We would like to say it’s big budget-cutting news that President Barack Obama has announced that he will freeze federal pay for two years.
But the plan is just window-dressing. It won’t go nearly far enough to rein in outrageous federal government compensation and to reduce trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits.
Civilian federal employees, who would be affected by the freeze, enjoy vastly larger wage-and-benefit packages than their similarly qualified private-sector counterparts in the same types of positions. That difference adds up to $47 billion, estimates Brian Riedl, a Heritage Foundation expert on the federal budget.
But the president’s proposed “freeze” on federal pay is not much of a freeze at all. As The Associated Press noted, the plan “would not affect bonuses or step increases for federal employees.”
So federal workers will continue to get many of the raises they would have received anyway. That will sharply reduce any savings the president’s plan might have created. Even the head of the massive federal workers union the American Federation of Government Employees acknowledged that the proposal would not create big savings.
In announcing the “freeze,” the president said, “The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifice, and that sacrifice must be shared by the employees of the federal government.”
We agree. But the purported “pay freeze” is far too limited to do much good where our nation’s annual deficits are concerned. Reform of the compensation for 2 million civilian federal employees is desperately needed, but this proposal unfortunately won’t accomplish that.