A growing number of employers are offering paid family leave. And if Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) gets her way, the federal government will be one of them. Comstock introduced a bill last month, the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act, which would make 12 weeks of paid time-off available for any federal employee who gives birth to, adopts, or fosters a child.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) would be free to widen the leave time further to 16 weeks, if funds aren’t too tight and if more state and private-sector employers start offering 16-week leave, according to the bill’s text. It states that funding for any duration of leave would come directly “from any appropriation or fund available for salaries or expenses for positions within the employing office.”
Comstock told her colleagues that passing this law would not only make life easier for working parents; it would benefit the entire government by giving federal employees one more incentive to stay in the workforce. Without it, more federal workers may jump ship for private-sector employers who offer paid family leave and other benefits, she said in a June 29th statement following the bill’s release.
“This is a competitiveness issue as well as a retention issue for the federal workplace to attract and maintain the top talent in the workplace,” Comstock said.
Comstock’s bill is now in the hands of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the Committee on House Administration. It is now up to Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to decide when either committee will proceed on the measure and refer it to a full House vote.
She has some bipartisan backing. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) cosponsored a federal paid-family-leave bill with her last year.
Their collaborative proposal, the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act of 2017, never made it out of committee but still got the endorsement of 24 federal employees’ unions. National Treasury Employees Union president Anthony Reardon wrote a letter praising the 2017 bill as “legislation to bring the federal government into the 21st century” on the issue of parental leave. Reardon wrote that almost every major corporation has enacted paid leave policies in recent years and that “the federal government now lags behind.”
Most federal workers can take only unpaid leave following the birth of a child, per the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which mandates up to 12 weeks of uncompensated time off. New parents who are juggling large expenses—and let’s be honest, most new parents are—frequently forego this time off, as they cannot afford to go without several back-to-back paychecks.
Most private-sector employees don’t get paid leave for new children, either: no more than 15% of U.S. workers had paid family leave available to them in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But as Comstock and Reardon suggest, this may be changing. That 15% total marks a four-percentage-point improvement from 2012, when BLS data found that only 11% of workers could take paid family leave.
And meanwhile, a larger—albeit more contentious—discussion is under way in Washington about how to make paid family leave available to all U.S. workers, private- and public-sector alike. On July 11, the Senate held a hearing in which Republicans and Democrats pitched two competing bills aimed at spreading paid family-leave benefits to 100% of the workforce.
The two bills differ fundamentally in how to pay for it, however. The Democrats’ proposal, a bill by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), would create a nationwide program and finance it with a slight increase in payroll taxes; while the Republican proposal, developed by Republican senators Joni Ernst (Iowa), Marco Rubio (Fla.), and Mike Lee (Utah), would allow workers to pay for their family leave themselves in exchange for reduced Social Security benefits.
In a July 5 video, Rubio touted the GOP proposal as a “fiscally responsible” solution. He tweeted after the July 11 hearing that he is writing the proposal up into “a bill we hope can garner widespread support.”
One could argue that a bill capable of widespread support already exists: Maloney and Comstock’s federal-centric bill. Their measure, while more limited, already commands a bipartisan base of advocates. And by relying on federal agencies’ existing revenues, it is arguably revenue-neutral and thus, like Rubio’s, able to claim fiscal responsibility.
Congress’ lawmakers may disagree vehemently over the size of the federal government and the federal budget. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle mutually appreciate the principles of strong families and a capable and competent federal workforce. They have an opportunity affirm both principles together, by rallying together to move federal paid family leave forward out of committee and into law.
