This is reflective of more than the ”fiscal responsibility and economic conditions” referred to in the article; it’s about ideology and pain:
Most civilian federal employees will not see a pay raise in 2027, according to an alternative pay plan President Donald Trump issued this week.
The president is officially planning for a pay freeze on both base and locality pay for most civilian federal employees, citing fiscal responsibility and economic conditions.
“I have determined that for 2027, base pay and locality pay for civilian federal employees will not change from the 2026 rates,” Trump wrote in his alternative pay plan letter, quietly transmitted to Congress on Wednesday. “This decision will maintain fiscal responsibility without harming the government’s ability to recruit and retain well qualified employees.”
The planned federal pay freeze makes an exception for federal law enforcement personnel, who are expected to receive a 3.8% raise starting in January. The larger raise for law enforcement is meant to improve recruitment and retention for “critical law enforcement roles,” the letter states.
…
The varying pay increases align with White House’s budget proposal earlier this year, which recommended a 5-7% military pay raise and omitted any mention of a civilian pay raise.
The 3.8% pay boost for federal law enforcement is also on par with the 2026 pay raise amounts. Aside from law enforcement, other civilian federal employees received a 1% pay raise this year.
…
The federal pay raise amounts will not be final until the president signs an executive order to officially set the rates — something that usually happens each December.
Democrats have been attempting to push for a larger 4.1% pay raise for federal employees through the introduction of the FAIR Act earlier this year. Despite its reintroduction each year, Congress has yet to pass any version of the legislation. The actual federal pay raises employees receive typically fall short of what the bill has proposed.
It’s easier to understand this action when you take into account two quotes from Republican “thought leaders” (I cannot use that term more loosely) over the years - one past and one current.
The first is from Grover Norquist who was President of Americans for Tax Reform, during an interview with NPR on May 25, 2001: “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”.
The second is from Russell Vought, the current Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and one of the architects of Project 2025: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma”.
This has been the goal of Republicans since the time of Reagan and his pithy view that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.””
There are so many things wrong with these views, and I believe it is fertile ground for Democrats to make hay.
Let’s start with the fact that government jobs Republicans hate (as opposed to the law enforcement jobs Republicans love) are, well, actual real jobs. “Bureaucrats” do everything from making sure Medicare and Social Security work to protecting our food supply, water and air to maintaining infrastructure to making our skies safe for travel to providing care for veterans and so much more. The money paid to government employees is just as green as the money paid to private sector workers. Public sector wages paid to government employees circulates through the economy just as much as the money from private sector workers.
Secondly, Russell Vought and his ilk are both uninformed and, to be blunt, a**holes. Wishing anyone malintent simply because of the job they’ve been hired to do shows a total lack of empathy and a willfulness ignorance of what those jobs entail. They literally cannot grasp that the role of government is help the people it serves by doing things collectively that we want as a society but cannot do individually. And remember, per Gustave Gilbert, the head psychologist at the Nuremberg trials, “I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Finally, Republican words and actions make it very clear that they don’t believe in the mission of the federal government (outside of law enforcement and keeping the people they nominally serve “in line” and subjugated to their preferred ideologies.
This is an opportunity for Democrats. They should find their collective spine and stand up for the hard-working people who make our government (and our country) run and provide safety, benefits and good things for the people they believe in serving (as opposed to elected Republicans). I’ve said repeatedly during my campaigns and in the post below that electing people to run an organization who don’t believe in the organization’s mission will result in the failure of that org and everyone who works in that org losing their jobs.
Oh, and in the case of the federal government, with the largest budget of any organization in human history, hiring people to run it but who don’t believe in its mission simply means they look at it as a slush fund to enrich themselves, their families, their friends and their crony supporters.
It’s about the corruption, stupid.
Let’s follow Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland had stand up for all workers, including those who ensure that the largest organization in the world actually benefits the people it is meant to serve:
Johnny Paycheck - Take This Job and Shove It
