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By: FEDweek StaffDecisions on the January 2021 federal employee pay raise as well as various benefit matters won’t be made at least until September and in many cases likely not until after the November elections.
Apart from a planned brief return of the House later this week to vote on a Postal Service bill, Congress likely will not be in session until after Labor Day, following its decision to recess without taking action on further pandemic relief. That action set aside a House-passed bill that to provide hazardous duty pay to federal employees and others in frontline positions related to the pandemic, provide various other more minor benefits, and generally require continued telework by those eligible for it until certain standards are met.
That bill and a less ambitious Senate Republican counterpart were shelved after leaders were unable to reach an agreement and President Trump meanwhile took several administrative actions on issues under dispute—actions that for the most part have yet to show a practical effect. Among them, for example, is suspending from September through year’s end the obligation to pay Social Security taxes, which however still would come due. The government has not yet said whether it will apply that policy to its own employees.
Other benefit issues remain pending before Congress as part of the annual DoD authorization bill, which has passed both the House and Senate in differing versions. Differences mainly include language in the former, but not the latter, to broaden the scope of the paid parental leave authority to include all employees outside the Title 5 body of civil service law; restrict DoD’s ability to refuse to bargain by citing national security grounds; grant all wage grade employees within a GS pay locality’s boundaries the same raise as GS employee receive; and strengthen EEO protections government-wide.
Another provision of the House bill would prevent employees from losing annual leave if they were unable to take it due to pandemic-related work, although OPM recently issued rules to that same effect.
On pay, the House has passed the general government appropriations bill—as part of a larger package—for the upcoming fiscal year that takes no position on a raise for January. That effectively endorses the 1 percent that President Trump recommended in his budget plan early this year; employee organizations meanwhile continue to push for 3 percent in the name of parity with military personnel, who are in line to receive a raise of that size.
However, given the short working time that Congress has scheduled before October 1, an extension of current spending—rather than enactment of appropriations bills—is the most likely course of action. That would leave final decisions to a post-election session.
Meanwhile, there has been no movement in Congress toward enacting the various benefit-cutting proposals that Trump’s budget also included regarding matters such as benefits for new retirees and COLA benefits for all retirees.
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