Now that the Senate has pushed its version of reconciliation funding over the finish line amid a blizzard of changes to the bill, here’s a look at a few workforce and tech items that either failed to make the final version of the legislation, or were beaten back on the funding front during the process.
A series of controversial provisions – targeting Federal workers’ retirement benefits, civil service protections, union operations, and even cybersecurity funding – were stripped from the reconciliation bill by senators over the weekend as lawmakers finalized their version of the legislation to send back to the House. Lawmakers in the lower chamber now must consider the bill and how it differs from the reconciliation bill that House members voted to approve last month.
Some of the provisions dropped over the weekend from the Senate version include ones that would have scrapped the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) supplement for early retirees and forced new Federal hires to choose between at-will status with no job protections or paying 9.4 percent of their salary into their pension.
Other items that did not make the Senate bill include a 10 percent charge on union dues; a requirement for unions to pay the full cost of official time and office space for union representatives; giving bonuses to Federal “cost cutters”; eliminating funding for electric vehicles in the U.S. Postal Service’s fleet; and charging a $350 filing fee for claims and appeals filed with the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Many of those items were dropped from the bill following findings from the Senate parliamentarian who warned that the provisions wouldn’t pass muster with the Senate’s Byrd rule, which requires that measures included in reconciliation legislation must directly impact Federal spending and not be merely incidental to non-budgetary policy changes.
In addition to the Federal workforce items, at least one cybersecurity-related item failed to catch on to the bill.
A proposal from Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee ranking member Gary Peters, D-Mich., to provide $99 million in funding for the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program (SLCGP) did not make it into the reconciliation bill.
SLCGP, which was created under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, is up for reauthorization this year to continue funding the $1 billion grant program which provides those funds over four years. Without congressional action, the program will expire in September.
Experts who testified before Congress said that it is “essential” to providing assistance to state and local governments to defend against cyberthreats.
Then Senate reconciliation bill passed by the Senate also rescinded $850 million from the Open RAN grant program – established as part of the CHIPS and Science Act – which aims to boost open, interoperable wireless networks by funding research and development, testing, and deployment.
Those funds were appropriated to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in 2022.