Defending Benefits

Federal employees seem skittish heading into 2008, at least when it comes to their benefits. Some of this anxiety is justified: The federal government cannot surpass private-sector salaries, so benefits are important as compensation and incentive. But in some cases, feds seem resistant to proposals that would expand their benefits to other Americans out of protectiveness -- a sense that to let nonfederal employees in the door would lower the emotional, if not financial, value of those benefits.

When Government Executive published a story about a proposal by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., to allow uninsured Americans to buy into the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program as part of her plan to reform the health care system, 75 percent of readers said they opposed the plan. That margin seemed somewhat surprising, given that a story that preceded the survey made it clear that Clinton's plan would create a separate risk pool for nonfederal employees, and would have no impact on premiums.

In another recent survey, readers of FedSmith, an news and information Web site for federal employees, said by a 7-point margin that they thought domestic partners of federal employees shouldn't be eligible for health and retirement benefits. Those results could have more to do with an unwillingness to sanction gay and lesbian relationships (the comments FedSmith received certainly suggest that) and less to do with the exclusivity of federal employee benefits. Still, it suggests a reluctance to share benefits outside a traditional community, even if that opening up would benefit federal employees who could get health coverage for their partners.

The continuing debate over the Government Pension Offset provision of Social Security -- which reduces spousal benefits by two-thirds of the amount that workers not covered by Social Security receive in their own pensions -- is an example of the outside pressures on benefits for federal workers. At a hearing last week on the offset's impact on public employees, there was a striking difference between the way employee advocates and budget analysts characterized the provision.

David Rust, acting deputy commissioner for disability and income security programs at the Social Security Administration, told the panel that GPO removed an advantage for federal employees. Rhoda Trent, president of the advocacy group Federally Employed Women, countered in a written submission that GPO penalizes federal workers who already make other sacrifices to serve the government.

Both of them are right, of course: Whether it's the height of unfairness or a restoration of balance not to let federal employees collect full spousal Social Security benefits depends on your perspective. But it's not just that Trent represents federal employees and Rust has to oversee an entire subset of Social Security programs. Deciding whether to repeal GPO requires lawmakers to balance rewarding federal employees for their sacrifice and calculating the cost of that reward to an already economically stressed program that's about to come under even greater strain.

In a world where the pay gap persists with no truly serious efforts to close it, and where we expect federal employees to build long, stable careers on something more than post-graduate fervor and ramen noodles for supper, benefits are a critical compensation for the other sacrifices public servants make. It's important to protect those benefits from decimation by outside economic pressures. But when expanding those benefits to others would come at relatively little cost to federal employees, perhaps they don't need to feel so threatened by the needs of their fellow Americans.