On the recordNovember 30, 2017
I want to thank Mr. Connolly, and I want to salute him as a really ardent champion for those of your constituents who work in the Federal Government. In Maryland, as in Virginia, we have lots of them, but it is not just there. Eighty-five percent of the Federal workforce lives outside of the Washington/Maryland/Virginia area: Kentucky and California and South Carolina and Texas. This would apply to all new employees. Millions of new people coming into the workforce would be added, doubling the probationary period. Imagine if you were trying to hire for your small business and you had to tell people that they were going to be on probation for 2 years basically, with none of the rights that you would have vested as if you had really gotten hired and been part of the workforce. I want to say, they are willing, apparently, in this bill, to give people a whole extra year on probation. They are not wanting to wait even 1 year or a half a year, maybe, for the GAO to do a proper study so we can use evidence-based policymaking, as the gentleman says. That is the very least that we can do. The good gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Comer) said that there was a study done 10 years ago.





