Pay Parity Problems

The House Budget Committee voted against an amendment Wednesday to include equal pay adjustments for military and civilian federal employees in the fiscal 2005 budget resolution.

"I am very disappointed that the House Budget Committee failed to support the bipartisan principle of pay parity," said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md. "Unlike the House, a bipartisan majority in the Senate has embraced pay parity."

Early this month, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles, R-Okla., included pay parity language in his committee's fiscal 2005 budget proposal.

Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., a member of the House Budget Committee, tried to include pay parity in the House resolution. Hoyer said he would continue to work with other lawmakers, including some Republican allies, to implement equal pay adjustments.

Several congressional staffers, however, said this week that they expect Congress to approve equal pay adjustments despite opposition from the White House.

In the fiscal 2005 White House budget proposal, President Bush asked for a 3.5 percent pay increase for military personnel and a 1.5 percent average raise for civil servants. The president said uniformed personnel deserve the larger raise because of continuing military operations overseas. Administration officials and some Republican lawmakers in the House have said that the federal government cannot afford to grant the equal increases.

The White House proposed a disparate pay adjustment last year as well, but Congress overruled that plan in January and gave both military and civilian employees a 4.1 percent raise. Supporters of pay parity have said that civilian employees of the federal government are heavily involved in homeland security efforts and should not be snubbed.

Clay Johnson, the Office of Management and Budget's deputy director for management, has been visiting Capitol Hill recently in an attempt to convince lawmakers pay parity is not feasible, according to a congressional staffer.

"They have all sent a clear message to him that pay parity will be in effect at the end of the day," the staffer said, noting that the equal pay movement has strong backing from senior Republicans and Democrats.

"Chairman Nickles did not have to include that language. He's retiring," the staffer noted.

While the pay parity effort is facing some resistance, the staff member said that it might become more difficult in future years. The White House is pushing an initiative to move the federal government into a pay-for-performance system. As more federal agencies adopt the performance pay approach, standard pay raises for federal civilian workers will not be guaranteed.

"This may be one of the last years that we have an easy ride with pay parity," the staffer said.