'Pay Parity' Still Drives Civil Service Raise

When it comes to federal pay, this year appears to be a replay of previous years, and Congress seems to be in no mood to take on the big issue of changing the government-wide pay system.

The House Appropriations Committee late Tuesday approved a fiscal 2007 spending bill that includes a 2.7 percent pay raise for federal employees in 2007, higher by half a percentage point than what the White House had recommended. (In past years, the House and Senate have accepted the committee's decision.)

As in most years in the past two decades, the committee settled on the number in the name of continuing "pay parity" between the civil service and the military in providing annual raises.

President Bush began the year proposing a 2.2 percent raise for both groups, but Rep. John M. McHugh (R-N.Y.) , chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee, bumped up the military raise last month. Advocates for federal employees soon urged the leaders of the House Appropriations Committee to follow suit.

"The Washington area delegation has worked hard over the past decade to ensure that Congress follows the bipartisan principle of pay parity each year, and this year was no different," Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), House Democratic whip and a longtime supporter of higher pay for the civil service, said yesterday.

The spending bill also made it clear to the White House that members are wary of tampering with the basic structure of the pay system. The White House has called for moving away from a single pay raise provided to all federal occupations to a more complex system that takes into account the wage growth in local markets by occupation.

Congress has given a green light to the Defense and Homeland Security departments to switch to such systems, but they are off to a slow start, and the Appropriations Committee seems to believe that the kinks have to worked out in the two big departments before expanding the concept across government.

In authorizing a 2.7 percent raise, the spending bill stipulates that "this adjustment shall apply to civilian employees in the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security."

A month ago, Defense moved 11,000 employees into its new pay program, called the National Security Personnel System. Before the committee acted, Pentagon officials decided to provide the equivalent of the general raise to those 11,000 employees.

That's partly because those employees will not have been covered by the NSPS for a full year when January rolls around, making it difficult to evaluate their job performance and tie it to a pay raise then. Defense also has not developed its own version of locality pay, called local market supplements, and will use the same 2007 locality pay adjustment authorized for General Schedule employees by the president. That announcement typically comes in late November or December.

The committee's requirement that Homeland Security employees also receive a 2.7 percent raise should not cause problems there. The department has fallen behind schedule in launching its new pay-for-performance system, which has been pushed back to February 2007, a month after the next general pay raise. The Homeland Security pay changes will be phased in through 2008.

The House committee also denied the Office of Personnel Management's request for $2.1 million to conduct a study on how to refine locality pay adjustments.

Currently, a single locality pay adjustment is made for each metropolitan area, and the White House would like to vary the size of the adjustment according to occupation. Rather than a one-size-fits-all raise in a particular area, the White House would prefer that employees in high-demand jobs get a higher locality adjustment than employees in less-competitive jobs.

Defense and Homeland Security plan to link locality raises to occupations, and a report from the Appropriations Committee directs OPM to continue working with the departments on their pay changes "before expanding . . . to other agencies."

Controllers Miss by 8 Votes

A House bill aimed at restarting negotiations between the air traffic controllers union and the Federal Aviation Administration failed by eight votes last night to win the two-thirds margin needed for passage.

The vote was 271 to 148, with 76 Republicans voting with Democrats to restart the talks. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Steven C. LaTourette (R-Ohio), was brought up under special rules that required more than a simple majority for approval.

On Monday, the FAA imposed a contract on the National Air Traffic Controllers Association that will limit pay raises for controllers. The agency declared the talks at an impasse in April.

Stephen Barr's e-mail address isbarrs@washpost.com.