Skip to main content
Home
We Can Stop Project 2025
Learn. Share. Take Action: Vote.

It's just telling that you've got an authoritarian playbook that sort of, at every pass, seems to be more focused on driving up corporate profits at the expense of the American people.

Andrea Ducas, vice president of health policy, Center for American Progress
"Shocking": Experts warn "irresponsible" Project 2025 Medicare proposal would harm seniors

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Contents
  • Recent Press
  • Random Excerpts
  • Search
  • Bulletins

Page 76

See this page in the PDF

Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy

to delay. With the proper limitation of labor union actions, the FLRA should have limited reason for appeals. The EEOC’s federal employee section should be transferred to the MSPB, and many of the OCS’s investigatory functions should be returned to the OPM. The MSPB could then become the main reviewer of adverse actions, greatly simplifying the burdensome appeal process.
Making Civil Service Benefits Economically and Administratively Rational. In recent years, the combined wages and benefits of the executive branch civilian workforce totaled $300 billion according to official data. But even that amount does not properly account for billions in unfunded liability for retirement and other government reporting distortions. Official data also report employment as approximately 2 million, but this ignores approximately 20 million contractors who, while not eligible for government pay and benefits, do receive them indirectly through contracting (even if they are less generous). Official data also claim that national government employees are paid less than private-sector employees are paid for similar work, but several more neutral sources demonstrate that public-sector workers make more on average than their private-sector counterparts. All of this extravagance deserves close scrutiny.
Market-Based Pay and Benefits. According to current law, federal workers are to be paid wages comparable to equivalent private-sector workers rather than compared to all private-sector employees. While the official studies claim that federal employees are underpaid relative to the private sector by 20 percent or more, a 2016 Heritage Foundation study found that federal employees received wages that were 22 percent higher than wages for similar private-sector workers; if the value of employee benefits was included, the total compensation premium for federal employees over their private-sector equivalents increased to between 30 percent and 40 percent.'* The American Enterprise Institute found a 14 percent pay premium and a 61 percent total compensation premium.”
Base salary is only one component of a federal employee’s total compensation. In addition to high starting wages, federal employees normally receive an annual cost-of-living adjustment (available to all employees) and generous scheduled raises known as step increases. Moreover, a large proportion of federal employees are stationed in the Washington, D.C., area and other large cities and are entitled to steep locality pay enhancement to account for the high cost of living in these areas.
A federal employee with five years’ experience receives 20 vacation days, 13 paid sick days, and all 10 federal holidays compared to an employee at a large private company who receives 13 days of vacation and eight paid sick days. Federal health benefits are more comparable to those provided by Fortune 500 employers with the government paying 72 percent of the weighted average premiums, but this is much higher than for most private plans. Almost half of private firms do not offer any employer contributions at all.

Take Action

Vote. Share. Get involved.

Project 2025 - Top Issues

Read Project 2025 on top issues:

Medicare, education, health care, climate change, veterans, energy, birth control, Social Security, overtime, agriculture, mifepristone, Israel, small business, school lunches, disabilities, Supreme Court, abortion, the death penalty, porn, immigration

Dive Deeper

Read the Project 2025 Comics

Comics explaining Project 2025 (https://stopproject2025comic.org/): 

"Project 2025 is a detailed plan to shut you up, and shut you out.

Don’t let it do either.

Read on, then vote."

Comics explain Project 2025 by topic: Children. Health care. Voting. Taxes. Climate. Education. And more.

Read Project 2025 in an open, online discussion

Read and discuss Project 2025 - the whole thing

Joyce Vance Columns on Project 2025

Law professor and NBC Legal Analyst Joyce Vance covers Project 2025

Some Recent Press

more

Bulletins

  • Project 2025: Eliminate, Eliminate, Eliminate
  • Project 2025 - Impact on Medicare
  • Project 2025's Most Used Words
  • Project 2025 and The Issues
  • Project 2025 and New Mexico
more

Subscribe

Copyright © 2026