Pay Order Repeats 1.3 Percent Raise Plan

As expected, President Obama has issued an order setting a 1.3 percent average general schedule pay raise in January to take effect by default if no specific figure is enacted into law by then. The amount repeats the figure the White House proposed in its budget plan earlier this year. Congress so far has been following the practice of the last two years in which raises (of 1 percent for both 2014 and 2015) similarly were set by default when spending bills remained silent about a raise. One difference is that while the prior two raises were paid entirely across the board with no locality component, the 2016 raise would be split: 1 percentage point would be paid across the board while the funds for the other 0.3 percentage points would be divided up and paid in varying amounts according to the indicated pay gaps among the localities. That presumably will include 13 new localities that have been proposed for 2016; rules to formally create them, and designate their boundaries, are still in proposed form. The exact locality figures won’t be known until late in the year, when pay comparison figures are released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a final order to carry out the raises is issued. The total amount could yet be changed in the congressional budget process, but so far legislators have continued the practice of allowing the default raise to take effect by setting no raise in spending bills. Those bills do, however, specify that assuming a raise is paid, increases for blue collar employees would be capped at the local GS amount. Also, political appointees would not get a raise although executive schedule pay rates would increase on paper, raising the caps applying to the SES and several other high-level pay systems.