Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Chairman, President Obama announced a pay freeze. Within his Executive order, he froze all pay he could freeze. The one he could not freeze was step increases. This simple amendment adds to President Obama's 2-year freeze a 7-month freeze for the period he was unable to cover of step increases. Step increases are simply pay increases because you're on the job, period.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ISSA. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I just want to clear up some facts because I believe, in the effort to try to make a point, people have failed to be quite as accurate as they should be. First of all, as for political appointees, the President has already frozen their pay. Second of all, awards, raises, and bonuses are not limited by this freeze. The fact is, if somebody is meritorious of a raise, award or bonus, he will still be able to get it.

When they say that budgets have been cut, if budgets have been cut, not having this $500 million in the first year and another $500 million in the second year will, in fact, allow those budgets to go further.

When they say that these are effectively meritorious, from the Office of Management and Budget of the Obama administration, we have received the figure. It is 99.94 percent of all eligible Federal employees, meaning only six out of every 10,000 employees, failed to get this automatic increase.

This saves over $500 million in 7 months and over $700 million the next year. It is consistent with President Obama's freeze, and the freeze is exactly what we're trying to do--give the President what he said in the spirit in which he said it.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ISSA. Thank you. I won't use it all.

It has been a long night, and the American people are hopefully still watching. As they watch what we are doing here and as they see people coming and crying for the Federal worker, I hope what they realize is that the Federal worker is not losing a day's pay. We are not eliminating Federal workers, and Federal workers will be able to get awards, bonuses, any meritorious increase or promotion. We are simply saying that, for 99.94 percent of all non-uniformed Federal workers, to simply get longevity increases after the President has ordered a pay freeze is disingenuous to the process. We want to be genuine to the President's Executive order and genuine to the process here. The House of Representatives rolled back our funding by 5 percent, and that was a good start; but if we don't do this, we're not even genuinely freezing the pay of our own Federal workforce.

I strongly urge support for this amendment in keeping the promise of the President and the promise to the American people.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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