Pay Gap Puts Feds on the Defensive
Rob Bluey /
The Obama administration has been on the defensive about exorbitant federal pay ever since a Heritage Foundation report revealed government workers earn significantly more money than their private-sector counterparts. Now the administration’s personnel office has resorted to attacking the report under the false pretense that Heritage failed to compare the correct data.
Heritage economist James Sherk estimated that salaries and benefits — for identical jobs — are 30 percent to 40 percent higher in the federal government than in the private sector.
In effort to refute Heritage’s study, Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry claimed federal employees earn 22 percent less. Berry accused Heritage of comparing “apples to oranges” by “look[ing] only at gross averages” when analyzing the salary data. But that’s just plain false — and an indication that Berry never read Sherk’s study or the nine appendixes that explain how Heritage used controlled data to arrive at the conclusions.