The Federal Salary Council, the key advisory group on federal employee pay in general — and on the GS locality pay system in particular — will meet August 5 for the first time in nearly two years.
“The Council will hear public testimony about the locality pay program, review the results of pay comparisons, and formulate its recommendations to the President’s Pay Agent on pay comparison methods, locality pay rates, and locality pay areas and boundaries for 2023,” an announcement said.
The council oversees comparisons of federal vs. non-federal salaries by the Labor Department that federal employee organizations commonly cite in advocating for higher federal pay. The numbers by locality are used in determining the differing raises among localities. Its recommendations are then passed to a higher-level group, the President’s Pay Agent, which in turn makes recommendations to the White House.
The “pay gap” figure was determined in late 2020 to be about 23 percent on average; no figure was released last year because the council was dormant last year due to a lack of Presidential appointees, as it had been during the first year of the Trump administration. Earlier this year the Biden administration reconstituted the council by appointing Stephen Condrey, an HR expert and consultant who headed the council during the Obama administration; Jared Llorens, who has held numerous previous HR-related positions including at OPM; and Janice Lachance, OPM director for part of the Clinton administration.
The council also sets standards for when a city area should have its own locality designation—providing higher pay rates than the catchall “rest of the U.S.” area—and the standards for adding outlying areas to existing localities.
Federal unions hold the majority of seats on the council, which enabled them to hold off ideas raised by Trump administration appointees to fundamentally change how the salary comparisons are conducted. Among them was including the value of benefits in the calculations, based on a premise that federal benefits in areas such as retirement and health insurance on average would be deemed superior, narrowing the reported pay gap.
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