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Washington, D.C.—There is a crisis in public service which the nation “cannot hope to solve absent a commitment to establish a fair process for setting federal salaries” that makes government employment competitive with the private sector, the leader of the largest independent union of federal employees said today.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) offered that assessment as members of the National Commission on Public Service touted their report on management and organization of the federal government at a hearing of the House Government Reform Committee.

“Changes in management and organization alone will not get the job done,” President Kelley said. “There must be a commitment both to better pay for federal employees and to adequate funding for their agencies. We must address the growing budget crisis that leaves federal agencies without the resources needed to do the work expected of them by the American public,” she said.

As she did in testimony before the commission and in follow-up comments to Paul Volcker, its chairman, President Kelley took serious issue with any recommendations that do not address the critical funding and pay issues.

The commission’s report focuses on increasing salaries for highly-paid top-ranking government officials, a policy, President Kelley said, that will “serve only to further erode the morale of dedicated and talented front-line federal employees.”

She noted again the administration’s insistence that it have the right in the new Department of Homeland Security to strip from employees their basic civil service and collective bargaining rights. “This is hardly the way to generate a positive feeling for federal service both among those working for federal agencies and those considering government work as a career,” Kelley said.

In the same vein, she pointed to the administration’s insistence that as many as 850,000 federal jobs be made available to the private sector, even though there is no credible evidence that taxpayers save money and receive adequate value for the dollars paid to private contractors.

In particular, the NTEU leader pointed to what she called “this administration’s total disregard for federal employees and the valuable work they perform” as being crystallized in the new Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-76 presumption that all activities performed by federal employees are commercial in nature unless agencies justify that the jobs are inherently governmental.

That is “a sweeping change,” Kelley said, “which can only lead to a major downsizing of the federal workforce and a further decrease of any kind of accountability or oversight of contractors.” The administration’s efforts to dramatically increase federal contracting “sends shock waves through the federal workforce, serving to further exacerbate the human capital crisis,” she said.

“There is little in the commission’s report that truly addresses these serious problems in any meaningful way,” President Kelley said.

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 federal employees in 29 agencies and departments.