Two-Thirds Of Federal Workers Get a Bonus

• Employees in the Washington area fared slightly better than those who work outside the region. Sixty-five percent of the locals got bonuses compared with 62 percent of those who work farther away.

• Employees at some agencies did much better than others. Although more than 9 in 10 General Schedule employees at the NSF, GSA and Department of Energy got bonuses, only about half of such workers at the departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs (VA) were rewarded. General Schedule workers in defense agencies also tended to do better -- 69 percent got bonuses compared with 57.4 percent of similar workers in non-defense agencies.

• About 75 percent of employees in administrative, clerical, office services and engineering jobs got a bonus, compared with fewer than half of information technology, medical and biological sciences workers.

• Bonus size varied considerably. The typical award for a member of the Senior Executive Service was $10,000, or about 7.2 percent of salary, compared with a typical award of $865, or about 1.7 percent of salary, for other workers.

The bigger awards tended to go to employees at the departments of the Interior, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Education, and Energy, and the GSA. The typical bonus at those agencies was more than 2.2 percent of salary. It was only about half that at the VA, the Department of Transportation and the Social Security Administration.

• Political appointees faced a mixed blessing. Their bonuses, about 2.8 percent of salary, tended to be bigger than those for career workers, at 1.6 percent. But political appointees were less likely to get the awards in the first place -- only about 14 percent received them.

Awards for political appointees were banned for eight years until the Bush White House decided to lift the prohibition in 2002, clearing the way for $1.44 million in bonuses to be granted to 470 appointees. .

In general, cash awards based on annual performance ratings may not exceed 10 percent of base pay for General Schedule workers and 20 percent for members of the Senior Executive Service. But agencies have broad autonomy to devise their own bonus systems. So who awards the bonuses, how many may receive them and the amounts can vary considerably across departments, said Doris Hausser, senior policy adviser to OPM Director Kay Coles James.

"It is an extraordinarily decentralized program," Hausser said.

William A. Conte, 56, who retired this month after more than 33 years as a staff pharmacist and manager at the VA, said bonuses help keep senior managers from leaving government for more money elsewhere. He said he received a salary of $138,700 and a bonus of about $12,000 in fiscal 2002, when he was director of the VA Medical Center in Bedford, Mass.

"Some [bonus] numbers come back and they may not look good, but the reality of the situation is there's a lot of people putting a lot of hours in there for a lot less pay than they could get in the private sector," Conte said. "I understand it's a taxpayer-slash-government issue, but the reality of the situation is there's very few people that would do the work that senior executives do for the money they get."