House members to push for 4.1 percent civilian pay raise

Federal employees should get a 4.1 percent pay raise in 2003 instead of the 2.6 percent President Bush has proposed, a key House Appropriations Committee member said Monday.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said he will push for civilians to get the same raise as military personnel. The Bush administration's 2003 budget proposal called for a 4.1 percent military pay increase and a 2.6 percent civilian pay raise in January 2003.

"For the Bush administration to put forward an inadequate pay adjustment for federal employees is extremely short-sighted," Hoyer said. "This is sending the wrong message to federal employees at a time when the American people are depending upon government more than ever and we are staring a human capital crisis in the face."

Hoyer is the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Treasury, Postal Service and General Government. Last year, he attached an amendment to the Treasury-Postal appropriations bill mandating a 4.6 percent average pay raise for civilian employees, the same basic pay raise that military personnel received. The Bush administration had called for a 3.6 percent raise for civilians in 2002.

Last week, Reps. Jim Moran, D-Va., Tom Davis, R-Va., Connie Morella, R-Md., Frank Wolf, R-Va., Al Wynn, D-Md., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C. joined Hoyer in sending a letter to President Bush urging him to endorse military-civilian pay parity in 2003.

Military and civilian pay increases have been the same in 17 of the last 20 years, but the Bush administration began arguing last year that the two raises should not be automatically linked, noting that military personnel put their lives on the line in the battlefield.

Defending the proposed 2.6 percent pay raise for 2003 at a budget briefing on Monday, Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels reiterated that difference. "We believe that a distinction can and should be made between [civilians and] people who are in harm's way at time of war," Daniels said.

Daniels also said that using the change in the Employment Cost Index as a basis for adjusting federal pay, as has been done in recent years, would have resulted in a 3.6 percent civilian raise next year.

"But that's only a starting point," Daniels said. "We thought giving back 1 percent--or lets's say taking 1 percent less from this rule-of-thumb index--would be something federal employees would feel was fair."

Hoyer said that the government will have trouble recruiting and retaining employees without a bigger increase, saying that federal workers are paid far less than their private sector counterparts.

Under the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act, federal pay raises are supposed to include two parts: an across-the-board increase based on the change in the Employment Cost Index and varying locality-based increases based on labor costs in 31 metropolitan areas across the country. For 2003, the formula in the act calls for a 3.1 percent across-the-board increase plus double-digit locality-based increases.

The Bush administration's budget would cut both the across-the-board increase and locality raises, squeezing them into a 2.6 percent average pay raise. If Congress doesn't act to increase the raise, the Bush administration would decide later this year how to divide up the 2.6 percent between an across-the-board pay hike and locality-based increases.