The outcome of a potential major expansion of paid leave entitlements for federal employees could be decided soon, with a pending move in the Senate to take a position in advance of a decision to be made in a conference.
The Senate plans to consider competing stances on the issue in advance of a conference with the House on the annual DoD authorization bill (HR-2500, S-1790). The House version of that measure would change from unpaid to paid the leave entitlement under the Family and Medical Leave Act, which provides for up to 12 weeks of leave per 12 months for parental purposes and for personal and family medical conditions. The Senate, which had passed its version of the bill previously, has not taken a position on that issue.
In part because of the prominence of the issue, the Senate is moving toward taking a formal position before the conference. One proposal would instruct the conferees to accept the House position; the other would aim to create a combination of compensatory time and tax incentives to use for the same purposes in lieu of paid leave.
There is some precedent for the Senate backing paid leave; a committee has endorsed it for employees of intelligence community agencies, although only for parental purposes, as part of an intelligence authorization bill (S-1589).
The White House has not taken a position on the House language other than to say that it favors paid parental leave for all American workers, federal workers of all agencies included. However, in several statements on the intelligence bill it has expressed concerns about providing parental leave to only a segment of the federal workforce.
Conferences on the annual defense bill typically are fairly short since much of the work on resolving differences is done in advance.
Other language in the House bill but not the Senate bill would return the standard probationary period at DoD to one year and generally bar agencies from asking about a job applicant’s criminal record as an initial screen. Both would extend various special hiring and pay authority and would extend a GSA policy allowing agencies to generally reimburse employees for the extra tax burden of relocation expenses to cover all relocations, including those of newly hired employees, employees returning home from overseas assignments in order to retire or otherwise separate, and “last move home” relocations for SES members poised to retire.
