DPBO: An inexpensive way to make the federal workforce more competitive and fair

On June 2, 2010, President Obama announced that the federal government would be extending some benefits to domestic partners of federal employees, including access to child care services and long-term care insurance plans. The Defense of Marriage Act prevents the president from directly extending the full package of benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of federal workers. When announcing the new, limited benefits earlier this month, President Obama reiterated his support for the current DPBO legislation, and urged Congress to pass the legislation so he could sign it into law.

DPBO is modeled after policies enacted by many state and local governments, as well as some of the nation’s leading nonprofit and for-profit entities. Eighty-three percent of Fortune 100 companies and 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies currently offer these benefits, along with nearly 80 percent of the 200 top-grossing United States law firms. Twenty-two state governments, along with the District of Columbia and hundreds of local governments, also offer similar benefits to their employees.

DPBO puts the federal government on equal footing with these leading workplaces.

Offering competitive benefits is important, because the federal government is already at a disadvantage because it pays its workers less than they would make in comparable jobs in the private sector. Specifically, the average pay gap between federal and private sector jobs is 22 percent, according to the current federal Pay Agent computed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Office of Personnel Management. Similar gaps have been reported for most of the past decade.

Implementing policies like DPBO will help mitigate the impact of the overall compensation gap between federal civilian workers and private sector employees. Doing so will attract more people to federal public service, which is a concern considering that nearly 600,000 federal workers will retire between now and 2018.

Besides helping the federal government recruit the best and brightest, DPBO would also put gay and lesbian federal workers on equal footing with the straight peers. The Williams Institute estimates that 34,000 federal employees have same-sex domestic partners. These employees, their partners and their families need access to affordable and high-quality health insurance and other benefits just like their heterosexual peers. DPBO provides this access. In turn, these federal employees will be less likely to seek a new job just to get these benefits, reducing turnover rates — and the associated recruiting and training costs — for the government.

And the best news about DPBO is its low cost. The federal government (including the postal service) spends about $193 billion each year on salaries and benefits. Extending benefits to same-sex domestic partners of civilian federal employees would increase total salary and benefits expenses by about 0.04 percent.

Offering benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees is a common-sense step for the government to take. Extending these benefits is relatively inexpensive, and it puts the federal government on equal footing with the policies of leading private U.S. employers as well as a growing number of state and local governments. Finally, these benefits would help families headed by same-sex couples gain access to health and life insurance policies that would otherwise be out of their financial reach.

Jeff Krehely is the director of the LGBT Research and Communications Project at American Progress.