Trump has just canceled the pay raises for federal employees that were supposed to go into effect in January:
WTOP – President Donald Trump says he is freezing automatic pay raises for federal employees in 2019, citing the need for government belt-tightening.
In a letter to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Trump said he is zeroing out both across-the-board pay increases as well as locality pay raises that are based on where federal employees live, which were set to go into effect in January 2019.
“We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” Trump said in the letter.
In his letter, Trump said federal pay would have automatically risen by 2.1 percent next year. Separately, the Senate backed a 1.9 percent pay raise for federal employees.
The freeze affects federal employees covered by the General Schedule, which is the majority of the federal workforce. Military members are set to receive a 2.6. percent raise in 2019, Federal News Radio reported.
Well that’s a good sign of fiscal sanity that we don’t see much in our government. But it must be followed through on the big ticket items as well, in order to have a significant effect on our fiscal sustainability. Otherwise this is just window dressing.