Akaka introduces bill to automatically boost TSP contributions
May 15th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, today introduced a bill that would automatically increase the Thrift Savings Plan contributions of some new federal employees. The Save More Tomorrow Act would only apply to automatically-enrolled feds — that is, new employees who make no choice on TSP and are automatically enrolled in the G Fund at 3 percent — and would boost their contributions by 1 percent each year.
Akaka’s office said this would help push more feds to invest 5 percent of their paychecks in their TSP. That’s the amount federal employees have to contribute to get the maximum matching contribution from their employing agency. The Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which governs TSP, has repeatedly expressed concern that many federal employees are leaving money on the table by not contributing 5 percent.
Said Akaka:
The Save More Tomorrow Act will make it easier for new TSP participants to save for retirement. Pairing automatic enrollment with automatic escalation in 401(k) plans has proven effective in increasing private sector savings rates. Congress should incorporate this best practice into the TSP.
Tags: Daniel Akaka, TSP
Your salary is (probably) now online
May 15th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
The Asbury Park Press, which like Federal Times is owned by Gannett, this morning posted their latest database of federal salary and bonus information.
APP obtained 2011 salary data for most federal employees through a Freedom of Information Act request. A user can search by name, agency, job title, and location, and find out many feds’ grade levels, salaries, and bonuses for 2011. For example, a search for “Geithner,” “Treasury” and “District of Columbia” will reveal Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was paid $199,700 last year and received no bonus.
The list is not comprehensive, however. It doesn’t include FBI, CIA, Defense Department, or IRS employees, or employees involved in security work, nuclear materials or national security matters. A separate U.S. Postal Service database can be found here.
What do you think about this database? Will it spark conversations in your office about what your colleagues are making? Are you angry that federal salary data has been posted publicly? Sound off below.
Will 5% pay cut change your retirement plans?
May 11th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
The House yesterday passed a budget that hikes federal employees’ retirement contributions by 5 percent, which translates to an effective cut in take-home pay. If that becomes law, what would it mean for you? Would it change how much you invest in the Thrift Savings Plan? Or would you go so far as to bail out of the pension system — leave the federal service before retirement and get your FERS contributions refunded, with interest? (See “If You Leave Before Retirement Age” on this page for more details.)
Write me at slosey@federaltimes.com if you’d like to talk further. If you prefer to stay anonymous, that’s fine.
Tags: FERS, pay cut, what do you think?
Is your agency rolling back retention incentives?
May 11th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
With agencies facing tight budgets and unprecedented scrutiny of their payroll costs, has your agency reined in its use of retention incentives? Have you recently lost a retention incentive, or are you offering your employees fewer such bonuses to hold on to them? If so, why?
E-mail me at slosey@federaltimes.com. I will keep your response anonymous if you like.
Tags: incentives, retention, what do you think?
OPM’s Berry: Justice Dept. opinion ties my hands on gay spouses’ health benefits
May 9th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
Last week we reported that even though lesbian federal employee Karen Golinski won health coverage for her wife — courtesy of a February court ruling — the Office of Personnel Management is still instructing federal agencies to deny the same coverage to all other gay and lesbian feds’ spouses.
Today I asked OPM Director John Berry how his agency can legally extend Federal Employees Health Benefits Program benefits to only one couple, and treat thousands more differently. He said, basically, that the Justice Department’s legal opinion on the Golinski ruling has tied OPM’s hands:
As someone who’s openly gay and has a partner that would love to join the FEHBP program, and I would love to have him be able to join the FEHBP program, because it’s a great program. I look forward to this issue resolving itself, personally. So you can rest assured, I’m watching this issue closely. That being said, it’s the Justice Department that gets to decide what a court ruling allows us to do. And the Justice Department has defined that, how this court ruling, because of the jurisdiction of the court and the direction of the court, it only applies to this one person. That’s what I’ve been told.
I have to do what the Justice Department tells me to do. As a sworn officer, upholding the Constitution, I’m enforcing what the Justice Department’s told me.
Berry pledged to keep pushing to extend health care benefits to gay and lesbian feds’ same-sex partners, and said he hopes Congress will pass a bill granting those rights:
My hope, at the end of the day, is that Congress can act. We’ve had wonderful bipartisan support on this. Sen. [Susan] Collins [R-Maine] has been as strong an advocate as Sen. [Joe] Lieberman [I-Conn.] and Sen. [Daniel] Akaka [D-Hawaii] in the Senate, and we’ve got the same in the House. I think there’s a shot that, even legislatively, we can move forward on this, is my hope. Otherwise, we’ll wait and see what the Justice Department allows us to do, responding to appropriate court action.
However, Senate support for extending same-sex benefits isn’t as bipartisan as Berry suggested. Collins remains the only Republican co-sponsor of S 1910, and no Republicans have signed on to the House version, HR 3485. And with House Republicans dead-set against broadening federal employees’ benefits — gay or straight — I don’t see how same-sex health benefits can possibly pass Congress.
Berry’s comments came a few hours before news broke that President Obama now backs gay marriage.
Tags: FEHBP, gay rights, John Berry, same-sex benefits
OPM: FEHBP must cover lesbian fed’s wife, but no other same-sex spouses
May 3rd, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
Karen Golinski, a lesbian federal employee, won a major court victory in February when a federal judge ruled that the government had to extend health benefits to her same-sex wife. But other gay and lesbian feds won’t be able to benefit from Golinski’s victory at this time.
The Office of Personnel Management in March ordered Blue Cross Blue Shield to cover Golinski’s wife, Amy Cunninghis. But today, OPM sent a notice out on its listserv that said the Golinski ruling does not apply to anyone else.
“OPM has been directed by the Department of Justice to continue applying the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to all other situations,” OPM said. “Therefore, if you receive a request to enroll a same-sex spouse, you are still precluded by DOMA from processing the enrollment request or sending it to the [Federal Employees Health Benefits] Plan.”
OPM has been in an awkward position for some time regarding health benefits for same-sex spouses. OPM Director John Berry is gay, and has repeatedly said he thinks gay and lesbian feds’ spouses should be covered. But Section 3 of DOMA prevents the government from legally recognizing same-sex marriages, which bars gay feds’ husbands and wives from FEHBP. The Justice Department last year said it believes DOMA is unconstitutional and it would no longer defend the law. And last July, Justice backed Golinski’s case in a brief that amounted to a mea culpa for the government’s “significant and regrettable” history of persecuting gay and lesbian employees. (Go back and read that blog, and this one for some background on how gay and lesbian feds were treated. It’s pretty startling.)
But even though the Obama administration may want to extend health care to gay and lesbian feds’ spouses, it now seems pretty clear that won’t happen until DOMA is repealed or struck down.
Union fears pay cuts could hurt TSP savings
May 1st, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
Federal employees’ Thrift Savings Plan accounts could end up collateral damage in the push to hike federal employees’ pension contributions, the American Federation of Government Employees said yesterday.
At Monday’s meeting with the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, AFGE public policy director Jacque Simon asked for more granular, grade-by-grade data on TSP contribution rates. Simon said she wants to know whether lower-paid federal employees are pulling back on their TSP contributions in response to proposals to increase pension contributions by anywhere from 1.2 percent to 5 percent.
“It’s going to be increasingly important to have access to data like that,” Simon said. “We have good reason to believe that TSP participation by people in lower grades is going to decline as people are forced to pay more for their FERS annuity. [...] It’s crucial we get that [information] not next year, but today.”
The board said it didn’t have data that could be broken down in that way, since it only tracks the dollar amount of employees’ contributions — not percentages of their overall salaries. But the board said it could get limited information on contribution rates for automatically-enrolled feds, although those participants make up a miniscule portion of the overall TSP population. Simon said that would be better than nothing.
Tags: AFGE, Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, pension, Thrift Savings Plan
AFGE’s Gage fires back at Romney
April 26th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
(Darren McCollester, Getty Images)
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s comment about “unfair” federal pay and benefits has raised the hackles of the two largest federal unions. The National Treasury Employees Union slammed Romney yesterday for going after middle-class federal workers. And today, American Federation of Government Employees President John Gage let loose with an even more cutting response:
You know what’s really unfair? The specter of having a new boss who thinks so little about the work that you do that he can’t bother getting his facts straight before making the ridiculous and patently false claim that federal workers are “getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve.”
Gage flat-out rejected Romney’s allegation that feds receive drastically higher pay and benefits than private-sector employees, and cited “decades of research by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics” that shows feds consistently earn much smaller salaries.
What Gage said is true, but may not tell the whole story. The Federal Salary Council, using BLS data, last reported in November that federal pay fell even further behind private-sector pay last year, and concluded that feds now earn 26.3 percent less than their private-sector counterparts. But some federal pay experts have their doubts about the council’s methodology. (Even Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry has said the government’s pay gap numbers have a credibility problem.)
And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office came to very different conclusions earlier this year — partly by throwing health, retirement and other benefits in the mix, which the salary council does not. CBO found federal employees are compensated, on average, 16 percent higher than private-sector workers. (It’s also worth noting that Gage and other union officials heavily criticized CBO’s study when it was released.)
Tags: John Gage, Mitt Romney, pay gap
Romney: ‘Unfair’ for feds to get better pay, benefits
April 25th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
(Darren McCollester, Getty Images)
Now that Mitt Romney has all but locked up the GOP presidential nomination, he’s turning his focus to the general election against President Obama. And if his comments last night are any indication, your pay and benefits are going to be a hot topic between now and November:
I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. [...] This America is fundamentally fair. We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next. [emphasis added]
This isn’t the first time Romney has taken aim at federal employees. Last August, he said the government has too many feds who are paid too much, and in November he proposed cutting 10 percent of the federal workforce through attrition to save $4 billion.
National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley blasted Romney’s comments:
Every day, federal workers — from law enforcement officers to food inspectors to doctors to scientists in virtually every discipline, and many others — perform a variety of tasks vital to ordinary people throughout our country. Every federal employee knows well there is a direct connection between the efforts he or she makes, day in and day out, and the quality of life for the public they serve.
Kelley also reiterated that federal employees are in the midst of a two-year pay scale freeze that is expected to save $60 billion over a decade. Also, Congress has also passed pension cuts for new and future feds that will cost them $15 billion.
Tags: Mitt Romney, NTEU, pay gap
Obama pushes for Senate transportation bill with phased retirement
March 19th, 2012 | Pay & Benefits | Posted by Stephen Losey
President Obama today urged the House to pass the transportation bill the Senate approved last week. That bill, S 1813, contains a provision to allow older feds to phase into retirement — that is, work part-time while earning a partial pension — at the end of their careers.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on March 8 said he planned to bring the Senate’s bill up for a vote, instead of the troubled House transportation bill. But he may change course on that. Boehner is facing resistance to the Senate bill from members of his own party, and The Hill reports that he won’t decide how to move forward until he speaks to members of his caucus. He could announce this week how he plans to handle the transportation bill, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Tags: Congress, John Boehner, phased retirement