Several developments in Congress offer hope that a federal employee raise will be paid in January 2014, and that it might even be higher than the 1 percent the White House has recommended. The House Appropriations Committee has begun drafting spending bills for the upcoming fiscal year that do not specifically include money to pay a raise but don’t rule one out, either. Last year by this time the House had voted as part of a budget outline and as a freestanding bill to continue the pay freeze through 2013 and the appropriations bills it drafted specifically denied any raise. This year there has been no such separate bill for 2014, the budget outline is silent on a raise, and the early appropriations bills similarly are neutral: they say that if a raise is paid, the cost would have to be absorbed out of each agency’s general funding accounts. The White House proposed a 1 percent raise for both federal and military personnel in January, but a House Armed Services subcommittee has recommended increasing the military raise to 1.8 percent, the figure indicated by a labor cost index measure to which both military and federal employee raises are supposed to be linked. There likely will be calls for increasing the federal employee raise to the same figure in the name of pay parity. That was the practice for many years but has been abandoned more recently, with military personnel continuing to receive raises the last three years while federal salary rates have been frozen; also, in 2010 federal employees did get a raise but military personnel received a larger one.
