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Most US federal retirement plans are now fully funded, but since plan assets must legally be invested in federal securities, fund surpluses are used to reduce overall federal budget deficits. As a result, current taxpayers are not charged with the cost of future federal retirement obligations. Nevertheless, federal rules do require the employing federal agency to budget for current personnel’s accruing liability of retirement promises. Therefore, policy decisions regarding the number of federal civilian and military personnel and the design of their retirement benefits may be made with a better understanding of the costs.

This chapter compares the administrative costs of public sector defined benefit and defined contribution systems offered by the federal government and many states. Administrative expenses are presented as percentages of both income and assets, and the author discusses how administrative expenses might enter into the decision by a public sector employer as to whether to establish a defined contribution plan.

This chapter examines the connection between disloyalty charges and the shift toward the political center, or out of government service, by many public officials, which has been difficult to discern because of the silence that loyalty defendants maintained, even many years later. As they organized papers, gave interviews, and drafted memoirs, they typically avoided disclosing that they had been investigated and downplayed the leftism that had put them in the line of fire. Leon and Mary Dublin Keyserling were not the only former loyalty defendants to offer accounts that were distorted by an accumulation of omissions; they are not to blame for trying to protect themselves and their associates from further persecution. In addition to impeding progressive reform, policymakers' traumatic encounters with the federal employee loyalty program impoverished the primary sources on which scholars have relied to understand mid-twentieth-century American politics.

This chapter discusses an example of individual corruption—insider trading in securities markets on the basis of information misappropriated from the government. It also addresses the taxation of capital gains from assets that need to be sold to avoid financial conflicts of interest. In each of these contexts, unique challenges are posed if federal employees are regulated by both federal ethics law and other areas of law. Lack of coordination can cause a government employee, who is affected by both areas of law, to be pulled in two inconsistent directions.

The introduction explains how and why the Civil War era female federal workforce was an important, though often overlooked, cadre of labor feminists in the struggle for women’s rights in America. Labor feminism as used in the book is defined.

This chapter describes how postal unions dropped all remaining Jim Crow branches and locals not long after President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988 on January 17, 1962 providing limited collective-bargaining rights for federal employee unions that did not practice racial discrimination. In the space of just a few years, black postal workers and their allies had won important gains in the fight for equality in the post office and its unions. That included the integration of unions, the breaking down of race and gender barriers to all postal crafts and management positions, and the monitoring and enforcement of executive orders and laws relating to equal employment opportunity. The abolition of Jim Crow union branches and locals set the tone for a decade of struggle parallel to that outside the post office.

Employees of the federal government have been doing historical work since 1861 and have facilitated historical work in countless ways. This chapter discusses how academic historians have dominated the Mississippi Valley Historical Association / the Organization of American Historians (OAH) over nearly its entire lifetime. The marginalization of federal historians for many years led to the formation in 1979 of the Society for History in the Federal Government. The OAH soon began to better accommodate these historians, and at the end of its first century chose one of them to serve as its president.

Scholars have emphasized that policymakers designed the federal Indian school system to assimilate Native children and create a colonial labor force by training Native female students for primarily menial domestic labor. Inadvertently, these policies brought thousands of Native people into the Indian Service in both the white-collar and the menial sector. However, we know very little about them, why they took those jobs, and how they strategically used their positions. This chapter shows that Native women adapted to the changes wrought by the modern economy; but racially marked as Indians, they also struggled for economic and cultural survival in a hostile world. In order to access their voices, it draws upon fifty-five personnel files from the Indian School Service. Beginning in 1905 the Office of Indian Affairs kept individual files for each employee that afford an intimate portrayal of the everyday work lives of female personnel. Assembling personal and professional correspondence, efficiency reports, requests for transfers or retirement, and more, the files illuminate the occupational paths of these women.

This chapter focuses on Cleveland Morgan, a black member of New York Branch 36 of the NALC and among the first to set up picket lines in New York City to kick off the nationwide March 1970 postal wildcat strike. It was a strike that was also illegal because federal employees were still denied that right. Morgan, originally from rural Georgia, came to the post office in 1963 after attending New York University. Besides working at the post office, to help support his family Cleveland also drove cabs and buses. It was typical for postal workers then to work a second job to make ends meet. This was also while he was coming to the General Post Office at midnight to “box up” mail to deliver the next morning at the Empire State Building with thirty-six other carriers.

The discussion in this chapter briefly explores the wide variety of federal compensation regimes and how they fit into the federal regulatory programs to which they are attached. Congress has, over the years, created several compensation programs to supplement or replace state common law for federally regulated products and activities. One of the earliest was the Federal Employees Liability Act, enacted in 1908 to replace regressive state common law doctrines that shielded railroads from liability with a more “enlightened” federal common law cause of action for workers of interstate common carriers. This progressive model “was not widely influential,” and more recent statutes generally serve the dual role of providing limited corrective justice to victims and preventing state common law from discouraging favored industries from manufacturing valuable products.