One hundred ten members of Congress, in a letter led by Rep. James Walkinshaw, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Rep. Steny Hoyer and Sen. Brian Schatz, are asking congressional leaders to guarantee federal civilian employees a pay raise of at least 3.8% in the fiscal 2027 appropriations bill. The letter, dated Sept. 22, pushes back on a pay freeze the Trump administration formally proposed for most of the federal workforce this year. Only one Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, signed on.
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110 Signers, All But One A Democrat
The letter, posted on Rep. Walkinshaw’s official House website, carries 110 signatures: 12 senators and 98 House members, a coalition large enough to reflect real numbers of federal employees and retirees in members’ own districts rather than a purely partisan head count. Fitzpatrick’s is the only Republican name on the list, making the effort almost entirely a Democratic one despite its framing as a defense of the broader federal workforce. Walkinshaw represents a Northern Virginia district with one of the country’s largest concentrations of federal employees and retirees, which is part of why his office is the one hosting the letter rather than a committee chair’s. Van Hollen and Schatz, the two lead Senate signers, sit on committees that oversee federal-workforce policy, while Hoyer has co-led similar pay letters in past appropriations cycles from his own Maryland district, another area with a heavy concentration of federal workers and annuitants.
The Freeze The Letter Is Fighting
The administration’s own alternative pay plan for 2027, reported by Government Executive in late August, would freeze base and locality pay for most civilian federal employees at 2026 levels while granting federal law enforcement officers a 3.8% increase under a separate pay authority. The 110-lawmaker letter’s demand, that the broader civilian workforce get “no less than 3.8%,” effectively asks Congress to extend the same figure the administration already carved out for law enforcement to everyone else on the federal payroll, rather than proposing a new number of its own. Congress, not the White House alone, has the final say once the fiscal 2027 appropriations bills move. Under the law governing federal pay, the president can set an alternative figure each year in place of the formula-driven raise that would otherwise apply, but that alternative plan takes effect only if Congress does not write a different number into appropriations legislation first, which is the opening the 110 signers are trying to use.
Two Years Of Raises That Trailed Inflation
Federal civilian employees received a 2% across-the-board raise in 2025 and just 1% in 2026, the smaller of the two increases confirmed in the Federal Register’s January 2026 pay-schedule notice. Both raises came in below the pace of consumer prices those years, meaning the purchasing power of a federal paycheck has been eroding for two straight cycles even before a possible third-year freeze arrives in 2027. That compounding effect, rather than any single year’s number, is the core of the argument the letter’s signers are making to appropriators. A third consecutive year of pay lagging behind the cost of living would extend a stretch already longer than the increases federal employees saw earlier in the decade, according to the letter’s own account of the two prior raises.
Why Retirees Have A Stake In Active Workers’ Raises
The fight over 2027 pay is not only a workplace issue. Federal employees under the Federal Employees Retirement System have their pension calculated from their “high-3,” the average of their highest three consecutive years of salary, a formula OPM’s own retirement-computation page lays out in detail. A frozen or below-inflation raise in an employee’s final working years lowers that high-3 average and, with it, the size of the annuity that employee draws for the rest of retirement, a consequence that plays out years after the paycheck itself is spent. Retired federal employees do not receive the annual raise directly, but the workers whose pay is being negotiated today are the retirees the high-3 formula will eventually apply to. Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment, which many federal retirees also draw on alongside a FERS annuity, is calculated on an entirely separate index, so a frozen federal pay year does not automatically translate into a frozen Social Security benefit, even though both are on a fixed-income household’s mind at the same time.
What Happens Next In The Appropriations Fight
No fiscal 2027 pay figure is final. Under the process OPM outlines on its own salaries and wages page, an annual federal raise is set either by the president’s own pay authority or by Congress overriding it through appropriations language, which is the route the 110 lawmakers are now pushing. Both the administration’s freeze plan and the letter’s 3.8% counter-offer remain proposals until an appropriations bill actually sets the number, and that bill has not yet cleared Congress. Appropriations committees in both chambers still have to reconcile their own spending bills before any pay figure for 2027 becomes final, a process that in past years has stretched past the start of the fiscal year it was meant to cover.
Sorting Out Debt And Accounts While Pay Lags
Two years of raises that trailed inflation, and a proposed freeze the 110-lawmaker letter is trying to head off, leave many federal households working out how to keep a collector’s call, an overdraft or a dispute over deducted pay from turning into a bigger problem while the appropriations fight plays out. That is a separate task from the pay dispute itself, and one that does not wait on Congress to finish its work.
The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit walks through the 2-month bank protection rule for federal benefit deposits and the debt-validation steps for responding to a collector, alongside a protected-funds and dispute log for keeping a record of each contact.
Read the account and debt protections in The Bank Account & Debt Protection Kit.
This article was produced with AI assistance and checked against the primary sources linked above.
David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
