Senators push to avert pay cliff looming over overseas Foreign Service officers in stopgap spending deal

A bipartisan pair of senators are urging their colleagues to include language in the anticipated stopgap continuing resolution that would avert a potential pay cliff impacting overseas Foreign Service officers and other civilian workers.

When Congress passed the Federal Pay Comparability Act in 1990, the measure inadvertently excluded some federal workers, such as members of the U.S. Foreign Service, stationed outside of the continental U.S., from locality pay. In response to this oversight, officials developed Overseas Comparability Pay, which steps in and provides the equivalent of Washington, D.C., area locality pay to those excluded under the 1990 law.

But the legal authorization to make those payments expires at the end of the month, alongside the deadline to avert a government shutdown. If Congress goes over the pay cliff, Foreign Service officers would see pay cuts averaging 22% beginning in October.

The full list of impacted positions includes Foreign Service officers serving overseas under the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, the Commerce Department’s Foreign Commercial Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, U.S. Agency for Global Media and the Peace Corps.

Sens. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, who co-chair the Senate Foreign Service Caucus, sent a letter Monday to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urging that language be included in any continuing resolution to keep the government funded past this month to temporarily reauthorize the Overseas Comparability Pay program for the length of the spending agreement’s duration.

“Foreign Service officers serve our country in some of the most dangerous and difficult places in the world,” Van Hollen and Sullivan wrote. “A potential lapse of OCP would compound the challenges they face, imperiling the long-term effectiveness of the Foreign Service, and its ability to recruit and retain the most talented officers.”

The provision is one in a long laundry list of requests for temporary reauthorization of existing programs or funding boosts to targeted agencies that the Biden administration and lawmakers say need to be in a continuing resolution. Among the requested funding boosts over fiscal 2024 levels are a sizeable proposed increase in the Social Security Administration’s long-neglected administrative costs and an additional $24 million for the Office of Personnel Management for its planned rollout of the new Postal Service Health Benefits Program this fall.

But talks appeared to remain in limbo, as 14 House Republicans joined all Democrats to defeat House Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposed bundling of a six-month continuing resolution with controversial voter ID legislation Wednesday. Senators and some House lawmakers from both parties and the White House have signaled a willingness only to approve a three-month spending deal, which would place a new deadline amid the December holidays.