What is your opinion of the pay raise for federal employees?

I believe they DO deserve a pay raise but, my perspective is that they DO NOT deserve a 3.3% raise, but a similar raise like we received (1%) this year look at the numbers & listen to my reasoning here.

I've had the opportunity to be deployed with some great Americans - both military and civilian (Federal employees and contractors), most recently I redeployed from Afghanistan last April as the Senior Enlisted Leader for the CAAT and we had some great Federally employees making a huge strategic impact which has and will continue to save large numbers of American and Coalition lives.

Looking at the Federal employee pay raises since Desert Storm, you see a complete linear pay raise of 205% for the 23 year period.  So if an employee had a $30,000 salary in 1990 (the year Iraq invaded Kuwait), 23 years later the pay (based only on annual pay raises, and including the 2014 raise) would be $61629.83 as an annual salary. Here's a link for multiple references concerning the Federal employee pay raises (see page 11):

http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/94-971_20100120.pdf  (if this link does not work, copy the link and paste it into the web browser)

(the multiplier for the 20 years is 2 [login to see] 65314, but also includes pay freeze and included is also the 2014 raise)

Now lets look at military raises during the same period:

If you take the same base military pay amount as I used in the example above ($30,000 base pay) and use the linear multiplier (roughly 214%, the multiplier is below) it gives us an annual salary of $64055.81

(the multiplier for military base pay from 1991 to current is 2 [login to see] 946)

Here's the military pay raise chart (over 50 years of documented pay raises on the chart):    http://www.navycs.com/charts/

Again, the cumulative pay difference is $2425.98 which equals a $202.165 monthly difference.  I believe the hardships our Soldiers endured coupled with multiple deployments equates to a much larger pay differences earned by the service member.

Understand there are benefits on both sides that are almost intangibles (military members can receive non-taxed benefits such as BAS & BAH; federal employees can receive Thrift Savings Plan matching funds up to a specific percentage) so understand I did not take those figures into account however, I tried to give you the information to make your own educated opinion.

Historical Archive of US Military Basic Pay

Directory of historical United States military pay and allowance charts, with raise percentages, for the years 1949 through 2017.