A few months ago, a colleague forwarded to the author a number of recent arbitration decisions which had gone against Federal agencies and had resulted in tens of millions of dollars in overtime payments to bargaining unit employees wrongly designated as exempt from the FLSA. The overtime and associated costs paid by multiple Federal agencies in arbitration decisions or in settlements reached by the parties was truly staggering.

The co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released a draft report on 11/10 outlining ways to cut the federal deficit. We highlight some additional items from that report that will be of most interest to our readers.

President Barack Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission has caught the public’s eye with a draft report that calls for freezing federal salary and compensation levels and changing the way federal retirement compensation is calculated as ways of cutting federal spending.