“He was poised to draw $60,000 a year at age 50! Something is definitely wrong with the federal retirement system if this is correct.”
Chickenfeed! Our town’s first police chief retired out due to a heart attack (he’s actually a friend). Public pensions are public a public record here. Today, his total pension, which has been indexed for inflation, twenty years later is now more than $150k per year. Also, we have had two fire chiefs retire in close succession as each one reached “full retirement” at age 50. They make make more in retirement than the made in their last working years because of “accrued vacation.” Their first year’s retirement income is 280,000, $100,000 above their working salaries. If they each live to age 80 ( along with their spouses should they live longer than their husbands), their cost to the taxpayers will be something on the order of $10 million apiece.
The public sector pension programs (federal and state) are unsustainable and are eventually going to be curtailed and/or eliminated. The private sector has had a jump start on abandoning unsustainable, back-end loaded defined benefit pensions - promised more when times were good and the subsequent mismanagement and liabilities made it difficult or impossible to sustain as the future arrived to pay out benefits. But that is for another thread.
What McCabe situation shows in the background is how federal employees can be rewarded with pensions and paid medical benefits that non government workers can only dream about.
Yes $60k a year is squat! He should have been a Chicago school administrator and that would have been $18million plus!
I read someplace that that the coward of Broward will draw about 60k per year.
someone started running with that $60,000 figure which is off. McCabe would have qualified under FERS (Federal Employee Retirement System) as an LEO - (Law Enforcement Officer - 1811 category) To draw a pension at 50, he must have completed 20 years as a qualified LEO and been in the job on his 50th birthday. Sessions made sure that did not happen.
The percentage for the first 20 years is 1.7% of your high-3 average salary multiplied by your years of service which do not exceed 20, PLUS 1% of your high-3 average salary multiplied by your service exceeding 20 years.
Since his employment ended at age 49 he would be eligible for deferred retirement at a much later date.
He might appeal to OPM (unlikely) or file a law suit showing cause for illegal dismissal and request a court append his last day to his 50th birthday.
Since Sessions acted on a recommendation from Office of Professional Responsibility - OPR is the FBI's equal to Internal Affairs, Sessions is on good ground. McCabe might argue that Session acted with malice to grossly punish an agent who was stepping down anyway.
I don't care. The action against McCabe is a happy moment for SAs and SSAs that have watched these antics go on for far too long.