ABSTRACT
During the early and mid-1980s, the federal deficit explosion—accompanied by wholesale chopping at poverty benefits—sparked a brief but irate public reaction against the cost and generosity of federal pensions that ultimately made possible the passage of reform legislation through Congress. True enough; the rapid growth of overall federal pension costs was also due to a sizable increase in the number of retired beneficiaries, from 962,000 in 1970 to 2,065,000 in 1988. The best way to highlight the inappropriate generosity of civil service retirement benefits is to compare the Civil Service Retirement System with typical private pension plans. As an extension of the "comparability" argument, it is sometimes maintained that the relative generosity of federal pensions is a legitimate trade-off with other substandard features of a federal worker's total compensation package. One approach to the whole "comparability" issue might be called the "market" test.
