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Washington, D.C.—The leader of the nation’s largest independent union of federal employees today tied an unwelcome and unacceptable increase in the processing time for federal retiree pensions directly to sequestration—and she called for an end to that damaging policy.

“The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) simply cannot succeed in its effort to fix the problems of delays in processing pension checks while the sequester is in place,” President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said in a statement submitted to a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee.

“The long wait to receive a first check in retirement and the even-longer wait to receive the full amount of an annuity check are problems I hear about too often,” Kelley told the Federal Workforce Subcommittee, which was examining OPM pension claim processing.

“Sequestration is a bad idea and an abdication of congressional responsibility,” she said. “It is strangling the agency budgets of my members, who already have increased workloads due to increased retirements and previous budget cuts. It will cause serious financial hardship for those federal employees who will be furloughed, and now, for those who seek to retire.”

Kelley has been a leading advocate for significant improvements in OPM pension processing efforts, noting that an OPM plan put into effect some 16 months ago was beginning to have a positive effect.

In January 2012, she said, the backlog was more than 61,000 cases; by the end of December, that number had fallen to a little more than 26,000. “It was all heading in the right direction until sequestration became a reality,” she said. The backlog is now more than 36,000 claims.

Constant political attacks on federal workers, along with the ongoing three-year pay freeze, the threats of government shutdowns and now the unpaid furlough are contributing to a growing number of retirements, she told the subcommittee. “Fifty-three percent of the federal workforce is eligible to retire,” she said, “and many are simply no longer willing to endure the current challenges of being a federal employee.”

As the largest independent federal union, NTEU represents 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.