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Washington, D.C.—There are more than enough options available to the federal government to address the crisis surrounding its recruitment and retention problems, but without sufficient funding to implement them, they might as well not exist, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees said today.

In testimony to a key Senate subcommittee, President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said “the problem is not a lack of options, it is a lack of resources.”

Until a decision is made by Congress and the administration to provide federal agencies with funding levels that reflect their missions and their needs, she said, “the government’s recruitment and retention problems will remain in crisis.”

Kelley made her remarks in testimony before the Subcommittee on Government Management of the Senate Committee on Government Reform, which is examining the potential for expanding flexible personnel systems governmentwide.

NTEU has been a leading advocate of the need for higher pay for federal employees, along with adequate and stable funding not just for agency missions but for implementation of retention and recruitment programs.

Kelley repeated NTEU’s firm belief that for most prospective federal employees, “the most critical element in deciding whether or not to accept a job is salary.” With salaries for public service work lagging

behind the private sector by as much as 30 percent, the NTEU leader said, “there is little question why we face the crisis we do today.”

She urged continuation of military-civilian pay parity, along with full implementation of the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA), emphasizing that complying with FEPCA “would do more to address recruitment and retention in the federal government than all the government’s other incentive programs combined.”

The NTEU president said that in fiscal 1999, less than one-quarter of one percent of the federal workforce received any form of recruitment, retention or relocation incentive, including benefiting from such programs as retention allowances, bonuses, performance awards, student loan repayment awards, incentives, and bilingual or other awards.

“It makes little sense to offer this range of incentives to agencies, encourage them to use them to solve their human capital crises, yet provide them with no money or resources to accomplish the goal,” she told the Senate subcommittee.

Kelley thanked Subcommittee Chairman Richard Durbin (D-IL) for his leadership in support of legislation that she said would “bring fairness” to federal contracting out decisions. “No one can be sure if any real cost savings have been achieved, or even if government services for taxpayers have been improved,” Kelley said. She added that directives to agencies to meet contracting out quotas, such as recently issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), “send an unmistakable message to federal employees that they are not valued.”

She also urged Congress to repeal or modify a section of the 1998 Internal Revenue Service restructuring act that dictates mandatory termination for any one of ten specified offenses. “The broad scope and vague nature of the ‘10 Deadly Sins,’” Kelley said, “has created nothing but anxiety and confusion in the workplace.” Only seven of the approximately 1,300 charges against IRS employees under that section of the law involving harassment or retaliation against a taxpayer have been substantiated, she said.