Bush to Seek 3 Percent Raise For Civil Service and Military

President Bush will propose a 3 percent pay raise for federal employees and military personnel in his fiscal 2008 budget, scheduled for release on Monday, a senior administration official said yesterday.

Clay Johnson III, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, said the president's civil service pay advisers and Pentagon officials had acted independently in coming up with their pay recommendations. If accepted by Congress, the raises would take effect next January.

Under current practice, most of the money for the annual civilian pay raise is allocated across the board, as a nationwide increase, and a small portion is parceled out by locality to reflect labor market conditions. The new budget will propose using an additional factor -- recruitment and retention needs for special occupations -- in distributing raises, officials said. This would give Bush more leeway in salary adjustments.

The administration proposed a similar, three-way pay allocation process in last year's budget, but the recommendation was not taken up by Congress.

Federal pay is an important part of the Washington-Baltimore economy. The region is home to about 10 percent of the federal workforce, and the annual federal employee payroll (not counting the military and U.S. Postal Service) runs about $20 billion. Many corporations and nonprofit organizations use the federal raise as a benchmark when deciding their annual salary adjustments.

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), a longtime advocate for federal employees, said he planned to study the budget proposal, particularly in the context of what he called "an already significant pay gap between federal employees and their private-sector counterparts."

Johnson said the proposal to provide the civil service and the military with a 3 percent raise next year was based on the Labor Department's Employment Cost Index, which tracks wage growth in the private sector. In most years, Congress relies on the index as a starting point for debate on government raises.

The pay proposal marks the second consecutive year that Bush's budget has called for equal adjustments in civil service and military pay. The fiscal 2007 budget proposed an average 2.2 percent raise for both groups. Bush put the raise into effect after Congress failed to complete work on fiscal 2007 spending bills.

The Washington-area congressional delegation usually supports equal adjustments in pay for the military and the civil service, and Hoyer and other area House members recently wrote Bush urging him to support a "pay parity" policy in 2008.

While the president's 2008 budget will propose comparable raises for the civil service and the military, Johnson said, he stressed that the recommendations resulted from "two independent agency processes. The goal is not parity, but that is what the two proposals ended being."