Locality Pay Fell First

The locality part of the 1990 federal pay law quickly fell by the wayside when the Clinton administration raised concerns about the methods used to measure the pay gap. Congress did not take issue with that assessment, in part because it shared those concerns and in part because of the money to be saved by not funding locality pay. In most years, including the last several with President Bush in the White House, the ECI-indicated raise has been sweetened somewhat-typically in the name of pulling the federal raise up to what uniformed military personnel stand to get-and the additional money has been designated as locality pay, in amounts well below what the 1990 law called for. However, up to the new budgetary proposal, administrations had been keeping to the ECI as the indicator for the across-the-board raise component.