Last night, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved to modify the federal pension system that would increase the amount government employees contribute to their pensions.
Quietly tucked away into the 2012 American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act (aka: The Highway Bill), this stand-alone legislation (H.R. 3813 as incorporated into H.R. 7), would require federal employees and members of Congress to pay a total of 1.5 percent more toward their pensions over three years beginning in 2013.
I guess if you can’t get it through the front door, the back door swings just as wide (yet more quietly).
Just adds insult to injury. I see that it also includes the new “high-5” computation and eliminates the annuity supplement for those retiring after 2012. On top of the pay freezes in the coming years, this is very disappointing. I wish I were eligible to retire this year. I just missed the CSRS and now I’ll be a victim of this legislative maneuver.
This is SOP for the way our dysfunctional Congress works. Use the govies as a convenient, politically acceptable battering ram then sneak self-serving language into unrelated legislation to avoid any public scrutiny and real accountability. Read almost any legislation and see how much is in it which is unrelated and meant to either hide from the public or in return for favors elsewhere. This is not what our founding fathers had in mind. http://www.thegovernmentman.com
Now there’s action in the House to strip those provisions in the Highway Bill that relate to federal employee benefits. Backtracking on their original intentions, the Bill’s author claims they “never thought [the pension provision] would be used as funding for transportation”. Sneaky??? Busted!!!