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I’m in the same boat as you.

I left (lost, actually) a great private sector job in 2002.

As for the comments about how great Fed benefits are - really? The health insurance is so expensive we use my husbands, Holidays and vacation are just normal - I had more at my private sector job. What other benefits are there? We can’t even get coffee for a department staff meeting. I buy my own pens and planner, and folks who telework pay for their own internet. My private sector company paid for all of that.

My office is an old nasty building that doesn’t even have central air. There is so much work and so few staff everyone in my office takes work home (we don’t get OT either).

People really have no idea what they’re talking about when they start whinning about how great Federal employees have it.

Do I think there are useless employees, useless jobs and even useless agencies? Yes. But the broad brush sweeping all of us as lazy, underworked, overpaid rubes is way off base.

People really have no idea what they’re talking about when they start whinning about how great Federal employees have it.

Yeah...I notice that many of the people who do that complaining don't actually have any contact with those federal jobs.

Another aspect to this article that conservatives are walking right into is that it's an attack on the upper salaries, giving tacit support of a flatter salary structure, not one based on market pricing and skill sets.

The problem isn't the highly specialized, well-paid professionals. It's the numerous bureaucrats at lower levels that are compensated at greater-than-minimal levels for minimal work (productivity, quality, difficulty, or other measure).

I now work for the VA - and just now, in 2011, have managed to match the salary I had in 2002. My current job is much more complex and technical then my private sector job ever was, for the whopping salary of $49,000. As for the comments about how great Fed benefits are - really? The health insurance is so expensive we use my husbands, Holidays and vacation are just normal - I had more at my private sector job. What other benefits are there? We can’t even get coffee for a department staff meeting. I buy my own pens and planner, and folks who telework pay for their own internet. My private sector company paid for all of that. My office is an old nasty building that doesn’t even have central air. There is so much work and so few staff everyone in my office takes work home (we don’t get OT either).

I feel for you, and totally agree with what you posted.

If there are any GOP staffers or lawmakers who read this forum, here is a message for them:

What the hell are you doing? Going after VA doctor salaries now?!

This is total BS. Scape goating lowly GS workers or the salaries of professionals that ARE doing a good job for the taxpayer is not what we elected you to do. The Fed workers have already taken it in the shorts: pay freeze for effectively 3 years, now proposed to effectively 6 years; no cost of living (locality pay) increase for 2010 and now 2011; health care insurance going through the roof; proposed 5% pay cut, etc, etc, etc.

Even if they added all of that up, the effect on the debt and deficit would be in the .0025 range.

I'll spell it out in language that Rush Limbaugh used:

"Medicare and Medicaid ARE the deficit."

What is the GOP strategy? That if they demonize VA doctors and nurses, and make them suffer even more, then it will be easier to "sell" the public on the necessary entitlement cuts that have to be implemented? That's a pretty pi$$ poor strategy, and whoever is advising Ryan and Boehner should be fired.

Do your jobs Republicans. Reform "Entitlements" and stop with the chump change propaganda TV appearances.

Yeah, what you said.

Today, I am on detail 1000 miles from my home, working late in my hotel room because deadlines don’t care if you’re on leave or on travel. I am paying for my own internet in the hotel room because no hotels with free internet were offering the government rate. Tomorrow is supposed to be my AWS day, but instead I will again be working in my hotel room, stopping just long enough to load up and fly home. Pay? I have been trying to move up into the next grade for 3 years, but hiring and promotion freezes have been in place for 2 years now. All of my friends who graduated with their MPAs with me are working for almost 25% more than I am making in their private sector jobs. I’m here because I like public policy, even though I was in the top of my field as a COBOL programmer in the 80s.

Jeez, how I wish I could just have one day to live as one of those fat, dumb, lazy, and happy feds.