WASHINGTON -- The Federal Emergency Management Agency has informed employees who worked extra hours battling a record wave of natural disasters in 2017 that they may have to pay back some of their overtime.
Federal law caps some federal employees' premium pay and permits agencies to recover money paid in excess of the maximum from future paychecks. FEMA says the extraordinary year of hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters means it may have to take that step.
"This year's unprecedented hurricane season led to a record-setting length of national activation," the agency said in an emailed statement. "Due to the extended work hours involved in supporting disaster recovery and response efforts for multiple storms, some employees have been affected by the annual maximum earnings limitation."
The agency last month sent employees a "Frequently Asked Questions" document saying that those who hit the annual cap because of the number of extra hours they've worked "may still be ordered to perform work without receiving further compensation" and would "continue to receive their regular base pay regardless of whether they exceed the annual premium pay cap or not."
Then, it said, "A bill will be determined and established for any premium pay amounts over the annual premium pay cap and the employee will be notified and billed in 2018 for that amount."
The matter arises during a broader reckoning at FEMA. On Nov. 30, the agency's administrator, Brock Long, told a House Appropriations subcommittee that employees were "tapped out" after record activation.
"FEMA was never designed to be the first or only respondent in a disaster, but we often find ourselves in that situation," he said.
According to FEMA, there is a pool of about 500 employees whose compensation the agency is monitoring because they are at risk of exceeding the cap. Those employees are all exempt from the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and generally are toward the upper end of the agency's pay scale.
One FEMA employee, who asked not to be identified because she wasn't authorized to speak to the media, said workers have voiced concerns to agency leaders about the matter. Billing employees or docking pay could reduce the willingness of FEMA employees or other Homeland Security Department workers to sign up for deployments in the future, she said.
The federal Office of Personnel Management, which handles federal workforce human resources, said the ceiling on annual compensation was out of its hands.
"The premium pay caps are statutory, and [the personnel office] does not have authority to waive or modify the premium pay caps," the agency said in an emailed statement.
Under the law, an executive branch employee's premium pay -- which includes overtime -- combined with basic pay can't exceed the maximum rate of basic pay for certain categories of employees. An email to employees from FEMA on Nov. 2 offered the example of a category of employees based in Washington, D.C., who this year get a regular salary of $153,730; for those workers, Congress has capped the premium pay they can receive, including for working extra hours, at $7,636.40.
Along with the annual cap, there is also a ceiling on how much overtime compensation employees can receive each two-week period, but agencies have the discretion to waive that one, as the Department of Homeland Security did this year for hurricane relief -- contributing to the annual cap issue.
"Employees who have exceeded the annual premium pay cap will be contacted and provided options on the overpayment process," the agency told its employees. They will be able to give back the money through payroll deductions or simply pay the full sum, according to the Nov. 3 queston-and-answer document.
The House on Tuesday approved a bill to raise the cap on overtime for Secret Service agents, a third of whom had already hit the limit as of August. The agency, in a statement, said ahead of the vote that the bill would be a "tremendous lift to employee morale."
The bill has not yet been voted on in the Senate.
The Homeland Security Department is not powerless to address the situation for FEMA, said attorney Jacob Statman, who represents federal workers in employment disputes.
While the agency can't waive the pay cap, a different law grants it the discretion to waive the requirement that a particular employee pay back the excessive compensation, if the employee requests the waiver and the government determines that collection "would be against equity and good conscience and not in the best interests of the United States."
Agencies are generally hesitant to grant such waivers, said Richard Loeb, an attorney for the American Federation of Government Employees, in part because waiving repayments could draw scrutiny from their inspectors general.
Former Office of Personnel Management director Donald Devine, who led the agency under President Ronald Reagan, said Congress never should have deprived the executive branch of the authority to waive pay caps in the first place.
"You need a certain amount of flexibility in terms of running the government," Devine said. "Unfortunately, Congress gets frustrated about something, they usually try to find some blunt instrument way to do something."
PROCESS IN TEXAS
In southeast Texas, where Hurricane Harvey made landfall in late August, a survey showed that many of the hurricane's survivors continue to suffer the effects -- including financial losses and mental distress -- with the greatest hardship reported by Hispanic and black residents, as well as people with low incomes.
The survey found that, although the flooding in Houston received the bulk of the media coverage, residents in the state's "Golden Triangle," which includes Beaumont and Port Arthur, as well as residents in the coastal areas of Corpus Christi and Rockport where Harvey made landfall, were most likely to report damage to their homes or ongoing problems getting their lives back on track.
The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation conducted the survey between Oct. 17 and Nov. 20, using cellphones and landlines to obtain responses from 1,635 randomly selected adults in 24 Texas counties hammered by Harvey. The survey's margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Two out of three respondents said they'd personally suffered property damage, lost income or job disruptions. About 4 in 10 hurricane survivors applied for disaster assistance from FEMA or the Small Business Administration.
But only 26 percent said they had been approved, and 33 percent said they had been denied. The remainder said their applications were pending or they simply didn't know the status of their cases. About 4 in 10 of the people who had been denied assistance said they weren't given a reason. About 6 in 10 said they were not given instructions on how to revise their applications.
Sixty-four percent of black residents said they weren't getting the help they need, along with 44 percent of Hispanics and 37 percent of whites.
"A lot of people who were affected say they need more help," said Liz Hamel, a researcher with Kaiser who worked on the study.
A FEMA spokesman said Monday afternoon that the agency had not yet seen the embargoed study, and pointed to a news release stating that more than $10 billion in federal and state assistance has helped Texans recover from Harvey. That includes $1.4 billion in federal money given to 350,000 homeowners and renters, and $2.6 billion in low-interest loans to businesses.
Inspectors examined 580,000 damaged homes, FEMA said, and volunteers "mucked and gutted" 18,000 homes.
Jackie Chandler, spokesman for FEMA's Hurricane Harvey response in Texas, said Monday night that people who are declared ineligible for assistance are always given specific reasons, in a letter, for that determination. "The reason is in their letter. Everybody should know why they are ineligible."
There are a number of common reasons for such a decision by FEMA, she said. At the top of the list is that people already have insurance. Or they may have damage that is relatively minor; FEMA does not claim it will make people "whole" after a disaster.
Another common reason: More than one person in the household files for disaster assistance.
Chandler said people have the right to appeal the decision. But she acknowledged that the bureaucratic hurdles can be difficult for people who have been through a natural disaster.
"There's this whole process they have to go through, and I'm sure that can be frustrating and confusing. They call it a catastrophic disaster for a reason," she said. "Yes, it's hard to understand it. We go to them to help them through that process."
Information for this article was contributed by Josh Eidelson and Christopher Flavelle of Bloomberg News and by Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post.
A Section on 12/06/2017