DAILY BRIEFING
Pay 'Think Tank' Sought
Office of Personnel Management Director Janice Lachance says she wants to form her own "think tank" to analyze federal pay issues, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Lachance said she plans to spend the next two years consulting experts from the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, Congress and employee groups in an attempt to find a "consensus solution" on the pay issue.
President Clinton's 1999 budget proposes a 3.1 percent average civil service pay raise, about half of what federal unions have signaled they'd like to get next year.
Current pay formulas show that federal workers are paid 22.6 percent less than private-sector employees in comparable jobs. Under current pay-setting formulas, that gap should trigger a 12.75 percent increase for federal workers next year. But the Clinton administration has made it clear it doesn't trust the methodology used to calculate the gap.
"There's information that indicates there is a pay gap. I don't know that anyone has much faith in those numbers ... Any compensation system that the government has must be credible. We must be able to explain it and defend it to those who pay the bills," Lachance told the Post.
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