Federal workers have become the go-to targets as Congress, and the White House, search for ways to lower the deficit, pay for tax cuts and put off looming reductions to defense spending.
Last week, they took a $15 billion hit in retirement benefits as part of legislation to extend through the end of the year the payroll-tax cut for 160 million Americans and federal unemployment benefits.
Their advocates are crying foul, saying two consecutive years of seeing their pay frozen means the nation’s 2 million civil servants already have contributed more than $60 billion to reducing government costs.
Republicans, led by their aggressive House freshman class, say federal employees, with their generally secure jobs and benefits, can do more. They have proposed several bills to make that happen. The White House also is asking federal employees to pitch in more for their retirement plans.
Under the bill passed Friday, about half of the $30 billion cost of extending unemployment benefits will be made up by requiring newly hired federal workers to pay an additional 2.3 percent of their salaries for their pensions. Currently they pay 0.8 percent.
Combined with other bills House Republicans have proposed to further limit federal wages and benefits, the total cost to civil servants could be $134 billion over the next decade, said House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland.
“The ongoing efforts to target federal workers will substantially undermine our ability to recruit and retain the quality of people we need,” said Mr. Hoyer, whose district encompassing some of the Washington suburbs is home to thousands of government employees.
Proposals on the table could affect civil servant numbers as well as their wages and benefits.
A group of Senate Republicans has proposed extending the federal tax freeze for two more years and reducing the size of the government workforce by 5 percent as one way to help avoid automatic Defense Department budget cuts passed by Congress last summer and due to take effect in 2013.
House Armed Services Committee chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, California Republican, has proposed putting off automatic defense and non-defense cuts by reducing the federal workforce by 10 percent over a decade. He would do that by hiring only one new federal worker for every three that retires.
“It does it with as little pain as possible,” Mr. McKeon said at a hearing last week.
Unions representing federal workers obviously disagree.
“It is unreasonable to turn to this dedicated workforce yet again while shielding those who are not paying their share,” said Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.
“I don’t know how cutting our retirement puts anybody back to work,” said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “What are we, an ATM machine?”
Republicans in December proposed an even more ambitious plan to pay for part of the payroll-tax and jobless-benefit bill by freezing government workers’ pay a third consecutive year and reducing pension benefits in addition to raising their retirement-plan contributions.
The Senate wouldn’t go along, but in the more recent round of negotiations the House GOP again asked for all federal workers to pay more for their retirements. Democrats objected, and in the end they settled for higher contributions only from newly hired employees.
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