Federal employees are set to receive the largest pay increase in four decades, courtesy of President Joe Biden.
In a letter sent to Congress last week, Biden called for a 5.2 percent overall pay increase for federal workers—the same increase that he’d included in his budget plan that was sent to Congress earlier this year. Biden said the huge pay increase was necessary so the federal government could “attract, recruit, and retain a skilled workforce with fair compensation in order to keep our government running, deliver services, and meet our nation’s challenges today and tomorrow.”
Technically, the pay increase will be divided into two separate categories. Federal workers would receive a 4.7 percent across-the-board pay raise, combined with a 0.5 percent bump in so-called locality pay. Because the amount of a federal employee’s locality pay varies from place to place based on the cost of living, the actual pay increases might not be the same for all workers.
It would be the biggest increase since federal workers received a 9.1 percent pay raise in 1980 during the waning days of the Carter administration, according to Government Executive, a trade publication for federal employees. As Government Executive notes, some members of Congress have been pushing for an even larger increase in federal employee compensation: A group of Democrats introduced a bill earlier this year to boost federal workers’ wages by 8.7 percent.
Hellbound and Down 