Nextgov

The debate over federal pay is hitting the blogs yet again. Paul Waldman of the liberal magazine The American Prospect predicts that we will hear much more in the coming months about how federal workers are overpaid. That debate already is escalating as a result of last week's recommendations to freeze federal pay increases by the president's bipartisan debt commission. The Debt Reduction Task Force of the Bipartisan Policy Center on Wednesday also called for a two-year freeze on federal civilian pay.

But Waldman says federal workers have become the scapegoat for reducing the federal deficit, arguing that recent claims that feds make an average of $120,000 per year, or twice as much as private sector workers, are overblown. Those claims, he writes, factor in a worker's salary, the value of health insurance and the value of other benefits like pensions. And while federal workers do have higher salaries than their private sector counterparts, the disparity is justified because feds tend to be in higher-paying occupations, he writes. For example, two-thirds of federal employees are classified as management or professional - managers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers - compared to less than a third of the private workforce, he notes. I'll throw information technology professionals into the mix.

Meanwhile, Jason Richwine at the conservative Heritage Foundation says Waldman's argument is tiresome, in part because labor economics literature have always been controlled for worker characteristics, and all analyses have shown federal workers on top. "Federal workers are more skilled than private workers, but their superior skills are not nearly enough to justify their higher salaries," Richwine writes.

So who's right, and what do you expect to come of the federal pay debate in the coming months?