Budget Proposal to Be a Key

President Obama meanwhile is to make a fiscal 2012 budget proposal in mid-February, a plan that may among other things call for an overall freeze or even cuts in agency spending authority, which provides money to pay employee salaries and related expenses such as travel and training. While a proposed pay raise typically is a major focus of the budget proposal, the current stopgap measure that denied a federal pay raise for 2011 would continue that freeze through 2012, and since Obama himself proposed that two-year freeze, there appears to be only an outside chance of pay not being frozen for next January as well. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans have indicated interest in linking pay more closely to performance; federal unions, Hill Democrats and the administration likely will cite DoD’s NSPS system, and the similar failed DHS alternative personnel system before that.