Letter to the President - Van Hollen, Democratic Senators Urge Trump to Reverse Course, Raise Pay For Federal Employees

Letter

Dear Mr. President:

We write to urge you in the strongest possible terms to reverse your decision to freeze pay rates for non-military federal workers in 2019. After months of indecisiveness and mixed signals, your decision further penalizes hard-working federal employees already straining under the impact of the unnecessary government shutdown that began on December 22nd.

Freezing pay for federal workers adds insult to injury for dedicated public servants already subject to political attacks and gamesmanship. In February 2018, your administration's budget proposed freezing federal civilian pay for 2019. In August 2018, the United States Senate included a 1.9 percent pay raise for civilian federal employees in the appropriations bill that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. This action recognized the many contributions of federal workers and rebuked your unsubstantiated proposal to further hinder their economic security and our collective ability to compete with the private sector. There should be a particular sense of urgency in bolstering, rather than undermining, the competitiveness of the federal workforce considering that the share of federal employees eligible for retirement is expected to jump to 30 percent in five years.

As a businessman, we would expect you to understand the importance of human capital investments in recruiting and retaining talented employees. We are deeply troubled that you would abdicate your responsibility to ensure the sustainability of the federal workforce--particularly while so many federal employees are actively working without pay during a shutdown triggered by your own equivocation.

We strongly encourage you to take immediate action to reverse your ill-advised pay freeze and lift federal workers from this added layer of financial insecurity. Should you choose not to change course, we will continue working on a bipartisan basis to ensure federal workers receive a pay adjustment for Fiscal Year 2019.

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