Contractor pay caps re-emerge in Senate

Reviving an ebbing debate over taxpayer-funded reimbursements for contractor executive pay, two senators on Friday introduced a bill to lower the cap for such payments to $400,000 and widen its applicability from the current top five highest-paid employees to a contractor’s entire staff.

Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced the Common-Sense Contractor Compensation Act (S. 2198) to “build on” a measure that passed in December 2011 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act that extended the current reimbursement cap -- $693,951 -- to cover all defense contractor employees.

“We will keep fighting to rein in exorbitant taxpayer-funded salaries for contractors,” Boxer said in a press release. “There is simply no reason that taxpayers should fund government reimbursements for private contractor salaries at a rate more than three times what Cabinet secretaries earn.”

Grassley said, “there’s no justification for these payments to be higher than the salary of the president of the United States.”