The annual meeting of the Federal Salary Council, which receives data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics used in calculating the official pay gap between federal and non-federal pay likely will occur in the weeks ahead. Release of the data typically reignites a controversy over how federal and non-federal salaries stack up. The process produces the government’s official estimates, based on methods and data specified in pay law, thatyear after year show federal workers are substantially underpaid on average, last year’s figure being 34.6 percent. That was up by about 8 percentage points over the prior year — and this year’s numbers also could show an increase since federal salary rates again were frozen during the measuring period while private sector salaries increasedoverall. However, various think tank studies using different methods and other data have found federal employees to be overpaid by more than 20 percent on average; those studies commonly were cited as justification for freezing federal salary rates for the last three years. The politically neutral CBO reported last year that salaries overall are roughly comparable, but with a substantial pay advantage for less educated federal workers and a substantial disadvantage for more educated ones. Another neutral entity, GAO, has said that none of the methods, including the government’s own, should be considered definitive.
