No Simple Formula for Understanding Lawmakers' Pay

The prickly issue of congressional pay showed up in a number of anti-incumbent, shake-up-the-establishment campaign ads that ran prior to yesterday's election. They usually included an assertion that the members of Congress had voted to give themselves pay raises.

Well, yes and no.

Since 1989, when members of Congress adopted a formula for adjusting their pay, they have turned down pay raises five times and accepted raises 11 times, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress.

The congressional pay formula is based on certain elements of the Labor Department's Employment Cost Index. The pay increase for 2007, for example, would be 0.5 percent less than the percentage change in private-sector wage growth for the fourth quarter of 2005 and the same quarter of 2004.

In theory, the formula would put members of Congress on track for a 2 percent pay raise in January.

But congressional pay is also linked to government salary scales. Under the rules, if white-collar federal employees get an annual base pay raise that is less than the formula's suggested increase for Congress, members are paid at the lower rate.

Because Congress has not wrapped up negotiations on a 2007 federal employee raise, lawmakers probably won't know the size of their raise until late December, when the president issues pay scales for government workers, diplomats, Cabinet officials and others.

For example, if Congress and the president decide to give federal employees a 2.2 percent pay raise next year, members of Congress will probably end up with a 1.2 percent raise.

That's because the president will split the federal raise into two parts -- a base raise and a locality raise. In recent years, about one percentage point of the raise has been allocated for the locality raise. Such a split would limit the congressional pay raise to the federal employee base raise -- 1.2 percent in this scenario.

Members of Congress are paid $165,200 -- the same salary as federal district court judges, deputy Cabinet secretaries and federal executives in a number of agencies.

Critics have pointed out that Congress prefers to rely on an automatic formula and keep its pay tied to other government officials as a way to avoid annual debates on whether lawmakers deserve higher pay. Some members of Congress defend the automatic raises as cost-of-living adjustments that are modest and appropriate for a board of directors.

Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit organization that tries to expose pork-barrel spending and bureaucratic mismanagement, would like Congress to take an up-or-down vote on its pay each year and justify the raise on meeting some goal, such as lowering a deficit or maintaining a budget surplus, said Tom Schatz , the group's president.