By Stephen Barr
Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Foreign Service officers looking for pay equity will have to keep waiting.

In the hours before Congress shut down for the year, Republican leaders dropped a compensation package designed to address salary differences between diplomats stationed abroad and those in Washington.

Diplomats assigned overseas take a 17.5 percent cut in pay when they leave Washington. The salary difference has long been a sore point inside the State Department and, by some accounts, discourages some mid-level officers from volunteering for overseas posts.

The pay package would also replace the current automatic salary increases based on length of service with raises based on job performance. That change has been a goal of the Bush administration, which has pushed for performance-based pay systems across government.

But some House members and senators objected to the pay package, apparently worried about its high price tag. Because the pay provisions were part of a State Department program bill scheduled for expedited approval, bill supporters decided it was best to move the legislation rather than risk having the measure snag on a secondary issue.

The pay package sought to provide a fix for what supporters call unintended consequences of the 1990 federal law that created locality pay supplements. The law's goal is to narrow pay differences between federal employees and private-sector workers holding similar jobs in certain geographic areas. But it does not apply to government employees who work outside the continental United States.

As a general rule, about 7,000 to 8,000 Foreign Service officers are serving overseas at any one time. As the pay differential has increased over the past decade, the American Foreign Service Association has contended that pay comparability should be addressed and not allowed to undermine Foreign Service morale.

(One step has been taken. In 2005, the pay difference was eliminated for members of the Senior Foreign Service. That group, about 600 diplomats, transferred to a pay-for-performance system and was brought up to Washington salary levels.)

When the State Department program bill came up on the House floor, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) said he regretted that the pay package was being dropped, noting that the provisions "were arduously negotiated by Republicans and Democrats" and endorsed by the White House and AFSA.

Smith said he would reintroduce the pay package in 2007.

According to congressional aides, some House members and senators objected to the cost of providing locality pay adjustments to the Foreign Service. The Congressional Budget Office had estimated the cost at $32 million in 2007, $99 million in 2008 and an average of $141 million a year from 2009 to 2011.

J. Anthony H olmes, the AFSA president, was traveling yesterday and not available for an interview. But he told AFSA members in a memo that he was "bitterly disappointed" that the pay proposal was not approved.

The State Department had included locality pay in its fiscal 2007 budget request, he said, adding that the union was confident that future funding would be available because removing pay disparity is important to the department.

"We believe that Congress in the end missed an exceptional, perhaps unique, opportunity to resolve this pay equity issue," Holmes wrote.

The Office of Management and Budget yesterday posted information on 18 electronic government initiatives, including data on the use of federal Web sites that provide services to the public.

For example, GovBenefits.gov, which provides information about Social Security, Medicare, child support, disability assistance and other federal benefits, receives more than 301,000 visits per month and provides more than 118,500 referrals a month to agency benefit programs, the OMB report said.

Another e-gov project, IRS Free File, permits taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of $50,000 or less to prepare and file their tax returns over the Internet using commercial software for free. The report shows that more than 3.9 million people used Free File during the 2006 filing season -- or 4 percent of taxpayers eligible to use the Web service.

Information about the projects, including a report from Karen S. Evans, the OMB's e-gov administrator, is available at http://www.egov.gov.

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