Raising Objections

When President Bush announced last week that he would limit next year's locality pay increases for federal employees to 0.5 percent, with the total pay increase averaging 3 percent, he was blunt in stating the reason for his decision.

Higher raises, Bush wrote, "would force deep cuts in discretionary spending or federal employment to stay within budget. Either outcome would unacceptably interfere with our nation's ability to secure the homeland and pursue the war on terrorism."

The president is correct that the alternative to his approach is expensive. In fact, he issued his plan to avoid triggering the section of the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act that would have provided federal employees with an average 12.5 percent increase in locality pay. Those 12 percentage points aren't small potatoes when translated into dollars. According to the president, they'd amount to $12.7 billion in 2008.

But in its mid-session review of the budget, the Bush administration has proposed eliminating or reducing funding for 141 government programs, which the Office of Management and Budget says would save $12 billion next year.

Apparently $12 billion isn't that hard to come by.

Bush could have backed a higher raise from the beginning of the process, sent a signal that he was committed to narrowing the pay gap with the private sector, and still claimed that his administration was dedicated to saving the government money overall.

But the truth is, the politics of federal employee pay bear more than a passing resemblance to Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football she swipes away from him year after year. Federal employees may hope that this time, they're going to kick the football, that locality pay will be distributed the way the law intended. But by the time they get there, Lucy's not just yanking the football away, she's long gone with it, stashing the ball at her psychiatrist's office.

This isn't the first time that the Bush administration has conflated pay issues with other agenda items, such as its attempts to limit collective bargaining by federal workers. As a story in the December issue of Government Executive on the President's Management Agenda explains, the Bush administration clouded the pay-for-performance waters in the National Security Personnel System by allowing the Defense Department to suspend collective bargaining rights until 2009, an effort that met with pushback from unions and this year, the Democratic Congress. A similar scenario played out at the Homeland Security Department.

The Bush administration's tenure has overlapped with a period when serious attention to federal pay reform could have done real good. A realistic, sensible and sensitive approach to pay might have made current employees happier and helped establish the federal government as a viable competitor to the private sector for a new generation of employees.

"Public service in America today is not just another job. It is an important act of citizenship," Bush told more than 3,000 federal workers on July 10, 2002. Acts of citizenship may involve sacrifice. Federal employees probably are never going to make what they could have earned in the private sector. But minimizing that sacrifice, making that act of citizenship a little more affordable, is surely worth something, if not every penny of $12.7 billion.