In recent years Congress has determined a federal raise by not determining one, allowing the White House proposal to take effect by default through silence. To boost the federal employee raise would require that Congress take a formal vote on the issue. The last time such votes happened, a three-year salary rate freeze, covering 2011-2013, was the result. If a move to specify a federal employee raise is made, it most likely would occur in the context of the general government appropriations bill; while the appropriations committees of both the House and Senate have started writing other spending bills, neither has addressed that one. Voting on appropriations bills is starting but there is little expectation that many if any of them will be enacted before the October 1 start of the new fiscal year. That would virtually guarantee that Congress will have to pass temporary funding delaying final decisions until after the elections. Meanwhile, it now is all but certain that the full House won’t call a vote on a budget outline for fiscal 2017 that its budget committee approved earlier, a non-binding measure that advocates familiar benefit changes such as requiring employees to contribute more toward retirement. That measure followed the pattern of the last several years of taking no position on a raise. The Senate has not drafted a counterpart and now it also is virtually certain that it won’t.