​For the moment, we’re safe. The federal government is currently funded through Thursday, Nov. 21. But, at the close of that day, once again federal employees and their families—and the people and businesses that depend on their work—might suffer yet another shutdown.
The only way out? The usual: Congress must pass at least a continuing resolution, just like it did back in September keeping the government open up to the next deadline.
That last bare-bones bill saved the day—but passing such temporary measures isn’t the best way to run a multi-trillion dollar organization.
“Federal employees, like everyone else, are planning their family year-end celebrations and the thought that a government shutdown could ruin those plans is upsetting,” Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said recently. “Civil servants are not involved in the funding dispute yet they are the ones who suffer if it goes unresolved.”
Other union leaders over these past months have likewise lambasted lawmakers and the White House for past shutdowns and near-shutdowns, along the same lines.
Of course, not only unions but a majority of federal employees themselves—as shown in the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey results, released earlier this month—decry the effects of shutdowns, with most feds expressing that they suffered negative effects from last winter’s partial shutdown.
​Will Congress and the White House—at the last minute—compromise enough to avoid another wasteful, damaging shutdown? Even passing a CR is tricky this year, as differences over the White House’s conduct and impeachment hearings could render the already polarized atmosphere even more so.

Federal employees continue to have the highest and lowest opinions of the same aspects of their workplaces, results of this year’s government-wide survey show, with slightly more positive views overall.
Once again, the most positive response to any question involved whether employees are willing to put in extra effort to get a job done, with 96 percent agreeing or strongly agreeing; 91 percent similarly said they are always looking for ways to do their job better and 90 percent said they consider their work important. Each has been unchanged, or within 1 percentage point different, for the last five years.
The next most strongly positive responses, each above 80 percent and also basically stable, involved whether employees like they kind of work they do, whether they know how it relates to the agency’s goals, whether they know what is expected of them on the job and whether their unit has the needed skills and knowledge.
Again at the low end were several performance-related questions: whether pay raises depend on how well employees perform their jobs (28 percent positive), whether steps are taken to deal with poor performers (34), whether differences in performance are recognized in a meaningful way (39), whether creativity and innovation are rewarded (44), and whether awards reflect performance (48). In each case that was up by a point or two over 2018 and several are up significantly over the last five surveys; in 2015 the positive response rates were 21, 28, 33, 37 and 40 percent, respectively.
In a new question asking what happens to poor performers in a work unit, 56 percent said those persons usually remain in the unit and continue to underperform; 17 percent said they remain but improve over time; and 10 percent said they leave for reasons including firing, transferring or quitting. The other 17 percent said there are no poor performers in their unit.

If there is a locality component to a January 2020 federal employee pay raise, in general employees in city areas where salary rates already are the highest would again benefit the most.
Congress and the White House still haven’t decided, but federal workers almost certainly will either receive a 2.6 percent raise paid across the board or that plus 0.5 percentage points for locality pay, yielding raises that would range from several tenths of a percentage point below 3.1 to several tenths above, varying by locality. The White House favors the 2.6 percent number alone and a Senate bill in effect agrees by taking no position, while the House has voted for the 3.1 percent increase.
That is among the many issues to be decided in the budget process for the fiscal year that began October 1, with a deadline ahead of November 21 when current temporary funding expires. One option under consideration would be to extend current authority into sometime in the new year, likely meaning in that case that the 2.6 percent raise would take effect by default at the start of 2020; supporters of the higher figure could then try to add the locality component retroactively.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data presented at the most recent Federal Salary Council meeting show that the San-Jose-San Francisco-Oakland area would receive the largest locality increase, based on the pay gap there—a gap that persists even though that area already has the highest rates.
Also high on the list would be other areas also with among the highest rates including Los Angeles, New York, Washington-Baltimore, San Diego, Seattle-Tacoma, Boston, Alaska (which is a locality in its entirety) and Houston. Also standing to receive one of the biggest raises would be the Laredo, Texas area, where the pay gap rose by more than 25 percentage points in one year (the report attributed that to technical issues that had an outsized impact due to a small sample size).
The smallest raises would go to the rest of the U.S. locality outside the designated zones, and Corpus Christi, Texas, Palm Bay, Fla., Indianapolis, and Tucson, Ariz.