Presidents Pay Agent

The president’s pay agent, a group composed of the Labor secretary and directors of the Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget, say the methodology behind federal locality pay doesn’t make sense — and hasn’t made sense since its creation.

Federal employees in the six newly established locality pay areas may be disappointed with the payout from their 2019 retroactive raises.

The Office of Personnel Management finalized six new locality pay areas for some 71,000 federal employees in 2019.

Federal employees in these four new areas would likely see the locality pay changes on or after Jan. 1, 2019 in their first paychecks of the new year.

Federal employees looking for major changes to locality pay will be disappointed in 2018, as the entities that typically make small but significant moves on federal salaries were largely inactive during the first year of the Trump administration.

The President’s Pay Agent approved a recommendation to add Burlington, Vermont, and Virginia Beach, Virginia, to the list of separate locality pay areas for 2018. The pay agent signed off on one recommendation from the Federal Salary Council but little else.

The Federal Salary Council voted Friday to add 13 cities to a list of municipalities where federal employees are paid more, in an effort to close a growing wage gap between feds and private-sector counterparts in certain regions of the country. 12 of the 13 recommendations had been approved previously but have gone unimplemented by the President’s Pay Agent, frustrating federal employees and the unions representing feds in those areas.