On the recordJune 7, 2016
I thank my friend and colleague from Oklahoma for his leadership and his support on this important bill. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of a bipartisan bill, H.R. 4906, which I am pleased to cosponsor with Chairman Meadows of the Government Operations Subcommittee. This simple bill makes, as my friend indicated, a technical correction to bipartisan legislation known as the Land Management Workforce Flexibility Act, on which I was pleased to work with the committee in passing into law just last year. That bill originally passed the House by a voice vote and then went on to pass the Senate by unanimous consent. As my colleagues will recall, that bill was intended to give temporary seasonal employees an opportunity to compete for permanent full-time employment within all agencies across the entire Federal Government. Merit promotion procedures provide an important career advancement path for Federal employees, and many nonentry-level jobs are filled using this process. Yet, no matter how long an individual has served, temporary seasonal employees never get access to merit promotion procedures. Now, who are those people? Those are men and women on the front line of wildfires in the West, who put their lives on the line to contain forest fires during the fire season out west--dangerous work, arduous work. We are simply trying to give them a fair shake, a fair shake that is available to all other Federal employees.…
