On the recordFebruary 17, 2012
I thank my good friend from Maryland. I appreciate the work of the conferees, but I oppose this conference agreement, not out of concern for the welfare of the tens of thousands of Federal employees that I represent, but out of concern for the welfare of the great Nation we serve. We are blessed with the least corrupt, most effective, least discriminatory, most responsive Federal workforce in the world. And yet how do we repay them? We are requiring them to increase their pension contributions by 400 percent, with no increase in benefits. So we are sending them a signal: We don't really appreciate what you're doing. You're expendable. It's a signal that will not be lost on the recruits that we desperately need in the future, let alone the hundreds of thousands, really, of Federal employees who could easily be making much more in the private sector. The whole country is going to pay a price for the signal that this bill sends, and that's why I think we should defeat it.
