Be Fiscally Responsible – Pay Feds a Market Wage to End Expensive Turnover
The Federal Managers Association believes in good government and fiscal responsibility. Unfortunately, the way federal workers are currently paid is the opposite of fiscally responsible.
At the outset, we want to acknowledge the 1 percent raise given to feds in 2021. Although we were disappointed the civilian workforce did not achieve the customary pay parity with the uniformed military, the 1 percent raise is nominally better than the pay freeze the Senate pursued. FMA will support a far more substantial raise in 2022.
And here is one reason why: It would save American taxpayers millions of dollars each year.
Hiring, recruitment and retention to the federal workforce are often talked about in Washington, D.C. On the front end, the federal workforce faces a concerning comparison with the private sector with regard to time to hire. In Fiscal Year 2018, the average time it took to hire a new employee in the federal government was 98.3 days, which was down from 105.8 days in Fiscal Year 2017. The Office of Personnel Management’s goal across the government is 80 days. And according to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average time-to-fill in the private sector is 36 days.
But the challenge doesn’t stop once an employee has been on-boarded. Between advertising for a position, recruiting, hiring, on-boarding and training, it certainly costs the federal government a hefty price to replace an employee. So it makes sense – and cents – to retain the best and brightest, particularly when compensation in the private sector is often far more lucrative compared to a career in public service.
To be fiscally responsible, there would need to be policies in place to encourage a high retention rate. However, more than 60 percent of federal employees hired since 2011 left the federal government within two years of being hired[1]. One of the primary reasons for this is, of course, low pay. By choosing to deny federal employees a fair market wage based on their skills and qualifications, a system has been set up that costs far more than just paying federal employees a salary that can compete with the private sector for the best people.
We reasonably have high demands of the quality of public servants. This standard cannot be met without paying them enough to compete with the private sector. The market has set the rate for high quality employees with deep institutional knowledge; the federal government must make efforts to compete with it, or lose the best candidates to the private sector. To refuse to do so, and then lose 60 percent of new hires in less than two years, is not fiscally responsible. Instead, it is a form of performative kabuki theater, one that wastes money in practice by pretending that only part of the cost exists.
Rather than saving the taxpayer money, lower pay for federal workers costs far more than raises would by shifting the cost from a fair wage that would attract the best candidates, over to the wasted costs of searching for a new employee who would not otherwise be necessary.
The federal government has a responsibility not to waste taxpayer money, just as it has a responsibility to provide the best quality of services to the public, and to treat federal workers with basic decency. These are not competing interests; to solve one is to solve all of them.
[1] https://www.govexec.com/management/2020/06/more-60-recent-federal-employee-hires-left-within-two-years/166131/
The views reflected in this column are those of FMA and do not necessarily represent the views of FEDmanager. To learn more about the Federal Managers Association (FMA), visit their website: FedManagers.org.