One day after President Biden proposed raising taxes on high-earning Americans to keep Medicare afloat, the Washington Post reports that Biden is now expected to float a 5.2 percent pay raise for federal employees, the largest salary boost since Jimmy Carter was president.

The raise, which would apply to 2.1 million workers, would go into effect in January as part of Biden’s fiscal year budget that starts Oct. 1, according to an anonymous senior federal official. It would be the largest since Jimmy Carter’s 9.1 percent increase in 1980, but would still fall short of the 8.7 percent raise called for by Congressional Democrats and federal employee unions.

Republicans slam

“President Biden is continuing to ensure that federal workers’ pay and benefits are insulated from the price-tag of inflation, but it will be paid for by American taxpayers who continue to be harmed by the Biden Administration’s inflationary policies,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) in a statement.

“We should be putting American taxpayers first, not the federal bureaucracy.”

Unions want more

The federal government’s largest unions say Biden’s proposal falls short, and say their members should receive an even larger increase.

“While we recognize the significance of this pay raise, more must be done to keep up with inflation and to begin to make serious progress in closing the double-digit pay gap between federal employees and their private sector counterparts,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees which represents 750,000 federal and D.C. employees.

Kelley says Congress should pass legislation for an 8.7 percent raise.

National Treasury Employees Union president Tony Reardon called the proposal a “solid first step” in the upcoming budget debate on Capitol Hill over the debt ceiling, but that the 8.7% increase would track the 2023 cost-of-living increases received by Social Security recipients.

“We believe rising costs and previous years of inadequate pay increases warrant the average 8.7 percent adjustment called for in the FAIR Act,” said Reardon, referring to the Federal Adjustment of Income Rates Act.