How feds have it made

If you had to do it over again, would you take a job with a large outfit, whose CEO frequently froze your pay? What if the board of directors was constantly trying to gut your pension plan and workers were occasionally locked out of their jobs or furloughed, taking a 20 percent pay cut? Better yet, what if people in other companies and professions assumed that you were overpaid, underworked and fireproof?

What if there was the possibility of a shutdown just before Christmas just about every year?

Sound familiar? It should, because that’s you. That’s where you work. The CEO is the president and the board of directors is Congress, whose members spend millions of dollars getting elected, then reelected, to come to a swamp (Washington, D.C.) most profess to loathe.

And it happens a lot. While the Trump administration and Republican-led House and Senate are the villains de jour, feds get kicked around when Democrats, who mostly profess to like them, are in control. There was a three-year federal pay freeze launched by the Obama White House, which also set up the sequestration process. There have been numerous government shutdowns, but the longest was during the Clinton years. With friends like that, who needs enemies, right?

This year, House Republicans led the charge for major cuts in the federal FERS retirement program. They also took a shot at the older CSRS system. Had they been successful, FERS workers would have been hit with a 6 percent cut in take-home pay. FERS retirees would have lost all inflation protection (no more COLAs), and workers who retire before age 62, including those forced to because of their jobs, would have lost Social Security “gap” payments worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Fortunately for federal and postal workers, retirees and their survivors, Congress did what it often does best, which is nothing. That’s the good news. But the not-so-good-news is that they will be back in January with the same-old whack the bureaucracy schemes. Maybe a pay freeze in 2019. Maybe cuts in the retirement plans. Or further personnel reductions in federal agencies — the IRS, EPA, and the Interior and State departments — where the bosses view all civil servants as closet Democrats with their own agenda.

So what happened this year, and what’s (maybe) gonna be on tap for 2018? We’ve rounded up reporters Nicole Ogrysko, Scott Maucione and Meredith Somers as guests for our Your Turn radio show at 10 a.m. today. They’ll talk about what happened on their beats this year and what to look out for next year. That includes things such as budget cuts, pay raises, the likelihood of furloughs or shutdowns, the status of buyouts in federal agencies and when to expect major reforms in Thrift Savings Plan rules.

If you have questions, shoot them to me before showtime at mcausey@federalnewsradio.com.
The show is live at 10 a.m. ET at: https://federalnewsradio.com/listen-live/ or 1500 AM in the D.C. area. It will also be archived if you can’t listen today, want to listen again or refer it to a friend.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Jory Heckman

Source: PNAS

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