2020 Budget Proposal Not Looking Good for Civil Service Workers
Plans in 2020 to gut existing retirement programs for federal employees and to freeze the pay of federal workers are once again on the table from President Trump.
Salary freezes for federal employees is a part of the proposed 2020 fiscal budget, along with a whole bunch of other changes to the Civil Service Retirement System and Federal Employees Retirement System, which would include doing away with ‘cost of living’ adjustments for those retiring under FERS (and reducing it to .5 percent for those retiring under CSRS,) getting rid of the supplemental coverage by FERS for employees that have retired before the age in which they could collect Social Security (age 62,) lowering the interest rate on the Thrift Savings Plan’s government securities fund, altering the calculations used to figure out the annuity and raising the mandatory opt-in payment by one percent.
Exact details of this budget will not be made known by the White House until next week, but these ideas are not new, arising in some form of what we’re seeing now in both 2018 and 2017, but did not pass in Congress, a situation that will probably happen again, now that the Democrats have a majority in the House.
Tony Reardon, the President of the National Treasury Employees Union, vocalized the distaste that most federal employee organizations felt at this proposed budget once again rearing its ugly head. He states that federal workers shouldn’t have the burden of paying for the “deficit with their pensions.”
Reardon said that the administration has learned nothing from the disastrous 35-day partial government shutdown.
David Cox, President of the American Federation of Government Employees agrees, calling the cuts “cruel and self-defeating,” and added that federal workers have lost more than $200 billion from cuts to their pay and benefits since 2011.
Even financial management groups chimed in, disapproving of the current cuts, stating that this is the government no longer investing in its own workforce, which clearly overshadow any of the proposed benefits this new budget would bring.
