#general schedule

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Tara Golshan at Vox (09.27.2019): 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wants to give congressional staffers a raise.

The 2020 presidential candidate is adding to her cadre of proposals aimed at addressing corruption in Washington, DC, which she sees as the root cause of dysfunction and a policy stalemate. The latest is to increase pay for congressional staffers — from chiefs of staff to legislative aides.

The reasoning is twofold: Warren argues paying congressional staff more would possibly keep them from leaving Congress and becoming wealthy lobbyists, and it could also help lawmakers attract more talent to their teams, instead of having to rely on outside sources, like lobbyists, for policy information.

Currently, each House and Senate office gets to act like a business: They are given a budget and are allowed to set salaries, with some limits, for staffers as they see fit. But that budget has shrunk over time. And between 2001 to 2018, a Congressional Research Service report tracking 15 congressional staff positions found the median pay for 10 of them decreased by at least 5 percent. A lot of lawmakers have proposed simply increasing that budget.

But Warren wants to do something different. She wants to make congressional staffers’ pay follow the same structure government agencies use to pay federal workers — through different grades and levels that are adjusted annually. It’s called the General Schedule (GS). GS employees in Washington, DC, saw an average 8.19 percent increase between 2001 and 2018. Their “base pay schedule is usually adjusted annually each January with an across-the-board pay increase based on nationwide changes in the cost of wages and salaries of private industry workers,” according to the US Office of Personnel Management.

How to stay ahead of Schedule every time…

Construction and Scheduling: a love/hate relationship?

I was consulting for a client a few years back and one of the client’s associate told me in the middle of a meeting:

” Construction schedules are useless, we always fall behind…”

My answer to his provocative line was:

“Like washing your hands, it’s useless, they always end-up dirty…, but still, you keep doing it…”

Scheduling a construction…

I know it was last season and the writers were scrambling to come up with a way to write JJ out, but it was the start of the season of terrible dialog for Reid. Some episodes are better than others, but certain writers just don't get Reid. Erica Messer, Janine Sherman Barrois, and Kim Harrison are the three worst at it. I would say in terms of having the character down, Kim is probably the worst offender.

Anyhoo, in "JJ" they had Reid sitting on Emily's desk eating antacids like candy and he says the retarded line "Maybe she asked for a raise" and Prentiss has the good sense to give him a "Are you retarded?" look. If I could have looked at the writer in that moment, I would have given her the same look.

Now, I know in the previous season they even had someone say they wanted a raise and I just took it as a joke, because the thing is: FBI agents do not get raises! Well, not in the traditional sense. Like other federal employees, FBI agents are on the General Schedule pay scale. Theirs is specifically for the LEO (law enforcement officers). Usually every year they increase the general schedule pay by a small percentage to reflect inflation so that the pay is still sufficient for living. There is also a bonus for locality based on where the agents live/work to cover the different economic situation at their location. Some places are more expensive to live in so they have a higher percentage. The bonus for the DC/Virginia/Maryland area is over 20%. But, Congress lobbied to have a freeze put in place on the GS increase so that it could not go up for a few years. So the only way for an agent to get a pay increase is to get a promotion. 

The rank system for the FBI (and other agencies) has grades and steps. FBI agents start out at GS10 step 1. Their pay will reflect this as it is a set amount. After the first two probationary years the agents are eligible for a Within Grade Increase (WGI). So they can move to step 2. There is a 52 week waiting period between each step until we get to step 4 and then the waiting period doubles. Steps 4-6 have a 104 week waiting period. Steps 7-10 have a 156 week waiting period. The only way to advance faster is to get a Quality Step Increase (QSI). If someone does excellent work, they can be recommended by their supervisor to get a step increase earlier than normal, but you can only get a QSI once every 52 weeks. So someone could get to step 4 naturally, then get a QSI to immediately take them to step 5. It can be possible for someone to get a QSI every 52 weeks but it is rare.

Now, a person doesn't need to get to step 10 before advancing to the next grade level. It is possible to go from GS10 step 2 and jump to GS11 step 1. Although the pay for GS11 step 1 is actually lower than GS10 step 10. In order to join the BAU a person must be a Supervisory Special Agent (minimum rank of GS14 step 1) or have the experience to qualify for that rank. I think that at least 52 weeks is needed in between grade increases as well, but I read an article from 2009 that said something about the waiting period being removed. The highest rank you can attain is GS15 step 10-- not that it matters because after about step 4 or 5 the agents don't make any more pay. Even if they work overtime they don't get zip because Congress capped the salaries at $155,500. Not even the General Schedule increase can change that until they change the law to raise the amount.