House Passes Bill to Improve Federal Hiring Systems

MYTH: Members of Congress do not have to pay Social Security taxes. REALITY: Members of Congress, just other taxpayers, must pay into Social Security. Prior to legislation passed in 1983, congressional members, as well as federal civil service workers, were not subject to Social Security taxes or eligible for Social Security benefits. Since 1984, all members of Congress are required to pay into Social Security.

survivors in line with the COLAs that their counterparts under CSRS and Social Security receive.

Without passage of the Equal COLA Act, FERS retirees will continue to see their annuities, earned through committed service to the American people, decrease in value year after year, which is exactly what COLAs are intended to prevent. COLAs should be based on the actual measure of consumer prices, not arbitrarily constrained. FERS retirees deserve full protection to maintain their annuities’ purchasing power throughout retirement. This legislation would rectify the unfair policy of leaving FERS annuities unprotected from rising inflation.

Beyond the COLA disparity between retirement systems, annual COLAs for federal retirees fail to keep up with rising health care costs. Currently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates COLAs for federal retirees using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), which measures how urban wage earners and clerical workers under age 62 spend their money. As a result, seniors continue to get shortchanged by the annual COLA.

NARFE supports the Fair COLA for Seniors Act, which would address this inequity by adopting the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly (CPI-E) to calculate annual COLAs for seniors. The CPI-E would better account for the inflation of goods and services like medicine, health care, housing and other essential living expenses seniors most often purchase. Estimates from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas last year indicate the rate of health care inflation could double by mid-2023, meaning it’s more important than ever to push this bill.

NARFE is pushing for the reintroduction of both bills in the 118th Congress and will include updates in NARFE Magazine and NARFE’s weekly email newsletter, NARFE NewsLine, as soon as new information on these bills is available.

—BY SETH ICKES, POLITICAL ASSOCIATE

In late September, the House of Representatives passed the Chance to Compete Act., H.R. 6967. The NARFE-endorsed bill, introduced March 8, 2022, by Reps. Jody Hice, R-GA, and Ro Khanna, D-CA, would reform the civil service hiring system by allowing agencies to share assessments with each other, expand use of subject matter experts in the hiring process, and focus primarily on skills- and competency-based hiring vs. degree-based hiring.

Recent government-wide hiring data suggest that more than half of all competitive examining certificates have been returned without a hire being made. By improving candidate evaluation, the government should be able to increase hiring efficiency, ensuring agencies are able to recruit the employees needed to fulfill their missions.

The Committee on Oversight and Reform also acknowledged the decrease in quality of the federal workforce, arguing, “For years, quality hiring for the federal civil service has been undermined by overreliance on candidate’s paper credentials and self-assessments of their abilities.” Enhancing candidate criteria during the hiring process is likely to have a positive impact on overall hiring efficiency, securing more knowledgeable and skilled civil service hires.

The Chance to Compete Act outlines four important measures to achieve skillsbased hiring reforms. First, skills-based assessments will give agencies the freedom to focus on select applicants who