Recently introduced legislation would require the government to create and maintain a publicly accessible database of federal employees and their annual salaries.
The Where’s the Workforce At Listed by Duties and Office (Where’s WALDO) Act (S. 3553) was introduced by Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA). It would require the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to create a public, searchable website of federal employees to include the following:
- Position Information: Title, duties, and employing agency of each individual
- Work Location and Compensation: Primary duty station and annual rate of basic pay, including bonuses and supplemental wages
- Appointment Date: Date of appointment to the current position
Ernst has introduced the bill in response to a recent report published by Open the Books which found that the federal workforce became significantly more expensive during the Biden administration, with payroll costs rising 24% since 2020, primarily due to salary inflation at the higher end of the pay scale.
It also found that the number of employees earning six-figure salaries had increased dramatically, with 956 federal employees earning more than the President in FY 2024. The report attributed the surge in pay to annual raises, locality pay expansion, a shift towards higher-paying roles, and retention pressures for specialized talent.
Federal employee salaries are considered to be public information now, and there are websites currently available that contain much of the data that described in Ernst’s legislation. A couple of examples include FederalPay.org and FedsDataCenter.com.
One obvious difference, however, is that her bill would require the federal government to publish and maintain the database instead of private organizations.
Many of the records on these existing websites contain redacted information in some cases, such as names. In most instances, the government has concluded employees in some agencies are engaging in national security work and that it is not in the public interest to release their individual pay information. Names in these cases will often display as “Name unknown” or “Name withheld by agency.”
The screenshot below from FederalPay.org is an example of this. It shows redacted names for federal employees in the IRS salary data for fiscal year 2022.
As currently written, Ernst’s legislation doesn’t explicitly list federal employees’ names among the records the new website would contain. However, Ernst stressed in her press release about the legislation that she wants to “ensure that the American people know how their tax dollars are spent and what the bloated bureaucracy is up to.”
She also told Fox News, “Besides raking in massive paychecks, including close to 800,000 non-War Department employees who make $100,000 or more per year, hundreds of thousands of government workers’ names and information were redacted from the information Open The Books was able to obtain for it’s ‘Mapping The Swamp’ report.”
In a statement about the bill, she added:
Like a twisted game of reverse Secret Santa, taxpayers are gifting paychecks to bureaucrats who remain anonymous. The American people should not be forced to play ‘Where’s Waldo’ when it comes to figuring out where federal workers are during the workday. I will be embracing the Christmas spirit by creating a list, that anyone can check twice, to clearly state where every federal employee is and how much they are being paid.
Why is Federal Employee Salary Data Considered Public Information?
The current policy of releasing names and federal pay started in 2005. At that time, the Bush administration started withholding salary information from the public for about 900,000 federal civilian employees. The practice of refusing to release the information was “breaking a tradition of openness that began in 1816” according to a lawsuit filed by a group at Syracuse University under the Freedom of Information Act.
The group argued that “Citizens have a right to know who is working for the government” and the new policy changed that policy.
The federal government began publicly naming its employees, their job category, salary, and workplace in 1816. The first entry in the 1816 version of the Federal Register was James Madison. He was identified as president of the United States at a salary of $25,000 and that his birthplace was in Virginia. The second entry was Secretary of State James Monroe and noted his salary of $5,000.
It wasn’t just political leaders who were listed. According to an article in the Washington Post, Treasury Department messenger John Connell was from Maryland and worked in Washington for the federal government at a salary of $410 a year, and another Marylander, Richard H. Briscoe, worked for the Comptroller’s Office clerk for $1,000 a year.
