![]() In 1990, Congress passed the Federal Employee Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA). Many of these challenges go back decades. The previous two pay agent reports from the Biden administration said the cost is a “significant consideration.”īut this year’s report took a more direct stance and said the cost would “have a substantial impact on agency budgets.” In its 2022 report, that estimate was $19.2 billion. The pay agent’s latest report estimated that it would cost $22 billion to bring GS federal salaries in line with the private sector. A “substantial impact” on agency budgetsĪt the same time that the government faces these pay challenges, the cost of addressing the wage disparity is also growing rapidly. So far, there has not been an actual proposal from the Biden administration, and it remains unclear when or if a proposal will come forward. Pay compression is a phenomenon that curbs salaries for some senior-level GS employees due to legal pay caps. It’s a particularly acute challenge for hard-to-fill positions, such as those in IT and cybersecurity.Įarlier this year, the Biden administration hinted at recommending a legislative fix to pay compression, an effort that would address at least part of the challenge of the GS system. Many federal chief human capital officers (CHCOs) said that the GS pay system is the “single greatest obstacle” for agencies when competing with the private sector for new talent and retaining high-performing employees. When accounting for the value of benefits, and not just wages alone, some economists and groups such as the Congressional Budget Office said that federal employees are actually overpaid.īut similar to the pay agent, many federal advocacy groups and unions have called for significant changes to, or even a full replacement of, the GS system.Ĭhallenges with the GS system can additionally complicate agency recruitment and retention. Some experts disagree that federal pay falls behind that of the private sector. The council measures these disparities by comparing base pay rates of GS employees with the wages for their non-federal colleagues in similar roles and experience levels and who work in the same geographic region. In 2022, federal workers earned about 24% less in wages alone than their non-federal colleagues - a gap that grew since the last calculation of 22.5% in 2021, according to the Federal Salary Council. “As has been noted in earlier pay agent reports and discussed in other venues, we believe there is a need to consider major legislative reforms of the GS pay system,” the pay agent said in the October 2023 report. The Trump administration advocated for a revision to the GS system in 2020. Previous pay agents, including those from both the Obama and Trump administrations, have similarly suggested the government should consider “reforms to the white-collar federal pay system,” a 2015 report from the pay agent said. But it’ll take action from Congress to address the long-standing issue, according to the pay agent. The Biden administration has made nearly identical and repeated calls for a restructure to the pay system since its first pay agent report in 2021. The conversation around federal pay reform is far from new. 30 for Industry Exchange Cloud 2023 to discover the latest tools and techniques to manage your cloud services smartly and safely. “As currently applied, locality payments in a local labor market may leave some mission-critical occupations significantly underpaid while overpaying others.” “The current pay comparison methodology used in the locality pay program ignores the fact that non-federal pay in a local labor market varies substantially between different occupational groups,” the pay agent said in its October 2023 report. Specifically, the three-person pay agent, composed of Office of Personnel Management Director Kiran Ahuja, acting Labor Secretary Julie Su and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young, said the GS system’s use of locality pay doesn’t account for different occupations, for which salaries can widely vary. The General Schedule, the system that pays roughly 1.5 million civilian federal employees, is in need of an overhaul, the President’s Pay Agent said in its annual report, published Tuesday. The Biden administration is once again calling for “major legislative reforms” to a federal pay system that many experts say has been broken for decades. Between the Lines with the Administrative Conference of the United States.
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