Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I thank my colleague, the Chairman of the Subcommittee, Mr. Davis, for all he’s done to support federal employees and workers around this country. Congratulations to Congresswoman Maloney for her leadership on this issue over many years and congratulations on bringing this bill to the floor today. And to the Chairman of the full Committee, Mr. Waxman, thank you for all your efforts as well.
I want to join my colleague, the Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, in also commending our colleagues from the Virginia side of the river. Mr. Davis, Mr. Tom Davis, who is on the floor, as well as Congressman Frank Wolf – we’ve worked well together on issues supporting federal employees and trying to make the federal government a model employer, an employer we can be proud of, someone who tries to set the standard rather than bringing up the rear when it comes to policies for employees and the workforce.
As I think people understand, we are going to face a severe shortage of federal workers going into the future. Indeed, over the next five years, nearly a third – nearly a third - of the 1.6 million boomer-aged members of the federal workforce are expected to retire. We’re going to need hundreds of thousands of new workers to replace those departing federal employees and its going to be essential that we attract new, young workers into the federal workforce in order to continue the job that they need to do for the American people. That’s one of the reasons why this is an important measure we need to follow up on. This is a benefit that is currently enjoyed by employees of most of the Fortune 100 companies today. So we are playing catch up here at the federal government level. We are trying to compete with those in the private sector that are saying to young people, “Come work for us, because we’re going to provide you a benefit that doesn’t require you to choose between taking a little bit of time to care for your newborn child and getting a paycheck to help pay for your mortgage or for your rent or putting food on your table.” We think that it’s important that people not have to make that choice.
So yes, this is a very family-oriented, family friendly measure. Don’t let anybody kid you. Because we don’t want people who apply to the federal government to have to say, “Well, I’m not going to join because I’m going to be losing money to stay home for a short period of time to take care of a newborn child. I can go to work at one of those other companies.” This is a time when we need more folks working in the federal government on critical issues like homeland security, like defense, like medical research. We need to replace those individuals who are leaving so that we can make sure we have a vibrant federal government that can address the needs that we’ve asked of our federal employees.
So I congratulate again Congresswoman Maloney, the Chairman of the Subcommittee, the Chairman of the Full Committee, and I urge my colleagues to adopt what is a very family-friendly measure. We should be leading by example at the federal level.