U.S President Joe Biden has proposed a 2.7% pay raise for federal civilian employees. The proposal is to take effect with the 2022 budget, making the pay raise the president's most recent request for the 2022 budget. In April, the White House released a preview of the president's 2022 budget proposals and released the complete proposal on May 28, 2021.
According to the Biden administration, the request for a pay raise is so that federal agencies can employ and maintain an extensive and diverse workforce. The administration will also be proposing a pay raise, similar to this one, for active-duty troops of the U.S military come next year. However, it is still unclear how the pay raise proposal will address the issue of locality adjustments.
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“We are currently evaluating several options ahead of a final decision on the amount to be communicated to Congress in the president’s alternative pay plan," the official said when asked about locality pay plans.
The proposed pay raise is 2.7% of the federal pay raise that civilian workers got in 2021. It is also slightly higher than the 2.6% pay raise proposal of former President Donald Trump. Trump had requested a 2.6% pay raise, but Congress raised it to 3.1%.
The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) has applauded Biden's pay raise proposal. The National President of the Union, Tony Reardon, explained that the proposal is necessary to ensure that federal workers get the pay they deserve for their service to the country. Reardon said the union would be working with the Biden administration and Congress towards a significant acknowledgment of the efforts of federal employees. He hailed the workforce as the "bedrock of democracy" and applauded their efforts to their agencies and taxpayers before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Still, Biden's 2.6% proposal is lower than what some Democrat lawmakers would have for next year. The Federal Adjustment of Income Rates (FAIR) Act proposes a 3.2% pay raise for civil servants in 2022. Both NTEU and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) approve of this proposal.
Everett Kelley, the AFGE national president, said the federation applauds Biden for honoring the long-standing convention of a pay raise for civilian and military workers. Still, a 2.7% pay raise won't be adequate to offset the losses in buying power over the past ten years, Kelley added.
The sponsor of the FAIR Act and a Virginia Democrat representative, Rep. Gerry Connolly, also applauded Biden's proposal but stated that a 3.2% pay raise would be better to recruit a new set of civil servants whose salaries can compete with the wages of those in the private sector.
Biden Plans to Make Federal Hiring and Internships More Attractive.
Traditionally, budget proposals call for significant changes to civil servant's health and retirement benefits. The Biden administration departed from this tradition by calling for more hands in many federal agencies. For example, the administration wants a 9.6% increase in the Department of Housing and Urban Development workforce. It also envisions a 7.4% increase in the workforce of the Environmental Protection Agency. EPA had previously stated that its headquarters and regional offices need more hands as they have been struggling to stabilize the agency's research and program demands. The administration also sees the State Department getting an increase in its workforce.
Kelley explained that civil servants have been crying for more staffing to reduce the workload on them. He applauded the Biden administration for listening to their pleas. He also stated that increasing the workforce would mean fewer mandatory overtime for civil servants in many agencies. He listed the Department of Veterans Affairs, Bureau of Prisons, and Transportation Security Administration as agencies in dire need of more workers.
Other agencies that might be increasing their workforce include the Social Security Administration, which would get a 2.1% increase in recruits. In comparison, the Treasury Department would get a 6.1% increase in the size of its workers. NTEU also stated that the proposal would make it possible for the IRS to receive funding to employ 8,493 more employees.
“After decades of under-investment in a modern-day workforce, a failure to partner with labor unions, and ongoing, unwarranted attacks on its independence, the civil service is in need of repair and rebuilding, and the administration has already taken swift action to deliver on that goal,” Biden's 2022 budget states.
The administration plans to improve the hiring practices of the United States federal government to be able to compete with the patterns in the rest of the labor market. To achieve this, it is looking toward a more advanced personnel vetting and security clearance system.
The 2022 Budget Brings a Few Things to Light
There have been more hiring of marginalized groups in federal agencies in recent times. Yet, the complexity of civil service employment regulations has made it challenging to have a complete representation of the overall population in these agencies. Biden's administration is urging agencies to bring back their internship programs to have adequate representation of the young people in the agencies.
The administration pointed out that fewer civil servants below the age of 30 in all agencies than there were a decade ago. In 2010, federal agencies employed 60,000 paid interns and hired just 4,000 paid interns in 2020, the 2022 budget reveals. To end this discrepancy, the Biden administration wants agencies to identify the reason for the reduction of internship programs and create opportunities that can facilitate an increase in the number of young people in federal agencies.
According to the administration, the OPM and OMB, as well as the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, are all working on significant workforce reforms. For instance, the OPM is tailoring new guidelines that will make hiring practices more flexible to encourage a stream of talents into federal service. One of the guidelines will ensure that old civil servants can return to federal services based on the grade level they were at while in private employment instead of their previous grade level while in federal service. The administration stated that the OPM is also working on more regulations for the pathways initiative.
