Interview transcript

Terry Gerton Here we sit at the end of summer. The next thing that pops up on many feds forecast is shut down, end of September, the end of the fiscal year. We’re making some progress there. Both of the congressional chambers have passed a version of the CR, but they haven’t reconciled them yet. From NARFE’s perspective, what will you be watching for once they come back in September?

John Hatton We’ll be watching what the House does. So the Senate passed on a broadly bipartisan basis a continuing resolution that would extend current year funding levels to December 11th. Our hope is that the House basically just takes that up because you have that bipartisan agreement in the Senate and you always need that because you have that 60 vote threshold in the Senate. Whether there will be controversy within the House, particularly either among House Republicans to put that on the floor or unwillingness of House Democrats to then negotiate, like to come together and provide votes for it if the Republicans aren’t there, creates a little bit of uncertainty of whether that CR is gonna be passed in September and through December. Right now, I’d bet on it happening versus not happening. I don’t think a lot of people want a shut down heading into an election, but it’s been a rather chaotic environment in Congress and certainly partisan and so you never really know and there’s a lot different factions so it remains to be seen what the plan will be in September.

Terry Gerton Are there particular differences between the two versions of the CR that you would be concerned about?

John Hatton No, I mean, there’s the underlying basic extension of funds. There’s anomalies that were not negotiated on a bipartisan basis in the House. Generally, we’re probably not gonna take a view on some of those more specific government funding provisions one way or the other. I think the Senate, because it’s got a very broad bipartisan support, is just much more likely to pass than the House one is. And, you know, the House usually acts on a partisan basis first, has to go to the Senate. They have to work in that bipartisan basis because of the 60 vote threshold and then you get closer to kind of a resolution. So I think it’s just more about simplifying it and ensuring it is a passable piece of legislation.

Terry Gerton There’s some other discussion on the Hill about ways to prevent future shutdowns. And so from NARFE’s perspective, what are you hearing there and what are some of the ideas worth paying attention to?

John Hatton So there’s a bill that’s been introduced in both the House and the Senate called the Prevent Government Shutdowns Act. It’s a Lankford (R-Ok.) and Hassan (D-NH) bill in the Senate. That is a leading Republican and a leading Democrat on the relevant committee. It’s an Arrington (R-Texas.)-Panetta (D-Ca.) bill in the House. There are probably sufficient Democratic co-sponsors to potentially get support in the senate if you have all the republicans supporting it as well, tough to tally up the exact numbers before it gets there, whether it gets to the floor. What that bill would do is if we reach the end of the fiscal year and no bill has been passed, there would be an automatic continuing resolution. It would then combine with the requirement that the chamber stay in session. The only business they can do is working on appropriations, limitation on congressional travel. So things like people taking CODELs in the middle of a shutdown. Those are congressional delegations and foreign trips, for example, would be prohibited. So we think it puts some teeth on it. So it’s not just an automatic CR. And there’s some reason for people to work it out. And so we’ve supported that there was a hearing in the House by the House Appropriations committee that looked at it, that brought over the senate. So there’s certainly a growing potential consensus around this. I think there’s still opposition from appropriators, particularly Democratic appropriators where they think that gives up some power or authority to the administration and takes it away from Congress because you have that backstop that this could just go on indefinitely. Understand their concerns, I think, from the federal workforce concern. We’ve just seen way too many shutdowns, way too much disruption in government, functioning way too risk put on the federal employee to either keep on working or be furloughed without pay for a really long time. And I think this is a better solution than what we’ve seen in reality.

Terry Gerton John Hatton is staff vice president of the National Association of Active and Retired Federal Employees. Well, John, on that note, let’s turn to pay. We’re getting close to the deadline for the president’s alternative pay plan. So what is NARFE watching there? What are you hearing?

John Hatton Well, in the budget request to Congress, there was a pay freeze. So barring a surprise, we expect that alternative pay plan to communicate no increase in pay. At the same time, the NDAA that passed the House had a range of 5 to 7% pay increase for military. And so that’s a really big disparity there typically, particularly as you related to those working kind of side by side and various defense jobs, particularly stateside. Or even for those who are abroad and civilian and in harm’s way as all. I mean, you try to keep a degree of parity and we’ve really gotten away from that over time. And this would be a huge departure from that pay parity principle. So there seems to be some support on that. You know, that would likely need to go through the appropriations process in terms of a pay raise, so I would still hold out hope that there will be some pay increase provided through Congress and through the appropriation process, even if the President’s proposal is zero. If Congress has nothing, that pay freeze will go into effect, but there is certainly a role for Congress in the government funding process to provide something higher.

Terry Gerton We’ll have to certainly watch how that plays out. And one more topic you and I have talked in the past about OPM’s plan to collect federal employee health benefits and PSHB claims data. OPM has made some changes since the first proposal came out and NARFE recently commented there. Did they address any of your concerns? What’s still on the table?

John Hatton They have in some ways addressed some of our concerns, but we still had serious concerns that we communicated via our official comments. And so they explained a lot more why they wanted the data, but some of those explanations came in a blog post from the OPM director and not all in the official documents. So we had some concerns there. It’s to take that data in OPM’s roles Of an oversight agency. Mainly to root out potential cases of fraud, to reference, to analyze data to help drive improved policy decisions and improve out health outcomes and reduce costs. So that all makes sense as an idea of what they wanna do. But there’s reasons that generally employers don’t have access to medical claims data of their employees and we remain particularly concerned about that. And there’s not, in our view, enough limitations on their ability to protect that data from being switched from de-identified, from what they’re proposing is pseudonymized data. So … OPM would not have an ID that would track to a person, but it could be tracked later through a re-identification process. So there’s not enough limits on that re-identification process. There’s too many exceptions on their ability to get access to who people are. And then it’s within OPM’s own control to make those decisions. And the concern is that HIPAA provides specific reasons to protect employees from their employer having access to their health data so they will not be retaliated against. It could be because certain people have higher healthcare costs and you wanna reduce costs for the government. We don’t want employers in the private sector or employers in a public sector to have that type of data. Particularly when you talk about politics, there’s the concern that you could take personal health decisions and use as a repercussion against individuals. And they don’t say explicitly that they’re not going to use it for those purposes. So we would like to see them cleaning up in a lot of different ways to protect individuals’ privacy, to protect their data from security, from retaliation, and go from there.

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