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Washington, D.C.—Offering a relative handful of federal employees a small amount of incentive pay while continuing to provide no funding for child care subsidies, student loan programs, and recruitment and retention bonuses will accomplish very little except to further erode the falling morale of the federal workforce, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers said today.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) slammed as “not well thought out” an administration proposal to provide a human capital performance fund that would be prorated among federal agencies and be paid out according to management discretion.

“The far smarter course would be to provide federal agencies with adequate discretionary funding to implement recruitment, retention, and relocation programs and the wealth of incentive programs already available,” said Kelley.

“There are very good programs available under existing law that recognize and reward various aspects of excellence in performance,” the NTEU leader said. The administration’s policy has “multiple fatal flaws,” President Kelley said, including its failure to take into account existing federal employee concerns about the fairness of the performance appraisal system.

“I can’t imagine that giving managers more unfettered discretion to give incentive pay to a fraction of the federal workforce will do anything other than hurt employee morale virtually across the board,” she said.

Kelley has been the leading advocate for higher pay as one of the most important steps the government can take to address its continuing recruitment and retention problems. No annual pay raise has been even close to the level called for in the federal pay law, she said, and the pay gap continues to be substantial.

“We cannot now use this proposed fund as a further excuse not to close the pay gap that is a serious impediment to recruiting and retaining the employees the government needs to perform the work the American people expect and deserve,” President Kelley said.

At the same time, she has long urged that existing pay and award flexibilities be funded so that they can exist in fact rather than just on paper. She noted a recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report of employee interviews in 24 agencies and departments that found recruitment and retention bonuses to be among the most effective personnel tools agencies have, along with child care tuition assistance, transit subsidies and alternative work schedules.

“These are not particularly costly items,” President Kelley said, “but they help people in their day-to-day lives in ways that have significant positive impacts. The failure of agencies to use programs such as federal student loan repayment programs, time off awards and quality step increases for high performance, is a function of not having sufficient resources.”

She added: “We should be putting our emphasis on these programs, and not on some narrowly-focused, management-directed fund that employees rightly will be suspicious of from the day of its inception.”

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents more than 150,000 employees in 28 agencies and departments.