Obtained disability retirement and a cash settlement for a postal employee, thus allowing him to relocate from Florida to New York to be with his family in order to recover from a medical condition.
Achieved reinstatement of a Federal Air Marshall with full back pay and benefits for a total compensation of over $100,000 after his termination.
Obtained reversal of a denial of disability retirement for a postal employee by the OPM, plus attorneys fees from the MSPB.
As DoD prepares to launch in early July what will be the largest number of furloughs among agencies imposing them—the latest count now stands at about 650,000—components are issuing guidance on various special considerations. For example, memos state that organizations may not transfer any work from civilian employees to contractors or use overtime to make [...]
Several developments in Congress offer hope that a federal employee raise will be paid in January 2014, and that it might even be higher than the 1 percent the White House has recommended. The House Appropriations Committee has begun drafting spending bills for the upcoming fiscal year that do not specifically include money to pay [...]
The House and Senate budget resolutions differ in many ways affecting federal employees. Most notably, the House plan calls for a 10 percent reduction in the workforce through attrition and for equalizing the employer and employee contributions toward federal retirement benefits, which would mean about a 5.5 percent of salary increase in the employee share. [...]
Another question which OPM has not settled is whether members of Congress and their staff stand to lose the employer contribution toward premiums, which is worth about 70 percent of the total in FEHB, by switching to the exchange system. Some read the law as meaning that will happen. That prospect has drawn attention recently [...]
As measured by full-time equivalent positions, the budget projects an increase of 6,100 over the estimated 2013 total of 1,128,800; the 2012 actual was 2,090,700. The biggest gainer would be VA, up 8,200, mainly for medical care, and Treasury, up 5,600, mainly for increased tax compliance efforts at its subcomponent IRS. Other increases are targeted [...]
Political leaders have wrapped up work on the budget for the current fiscal year, nearly six months into it, with enactment of a catchall spending measure that among other things cancels the 0.5 percent federal employee raise that otherwise would have started in April. The measure also avoids the threat of a partial government shutdown [...]
The House Budget Committee this week is set to approve a budget plan for fiscal 2014 that repeats several proposals affecting federal benefits from prior years. They include requiring equal contributions by employees and the government toward CSRS or FERS retirement benefits—meaning an increase in the employee share of about 5.5 percentage points–and a 10 [...]
While planning for fiscal 2014 has begun, Congress is still finalizing work on the current year budget. The Senate is set to join the House in preventing the 0.5 percent pay raise for federal employees scheduled to take effect after a current temporary funding bill expires two weeks from today (March 27). The House earlier [...]
Agencies have been notifying unions that they expect to conduct furloughs, triggering bargaining that the unions say they will pursue aggressively and that agencies say they will honor. While negotiations cannot stop a furlough, they can affect the “impact and implementation” — meaning details such as timing of furloughs, whether certain employees would have first [...]
The delay from early February to mid-March in submitting the annual White House budget proposal—which officials attribute to the series of budgetary uncertainties in recent times—will cause Congress to act more quickly than usual, possibly a sign that it will fall back on familiar proposals regarding federal employees. The first step in Congress after receiving [...]
