Protect Your Well-Earned Benefits

In case you have yet to contact your senators to urge them to reject postal and federal employee benefits cuts, please do so immediately. If you have already reached your senators, thank you.

On May 22 , the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1 by a one-vote majority (215-214). The bill includes cuts targeting postal and federal employees. In part, H.R. 1 would eliminate the Federal Employees Retirement (FERS) supplemental annuity for postal and federal employees who retire in 2028 and thereafter. The FERS supplement provides an essential financial safety net for FERS employees retiring before reaching Social Security eligibility.

The measure also would impose a user fee on employees seeking to appeal an adverse personnel action to the Merit Systems Protection Board. And finally, H.R. 1 would penalize, through increased FERS contributions, any federal worker or newly hired or promoted EAS-level postal employee who declines employment as an “at-will” employee. At-will employees can be fired for any reason or for no reason and have virtually no civil service protection. This package of benefit reductions is intended to help offset a series of White House legislative priorities, including extending corporate and high-income tax cuts, increasing border security and immigration enforcement and boosting funds for the Defense Department.

It is important to note that—through the coordinated efforts of the postal and federal employee community, including aggressive NAPS advocacy using its legislative portal—a number of harmful cuts originally approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability were deleted from the House-passed bill (H.R. 1). These cuts included altering the CSRS and FERS retirement formulas and increasing FERS contributions for postal and federal employees hired prior to 2014.

We need to remove the remaining anti-postal and federal employee provisions from the bill and ensure the deleted provisions are not resurrected. Therefore, it is crucial that NAPS members contact their senators to oppose cuts to postal and federal employee benefits.