Federal computer Week: “…In its proposal, the White House terms the current civil service system “a relic of an earlier era,” and calls the laws and regulations surrounding hiring, pay, performance management and retirement “complex and outdated.” One of the proposed reforms to the civil service includes a pay freeze for civilian employees in 2019; military members, by comparison, would receive a 2.6 percent pay raise. “We did not propose a civilian pay raise this year,” Mulvaney said in a Feb. 12 press call. “Instead what we’ve done is set up a $1 billion fund with an idea toward giving managers the ability to give pay to people who actually merit the increase. Somewhere in the high 90’s of federal workers get programmatic performance based increases every year. I think it’s fair to say that’s probably not a true performance-based indicator.” The proposal also outlines significant cuts to federal retirement benefits. The White House estimates the proposed changes — eliminating cost-of-living adjustments for Federal Employee Retirement System retirees; reducing Civil Service Retirement System retiree cost-of living adjustments to 0.5 percent; recalculating the pension formula from the average of an employee’s three highest salary years to the five highest; increasing employee retirement contributions by one percent per year; and reducing the G-fund interest rate — would save more than $2.5 billion in fiscal year 2019, and almost $84 billion over 10 years…”