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Washington, D.C.—The principal problem with the present federal pay system isn’t the system itself, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal workers said today, it is instead the failure of the government to provide the resources to fund the system.

“Fashioning a new system without a commitment to fund it will be a huge waste of time and effort,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), who was commenting on an Office of Personnel Management (OPM) study of potential changes in the federal pay system.

President Kelley said that failure to fully implement the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA) continues to be a major obstacle in the ability of the federal government to attract and keep skilled workers.

FEPCA, legislation signed into law by President Bush’s father, called for the closing, in stages over 10 years, of the gap between public and private sector pay. Since its effective date in 1994, however, federal employee pay has not been raised in line with figures generated by the FEPCA formula. As a result, federal pay continues to lag as much as 32 percent behind private sector pay, depending on region of the country.

FEPCA has not failed because of any faulty methodology in its survey technique, President Kelley said.

“It failed because the pay increases called for by the Act required more funding than the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the White House, both under President Clinton and President Bush, were willing to support.”

The NTEU leader noted that OPM Director Kay Coles James previously had described to NTEU the process of coming up with a new federal pay system as “starting with a blank sheet of paper.” NTEU hopes to make one option both widely used in the private sector and “embraced by NTEU,” President Kelley said—namely, setting pay through the collective bargaining process—a key part of any new system.

Greater resources for federal pay are critical if agencies are to continue to improve the delivery of government services to the public, the NTEU leader said. “No other factor will play a larger role in determining whether the impending human capital crisis in the federal sector will come to pass or be averted,” she said.

A wide range of experts, both within government and outside of it, have expressed concern about the impact on federal agencies of a likely wave of federal employee retirements over the next few years. More than half the present federal workforce will be eligible for either regular or early retirement over that period.

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments.