The Department of Veterans Affairs is reviewing more than 4,000 positions at risk of a downgrade in their respective pay scales.

The six VA positions under review include a mix of white-collar General Schedule (GS) and blue-collar Wage Grade (WG) positions.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) estimates about 56% of VA employees in these 4,000 positions are veterans. Some of the positions under review cover VA employees who make less than $20 an hour.

The positions the VA is reviewing cover all 18 Veterans Integrated Services Networks (VISNs). More than 1,700 positions under review are located in the Veterans Health Administration’s Finance Revenue Operations and Procurement and Logistics Office.

AFGE says affected employees have received notices in the mail about the consistency reviews. But Thomas Dargon, supervisory attorney for AFGE’s National VA Council, said the union hasn’t received notice from the VA yet about any imminent downgrades.

However, if the VA decides to downgrade any of these positions, Dargon said the department will face an even harder time filling these positions.

“The bell’s already been rung here. I’ve seen the letters that have gone out to impacted employees, and VA doesn’t have a lot of answers to the questions they’re asking,” Dargon said.

The VA put a moratorium on downgrading employee positions in 2012, allowing the department to revise a national handbook, computer software and other administrative tasks to ensure it classified employees fairly and consistently.

The VA, however, ended that moratorium earlier this year, and is conducting “consistency reviews” on six of its occupations, at the direction of the Office of Personnel Management.

VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes told Federal News Network in a statement that OPM directed the VA to conduct agency-wide consistency reviews of these six occupations, after VA employees appealed the classification of their positions to OPM.

OPM, following a classification oversight review of VA in spring 2023, determined that two positions, industrial hygienist GS-0690-12 and purchasing agent (prosthetics) GS-1105-06, were not properly classified at the correct grade level.

VA, in a memo obtained by Federal News Network, said its Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer, “is working to strengthen consistency and oversight of classification determinations across the department by taking action to ensure employees are in appropriately and consistently classified positions, reduce geographical and organizational pay disparities and decrease hiring times.”

The VA is conducting consistency reviews on the following positions:

• File Clerk (GS-0305-05 and above)
• Financial Accounts Assistant (GS-503-all grades)
• Industrial Hygienist (GS-0690-12 and above)
• Purchasing Agent (OA) (GS-1105-07 and above)
• Housekeeping Aid (WG-3 and above)
• Boiler Plant Operator (WG-5402-10 and above)

Reviews of these occupations will occur in two phases. The first phase of reviews began on March 1 and will conclude on April 26. The department will start a second phase on April 29, and complete the reviews by May 1. VA expects to submit all its reviews to OPM by May 1.

“VHA Consolidated Classification Units will be required to initiate a consistency review process, which will require the identification of [position descriptions] in need of review. [Position descriptions] determined not properly classified will be sunset through attrition and positions impacted will be recruited at the appropriate grade levels, as applicable,” the VA memo states.

Once VA conducts its consistency reviews, it will provide reports back to OPM on whether their internal findings demonstrated that those positions are properly classified as compared to OPM standards.

“From there, I suspect some decision will be made,” Dargon said. “AFGE has not been notified of any imminent downgrade at this point, but I do not suspect the consistency reviews to result in employees being upgraded.”

Dargon said AFGE “does not support any downgrade whatsoever, and that “there is already a significant pay disparity between the public sector and the private sector.”

“VA has a notoriously difficult time not only recruiting, but retaining employees, and downgrading these positions is not going to make it any easier to fill them. And it is not going to bolster morale in the workplace,” Dargon said.

Hayes told Federal News Network that the VA issued a letter temporarily suspending changes to lower grade actions on June 29, 2012. Hayes said OPM assessed VA’s classification process in March 2023, and in September 2023, “determined there were no barriers prohibiting VA from conducting the reviews.”

VA, he added, expects to complete its consistency reviews of these positions by May 31.

“Should the reviews conclude that any positions were improperly classified, VA will consider all potential options to correct this misclassification,” Hayes said. “VA will do all we can to mitigate any potential adverse impact to our current employees. VA is committed to partnering with OPM to update classification standards and ensure they reflect the work done at VA and across the federal government.”

According to slides obtained by Federal News Network from a VA briefing presentation, VHA directed its Workforce Management and Consulting Office to cancel any VHA job opportunity announcements (JOAs) for occupations and grades that are subject to the consistency reviews.

As part of the consistency reviews, VHA classifiers will take a closer look at the qualifications required to perform the work for each occupation, and whether the agency has properly applied OPM’s classification or job-grading standards.

Classifiers cannot compare these six positions to other VA jobs or positions, consider any qualifications the employee has that are not required to perform the job, or account for how well an employee performs the work or the amount of work the employee performs.

“The goal of a classification consistency review is to ensure positions are classified in compliance with OPM classification standards and graded consistently VHA-wide,” the presentation slides state.

VHA is outlining “mitigation strategies” for pay-related staffing challenges. They include supplementing the base pay of these six positions with recruitment and retention incentives — such as critical skills incentives and special salary rates available under the toxic-exposure PACT Act.

“I can appreciate that the HR community at VA is trying to create a soft landing for employees who may be impacted by these downgrades through various recruitment and retention incentives, or ‘mitigation strategies,’ as they call them. But that’s not good enough, Dargon said. “There’s no reason to downgrade these employees, to make these positions harder to fill than they already are.”

Under Secretary for Heath Shereef Elnahal included housekeepers as part of a “Big Seven” list of occupations outlined in the VHA’s top hiring priorities in 2023. Those “Big Seven” positions cover VHA jobs that have a direct impact on patient care — and include physicians, nurses, licensed practical nurses, nursing assistants and food service workers.

Dargon warned that any potential reduction in pay for housekeepers would “be felt very quickly and sharply by folks in that field.” He said VA housekeepers in Pittsburgh, for example, are currently making about $16 an hour.

“These jobs are difficult to fill, and it’s difficult to retain workers,” Dargon said. “We have people who have military backgrounds themselves, who are veterans coming back to the VA, continue giving back, who believe in the mission, who are making just over $15, $16, $17 an hour — and you’ve got VA considering a downgrade.”

Dargon said the VA, by sending these letters to impacted employees, puts them in a position of “feeling undervalued or not seen.”

“Housekeeping aids are very much the backbone of health care institutions. You do not need to be a nurse or a doctor to be considered a vitally important part of the healthcare system that is VA,” he said. “Telling those employees who are working, in some instances, in really difficult environments, every hour of the day, to keep the VA clean and safe, that their position is actually compensated too highly — I can’t imagine what that feels like.”

Dargon said that if VA were to downgrade any of these occupations, it would probably lead to the department contracting out more of this work, “because the positions have become so unattractive through pay or other working conditions.”

VA saw record hiring last year, but is now looking to manage the size of its largest-ever health care workforce.

VA in its fiscal 2025 budget request plans to reduce its total workforce headcount by 10,000 positions. Most of the workforce reduction would come from VHA.

VHA Chief Financial Officer Laura Duke told reporters last month that the workforce reduction is necessary, because the agency far exceeded its hiring goals last year, and because it’s seeing higher-than-expected retention rates.

VHA earlier this year rescinded some temporary and final job offers to prospective hires. But the agency later issued a memo, telling leadership and HR officials to only rescind job offers as an “action of last resort.”

AFGE and VA finalized a new labor agreement last August, updating the terms of their labor contract for the first time in more than a decade.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough, at the signing ceremony, said the new contract would help with “easing the process by which we can fill vacancies,” and will allow the department to make new hires more quickly.

Dargon, however, said recent events suggest the VA is no longer making an effective pitch to prospective hires.

“I was on the negotiating team for the master agreement, and sat at the bargaining table with department officials who insisted that the reason they could not quickly hire employees was because of the provisions in the collective bargaining agreement — that it took too long that these were hurdles or impediments to quick hiring. We knew that was never the case, but we agreed to certain revisions in our contract to allow for more streamlined hiring procedures,” Dargon said. “Now they’re telling us they’ve hired too many people, maybe they’re not going to hire as quickly, they’re not going to fill vacancies through attrition. And now we’re looking at existing positions, and the idea of downgrading them.”

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The results of our 13th annual financial readiness test show career military families struggle in this area. Only 2% of military test takers correctly answered all nine questions, which is designed to measure basic money knowledge associated with financial readiness. This compares to 6% of civilian respondents.

While financial education plays a role in improving military families’ money mastery, it’s not the only solution. There are two other key elements — which go hand-in-hand — that can help military families improve their financial readiness.

Using good habits to pursue goals

The role of everyday habits cannot be overstated. In his book “Atomic Habits,” James Clear asserts “habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” He makes the case that daily, seemingly insignificant choices — saving a few dollars, investing consistently, or avoiding unnecessary debt — compound over the years into something powerful. Clear proves the point that small habits can lead to big transformations. First Command Financial Advisors see this in action every day as they coach military families in their pursuit of financial security.

We recommend consistency in simple habits, like automatically depositing a portion of each paycheck into savings or an investment account or sticking to a budget. While this can be easier said than done, 2024 might be an ideal time to increase your savings. Service members are expected to receive a 5.2% pay raise in January, one of the biggest annual pay raises in the last 40 years. Consider stashing a little more money into a savings or investment account. First Command Advisors believe in the merits of the 50/50 Plan. The idea is to allocate half of every pay raise to upgrading your current lifestyle and the other half to building a foundation for your financial future.

Creating systems to form good habits

Many people set out to adopt new habits but fail without a system to achieve the habit. For example, you may have a goal to stick to a budget. While this is a worthy aim, without a budgeting tool and time set aside to make sure you’re staying on track, you likely won’t. In many cases, the probability that you’ll form a long-lasting habit is as likely as the strength of the system you have in place.

Katy Milkman, author of the book “How to Change,” advises this five-pronged approach to habit formation.

• Set a specific goal. Try a specific goal like “I’ll save $100 each month.” Research shows a benefit to being specific about exactly what you want to achieve.
• Create a detailed, cue-based plan. You need to think about exactly how you’ll fit this goal into your life. For a budget-based goal, this could be “I’ll review my budget every Tuesday after dinner.”
• Make it fun to repeat. If the idea of reviewing your monthly budget sounds like pulling teeth, consider adding a positive reward to sweeten the routine. This could look like trying a new restaurant for takeout or enjoying your favorite beverage.
• Foster flexibility. If your routine becomes too brittle, you’ll follow through less often. If your original plan doesn’t pan out, be OK with pivoting.
• Find the right kind of social support. Milkman emphasizes the importance of social support in building and maintaining habits. For some habits, this could mean sharing your goals with family and friends. For financial habits, this could be the support of a financial advisor. 

Financial advisors: Your financial habit building support team

The second way you pursue financial readiness is by enlisting the help of a financial advisor. The First Command Financial Behaviors Index shows that, on average, military families who work with an advisor report average monthly contributions to savings and retirement accounts totaling $3,316 per month versus $1,298 for their colleagues without an advisor. If you’re looking to improve your financial literacy and set good habits, start by reaching out to a financial advisor who knows the military lifestyle.

You work hard in service of your family and the nation. Don’t neglect to pursue your financial goals. By establishing a system to nurture good financial habits and working with a financial advisor, even your most far-fetched goals may be possible.

Mark Steffe is president and CEO of First Command Financial Services, Inc.

The post Harness the power of good habits to pursue your financial goals first appeared on Federal News Network.

The fiscal 2024 homeland security appropriations measure includes $1.1 billion to continue the pay increases at TSA that began last July. Those raises brought TSA salaries in line with the rest of the federal government. The agency is already reporting drastically reduced attrition rates as a result of the pay bump.

Some Republican lawmakers had advanced legislation to reverse the higher pay rates for some non-Transportation Security Officer employees. The issue was reportedly among the areas of contention this week as appropriators raced to reach an agreement on the homeland security spending bill.

But the final bill ultimately continues the new pay rates, at least through the end of this fiscal year. In a statement, American Federation for Government Employees President Everett Kelley applauded the provision for TSA pay.

“We are very happy that Congress is providing the Transportation Security Administration with the funding it needs to competitively pay its workers and address recruiting and retention challenges that affect everyone who travels by air,” Kelley said.

However, the funding of TSA pay, separate from other federal employees, through the appropriations process means the issue will continue to be subject to the often-protracted annual battle in Congress over spending.

Meanwhile, TSA recently reached a landmark, seven-year collective bargaining agreement with AFGE. The union ratified the contract last week. TSA leadership is reviewing the final details before signing off.

Border Patrol hiring

With border issues taking center stage in the debate over the spending bill, the agreement ultimately provided $496 million to swell the Border Patrol’s ranks to 22,000 agents. It also includes $125 million for Border Patrol overtime pay.

Customs and Border Protection is currently recruiting Border Patrol agents at the GS-11 level. The agency is offering a $20,000 recruitment incentive for agents who successfully complete the academy and another $10,000 to those who complete three years at a “hard-to-fill” location.

The spending bill also includes $20 million to hire an additional 150 CBP officers to support counter fentanyl efforts.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is forecasting additional hiring increases for CBP and TSA in fiscal 2025 budget plans.

The homeland security package also includes $11.5 million for CBP’s suicide prevention and wellness efforts, as well as “employee onsite clinicians and child back-up care,” according to a summary of the legislation.

CISA funding cut

For the first time in years, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will see a slight cut to its annual budget. The bill allocates $2.873 billion for CISA in fiscal 2024, about $34 million below the fiscal 2023 levels and $183.3 million below the Biden administration’s budget request.

Compared to last year, CISA will receive about $47 million less for the Joint Collaborative Environment program and $66 million less for the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program. At the same time, CISA will see a new funding line of $145 million for its Cyber Analytics and Data System effort.

CISA’s Chemical Security program also received a $15 million year-over-year cut in the bill. Lawmakers have yet to reauthorize the agency’s key chemical security inspections program.

The post TSA employees will keep their pay raises under 2024 spending deal first appeared on Federal News Network.

Years of pay caps have pulled the long-standing pay system for blue-collar federal employees away from the structure’s original intent.

The Federal Wage System (FWS), covering about 192,000 federal employees, was initially created to try to keep wages aligned with “prevailing,” or market rates in localized areas. But for the last 45 years, since fiscal 1979, many blue-collar feds have seen limits on their annual pay raises.

The intention of the pay caps is to ensure annual raises don’t exceed the raises that General Schedule (GS) employees get, and to address budgetary concerns, the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the pay system, has said.

But as a result, wages for blue-collar feds in 75% of FWS localities no longer align with local pay rates for similar jobs, according to a March 5 report from the Government Accountability Office.

There are also two different locality maps for GS and FWS employees. While the GS locality pay map contains 58 different areas, the FWS map has 248. The number is much higher for FWS because the map is connected to more targeted concentrations of federal employees working at, for instance, specific military bases, or Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers, GAO said.

“Employees in different FWS wage areas might find themselves with different annual pay increases. That has resulted in some, I think, confusion,” GAO Director of Strategic Issues Yvonne Jones, the report’s author, said in an interview. “[There have been] questions over the years for why the pay schedules for the two different sets of employees would be different, when the employees are working in what may look like the same place.”

Currently, out of the 248 Federal Wage System localities, 117 FWS localities are above prevailing rates, while 69 are below the market, GAO said.

The Biden administration said it’s “pursuing structural reforms” to some of the government’s largest pay systems — including the Federal Wage System for blue-collar feds, according to the 2025 budget request.

The Office of Management and Budget specifically pointed to what it said are long-standing “pay limitations” for blue-collar federal employees, as a result of aligning the pay ceilings and floors with those on the General Schedule.

One possible response to the issue may be “removing current ceilings in the FWS wage schedules and establishing a statutory minimum for annual pay rate adjustments,” OMB said in a budget request document.

Although the budget request alluded to some possible fixes, there is not yet a specific legislative proposal addressing the topic.

A proposal to merge FWS, GS maps

The Federal Prevailing Rate Advisory Committee is looking into another way to resolve some pay challenges for FWS employees.

In December 2023, the council, composed of members of OPM, the Defense Department and other stakeholders, voted 9-1 in favor of a draft proposal to merge the FWS locality map with the locality pay map for GS employees.

FPRAC has been considering possible reforms to the FWS map for 15 years. But the current draft proposal comes from a more recent 2022 request from Congress, which asked OPM to consider ways to merge the two locality pay maps.

Even though the council approved the proposal, some members said they still have “substantive” concerns about the cost and implementation of the changes.

A map-merger could lead to recruitment and retention issues for the Federal Wage System workforce in areas where the pay rates might decrease — possibly opening the door to federal positions moving to contract employees to save money, Nancy Speight, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for civilian personnel policy, said in December.

GAO’s Jones also said there are a number of complicated issues that need to be considered and assessed, if OPM were to merge the two maps.

For instance, aligning the maps would affect the wage survey DoD uses to help calculate wage rates in different FWS localities each year. DoD’s annual survey for FWS looks at data like job descriptions and numbers of employees in local areas to help set the pay rates each year.

“If you change the definition of the area, you will change the wage rates,” Jones said. “The point of the FWS system is to provide a wage rate which is close to the market rate in a particular geographic area. So, if you redefine the boundaries of that area, then of course you will change the data inputs into the survey.”

Those changes could lead to more Federal Wage System areas having either a lower or higher pay rate than the prevailing rate, Jones said, adding that “it’s hard to know without actually doing the exercise.”

Currently, OPM Director Kiran Ahuja and other agency officials are reviewing FPRAC’s recommendations. OPM is expected to issue a decision on the recommendations in April.

“We will be waiting with the interest, as others wait with interest, to see what that decision is,” Jones said.

GAO plans to publish another report in the near future on FWS. But right now, it’s in the very early stages of the process. Eventually, the report will look at wage rates for a range of military facilities across the country, and some of the issues associated with setting the priorities.

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After months of negotiations, the Transportation Security Administration has reached a milestone agreement with its union, the American Federation of Government Employees.

Now with a newly ratified seven-year collective bargaining agreement, TSA and AFGE are aiming to expand employee rights and workplace conditions for transportation security officers at airports across the country.

Coming after a pay increase TSA employees received in July 2023, the new contract will replace the previous agreement between TSA and AFGE.

The contract itself has significantly expanded as well. There were just 14 articles in the previous agreement — now, there are 37.

TSA employees will see a streamlined process for grievance and arbitration, expanded official time, fewer restrictions on their sick leave policy, and collective bargaining options at the local level — as just a few examples of what’s included in the new agreement.

Even seemingly smaller items in the contract — like letting TSA employees wear polo shirts and shorts on hot summer days — can make a significant impact for the workforce.

“It’s more flexible for the employees, their work-life balance, and the ability for them to make their shifts work well for them,” Johnny Jones, secretary-treasurer of AFGE Council 100 representing TSA employees, said in an interview. “There will be better communication, hopefully, between the union and management to resolve issues in the workplace.”

The union ratified the new collective bargaining agreement Monday. It now heads to agency leaders for a final review and sign-off before implementation begins.

“TSA is eager to partner with AFGE on the new collective bargaining agreement,” a TSA spokesperson said in a statement. “The agency has and continues to work closely with AFGE in support of our Transportation Security Officers around the country.”

The spokesperson said TSA could not comment on any specifics of the agreement until the agency head review is complete.

House Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said he’s “pleased” with the new agreement between TSA and AFGE.

“The improvements in this agreement, along with the boost in pay TSA’s frontline workforce began receiving last year, represent the most significant advancement for the workforce ever,” Thompson said in a statement.

Streamlined processes for grievances, arbitration

Under one notable provision of the new collective bargaining agreement, TSA officers can now file a grievance with TSA management for more types of adverse actions — including removals, involuntary demotions, and suspensions over two weeks, AFGE said in a press release Monday.

An employee can file a grievance, for example, when they take issue with a performance-based or adverse action that an agency manager has taken. And if an employee’s case doesn’t get resolved in the grievance process, AFGE can now move into the arbitration process to try to reach an agreement using a third-party arbitrator.

It’s a relatively complex part of the new contract, but Jones said it’s extremely important — it can protect TSA employees who may face challenges with management while on the job.

“Most people don’t understand the arbitration component until you’re actually in a situation like this,” Jones said. “It helps enhance the employee’s ability for the job protection because it becomes a fairer process, whereas it was so one-sided in the past. Now, it’s going to open up that ability for employees to check the balance of management’s powers.”

The future of the TSA pay raise

The new bargaining agreement dovetails with another recent, major change for TSA employees. The workforce received a major pay increase in July 2023, which brought their salaries on par with the rest of the federal civilian workforce. The TSA pay scale now mirrors the General Schedule.

The pay increases were first funded through the fiscal 2023 Homeland Security appropriations bill, which cleared Congress in late 2022. After the change, some TSA employees received as much as a 31% pay boost.

Since then, TSA attrition has declined by 11%, as the agency makes gains in retention and begins mitigating what has historically been high staff turnover. But because it was appropriations that made the pay raise possible, there’s always a chance the funding could be reversed in the future.

“Under the continuing resolution, the agency is having to rob Peter to pay Paul to keep everybody getting paid, because that’s the way the bill was set up,” Jones said. “It’s important to get the pay set up right, so we can get the full funding for it. We haven’t had that yet.”

At least for the next couple years, the pay equity initiative appears to be here to stay. The minibus appropriations package for fiscal 2024, signed into law last week, maintained the higher pay rates for agency employees.

And in the White House’s 2025 budget request, TSA would receive an additional $1.5 billion to continue funding the pay equity initiative.

“The TSA workforce deserves to be fairly compensated at rates comparable with their peers in the federal workforce,” the budget request said.

A push for Title 5 at TSA

For AFGE, there is more work ahead to fully solidify changes for TSA employees. For instance, Jones said, there are still concerns around overtime scheduling for TSA employees, who are often told to work overtime hours with little to no advance notice.

Currently, there’s no process in the bargaining agreement for managing or scheduling those extra hours.

“That was one of the biggest issues for employees, and that process is deemed non-negotiable by the agency,” Jones said. “There’s a lack of planning, which has an impact on the workforce. It’s last minute. The employees are tired of mandatory overtime. There has to be a better way.”

Additionally, AFGE is continuing to push for TSA to be moved into Title 5, the personnel system that sets pay, benefits and performance standards for the vast majority of federal employees. When Congress first created TSA in 2002, it specifically excluded agency employees from the General Schedule pay scale and the Title 5 personnel system.

Improvements to the arbitration process, for instance, could be taken another step further, Jones said, if TSA moved into Title 5.

“The way our arbitration process works, it’s a lot better than it was, but it’s not exactly 100% like other agencies would have,” Jones said. “It’s a great contract — we got a lot of what we would like to achieve. But we still have other issues that are a long ways from being resolved. We have to get what we can, when we can, and lock it in for as long as we can — until we can get Title 5. That’s the most important part.”

Federal News Network’s Justin Doubleday contributed to this report.

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The bipartisan fiscal 2024 spending “minibus” lawmakers agreed to over the weekend leaves many agencies at or below last year’s spending levels.

While the spending package represents a crucial step toward moving several agencies off a continuing resolution and onto more solid spending ground for the rest of the fiscal year, agencies are facing further financial uncertainty for the long-term.

Still, the White House is urging a quick passage of the appropriations minibus.

“This bipartisan legislation represents a compromise and neither side got everything it wanted, but it would prevent a damaging shutdown of several key agencies, protect key priorities and make progress for the American people,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement of Administration Policy Tuesday.

The new package includes funding plans for the departments of Agriculture, Justice, Commerce, Energy, Interior, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Veterans Affairs, as well as many smaller agencies.

After the March 8 deadline for passing the six-bill minibus, House and Senate appropriators are expected to turn to the remainder of the appropriations bills, which now have a March 22 deadline.

While agency spending plans appear to be nearing the finish line, what may be top of mind for many federal employees is how the appropriations package affects the federal pay raise for the rest of the year.

At the end of December, President Joe Biden enacted a 5.2% average federal pay raise for most employees on the General Schedule.

Federal employees will continue to receive their higher pay rates that first took effect in January. But the funding will have to come from existing budgets, which may stretch agencies’ spending somewhat thin.

Of course, there are several other key areas where agencies will see spending differences under the new minibus.

Pay for federal wildland firefighters

Unlike the flat or reduced budgeting that many agencies will see under the new minibus, federal wildland firefighters at both the Interior Department and the U.S. Forest Service will be getting more secure resources.

As Congress ran down the clock for reaching spending agreements over the last several months, the frontline employees have come to the edge of a pay cliff many times over.

Now, the 2024 Interior, Environment and Related Agencies appropriations bill maintains a higher pay rate for federal wildland firefighters.

Firefighters first received a pay boost in 2022 as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Under the infrastructure law, federal firefighters received either $20,000 or 50% of their annual base salary, whichever number was lower.

In addition to maintaining that raise, the minibus keeps current staffing levels for federal firefighters as well.

Advocates of federal firefighters, including the National Federation of Federal Employees, said they were “pleased” with the outcome — and are now setting their sights on future developments for the frontline workforce.

“For months, these selfless men and women have had to live with the possibility of their pay being cut in half overnight,” NFFE National President Randy Erwin said in a statement. “We can now further focus our attention on passing a permanent base pay increase through supplemental legislation.”

Some senators have already started pushing for a permanent pay raise for firefighters as well, under a bill called the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act.

A hiring surge for FAA

Employees at the Federal Aviation Administration will also see some added support as part of the appropriations minibus.

The package, under the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies bill, provides just over $20 billion for FAA. It’s an increase of about $1 billion from the agency’s funding for fiscal 2023.

Roughly $12.7 billion of the funding will go toward a hiring surge for the agency. If the legislation is enacted, FAA will have the funding to hire an additional 1,800 controllers to try to stave off staffing loss due to retiring employees.

Resources from the minibus will also go toward improving training facilities for air traffic controllers and enhancing IT and telecommunications systems.

Additionally, nearly $3.2 billion will be put toward improving FAA facilities and equipment. About $3.9 billion will go toward grants aiming to reduce airport emissions, build new infrastructure at airports and more.

Cuts to spending for EPA, NSF

Although federal firefighters and FAA employees will see stabilized or increased resources, many agencies are simultaneously facing budget cuts under the minibus.

The Environmental Protection Agency will take one of the larger funding cuts as part of the appropriations package.

The minibus provides EPA with just under $9.2 billion — roughly $1 billion less than EPA’s enacted 2023 budget of more than $10.1 billion.

House Republicans were particularly focused on implementing budget reductions for EPA and touted the 9.6% cut included in the package as a success.

But the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 7,700 EPA employees, expressed major dissatisfaction with the funding decrease for 2024.

“At a time of climate emergency, the agency budget should be increased, not slashed,” Marie Owens Powell, president of AFGE Council 238, which represents EPA employees, said in a statement Monday. “Our work is mounting … Congress must restore EPA funding in fiscal 2025 and we will continue to raise our voices to make sure it does.”

The minibus, however, maintains current staffing levels across all of EPA’s components. In total, EPA has about 15,100 employees.

At the same time, EPA has been pushing for a hiring surge through separate funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. The agency initially planned to add another 1,000 employees to its roster this year, but its appropriations may now impact the end number.

Along with EPA, the National Science Foundation and NASA will also take hits to their 2024 appropriations.

The minibus gives NSF about $9 billion for the fiscal year, which is $479 million below the 2023 enacted level, and $2.3 billion below the budget request.

NASA will get about $24.5 billion, which is just about $509 million below the enacted level and $2.3 billion below the budget request.

Stagnating pay, staffing at Bureau of Prisons

For salaries and expenses for several Justice Department components — the FBI, U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and U.S. Attorneys — the appropriations committees approved a $19.1 billion budget. That’s $1.4 billion below the budget request for 2024.

In total, DOJ will receive a discretionary total of $37.5 billion, representing a significant decrease from last year’s enacted amount. DOJ’s new topline number is $977 million below 2023 funding, and a $3.8 billion departure from the budget request.

On its own, the FBI will see a 6% budget cut. And the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) will have their budget reduced by 7% for the fiscal year, according to the minibus.

Perhaps most significantly, the Bureau of Prisons will face budget cuts for the rest of 2024 as well. The minibus includes $8.4 billion for the agency — on par with the fiscal 2023 enacted budget and about $250 million below the White House’s initial proposal for 2024.

While staffing levels and salaries for BOP will remain the same, the agency’s facilities budget will decrease by $180 million, putting it $110 million below the 2023 enacted level. The modest budget comes as BOP continues to face major staffing shortages and attrition challenges.

Brandy Moore White, national president of the AFGE Council of Prison Locals, said she was “extremely disappointed” with the funding proposal.

“Failing to provide the Bureau of Prisons with the funding it desperately needs to address staffing, safety and security issues will make it even harder for employees to do their jobs and make our prisons more dangerous environments both for employees and inmates,” Moore said in a statement.

AFGE National President Everett Kelley said while the union appreciates Congress pushing forward with an actual spending agreement, rather than another continuing resolution, the minibus is “at best an effort to tread water.”

“The six spending bills before Congress this week are far better than the partisan bills the House considered last year, which sought cuts of 20% or more from key programs,” Kelley said in a statement. “At the same time, the appropriations process remains fundamentally flawed. The fiscal year is already half over. Moreover, the inflexible spending targets imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act have resulted in damaging freezes and reductions to many vital federal programs.”

The post 6-bill minibus rewards some agencies, while slashing budgets for others first appeared on Federal News Network.

Fresh off a 5% pay raise, federal employees can look forward to some other enhancements coming their way, like the possibility of another hefty pay raise next year. For more on this and a few other matters, the Federal Drive with Tom spoke with John Hatton, the vice president for Policy and Programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE).

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And let’s talk about the FAIR Act federal pay rate increase for 2025. This is kind of a perennial where they look for not double digits but high single digits.

John Hatton Yeah. And so this is kind of a marker for members of Congress pushing for federal pay raises. In this case, Congressman Gerry Connolly(D-Va.) in the House and Senator Schatz (D-Hawaii) in the Senate. And I would say this is more of a negotiating tool for them in terms of trying to put this marker down as you get into the appropriations season. So the federal pay raise is typically based off of the most recent change in the employment cost index for private sector wages and salaries. So if you’re looking at that ended in 2023, it’s 4.5%. That’s typically reduced down by half a percent down to four for that across the board pay increase. That’s probably what you’re going to expect to see in Biden’s budget. If they’re looking to keep that same pay rate policy going forward, that they include a certain amount in this case, in recent cases, 0.5% for locality pay. The Fair act says, let’s go a little bit higher on locality pay, there’s a large pay gap between federal employee pay, similar private sector jobs of 27%. So they’re looking for a 3.4% increase in locality instead of that point five percentage point increase.

Tom Temin And locality is spreading like wildfire in some sense to every year there are new regions. And you wonder how did that get to be a locality pay. It’s harder to find places that aren’t locality pay.

John Hatton Yeah, there’s still this general breast of US locality pay, which actually also increases from the base to an extent different geographic areas continue to be above that, you’re going to have these new locality pay areas crop up. But certainly in large metropolitan areas, whether it’s San Francisco or New York or in the DC area, people are paid more because the cost of living is higher and wages are higher. So it is good policy, I think, to adjust pay for what the market rate is in that area.

Tom Temin And what is the latest thinking on whether federal employees are paid more or less than their counterparts in the private sector? I’ve always felt that, yes, some of them are underpaid. Some of them are actually better than the private sector. I don’t think there’s any single index that makes any sense because of the range of jobs involved.

John Hatton Yeah, what the federal government uses is the Federal Salary Council. And they try to match job to job, similar private sector jobs with the federal jobs and come up with some percentage difference, which is supposed to inform the changes in locality pay. And they found that taking that all in aggregate, there’s a 27% difference where the private sector gets paid more than federal jobs. Now, that’s not taking into account benefits. The Congressional Budget Office has looked at this before, they look at less of a job to job comparison and more of a human capital approach. So people with similar experience, people of similar educational backgrounds and what are they getting paid? And they find kind of the most educated in the federal workforce are paid less than their private sector counterparts. But if you get down to the lower educational levels, they’re actually paid a little bit more when you’re taking into account benefits and everything else. So depends on how you’re analyzing it, it’s complicated, but I think certainly there are plenty of cases where pay needs to go up to be competitive with the private sector in recruitment.

Tom Temin And in the last couple of years, you’ve probably noticed, as we have, that lots of agencies are getting spot authority to offer extra pay, extra benefits, extra hiring eases for strategically important jobs they might need. It’s fairly widespread, though.

John Hatton Yeah, I think that’s one of the justifications for the Fair Act or trying to close that locality pay gap is how much agencies are pushing for these special pay authorities so that they can actually recruit people, because what is being provided under the basic or general schedule system isn’t enough. So I don’t know if any one year that locality pay increase is going to be 27%, but little inches of work would help prevent kind of these situations where agencies are really struggling to recruit people because their pay is low.

Tom Temin Especially in an age when a pack of potato chips at the grocery store is five bucks. We’re speaking with John Hatton, vice president for policy and programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, NARFE. And the OPM data breach, this was back in 2015 kids, but it still resonates, doesn’t it? And there is something that would extend protection for people’s identities continuing. Tell us what’s going on there.

John Hatton Yeah. So just as a reminder, people, OPM allowed their database to be breached and personally identifiable information was revealed. Now, Congress responded to that by providing identity theft protection up to $5 million in insurance, but only for like the next ten years when they include it in appropriations bill. So there’s an effort to extend that information is out there hasn’t been put back in the box. So people may still need that protection resulting from that breach. So Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC.) introduced a bill to extend it. I think this will probably get a little bit more attention as we get closer to that expiration date, but it’s just a reminder to people that, yes, your data still may be out there, you still may need some of this protection and it should be the obligation of the federal government which gave it away to provide you with that identity theft protection.

Tom Temin The strange thing about that data is that it never did manifest itself in any obvious way. There wasn’t some big giant phishing attack that hit a million federal employees or anything. No one really knew what happened to it or where it went, or if it ever was used in some manner.

John Hatton Yeah, I think it’s probably difficult to actually parse out whether, if you do have some identity theft or fraud attack on you, if it came from that OPM data breach or a target breach or something else, there’s data hacks all over the place. OPM is not the only place to be exposed in this realm, so I think the danger becomes when people can collect data from multiple sources and starts piecing together and piecing together, and they get a much clearer picture of you and your identity and how you operate the one piece of data or the one attack may not be itself the most, but certainly is relevant in this case.

Tom Temin And the other thing about such data, it does go stale because people change jobs, they move and so forth. So you got to act quick on it, especially if you’re going to launch a phishing attack based on what you know about that person at that moment.

John Hatton True, and some of that is email addresses. But I think in this case you’re talking about Social Security numbers, CSA numbers, just identities and addresses. Now, if you’ve moved and certainly there was concerns about people who were in intelligence agencies, people whose identities has been protected based on their top secret clearances or otherwise.

Tom Temin And eventually you retire and then you worry about pharmacy benefits and Medicare Part D haven’t had the pleasure of navigating those shoals yet, but it’s complicated. But now there is a bipartisan bill that would help with Medicare Part D and drug costs.

John Hatton Yeah. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability advanced a bill that applies the FEHB. That was their jurisdiction. This was also going through energy and commerce and ways and means as to take it up as well. And it’s just an effort, and it’s nice to see some bipartisanship on this issue of drug pricing. And that would apply to federal retirees through FEHB. And now that more plans are integrating with Medicare Part D through that as well, and just prohibit some practices like the PBMs, negotiate drug prices, and they may get rebates, but they may not pass that rebate on to you as a consumer or the insurance companies that you’re paying the premiums for those claims, they made insure you to different pharmacies so you can’t go to the pharmacy you want. So some common sense legislation, getting at some drug pricing and getting at some of these practices that reduce your choice. So it’s good to see some bipartisanship, even in the midst of a very partizan environment, that some business can still get done and some improvements can still be made.

Tom Temin Yeah, that idea of the pharmacy benefits manager, I guess it had a good theory in that someone third party would argue with drug companies and get prices down, but it’s kind of turned into a profit center, almost, where the savings don’t necessarily get passed on to the actual buyer.

John Hatton Right now, they have an incentive to negotiate and get lower prices, but they don’t have the incentive to necessarily pass that on to the consumer as thoroughly as they should or could.

The post Are federal employees headed for another big raise next year? first appeared on Federal News Network.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) held a rally Tuesday, calling lawmakers to give the federal workforce a 7.4% average pay raise this year.

AFGE is backing the pay raise proposed by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) in the Federal Adjustment of Income Rates (FAIR) Act they introduced last month.

AFGE National President Everett Kelley told bargaining unit employees at the rally on Capitol Hill that it is “past time for federal employees to receive what they are due, for hard work and service to the American people.”

Kelley also urged lawmakers to “keep the government open [and] keep the government serving the American people.”

“This is the most basic function of Congress,” Kelley said.

Congress passed a continuing resolution last month to avert a partial government shutdown and extend funding for federal agencies through March.

It’s the third stopgap funding bill lawmakers have passed since the start of the fiscal year.

Under the current “laddered” continuing resolution, funding for some federal agencies will run out on March 1. Others have annual appropriations to last through March 8.

Democratic lawmakers echoed AFGE”s demand for higher federal employee pay, and urged their colleagues to avoid a government shutdown in March.

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) said a pay raise on par with the FAIR Act has been “long overdue,” and he would “make sure that you all get the pay raise that you deserve.”

Connolly and Schatz have reintroduced the FAIR Act in Congress for 10 consecutive years, although lawmakers have never acted on any version of the bill.

The lawmakers and federal employee unions say the FAIR Act would help bring federal salaries in line with those of the private sector.

According to the Federal Salary Council, federal employees’ pay lagged about 27.5% behind that of private sector workers in 2023.

About 57% of feds say they’re happy with their pay — a 10% decline in just the last three years, according to the results of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) from the Office of Personnel Management.

Rep. Val Hoyle (D-Ore.) said federal employees and the agencies they work for aren’t getting the financial resources they need.

“One job should be enough. And then, [to] not give you staff, and blame you when things start breaking, it is not right. You’re expected to show up at your jobs, even when government is shut down and you’re not getting paid,” Hoyle said.

Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-Ill.) told the crowd she also supports the FAIR Act.

“You work hard every day. You deserve the pay at the end of the day for the work that you’ve done, and you don’t make enough, you can count on me to do my job to raise your wage by 7.4%,” Budzinski said.

Budzinski, a member of the House Veteran Affairs Committee, said VA employees are “asked to do so much and not given enough to do your very important jobs for our men and women that have served.”

She said she would also oppose a fiscal commission that would “cut your pay and benefits and reduce the impact the workforce that we have that we so desperately need.”

AFGE and 116 House lawmakers oppose the creation of a fiscal commission, as proposed by a bill that passed out of the House Budget Committee in January.

AFGE says the commission would hold “enormous power to recommend cuts to Social Security and other popular programs without any ability for the public to weigh in.” The union opposes efforts to attach the fiscal commission bill to the fiscal 2024 spending deal.

Union officials and lawmakers are also pushing to ensure agencies receive enough annual funding from Congress to continue to meet their mission.

AFGE is calling for $20 billion in supplemental funding for the Social Security Administration over the next 10 years. The funding proposal, modeled after what the IRS recently received to rebuild its workforce and modernize legacy IT, would give SSA about $2 billion each year.

Rich Couture, the chief negotiator for AFGE Council 215, told Federal News Network the funding is “what we need in order to put our agency back on track and to provide the American public with the service that they deserve.”

“More and more work keeps getting dumped on fewer and fewer employees, which is creating a lot of stress for those workers. When you combine that with our lack of competitive pay and benefits, it is inducing a lot of our workers to leave, either through retiring earlier than they would have planned, or to find work with other federal agencies or with other employers, where the pay, the benefits, the telework are better,” Couture said.

Couture said SSA’s staff has “declined precipitously” since 2010, even though it’s seen a 17% increase in beneficiaries during the same period of time.

He added that short-staffing at the agency may have contributed to the agency’s discovery last fall that it made $23 billion in overpayments, and is looking to claw back those overpayments.

“We simply do not have the people to stay on top of those changes timely to make sure that they’re getting paid the right amount at the right time,” Couture said.

Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), a freshman member of Congress, recalled that his first vote in the House last year was a bill to roll back multi-year funding for the IRS under the Inflation Reduction Act.

While Congress is looking at a comprehensive spending bill that would mostly lock in current agency spending levels, Casar said the “money” is there to ensure federal employees get a substantial pay raise.

“We know the money is there to pay the everyday person that is doing the work of protecting this country. That meat doesn’t get inspected on its own. Those workplaces don’t get kept safe on their own. People don’t get their Social Security check on their own. That health care is something that people fought for and built in this U.S. Congress, but you deliver it, and it’s time for the U.S. Congress to do our job,” Casar said.

The post AFGE rallies for 7.4% federal employee pay raise, spending deal to avoid government shutdown   first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Department of Veterans Affairs gave its IT workforce a significant pay raise last summer, in the hopes of bringing more private-sector tech professionals into government.

More money led to more hires at the VA’s Office of Information and Technology. Now the department is counting on the same strategy to recruit and retain human resources employees that’ll oversee its health care workforce.

The Veterans Health Administration recently approved a Special Salary Rate for HR specialists and HR assistants, resulting in about a 15% pay increase. Eligible employees saw the pay bump go into effect last month.

David Perry, VHA’s chief officer for workforce management and consulting, said the SSR gives the agency long-term tools to compete for in-demand experts.

“HR has been a mission-critical occupation for the federal government for going on two decades now, and so we’ve been critically understaffed in this occupation for quite a long time,” Perry said in a recent interview.

“Our intention for the SSR is not only as a recruitment tool, but more importantly, as a retention tool, so that once we get HR on board, we can keep them into this profession,” he added.

The Office of Personnel Management typically sets governmentwide Special Salary Rates, which help agencies narrow the gap between what they and the private sector can offer in-demand experts.

But under the PACT Act — a sweeping 2022 law that expands VA health care and benefits eligibility for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service — the VA has the authority to set Special Salary Rates for non-medical Title 5 positions.

Perry said additional SSR proposals are in the “analysis phase” at VHA, but none have been officially submitted for approval yet.

“We’re now looking at essentially all of our non-clinical mission-critical occupations,” he said.

Before getting final approval on the SSR, Perry said VHA offered a critical skills incentive (CSI), worth up to 25% of an employee’s base salary, to HR professionals at VHA.

“Our timing was that we needed to do something immediate. And so, the critical skills incentive was that tool that we had at our disposal, to put in place to stabilize our HR workforce, as we worked through the analysis and approval process for the SSR,” Perry said.

The Special Salary Rate, he added, is a “more robust and longer-term package” for VHA than what the CSI previously offered. Unlike the CSI, the SSR does not need to be renewed or reapproved each year. It also counts toward the “high three” calculation for a federal retiree’s pension benefits.

OPM normally counts the highest three years of an employee’s base salary when calculating pensions.

“It’s more of a permanent adjustment to salary, and so it’s a much-preferred mechanism,” Perry said. “When we meet the criteria and justification for when we use an SSR, it is absolutely more employee-centric to use that authority, versus a critical skills incentive.”

VA’s ability to offer SSRs under the PACT Act lasts through September 2027, but VA OIT officials previously said the department can extend its ability to offer SSRs for an additional two years under the legislation.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough told reporters in October that the department is putting PACT Act recruitment and retention incentives to effective use, and that they’ve helped the department far exceed its recent hiring goals.

McDonough told reporters that the VA is focused on managing the critical skills incentive and Special Salary Rate carefully, “because we are showing a pathway forward for the rest of the federal government.”

“We have these authorities in a way that many of our federal agency partners do not, and would like to have it. So, we want to make sure we manage these tools,” McDonough said at a Nov. 29 press conference.

VHA’s HR-STAR program is also bringing in a pipeline of new human resources personnel into the agency every month.

To bring in the next generation of its HR workforce, VHA is taking new graduates through a year of specialized training, to become HR professionals in areas where there’s a shortage of them.

The HR-STAR program saw its cohort graduate in October, and it’ll keep producing new VHA HR experts each month.

Perry said VHA recently assigned the fifth cohort of HR-STAR graduates into HR jobs across the country.

“Just because we have the SSR in place, it’s not a silver bullet. So we still have to focus, and really make a concerted effort on our recruitment efforts, but also making sure that we’re training our staff for that retention aspect as well,” he said. “While the SSR has definitely helped us gain some parity with the private sector and other federal agencies, we still have a lot to do to make sure that we’re still developing and growing and training our workforce as well.”

HR work at VHA is complex, and candidates with human capital experience at other federal agencies still require substantial training to understand the particulars of the VA workforce.

That’s because VHA has separate pay and workforce regulations for medical personnel — covered under Title 38 of the U.S. Code — and non-medical personnel — covered under Title 5. To further complicate things, some VHA employees fall under a third “hybrid” category, which adheres to a blend of those Title 5 rules and regulations

Perry said it takes new HR hires about three years to fully understand everything about the job.

To make sure HR-STAR graduates continue to learn new skills after graduating from the program, he said his team is working on a longer-term training curriculum.

“Part of the charge I have for my team is to look at how do we do more of a two-year, three-year continual competency assessment across some of the larger areas that are needed to develop,” he said.

The post Special salary rate gives VHA ‘more robust,’ longer-term tools to hire and keep HR staff first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Senior political appointees, including the vice president, will continue to see their pay checks stagnate. The Office of Personnel announce a pay freeze will continue for certain categories of politically appointed feds. The freeze covers Executive Schedule employees, including ambassadors-at-large, non-career members of the Senior Executive Service, and other highly paid political appointees. OPM's recent announcement is not much of a surprise, though. The same pay freeze has been in effect for the last 10 years.
  (Continued pay freeze for certain senior political officials - Office of Personnel Management)
• The General Services Administration's commercial platforms initiative is out from under the glare of a protest. GSA decided to take corrective action by giving one of the vendors, bidding on the Commercial Platforms Initiative next generation contract, a second chance. GSA let ePS-National Diversity Veteran Small Business do a 30-minute live test demonstration last month to help address possible deficiencies the agency found in its bid. That decision by GSA led the Government Accountability Office to dismiss the complaint from ePS filed in December. It is still unclear when GSA will make the final awards for the new CPI vehicle. The current commercial platform contracts expire on March 24.
  (GSA takes corrective action on commercial platforms protest - GAO)
• The Congressional Research Service is hiring a new director, viewed as one of the most influential policy positions in the government. The top leader at the CRS, which is a part of the Library of Congress, oversees an organization that assists lawmakers at every stage of the legislative process. Mary Mazanec stepped aside as the director of the CRS in June, after more than 12 years. Robert Newlen has been acting director since July. The Library of Congress will hold a virtual information session about the position on Feb. 22. Applications are due by March 4.
  (CRS looking for a new leader - USAjobs.gov)
• Changes are coming to a long-used security questionnaire for government positions. Agencies will phase out the Standard Form-86 in the coming years, after the White House approved the new Personnel Vetting Questionnaire late last year. The PVQ will replace the SF-86 and several other forms that are the first step in getting a background investigation. The PVQ includes changes to questions around past marijuana use, mental health, and foreign connections. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency is working on the timeline for implementing the PVQ into its online e-App platform.
  (Goodbye SF-86? OMB approves new ‘Personnel Vetting Questionnaire’ - Federal News Network)
• For the first time in more than a decade, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) made a dent in its backlog. At the end of fiscal 2023, the agency’s immigration benefits and request backlog was at 4.3 million cases, down 15% from the year before. USCIS said it completed a record 10 million cases in 2023. The agency administered the Oath of Allegiance to more than 878,500 new U.S. citizens. USCIS said new online tools, including a self-service rescheduling feature, are helping improve the customer experience for those navigating the immigration system.
  (USCIS reduces backlog for the first time in over a decade - USCIS)
• Thousands of Defense Department users can now collaborate and share classified material in a way they have never been able to on classified networks. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has moved more than 200,000 users to its classified cloud environment. Users have access to the full suite of Microsoft capabilities with DoD 365-Secret, including Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. DISA began deploying DoD 365-Secret last year, initially targeting around 11,000 users for onboarding into the classified cloud environment.
  (DISA rolls out Microsoft 365 classified cloud to more users - Defense Information Systems Agency)
• So-called draft dodgers, who want to apply for a federal job, might soon have a little more leniency. The Office of Personnel Management wants to relax the rules on those who failed to register for the military draft, but who still want to work in government. Despite the military being all-volunteer for decades, the draft law still applies to men ages 18 to 26. Now, OPM is proposing to give men, who might not have registered in time, a chance to explain their circumstances when applying for a federal job. Comments on the proposed rule are due by April 8.
  (Bar to appointment of persons who fail to register under Selective Service Law - Office of Personnel Management)
• The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) is entering a new phase. The hub’s director Doug Beck laid out his vision for the unit’s next iteration dubbed 3.0. The goal is to take the capabilities developed during DIU 2.0 and apply them at scale, which means to improve to that next level, but at minimal cost, with resources already available. DIU 3.0 plans to deepen its partnership with the services and the Joint Staff to ensure the demand is there to scale certain technologies. Moving forward, DIU will embed personnel with combatant commands to help shape demand for technology.
  (Defense Innovation Unit lays out vision for its next phase - Center for a New American Security)

The post Decade of pay stagnation continues for VP, senior political appointees first appeared on Federal News Network.

With labor and management leaders preparing to sit down at the bargaining table, hundreds of employees at the Federal Housing Finance Agency may soon see changes in their workplace.

Pay equity, employee engagement and the creation of a clear grievance procedure are top of mind for Nathan Watkins, president of the nearly brand-new bargaining unit under the National Treasury Employees Union.

“It was almost exactly two years ago that a small group of employees, including myself, reached out to a couple of national unions trying to form a chapter at FHFA,” Watkins said in an interview. “We wanted, first and foremost, to give employees a voice.”

The organization campaign for FHFA, a small financial regulatory agency with a staff of a little over 700 employees, culminated in an overwhelmingly majority vote to unionize in August 2023. FHFA employees voted 254-24, or 91%, in favor of the union’s establishment. Currently, the bargaining unit represents about 500 employees.

“It was a wonderfully affirming, encouraging, uplifting result — but then there was so much work to do,” Watkins said. “All of a sudden, we’re bargaining the impact and implementation of certain policy changes and merit increases for the year.”

The next steps for the new NTEU bargaining unit are to sit down with FHFA management to negotiate and eventually sign off on the first-ever collective bargaining agreement for the agency. The upcoming contract will cover many areas that directly impact the workforce, including pay, benefits, work hours and other employment conditions. It is expected to be finalized sometime this year.

It’s a lot of work on the plate of what Watkins said is a “very small shop” of bargaining unit leaders.

“I’ve forgotten the rhythm of ‘9-to-5,’” he said. “It might be a bit of a pipe dream, but getting a good night’s sleep every night for a week would really show that we’ve pulled it off.”

The creation of a bargaining unit has been a long time coming. Over the last few years, FHFA has experienced a decline in employee engagement, according to the results of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) and the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work rankings. Satisfaction with pay, similar to federal employees at many other agencies, has also been declining for several years.

“Despite there being such a high morale drop, we saw a rapid climb to the top of response rates by agency,” Watkins said. “We still don’t believe that we’re being heard by the agency.”

Bob Stanton, FHFA’s branch chief of performance management and total rewards, said having FEVS results on hand — including the spike in response rate — is crucial to making improvements going forward.

“We’re looking forward to the upcoming FEVS, to be honest with you,” Stanton said in an interview. “We want to continue to learn from our employees, and we want to continue to learn from the union and have that collaborative relationship with them.”

There are other ways FHFA has been trying to gather feedback from employees. In addition to FEVS, the agency has “engagement ambassadors” who meet regularly to discuss ideas to better engage employees. Staff members can also use an online platform called “idea scale” to bring their suggestions for improving engagement up to the leadership level, said Debra Chew, FHFA’s director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Fairness.

“Through that process, we were really intentional in making sure that we were listening to the workforce and receiving their input,” Chew said in an interview.

In response to feedback, FHFA has offered “wellness” time off, which includes three hours of leave per pay period, and one full workday a year. Additionally, Chew said the agency offers full-time telework during the month of August, which can be difficult for employees who have kids at home returning back to school that month.

But in cases where there are further concerns from employees, Watkins said establishing an administrative grievance process is necessary as part of the collective bargaining agreement. It’s a way for employees to formally file concerns with management to then be addressed and resolved.

“We also want to really fill the void that is there right now, where employees can receive information from the agency about policies or resources that are available,” Watkins said. “It will give employees a voice so that their concerns, even if they’re not formal grievances, can be heard and acknowledged by the agency. That exchange of information to and from employees is one of our top priorities. I hope that the agency will hear us and acknowledge our appetite to speak up, to be heard and to work with us.”

Chew and Stanton expressed support for the establishment of an official grievance process, saying that it’s a benefit to the agency as much as it is to employees.

“We need vehicles and mechanisms to hear employee concerns and have those concerns help inform how leadership responds to employees, and help inform our policy development process,” Chew said.

One of the perhaps most notable collective bargaining topics Watkins will focus on in negotiations is establishing better pay equity at the agency. FHFA is a non-appropriated agency, which means the FHFA director has discretion in setting pay rates for employees, rather than deferring to the General Schedule. The agency uses a “pay for performance” system, in which employees receive annual salary increases based on their individual performance, and are eligible for performance-based annual bonuses.

There are also legal requirements for FHFA to keep on track with the pay rates of other federal financial regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Despite that, Watkins said FHFA pay has been lagging for some employees, as salary history holds a lot of weight.

“A lot, if not the majority, of employees who join FHFA come from the private sector or other financial regulators,” Watkins said. “Their salary upon hire generally sets their salary trajectory at the agency.”

FHFA pay satisfaction over time

The Biden administration has picked up on concerns around salary history as well. The Office of Personnel Management just finalized a rule barring agencies from considering salary history in the hiring process, which OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said can exacerbate preexisting inequalities, and disproportionally impact women and workers of color.

“Salary history is not necessarily a good indicator of worker value, experience and expertise, and it also may contain or exacerbate biases,” OPM said in the Jan. 29 final rule. “Pay setting based on salary history may be inequitable, can perpetuate biases from job to job, and may contribute to a pay gap between the earnings of men and women.”

By this October, agencies will no longer be able to set new or returning federal employees’ pay based on their private sector wages. Still, federal employees who have already been working at an agency, such as FHFA, may not see many changes as a result, since the final rule from OPM generally applies only to new or returning federal hires.

“Employees who may have joined FHFA earlier in their careers, being very competent and successful at FHFA, nonetheless make less than their peers at the same level without any chance of increasing their salary,” Watkins said.

Stanton and Chew said the agency is conducting a compensation study to better understand where there may be existing pay gaps — and how to correct them.

“It’s our first time being in the union environment,” Stanton said. “Our collaboration really began with listening to the concerns of the union and working with them. Now we are focusing on the future, and solutions that are beneficial to the bargaining unit and workforce. We all share the same goal — we want FHFA to be the best place to work.”

Watkins said “heavy-handed” management practices as well as a culture of fear and retaliation that he and his colleagues experienced was what first led to the decision to embark on creating a union at FHFA. Still, Watkins added that he’s optimistic about negotiations for the first-ever collective bargaining agreement. He said he’s hoping establishing clear policies on pay, benefits and a grievance procedure will reverse the current downward trend in employee engagement.

“I’m completely confident that management and senior leaders, when we get to the table with them, will recognize that we are all humans and colleagues working toward the same goal,” Watkins said. “I hope that by the end of contract negotiations — as difficult as the process will be — we’ll really have that mutual benefit that unions provide for federal agencies. I’m hopeful that we’ll work hand in hand with the agency in the future.”

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Pay, child care, housing, health care and spousal employment all remain major issues impacting the military’s recruitment and retention goals, the Defense Department officials told House Armed Services Committee (HASC) members during a panel hearing Wednesday.

Despite high agreement that changes are necessary, it will likely still be years before Congress and DoD can fully address the military’s quality-of-life challenges through the appropriations process.

HASC first stood up a temporary panel in June 2023 designed to focus exclusively on quality-of-life issues for military members. The panel, composed of 13 Congress members, has held hearings over the last several months to consider various personnel challenges, as well as possible solutions. House officials have said an upcoming report based on the discussions during those hearings will inform changes to be included in the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Increasing military pay, improving housing conditions and adding more child care options are all possibilities still on the table for the 2025 NDAA.

“Providing acceptable quality of life is the very least we can do,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), the panel’s chairman, said during a hearing Wednesday. “The work of this panel has revealed an alarming erosion of military quality of life that, if not addressed quickly, will place the very existence of our all-volunteer force at risk.”

Of the five quality-of-life issues the panel has been considering, Bacon asked each DoD official to say what they felt were the top two for their branch. The answers were varied, ultimately appearing to show that each of the five issues is equally vital.

“That’s an incredibly complicated and complex question that has a lot of interconnectivity between each one of those,” Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer said.

Some problems, however, require more immediate action. The DoD officials took the opportunity to bring attention to issues of compensation for military personnel — especially for junior members. Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Joanne Bass reminded the panel that Congress has not given military members a targeted pay raise since 2007.

“A couple of these problems are so big that if we don’t start taking immediate action on them now, we’re going to miss the curve in the future,” Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy James Honea added. “Military pay and compensation reform is going to be one of those big problems that we need to start taking a bite at today.”

In another major challenge, poor living conditions for military members is severely undermining DoD’s ability to recruit and retain members. The Government Accountability Office released a scathing report in September 2023 providing details into the subpar housing. Some military barracks do not meet even the most basic living conditions, as members have to deal with sewage overflow, mold and mildew, inoperable fire systems and broken air conditioning units — just to name a few issues.

The September report made 31 recommendations, and although DoD concurred with most of them, GAO officials have told Congress that turning some of the recommendations into law may be the best route — DoD has at many times in the past agreed to implement fixes, but the problems continue to worsen.

Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Carlos Ruiz agreed that creating a better strategy and maintaining sustained funding is necessary, but he added that there has been at least some progress to improve military housing conditions, in what he called “quick wins.”

“I’ve seen refurbished barracks — we have quite a few of them,” Ruiz said. “We’ve done 30 of them in two years, and we plan on doing more.”

The DoD officials at Wednesday’s panel hearing said consistent appropriations will be crucial to improving not only military housing, but all the quality-of-life issues under the House’s close watch.

“There was an express concern about the planning out to do that modernization,” Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force John Bentivegna said. “A stable budget is critically important to plan that out. That’s where we need help.”

Child care, another top concern for both DoD leaders and members of Congress, will also require major improvements. Defense officials said improving staffing numbers at child care centers has been promising, but added there must be continued and broader improvements going forward.

For the Marine Corps, staff turnover at child care facilities has dropped from 48%, now down to below 20%. Similarly, staffing for the Air Force’s centers has increased from 65% to 81% in the last year. As a result, the Air Force’s waitlist for child care services has also shrunk by 31%, Bass said.

Ultimately, it will require a holistic approach with adequate funding and attention to make improvements in the long term, the DoD officials said. But the current continuing resolution is hampering DoD’s ability to adequately address the major quality-of-life issues.

“We’re going to tackle this the best we can,” Bacon said. “We may not be able to pay for everything in one budget cycle, but we’re going to work hard with our appropriators and come up with a strategy to get this right.”

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After federal employees saw their first paychecks with a 5.2% raise this year, House and Senate Democrats are once again turning their attention to next year’s federal pay raise.

But under a continuing resolution that’s now funding the government well into 2024, many agencies are trying to figure out how to fund the already higher pay rates for their employees.

Still, in what’s become an annual tradition, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) reintroduced the Federal Adjustment of Income Rates (FAIR) Act in the House and Senate Tuesday. If enacted, the FAIR Act would give most civilian federal employees a 7.4% average pay raise next year. The legislation accounts for a 4% across-the-board raise, plus an average of a 3.4% locality pay adjustment.

The two lawmakers, alongside dozens of Democrat co-sponsors, said a hefty raise for federal employees is only fair given past years of pay freezes, government shutdowns and sequestration cuts.

“Whether inspecting our food, conducting medical research or caring for our veterans, federal workers play an important role in our everyday lives and deserve pay which reflects that,” Schatz said in a statement Tuesday.

Although bicameral Democrats push for the FAIR Act’s passage each year, Congress has never acted on any version of the legislation. Typically, the enacted pay raise for federal employees is lower than what’s included in the FAIR Act. For instance, in 2023, the FAIR Act proposed an 8.7% raise, but the actual raise feds received was 5.2% on average.

For years, federal pay raises have mostly stemmed from presidents’ alternative pay plans, but Congress has occasionally legislated raise amounts for civilian feds. Regardless, the funding for a federal pay raise — whether specified in legislation or authorized by the president — inevitably comes from congressional appropriations.

But under a continuing resolution, agencies’ budgets remain stagnant, while other budget costs, such as federal employees’ paychecks, continue to rise.

“That’s another reason why passing full-year appropriations, rather than a continuing resolution, is critical. Doing so allows Congress to provide adequate budget authority to cover the pay raise,” said John Hatton, a staff vice president at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE), in an email to Federal News Network. “Continuing resolutions keep past funding decisions static, without regard to increased costs — whether that’s from employee compensation, contract obligations or any other changing circumstance.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), as an example, has not had a substantive increase in its baseline funding for years. Because of that, CMS has to figure out how to deal with the extra funding needed for the pay raise while operating under a continuing resolution, said Marc Richardson, CMS’ director for marketplace innovation and technology group, at an AFCEA Bethesda Health IT event Tuesday.

Connolly and Schatz’s reintroduction of the FAIR Act marks 10 years in a row of Democrats’ push for a larger raise for civilian feds. The lawmakers, with the support of numerous federal unions and advocacy organizations, said the FAIR Act would help bring federal salaries in line with those of the private sector.

During 2023, federal employees’ pay lagged about 27.5% behind that of private sector workers, the Federal Salary Council reported.

“The FAIR Act is an important step in addressing that gap,” Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement. “By making the federal government a more competitive option for skilled workers, federal agencies can recruit and retain the employees necessary to better serve the American people.”

Pay satisfaction among federal employees is also dwindling. Currently, 57% of feds say they’re happy with their pay — a 10% decline in just the last three years, according to the results of the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) from the Office of Personnel Management.

“Pay increases for 2024 were not enough to offset rising inflation and the widened federal-private pay deficit,” Randy Erwin, national president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, said in a statement. “Congress must understand that to attract and retain a skilled workforce that best serves the American people, we need to pay our civil servants competitive wages.”

For the FAIR Act, lawmakers calculated the proposed raise percentage through a combination of the Employee Cost Index (ECI) and inflation levels over the last year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ ECI measures how much private sector wages grow over time.

There is legal precedent for these calculations. Under the 1990 Federal Employee Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA), the government can provide a base pay raise equal to the ECI from the second quarter of the previous year, minus a half percent. Since the ECI was 4.5% during 2023, the FAIR Act includes a base raise of 4%.

On top of the proposed 4% base pay raise, the 3.4% proposed locality adjustment in the FAIR Act aligns with rates of inflation during 2023.

Although FEPCA would technically allow for that amount, no president since 1994 has implemented the full raise that the law authorizes. Instead, presidents in most years have signed off on an alternative pay plan with a lower raise amount, usually pointing to budget constraints and economic uncertainty as reasons for the alternative.

A recent Federal News Network data dive showed that federal pay raises have lagged behind the private sector’s pay rates, as measured by the ECI, for more than a decade.

It will likely take until March to determine the Biden administration’s thinking for a pay raise in 2025. When the White House releases its annual budget proposal, it may give an indication for what the pay plan will be for next year for civilian federal employees.

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Despite progress since the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law in January 2009, President Joe Biden said women who work outside the home are still paid an average of 84 cents for every dollar earned by a man, and that the pay disparities are greater for many women of color.

The Democratic president said the “common-sense” steps announced Monday “will help pay millions of workers fairly, close gender and racial wage gaps and yield tangible benefits for the federal government and federal contractors.”

The Office of Personnel Management is issuing a final rule to bar the government from considering a person’s current or past pay when determining their salary for federal employment. Administration officials said this step will help limit pay discrimination and ensure compensation is based on an applicant’s skills, experience and expertise.

A similar proposal will offer protections to those employed by federal contractors.

The Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council is issuing a proposal to prohibit federal contractors and subcontractors from seeking and considering information about a job applicant’s compensation history when hiring or setting pay for anyone who works on a government contract.

The proposal also requires contractors and subcontractors to disclose salary ranges in job postings.

Administration officials said the proposal would help federal contractors recruit, diversify and retain talent, improve job satisfaction and performance and reduce turnover.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first bill then-President Barack Obama signed into law after taking office in 2009. Biden was vice president.

Ledbetter’s discovery that she was earning less than her male counterparts for doing the same job at a Goodyear plant led to a Supreme Court lawsuit and eventually the legislation bearing her name.

Shalanda Young, director of the White House budget office, said the law created important protections against pay discrimination and helped close persistent gender and racial wage gaps.

“But we still have more work to do,” she told reporters on a conference call arranged by the White House to preview the announcements.

Kiran Ahuja, director of the federal personnel office, said on the same call that the government “does a pretty decent job” on wages compared with the private sector.

In 2022, the federal government had a 5.6% pay gap compared with 16% nationwide. The difference in pay in the most senior ranks of the federal government is below 1%, Ahuja said.

“The federal government is proud of this progress we’ve made,” she said. “But we also realize that any gap is unacceptable.”

The National Partnership for Women and Families said the 84 cents that women earn for every dollar paid to a man results in a gap of $9,990, a sum that could help a working woman pay for approximately 64 weeks of food, seven months of mortgage and utility payments, about nine months of rent or more than a year of additional child care.

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This story has been corrected to show the spelling is Lilly, not Lily.

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The Department of Veterans Affairs is looking to grow its human resources staff to meet its hiring, onboarding and retention goals for its health care workforce.

To meet its HR staffing needs and encourage new hires, VA’s Veterans Health Administration is giving its HR workforce about a 15% pay increase.

VHA approved a Special Salary Rate for HR professionals at the end of last year, and covered employees will see the pay bump appear in their paychecks, starting this week.

VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes said Wednesday that the SSR covers VHA HR specialists (GS-0201) and HR assistants (GS-0203) in grades GS-4 through GS-15.

Nearly 8,000 HR employees are eligible to receive the SSR. According to March 2023 data from the Office of Personnel Management, VHA employed 6,749 HR specialists and 1,242 HR assistants in grades GS-4 through GS-15.

“Broader implementation will be considered through the fiscal year,” Hayes said.

VHA implemented the SSR for HR specialists and HR assistants on Dec. 31, 2023. Covered employees will see their first paycheck with the SSR this Friday, Jan. 19.

In some cases, covered employees may not feel the full effect of the approximately 15% raise, which is added after locality pay adjustments.

Federal employee pay under the General Schedule, with or without the SSR, is capped at level IV of the Executive Schedule pay scale, which is $191,900 in 2024.

Federal Times first reported VHA authorizing the SSR for HR staff.

To keep up with VA’s record hiring efforts in its health care workforce, VHA estimates it will need to hire about 1,000 HR professionals each year. VHA saw about a 20% vacancy rate in its HR workforce in 2022.

David Perry, VHA’s chief officer for workforce management and consulting, said in an interview last November that the agency’s HR-STAR program is now on track to deliver a new cohort of 80-100 trained HR professionals each month, ready to work in regions where they’re most needed.

The HR-STAR program saw its cohort graduate in October 2023, and it’ll keep producing new VHA HR experts each month. About 10,000 individuals have applied for the HR-STAR program.

Perry said it takes new HR hires at VHA about three years to fully understand everything about the job. That’s because VHA has separate pay and workforce regulations for medical personnel — covered under Title 38 of the U.S. Code — and non-medical personnel — covered under Title 5.

VHA human resources personnel are the latest — but not the last — recipients of the VA’s new pay flexibilities.

VA’s Office of Information and Technology (VA OIT) implemented an SSR last summer resulting in a 17% average pay raise for its IT and cybersecurity employees.

VA OIT leaders said the SSR helped it make 1,000 new hires and improve retention in 2023.

VA OIT also received top marks on the 2023 Mission-Support Customer Satisfaction Survey. conducted by the Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration. It ranked number-one among agencies with more than 100,000 employees on the scorecard.

Under the PACT Act, which expands VA health care and benefits eligibility for veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service,  the VA has the authority to set Special Salary Rates for non-medical positions that fall under Title 5.

Hayes said VHA intends to submit SSR requests for additional Title 5 occupations.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough told reporters in October that the department is putting PACT Act recruitment and retention incentives to effective use, and that they’ve helped the department far exceed its recent hiring goals.

“We have more tools that we’ll be announcing soon on this, because this is a profoundly important issue,” McDonough said at a press conference on Oct. 25, 2023.

The VA, under the PACT Act, is also able to offer a critical skill incentive (CSI) to employees with skills that are in high demand, or short supply at the department, and serve a “mission-related need.”

VA data shows nearly 32,400 employees received higher pay through the critical skill incentive between Aug. 19 and Oct. 31. A majority of the CSI awards went to HR specialists and assistants, housekeeping aides, security personnel, and police officers.

A small percentage of those critical skill incentives, however, went to career senior executives at VA headquarters. The VA announced in September that it canceled nearly $10 million of these bonuses to VA executives who were found to be ineligible for the awards.

McDonough said last November that VA was “a little overzealous on the execution of the critical skills incentive.”

McDonough told reporters that the VA is focused on managing the critical skills incentive and SSR carefully, “because we are showing a pathway forward for the rest of the federal government.”

“We have these authorities in a way that many of our federal agency partners do not, and would like to have it. So, we want to make sure we manage these tools,” McDonough said at a Nov. 29 press conference.

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