When outside-the-Beltway people think of federal pensioners, they often conjure up an image of a kindly old fellow feeding pigeons from a park bench.
Or of grandmotherly types doing volunteer work.
While that may be true of millions who get federal military pensions or Social Security, it is also true that many had exciting, secret and dangerous lives — or just weird duties while on active duty.
CIA operatives and NASA pilots are getting a federal or military retirement check, as are the daring team of Navy scientists who in the 1960s studied hibernation patterns of polar bears — the idea was to see if it was feasible to put deep-space astronauts to sleep for long periods of time.
I”m not sure how the studies went, but part of the very tricky research from the bold GS 13 and 14 scientists was to take the temperatures of sleeping bears. Nowadays there may be easier ways, but back then it was done the old-fashioned way, with a glass thermometer held by a civil servant.
The pension benefits of feds are the best in the nation for a couple of reasons. The annuities of feds are linked to salary and service time, and in the beginning, were made generous to offset lower pay.
But also, feds are in very elite company when they retire. There are hundreds of still-influential members of Congress and their staffs who are on the indexed-to-inflation federal civil-service retirement program.
Like other feds under the older Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), politicians enrolled in CSRS get bigger benefits payable as soon as they retire — or are retired by the voters.
Rank-and-file feds under the newer Federal Employees Retirement System get a less generous federal civil-servant benefit. It isn”t payable until they hit age 62 and is not fully indexed to inflation. Still, it outshines any of the remaining retirement plans for nonfederal workers.
Despite the wildly popular urban myth that members of Congress don”t pay into Social Security, the vast majority do and have for the past 20-plus years. Even those under the older, more generous CSRS program pay into Medicare like other federal workers.
In the Washington area — because of our large federal-military retirement community — even more people have a stake in the January retiree cost of living adjustments (COLA).
With three months to go in the COLA countdown, the CSRS-military-Social Security retirees are likely to get a January adjustment of about 4 percent.
Mike Causey, senior editor at Federal News Radio AM 1050, can be reached at 202/895-5132 or mcausey@federalnews radio.com.
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