Romney Champions Dishonest GOP Attack on Federal Employees

By Jon Perr
CrooksandLiars

Rolling out his plan to cut the national debt last week, Mitt Romney promised to "align federal employee compensation with the public sector." If so, the roughly 2.8 million federal workers whose pay has been frozen by President Obama can expect a big raise from President Romney. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, federal employees are now underpaid by 26.3 percent compared with similar non-federal jobs, a two percent increase over the previous year. And as it turns out, as a percentage of the total U.S. population, the federal workforce Romney wants to cut by 10 percent is already at its smallest since the 1950's.

For months, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has been at the forefront of the Republican crusade to demonize government workers as "freeloaders" and a "new privileged class in America." Regurgitating talking points from the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, Romney declared that "average government workers are now making $30,000 a year more than the average private-sector worker." And in the plan to cut federal spending he unveiled last week, Romney took aim at Uncle Sam's workforce:

Align Federal Employee Compensation With The Private Sector -- Savings: $47 Billion. Federal compensation exceeds private sector levels by as much as 30 to 40 percent when benefits are taken into account. This must be corrected.

As it turns out, not so much.

As the Washington Post reported Friday, the large and growing pay gap runs the other way:

The federal government reported Friday that on average its employees are underpaid by 26.3 percent when compared with similar non-federal jobs, a "pay gap" that increased by about 2 percentage points over the last year while federal salary rates were frozen.

(More here.)