A Few Thoughts On The Locality Pay Freeze

As you may have read on our homepage, President Obama, if his pay plan is implemented and not overridden by Congress, will become the first president since the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act went into effect to freeze locality pay. I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons.

1. It implies a fairly close reading of federal pay law. I spend a lot of time digging through Title V, and hadn't known that the President could freeze locality pay, though of course it's logical that he could.

2. The ability to do this hasn't actually lasted very long. 2003 was the first year that the President had the authority to freeze locality pay. There wasn't necessarily justification for doing it, since the economy was strong in comparison to what we're experiencing now, but the authority was there for the last six years of the Bush presidency, and it wasn't used. I don't think that this particularly implies anything about Bush and Obama's relative attitudes towards the civil service, which of course played out in multiple other policy arenas.

3. This all highlights how absurd the process for setting federal pay each year is. There is not a corporation in the world that would let any one of a number of committees take up compensation at its leisure, and if they didn't get to it, the chief operating order would just set pay in a two-page letter. It really does seem to me like the federal pay raise needs a more stable method of determination each year, whether it's permanently attached to an appropriations bill and a specific committee, or whether the President's Pay Agent simply gets to set it. But this is really bizarrely haphazard.