Senator to introduce legislation supporting SES pay raise

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., plans to introduce a bill this week that would raise pay caps set for senior career executives, his spokesman said Friday. Warner has met with members of the Senior Executives Association and pledged his support for raising the pay caps on career executives' base salaries, said Geoff Schwartzman, Warner's spokesman. "There is not a lot of incentive for people to stay in jobs where they are making the same amount of money as someone with fewer job responsibilities," said Schwartzman. Association President Carol Bonosaro said Warner's bill will closely resemble legislation introduced in the House last month by Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. Davis' bill, H.R. 1824, seeks to raise the pay cap on senior executives' base pay, allowing executives to get full raises, at least over the next few years, even if Congress doesn't allow political pay to rise. The Senior Executives Association has been trying for several years to convince Congress to raise the cap on executive pay. The current base plus locality pay for those at the top of the Senior Executive Service is capped at $133,700, the rate of pay on Level III of the political pay scale that covers members of Congress and Cabinet officials. The political pay scale's Level IV, which is $125,700 this year, is the cap on career executives' base pay. Congress has voted to block political pay raises every year since 1993, except for 1998, 2000 and 2001. Over time, more and more career executives have seen their salaries reach the pay cap, so that now executives at the top three of the six SES levels all earn the same amount of money. In eight cities, federal executives at the top four levels are all paid the same. During her Senate confirmation hearing last Thursday, OPM director-designee Kay Coles James said she realized some "serious inequities" exist with regard to pay compression, but she did not endorse lifting pay caps on members of the Senior Executive Service.