A Helping Hand

Not all benefits for federal employees are congressionally mandated, agency funded or included in the president's budget request -- some are made possible by the generosity of your 1.8 million co-workers.

Defense Department civilian employee Juan Cruz, who was badly burned in the Pentagon during the Sept. 11 attacks, is sending his daughter to Brown University with the help of colleagues.

"One of the most significant acts we felt from that day was the collective generosity from our fellow government employees," his wife, Veronica Cruz, also a Defense employee, said. Juan Cruz lost his speech for three months, had his fingertips amputated and just underwent another cornea transplant in September.

This week marks the two-decade anniversary of the Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund, which helped Cruz pay for his daughter's education. The fund represents a joint effort by unions and management groups to collect money from federal employees and corporate sponsors.

In the past 20 years, federal employees have collected $5.5 million in hardship aid for natural disasters or personal emergencies and $6.5 million in college scholarships through FEEA.

And on Wednesday, managers of the fund and the National Treasury Employees Union announced a new program. NTEU donated $726,363 left over from a $159 million lawsuit it won on behalf of federal employees to endow a new college scholarship.

NTEU filed the lawsuit in 1983, and 22 years later, about 212,000 current and former employees received money from special rate salaries they were wrongly denied. Now, five merit-based scholarships of $5,000 each will be paid annually to the federal community out of the rest. Before this gift, local scholarships were awarded for between $400 and $2,500 a year.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., honored the fund's anniversary, and government employees' generosity toward one another, at a breakfast Wednesday.

"Why am I not surprised?" Norton said. "I'm not surprised because I've seen what federal employees do for our country and the world."

The FEEA fund gave nearly $2 million in emergency grants and loans to federal employees affected by hurricanes Wilma, Katrina and Rita in 2005 alone. But the fund wasn't always so established.

Stephen Bauer, executive director of FEEA, said Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was the first natural disaster to really test the fund's mettle. Many federal employees worked and lived around Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, whose two bank branches were destroyed in the storm.

Bauer withdrew $20,000 from the FEEA fund's bank account in Colorado - the entirety of its balance at the time - and flew down to Miami with the cash in his jacket pocket to dole out to employees in need.

In April 1995, the FEEA fund stepped up its efforts when dozens of federal employees were killed in the Alfred P. Murrah building bombing in Oklahoma City. Government employees, with the help of corporate sponsors Geico, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Wright and Co., are paying full college tuition for the more than 200 children who lost a federally employed parent that day. Many of those kids are making their way through school now, and many have yet to start.