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Federal employees are really left behind by the cold of the holiday season.
President Donald Trump on Friday issued an executive order fixing federal employees' wages to 2019, while hundreds of thousands of them are on leave or working without paying because of a political stalemate over government funding.
The stoppage stops the 2.1% automatic increase that all civilian workers would have received under federal pay laws. Military personnel, which has been funded separately, will still receive a 2.6% increase.
Workers' unions say Trump is pouring "salt into the sore" by setting wage freezes while 800,000 federal employees continue to bear the brunt of a partial government shutdown. We now have nine days of political conflict between the President and Congress over Trump's $ 5 billion for the construction of the border wall – no end in sight. The Office of Personnel Management has even taken the unusual step of giving workers instructions on how to negotiate with homeowners and mortgage companies if they can not pay the rent.
In early August, Trump announced a general freeze on wages, saying the federal government could not maintain the cost-of-living wage increase and that these increases should be performance-related. His decision quickly prompted a public outcry and he then promised to "study" the case over the Labor Day weekend. But as Emily Stewart of Vox pointed out at the time, the only "study work" that he did this weekend was spending time at his golf club and tweet about personalities from Fox News. have relaxed the planned increases for federal workers. President Barack Obama has imposed a federal wage freeze for two years in 2010 in response to the financial crisis. And in 2012 and 2013, House Republicans intervened to freeze the wages of federal workers and members of Congress.
Federal workers still have a chance to see this increase. Congress has the power to overturn the executive order of the president, and House Democrats have been willing to fund a salary increase. Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said that a 1.9% increase in the cost of living would be the "first item on the agenda" of Congress at its meeting in January. (The Senate has already forecast a 1.9% increase in spending at the beginning of the year.)
And as the Washington Post notes, even the highest-ranking government officials risk seeing their paycheques enter the new year. The decree specifies that the salary freeze for senior civil servants in 2013 should end in January. According to the Post, if it comes into effect, then the Trump-nominated political members could be eligible for "payback increases" worth thousands of dollars.
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