H.R. 559 would make several changes to the process by which federal employees are disciplined for poor performance or misconduct.
The bill would extend probationary periods for federal employees from one year to two years; modify the process for disciplining employees for underperformance or misconduct; and allow agencies, in certain circumstances, to order employees (or former employees) to repay bonuses they received. None of those provisions would generally change the size of the federal workforce, its mission, or the amounts that agencies could pay employees. As a result, CBO estimates that enacting those provisions would have no budgetary effect.
H.R. 559 would reduce costs by preventing employees from being paid their Senior Executive Service (SES) salary once they were removed from the SES for underperformance and placed back into the civil service. (Under current law, such employees continue to be paid at their SES rate instead of at the lower rate they would otherwise receive as civil service employees.) The number of people potentially affected is small: According to the Office of Personnel Management, fewer than five employees since 2013 would have been affected by that provision, and the savings would have been less than $10,000 a year. On that basis, CBO estimates that the reduction in costs from implementing that provision would be less than $500,000 over the 2019-2023 period. Any reduction in spending subject to appropriation would require that appropriations be reduced by the estimated amounts.
Enacting the bill could lower direct spending by reducing the annuities of employees convicted of a felony. The reduction would be based on the period in which they were engaged in felonious activity while employed by the federal government. CBO does not expect that this provision would apply to a large number of people or that the annuities of affected employees would be significantly reduced. To the extent that the provision would reduce annuity payments to future retirees, those savings would be partially offset by refunding the retirement contributions (which are recorded as revenues) those employees made during the period in which they were committing a felony. CBO
