is now run by and for Washington–and for those who are paid by Washington–the American people, the national interest, and the exploding national debt be damned.
Wow, those fed workers sound really important- we probably wouldn’t be able to take a crap without them! Unfortunately for the 16% who can’t find work the issue of pay raises is moot- you have to have a job to get a raise. Hopefully if Republicans ever get it together and take the House, Senate and Royal Throne, about half those fed workers will be employed elsewhere- but I suppose that’s just a fantasy as well.
The real number of unemployed is 9.9%, which is the U-5 number. U-6, which is currently at 15.4% (neither is seasonally adjusted), includes people who want to work full time but can only find part time work. Part timers can still get raises, though.
Sorry I blew up- I’m glad you busted my myth. Maybe I was thinking about all the people who quit trying to find jobs and the fully 3.1 million workers that signed up for disability benefits since June 2009. Investor’s Business Daily notes that “the total number of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force entirely has exploded, climbing 7.3 million since June 2009.” We’ve got 5.4 million long-term unemployed, which is “almost one million higher than when the recovery began three years ago, and almost twice the level it ever reached prior to Obama’s recovery.” I don’t know if they’re included in the U-this or U-that, but I don’t think they are. Anyway, they’re out there and won’t be getting a raise unless the SS Admen jacks their disability checks or they give in and sign on with Mickey D.
If there exists anywhere, anybody that still denies obama thinks of himself as king/emperor/or maybe even God, I want whatever it is you are smoking. We cannot count on his elitist congress or his elitist supreme court to deny him his divine providence so I guess us peons/slaves will continue to be at his mercy.
The dirty little secret is that for federal employees and most other public employees a “pay freeze” doesn’t freeze pay for most employees. Most public employees get paid on a range and step system in which the employee’s job classification is assigned to a range of pay and the employee progresses through the steps in that range. For example, let’s say that a Widget Maker I job class is assigned to Wage Range 1 which has a starting pay, Step A, of $4000/month. After successfully completing one year of employment, the employee moves to WR-1, Step B, which is usually about a 3.5% wage increase or $4130/mth. This goes on as the employee progresses through often as many as ten or twelve steps in a pay range. Only if after many years the employee is at the top of the range would a pay freeze actually freeze his pay, by which time he is making half again or more as much as the entry level pay for the range.
A more likely scenario is that an employee would be hired as a Widget Maker I for a year, move up a step, then be promoted, often automatically, to a Widget Maker II and get two or three steps on the promotion. It is not uncommon for there to be three or four levels of Widget Maker each with a starting pay a step or usually two steps above the level below then there is Widget Making Supervisor, Widget Making Manager, and Regional Widget Making Manager. After that, the interested employee can go to the right party, write the right check, or sleep in the right bed and work through the DC levels of Assistant Deputies and Deputy Assistants and maybe even go on to be Secretary.
The other tool that managers have to reward friends or beat a pay freeze is have the job classifications of their employees reviewed by HR and as the result of the review have job classifications assigned to a higher wage range. This became epidemic in my state’s government during the ’80s and ’90s when we had constant budget issues and a generally flat general fund budget so there were very few general wage increases from ’85 until ’04. Employees who worked in agencies funded by general fund appropriations were stuck with flat wages except for their step increases, but federally funded agencies were having a heyday and to escape the flat general State or union contract wages, they’d just have their little HR girl down the hall invent a new job classification for their employees and give them a raise. When questioned about it, the answer was always, “it’s only federal money.” By ’02 a bundle of work in the heavily federally funded departments like Transportation or Health and Social Services was worth two to as much as four ranges, about 7% to 15%, more than the same bundle of work in a general fund department like Administration, Corrections, or Public Safety. One of the first things we did when we took over from the Democrats after the ’02 election was take that classification power and the “girl down the hall” away from the operating departments and centralize the people and the authority, for which we earned the everlasting enmity of the congenital ‘crats – especially for the taking away the girl down the hall part, some of whom were, shall we say, multi-talented women.
If Republican elected and appointed officials in both the states and the federal government knew anything about running governments, the dysfunctional classification and pay schemes and the stovepiped organizational structure would be the place they started in re-organizing and reducing the size and influence of government and government employees. You can do it in the name of efficiency and not take the political heat that comes from general budget cuts or eliminating functions and achieve the same results. Flatening the organizational structure eliminates much of the patronage level management and reduces it to a size that a Republican has a chance of filling with competent, loyal people; a Republican couldn’t fill all the political appointments in a Democrat designed government with loyal, competent Republicans if his/her life depended on it. Typically, Republicans change out at most thirty or forty percent of the Democrat appointees when they take over because they don’t have enough people who want to work for government and, too often don’t understand the need to change out the appointees in other than the most visible places. They they spend their term wondering why they’re being leaked, thwarted, and sabotaged.
“By ’02 a bundle of work in the heavily federally funded departments like Transportation or Health and Social Services was worth two to as much as four ranges, about 7% to 15%, more than the same bundle of work in a general fund department like Administration, Corrections, or Public Safety.”
Correction, not enough coffee yet: Two to four steps are 7%-15% more or less, two to four ranges are twice that or about 15% to as much as 30% more. For much of the ’90s our biggest competitor for hiring employees in the GF departments was the federally funded departments. They were even taking infrastructure classifications like budget, accounting, HR, and LR postions and inventing new job titles for them with higher pay than the official job classification had and taking employees from other departments. Employees themselves were not above finding a special friend in one of the better-off departments and “persuading” that special friend to invent a job for them.
Minor correction: you wrote widget maker, but i believe you meant widget regulator. Who in the federal government actually makes widgets?
If they thaw out fast, they will evaporate courtesy of the ‘Real Middle Class Tea Party Americans!’
Obama’s SOTU TV Audience Numbers Continue to Drop, Now Lower Than Bush’s Lowest February 15, 2013
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-s-sotu-tv-audience-numbers-continue-drop-now-lower-bush-s-lowest
“What actually is being asked to be given up by the typical federal worker – the one the president is calling a huge sacrifice – is $274 per employee per year,” Issa said on the floor.
The average person lost at least that with the new tax increases.
So we’re all supposed to shut up about taking home less, while you worthless parasites complain you’re not making *yet more*.
To be fair, our take-home pay got slashed too with the expiration of the payroll tax holiday. But you’re right, we have no business complaining about our pay being too small considering we are already pretty well compensated. The fact that many federal workers aren’t prepared for furloughs means that they didn’t do any contingency planning.
True, I hadn’t mentioned that. Mea Culpa.
I work for the VA at the GS-6 level which will soon be “reclassified” to a GS-5 so there goes my retirement and next vacation.
Look, while we complained about our income tax holidary being curtailed, has anyone spoken of the fact that Buffett and the other multi-millionaires and billionairs were not effected by the WONs tax increases? Recall that they do not earn an “income” so the WONs tax the rich did not really hit them. Where is the outcry by the GOP??? ….crickets chirping…. Where is Piglost decrying the rich?? …bull f@rting…
Both sides suck.
If someone has no income then what are you suggesting they be taxed on?
Republicans are great at taking a stand against something they know isn’t going anywhere, but how will they vote when the Senate passes a bad bill and sends it to them? Will they take a stand when the pressure is on them? Boehner will be tripping all over himself to find a way to pass it.
These idiots in the GOP arentgoing to win any elections pissing off the voters who work for the Federal Government like this. They are writing off a whole chunk of voters.
Shut up. Those of us whose taxes support you haven’t gotten raises in years. I live in Metro DC area (private sector) and haven’t had a raise in three years. People have been laid off. The cost of housing around here is going up. So is gas (and it gets expensive when you spend a couple hours a day in a traffic jams), and food. Also, instead of offering for nothing insurance with a small co-pay, we now have a $1,000 deductible with 20% after. (Glad I was able to keep my insurance.) When the economy improves for those who pay your salary, THEN it might be considered to give you a raise. But not now.
Is there some way to divide federal employees into military vs. hacks/bureaucrats? Why does the entire pay freeze have to apply to any of those in the military?