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Washington, D.C.—The reasons the “quiet crisis” in public service “has escalated to a fever pitch” over the past dozen years are clear, National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) President Colleen M. Kelley told a meeting of the National Commission on Public Service today.

“Inadequate pay and benefits, blind contracting out targets, artificially restricted agency funding levels and the failure of agencies to address infrastructure issues like training remain the primary obstacles” to retaining highly qualified employees and recruiting the talented employees the government will need tomorrow,” Kelley said.

The Commission is headed by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, who headed a similar body 12 years ago that identified, in particular, the growing pay gap between public and private sector work as a serious impediment in making government service “a credible career choice.”

“Nonetheless,” President Kelley said, “as we all know, the purchasing power of federal salaries has continued to erode and the gap has continued to grow,” reaching as high as 32 percent in some parts of the country.

Kelley, a member of the Federal Salary Council, is a leading advocate for higher federal pay.

“There is little point,” she said, trying to negotiate a new federal pay system unless and until policy makers are willing to spend political capital to commit the resources necessary to make a new system work.

In wide-ranging testimony on a variety of factors contributing to the federal government’s human capital crisis, the NTEU leader cited the administration’s proposal for a Department of Homeland Security, made up of some 170,000 employees from nearly two dozen agencies and departments—but without providing any additional resources.

“To add insult to injury,” she said, the administration proposed to allow the director of this agency to set or change federal employee rights and benefits whenever he or she chose. “Contrary to reassuring the nation’s federal workforce,” Kelley said, “these proposals have helped to exacerbate the crisis the federal government faces in attracting and retaining employees.”

The NTEU leader also pointed to sharp increases year after year in premiums for the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Plan. She urged support for legislation in the House and Senate that would raise the government’s share of FEHB premiums from the current average of 72 percent to the most common industry standard of 80 percent.

President Kelley aimed criticism at a variety of other federal workplace problems, including consistently inadequate funding for agencies, and the administration’s drive to ultimately contract out to the private sector 425,000 federal jobs.

“We cannot begin to discuss methods to retain and recruit a high performing federal workforce until the administration puts the brakes on its quota-driven outsourcing initiative,” she said. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has directed agencies to make available to the private sector by the end of fiscal 2003 15 percent of the jobs considered commercial in nature, a proposal Kelley has slammed as “counterproductive.”

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