While private-sector businesses struggle to keep their employees while dealing with anti-business, anti-growth policies of the Obama administration that have prolonged the recession, federal government employees live in a world where there hasn’t been a downturn — thanks to federal taxpayers. It is stunning and discouraging.

 

The number of federal employees getting automatic grade promotions has skyrocketed, prompting experts to ask whether managers are abandoning their responsibilities to make personnel decisions.

The number of so-called “career ladder promotions” — which can boost an employee’s pay by more than $10,000 a year, in some cases — jumped roughly 75 percent in the last three years, according to federal data. Last year, more than 108,000 employees received career ladder promotions, accounting for 35 percent of all promotions to a higher grade in the government last year. That’s up from about 21 percent in 2008.

These promotions enable newly hired employees to quickly move up the ranks of the General Schedule and other personnel systems virtually automatically. Instead of advancing to the next step in their grade after a year on the job — which provides a roughly 3 percent increase — employees move up one or two entire grades. That gives them anywhere from a 10 percent to a 20 percent raise in one year.

Some employees receive career ladder promotions several years in a row as they advance to their full promotion level.

Last year — the first year of a freeze to federal pay scales — the raises accompanying career ladder promotions cost the government between $634 million and $852 million, according to Federal Times calculations based on promotion statistics obtained from the Office of Personnel Management.