News/Commentary

Biden proposes whopping pay hike for federal employees ahead of midterms

February 10, 2022 | | Print Article

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President Joe Biden is once again raising wages for federal employees — this time reportedly by a whopping 4.6 percent.

“Federal employees and military service members would receive average raises of 4.6 percent next January under the budget President Biden will propose in March, marking what would be the workforce’s largest salary hike in two decades, according to senior officials at two federal agencies,” The Washington Post reported Thursday.

News of this raise comes less than two months since the president signed an executive order for “an across-the-board federal pay raise of 2.2% in 2022,” as reported by the Federal News Network on Dec. 22nd.

“Biden announced plans back in August to give civilian employees a 2.7% average federal pay raise for 2022. Wednesday’s order was the last step the president must take to finalize pay adjustments of any kind for General Schedule employees,” according to FNN.

The pay raise was described as “well above the 1% bump civilian employees received in 2021.”

News of the latest raise also comes amid 67,000 federal employees having just had their wages raised to $15/hour at the start of this month.

The Post admitted in its report that the latest raise — at the very least, if not all of the raises — are attributable in part to the influence of President Joe Biden’s union buddies.

“Biden’s approach underscores his administration’s close partnership with unions, whose collective bargaining power in the federal government is limited to working conditions, not wages, which are set by Congress. Biden established a contrast with the Trump administration early in his presidency with executive orders and rhetoric that shifted course from what was widely viewed as hostility toward civil servants by Trump,” according to the Post.

“Federal employee unions have enjoyed renewed clout in the current administration, for example, by largely setting the direction at some agencies for when their members will return to the office from remote work during the coronavirus pandemic, in some cases pushing return dates well into the spring. Permanent telework is also expected to be a fixture of post-pandemic work life for some federal employees.”

It appears the president has acquiesced to virtually every demand made by federal labor unions. The same is true of the demands made by teachers’ unions:

Given the president’s record low polling numbers and the fact that the U.S. government hasn’t grown anymore efficient in recent years, some suspect the incessant raises are nothing but an attempt by the president to essentially “buy” votes.

Look:

In fairness to the president, he’s a Democrat, and Democrats have always been for bigger government, despite warnings from critics who say bigger government isn’t, hasn’t been and will never be the solution.

One of these critics is Elon Musk, an entrepreneur and investor who’s founded a spate of successful companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.

During last year’s Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, he explicitly called for smaller government, not bigger.

“The government is simply the biggest corporation, with a monopoly on violence and where you have no recourse. … We should minimize what the government does. … The role of government should be that of like a referee, but not a player on the field. Government should try to get out of the way and not impede progress. Rules and regulations are immortal, they don’t die,” he said.

“Occasionally you see some law with a sunset provision, but really, otherwise, the vast majority of rules and regulations live forever. Eventually, it just takes longer and longer and it’s harder to do things. There’s not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations. And so gradually this hardens the arteries of civilization, where you’re able to do less and less over time.”

In added in conclusion, “So I think government should be trying really hard to get rid of rules and regulations that perhaps had merit at some time but don’t have merit currently.”

Listen:

But the current president believes otherwise and has, in addition to doling out raises like candy, been fervent in his implementation of more regulations and an ever-expanding government bureaucracy.

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Vivek Saxena
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