Last week, NFFE National Vice President Timothy Ostrowski joined House Representative Paul Tonko (D-NY) at a press conference in Troy, NY announcing the Congressman’s support for the Stop Excessive Payments to Government Contractors Act of 2011, H.R. 2090, a bill that would lower the cap on federal contractor executive salary reimbursements from $700,000 to $200,000.
Tonko unveiled the bill in his home district in an effort to highlight how community programs are being asked to sacrifice while other wasteful government spending practices continue. At the national level too, federal agencies have been forced to swallow more than a trillion dollars in cuts over the next decade while government contractors have escaped virtually unscathed.
Ostrowski, who is also president of NFFE Local 2109 at the Watervliet Arsenal in New York’s capital region, spoke in support of Tonko’s measure as a means of promoting shared sacrifice in the move toward tighter federal budgets.
“Federal employees have had to tighten their belts and sacrifice to help during these difficult times, and we believe it’s appropriate to ask the same of government contractors,” said Ostrowski. “We’d like to thank Congressman Tonko for introducing this common sense legislation which will put needed controls on spending and help save taxpayer dollars.”
Current federal law caps the amount contractors can charge taxpayers for a single employee at $693,000 per year – double what it was in 1998, growing an outrageous 53% faster than the rate of inflation. But that cap only applies to the top five executives at each contractor. For all other employees, there is no limit to what a contractor can charge to taxpayers. That means for a workforce that’s between two and three times the size of the official federal workforce, there is no limit on the amount of taxpayer dollars that most contractors are paid.
The Stop Excessive Payments to Government Contractors Act of 2011 would correct that problem by capping salary reimbursements from taxpayers for all contractor employees, saving tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.