GovernmentExecutive.com

Most federal agencies are starting the new year with an old budget, and employees are feeling the squeeze.

The continuing resolution lawmakers have passed for agencies other than the Defense and Homeland Security departments funds them until Feb. 15 at the lowest of the following three levels: House-passed fiscal 2007, Senate-passed fiscal 2007, or fiscal 2006 enacted.

Most affected are agencies whose personnel make up the bulk of their costs. President Bush granted a 2.2 percent pay raise for federal employees this year, which doesn't include additional hikes for promotions and within-grade increases. That money has to come out of agency budgets, so if agencies don't get an increase, the money has to be taken from elsewhere.

Last week, a spokesman for the Government Accountability Office said employees there are being asked to do everything they can to cut down costs, including limiting travel. Such measures are intended, he said, to prevent furloughs.

Agency heads often use the threat of furloughs to pressure lawmakers into additional funding. Jo Anne Barnhart, the outgoing commissioner of the Social Security Administration, told lawmakers and members of the media that proposed budget cuts for fiscal 2007 would require agencywide furloughs of about 10 days. The Energy Department and its union are in a battle over Energy officials' decision to delay bonuses until lawmakers finalize funding levels for the year. Officials said the bonus delay is designed to avert furloughs.

Last week, we asked Pay & Benefits Watch readers to tell us how their agencies are handling tight times. The most common restrictions are on travel and training.

Budget analyst Maureen Colgan at the Naval School of Health Sciences in San Diego reported that for the duration of the CR, employees are restricted to educational trips and can enter training only if they will lose a necessary job certification without it. Colgan also pointed out that since most employees have one or two years to complete continuing education requirements, making the case this year for travel or training is "a very hard threshold to meet."

The General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service is cutting back its travel, but by a strict percentage -- a 20 percent decrease compared to fiscal 2006, reported T. Casey Bowen, director of the Portfolio Management Division in the Greater Southwest Region. Bowen said the cut is a result of the CR and higher gas prices.

A Veterans Affairs Department employee who wished to remain anonymous reported a unique effect of the CR. After VA's recent data breach, in which a laptop containing personal information on thousands of veterans was stolen from an employee's home, officials have restricted work from home on personally owned computers. Some employees were promised agency laptops to fix that problem, the reader wrote, but the CR makes it unlikely they will get them anytime this year.

Still other readers pointed out that while the extended CR is unusual, budget belt-tightening is not. Woody Thomas, a review appraiser in the Agriculture Department's Farm Service Agency, said, "We've been cutting corners for most of my career, mostly because of a lack of funding for staff with expansion of programs."

Lawmakers have until Feb. 15 to either extend the CR or pass new spending bills. Either way, federal employees have become adept at keeping their programs running under all budgetary conditions.