GovernmentExecutive.com

Do you remember what you were paid at the dawn of your career? If you need to jog your memory, or if you just want to see what feds have made over the past several decades, the Office of Personnel Management has put General Schedule pay tables dating back to 1949 on its Web site.

Feeling angry about the size of your federal paycheck? Glenn Sparling of Ravenden Springs, Ark., certainly is.

Sparling says he's a former federal employee who wasn't paid what he was owed for his work. So Sunday afternoon, he decided to take out his anger on the nearest federal building he could find -- the local post office.

Sparling, according to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, drove his 1984 Chevy Blazer into town -- and straight through the wall of the post office.

But that apparently wasn't enough to calm him down. Because when the Blazer broke down on his way home, Sparling walked the rest of the way, then got behind the wheel of his 1972 Ford Mustang, and drove that back to the post office -- and right through the hole he had previously made.

"This time he really crammed it in there," said Ravenden Springs Police Chief Kevin Montgomery.

Luckily, nobody was in the building because it was Easter Sunday. As of Monday, the post office was open for business -- and Sparling was awaiting trial on multiple charges, including driving while intoxicated.

The General Services Administration has announced that it has raised the federal mileage reimbursement rate for using a privately owned car for government travel from 48.5 cents a mile to 50.5 cents. But you already knew that, if you read Robert Brodsky's GSA roundup Friday. The agency is seeking legislation that would eliminate the annual delay between when the IRS sets a new mileage rate and GSA verifies that it's acceptable for use in the federal sector.

The American Federation of Government Employees on Wednesday announced that it would lobby for a 4.4 percent pay increase for federal workers in 2009.

The union's proposal is much more generous than what President Bush requested in his fiscal 2009 budget request, which included a 2.9 percent pay increase for federal workers and a 3.4 percent pay boost for military personnel. AFGE noted that the president's proposal could "jeopardize the government's ability to recruit and retain quality talent."

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, pledged last week to lobby for a 3.9 percent pay increase for federal workers and military personnel.

Also last week, the House Budget Committee passed a resolution that includes a statement in support of pay parity for federal employees and military service members in 2009. Congressional support indicates that both groups could receive at least a 3.4 percent pay raise next year. --Brittany Ballenstedt

I realize that congressional hearings are rarely nonpartisan, or even fully bipartisan, affairs. But when you title your hearing on pay-for-performance in government "Robbing Mary to Pay Peter & Paul," aren't you kind of tipping your hand that this isn't exactly going to be a dispassionate analysis of the concept?

If you weren't among the hundreds of people who participated in our webinar yesterday featuring the Pentagon's Mary Lacey talking about the implementation of the National Security Personnel System, you can still go in and view the archived version. It was a lively event, and timely, too, since the Defense Department just issued performance-based raises to thousands of employees under the new system.

For most federal workers, yesterday was the deadline for picking a health plan for 2008. But Mike Causey reports in his Washington Times column today that Internal Revenue Service employees are going to get a little extra time. It seems that "many IRS workers didn't get health plan information because of late mailings or delivery glitches," so they're getting a two-week extension on making their decisions. Agencies have the leeway to grant extensions in situations like this, the Office of Personnel Management says.

Now that President Bush has made it official that most feds don't have to work on Christmas Eve, OPM has come up with some details on his order.

Those of you who already planned to take annual leave that day should note this proviso: "If an employee has scheduled "use or lose" annual leave for December 24, 2007, and is unable to reschedule that leave for use before the end of the leave year (i.e., January 5, 2008), the leave will be forfeited."

John Edwards is still flogging his promise to cut off health care for members of Congress and senior administration officials if the legislative and executive branches fail to agree on a comprehensive health care reform bill within his first six months in office. In fact, Matt Yglesias notes, Edwards is even running ads in Iowa touting the idea.

This is a terrific rhetorical device, but if Edwards is even halfway serious about it, I hope he's going to think it through a little more. Say what you want about political appointees, but they already have enough incentives not to serve their country. Why add more in the form of uncertainty about benefits? Here's what would be truly political courageous: For one of Edwards' opponents to say, "I see your point, John, but getting the most highly qualified and talented people to run government's programs and operations is too important to play games with the basic benefits they might receive in exchange for agreeing to serve and to help lead the effort to make government as efficient and effective as possible."

Pretty damning (so to speak) piece in the Washington Post today about federal employees' abuse of policies regarding compensatory time for attendance at religious services.

This story goes back awhile. In May 2002, GovExec's Brian Friel reported that two executives at a Navy facility in Rhode Island had been suspended after an inspector general's report concluded that they and other employees had used religious comp time for non-religious purposes. Two years later, he followed up with a column about how the two were eventually forced to retire.

In 2005, OPM issued rules requiring that employees who take time off for religious observances provide documentation of their activities. But the agency continues to promote the concept of time off for religious activities, noting in an April 2005 memo that federal employees could use such leave to "participate in the observance of Pope John Paul's funeral service."

Now, the Post reports, congressional investigators have found that Food and Drug employees were allowed to accrue large balances of religious leave -- and some were paid for unused portions of such leave when they changed jobs or retired.

By the way, it's worth noting, though, that some employees appear to have honestly accumulated leave, and some have notified their agencies when they received reimbursement for it they thought was unwarranted. For example, the Post reports, the FDA's Joseph A. Biviano got reimbursed more than $20,000 for unused religious leave when he was promoted to be associate director of management at the agency's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. As soon as he got the money, Biviano questioned whether he should have received it, and wrote the agency a check for $13,000 -- the net amount he got after taxes.

The Office of Personnel Management says there are no governmentwide rules for reporting on how religious comp time is being used. I bet that's about to change, since several members of Congress appear to be interested in that information.

You can't accuse the Smithsonian of failing to use incentives to recruit and retain employees. The organization has paid out nearly $2 million in cash advances, relocation expense payments and tuition reimbursements in recent years, the Washington Times reports. But the institution failed to report some of the payments to the IRS and "may not have withheld the proper tax amounts for employee pay," its inspector general says in a new report.

Smithsonian officials say they're taking steps to address issues surrounding the incentive program. For example, they told the IG that as of Oct. 1, the organization no longer offers to reimburse moving expenses to new employees "except in limited circumstances where justified."

A North Carolina man has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Roanoke, Va., on charges of making fraudulent military retirement and disability claims, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Virginia reports.

He's innocent until proven guilty of course, but it looks like he may have just been looking for a way to live up to his name: Randall A. Moneymaker.

I figured the announcement of this year's health premium increases would be big news for federal employees around the country, because it always is. But apparently the new Federal Employee Health Benefits Program rates are of global interest. Even the People's Daily, the official news organ of the Chinese government, reported about them.

On a day when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was trying to draw attention to her proposal for universal health care, one of her rivals, John Edwards sought to one-up her with an out-of the-box proposal of his own. According to the Edwards campaign, at a speech before the Laborers Leadership Convention in Chicago, Edwards said:

On the first day of my administration, I will submit legislation that ends health care coverage for the president, all members of Congress, and all senior political appointees in both branches of government on July 20th, 2009 -- unless we have passed universal health care reform.

There's already some chatter in the blogosphere about the possibly dubious constitutionality of this idea, at least as it applies to members of Congress. (The 27th Amendment says, "No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.")

"Senior political appointees," though, could be out of luck. But maybe Schedule Cs will get to keep their coverage.

Update: By the way, it's worth noting the first item in Clinton's plan unveiled today:

Americans can keep their existing coverage or access the same menu of quality private insurance options that their Members of Congress receive through a new Health Choices Menu, established without any new bureaucracy as part of the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program (FEHBP). In addition to the broad array of private options that Americans can choose from, they will be offered the choice of a public plan option similar to Medicare.

As scams go, it doesn't get much lower than this: the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that a U.S. Geological Service Survey employee in the city is facing federal charges that he faked cancer as a means of getting other employees to donate leave to him. Investigators say the employee forged four doctor's letters to document his "illness" and ended up collecting 869 hours of annual leave, worth about $35,000 in pay for time he wasn't working.

In Mexico, civil servants don't mess around when it comes to fighting back against changes in their benefits. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports today that a Mexican teachers union "plans to block ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border tomorrow to protest changes to federal employee pension plans."

The idea is to wreak havoc with U.S. travelers' efforts to venture into Mexico for Labor Day weekend. And it's not the first time the Mexican teachers have used this tactic: In June, thousands of them shut down traffic at the San Ysidro, Calif. border checkpoint.

The teachers, by the way, are unhappy with a new Mexican law requiring government employees in the country to contribute more to their pension plans and to work longer.

Here's a bit of serendipity for you: In her Retirement Planning column for GovernmentExecutive.com this week, Tammy Flanagan discusses the sometimes complicated effects divorce can have on the distribution of an employee's retirement benefits. And today, FedSmith's Ralph Smith outlines a case study in just how convoluted these cases can become.

Last month, I wrote a column about how bonuses for federal executives were attracting increased scrutiny. In just the past few months, top officials from the Veterans Affairs and Education departments to the Government Accountability Office have been called upon to explain awards they've handed out.

Well, the beat goes on with the Washington Post front-page story today about bonuses at the Food and Drug Administration - which quadrupled in four years, to a total of $13.6 million in 2005.

As I wrote in my column, some agencies' bonuses are more defensible than others. At first glance, the FDA situation looks pretty bad, due to several factors:

• The bonuses were supposed to be retention-based, but were awarded to some officials on the basis of merely signing declarations that they were "likely to leave the federal government for a higher paying position in the private sector."
• Large bonuses seem to have gone disproportionately to managers in FDA's Office of the Commissioner, rather than the scientists, inspectors and doctors who would seem to be more likely to command higher salaries in the private sector.
• The bonuses were awarded at time when FDA was enduring some high-profile problems with everything from flu vaccine shortages to a plan to the plan to close field laboratories that was suspended yesterday.

In case you missed it last week, next year's military pay raise (and by extension, the civilian raise, which is typically closely linked to whatever the troops get) got dragged into the whole debate over whether and when to pull our troops out of Iraq.

First, on Friday, President Bush made the following statement at the White House:

In February, I submitted to Congress a Defense Department spending bill for the upcoming fiscal year that will provide funds to upgrade our equipment for our troops in Iraq and provides a pay raise for our military -- it's a comprehensive spending request that Congress has failed to act on. Instead, the Democratic leaders chose to have a political debate on a precipitous withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. The House and Senate are now scheduled to leave for their August recess before passing a bill to support our troops and their missions. Even members of Congress who no longer support our effort in Iraq should at least be able to provide an increase in pay for our troops fighting there.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't take kindly to the insinuation that Democrats didn't care whether troops got a salary increase next year, and quickly fired back:

While Democrats have fought for a pay raise for our troops all along, the President was against the pay raise before he was for it. Two months ago, his Administration explicitly opposed Democratic efforts to give our troops a 3.5 percent raise and threatened to veto legislation if the pay raise was passed by Congress, calling it "unnecessary."

Here's an interesting factoid, courtesy of the West Fargo Pioneer (registration required): When Congress first made Independence Day a holiday for federal employees in 1870, those employees weren't paid for the day off.

Here we go again with the reports that federal employees are overpaid. The Asbury Park Press has crunched the numbers, and declares that feds, on average, are paid almost 50 percent more than private-sector employees -- $59,864 vs. $40,505, according to 2005 data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Almost a year ago, you'll remember, Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute published an analysis showing that when benefits are factored in, feds make double what private workers do.

My initial reaction is always to be highly skeptical of these kinds of comparisons because of the apples-to-oranges issue. After all, it shouldn't surprise anybody that the average federal employee, who's likely to be a white-collar professional, is paid more than the average private sector worker, who could be serving up lattes at Starbucks.

The Asbury Park Press insists that "Where job titles could be compared be it for engineers, doctors or food service workers the federal government still paid better than the private sector in three out of four cases." But that "where job titles could be compared" bit is a rather large loophole. What exactly are the titles? And what's in that fourth case?

Anyway, the most interesting part of the Asbury Park Press is its database of federal salary information, in which you can find a list of employees by locality and what they make, or search by individual name to find out his or her salary.

Just in case you needed to be reminded that the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program is a big business, Bloomberg News reports that shares of CVS Caremark and Medco Health Solutions were up in trading this morning. That's due to an announcement yesterday by Blue Cross and Blue Shield that it had issued contracts to the two companies for pharmacy services covering the 4.7 million people in its Federal Employee Program. Caremark will handle retail pharmacy benefits management, which it estimates will generate about $4 billion a year in revenue. Medco will handle Blue Cross and Blue Shield's mail order prescription drug program. Caremark had handled both the retail and mail order operations since 2005.

Linda P. Campbell, a columnist and editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, can't figure out why some federal employees would fleece taxpayers by illegally reselling the transit vouchers they receive from their agencies. "What were these 'public servants' thinking while they picked our collective pocket?" she writes. Then she adds this:

"I keep thinking about my father, who during 28 years as a federal employee wouldn't even read the newspaper or a magazine at work unless it was on his lunch break so he wouldn't deprive his employer of a full day's work."

Buz Livingston, a financial planner writing for the Motley Fool, couldn't put it more simply: "When it comes to retirement planning," he writes, "there's no doubt: the Thrift Savings Plan is the cream of the crop." It's better than 99.44 percent of private 401(k) plans, he says. What makes the TSP better? "Simplicity coupled with miniscule costs."

(Hat tip: FedSmith)

Looking for help in kick-starting the retirement planning process? OPM's got some Web video for you.

While the Homeland Security Department is getting at least a slight case of cold feet about pay-for-performance, the National Nuclear Security Administration is moving ahead with a pilot program to test the concept on its workforce. FedNews OnLine reports that all but 20 bargaining unit employees at NNSA headquarters will participate in the pilot, which is scheduled to last five years.