Corrections for the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act

[PaidParentalLeave]

Hey, everyone! If you are unaware, the government just gave federal employees a massive new benefit by passing the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act which provides 12 weeks of paid leave to federal workers for the birth, adoption, or fostering of a child and is to be used within one year of the qualifying life event. However, it seems that by rushing out the act there are all sorts of issues (for instance, it forgot to include employees of the USPS and FAA). Congress is working on the Federal Employee Parental Leave Technical Correction Act to fix these issues. While these corrections are a step in the right direction, one thing that has not gotten much news is the wording of the effective date section in the original act:

EFFECTIVE DATE.—The amendments made by this section shall not be effective with respect to any birth or placement occurring before October 1, 2020.

What this says is that employees with a child born (or placed) between October 1, 2019 and September 30, 2020 are not eligible for the leave even though the act is written in a way to grant leave to people within a year of the baby being born (or placed). To put this in to perspective, the parents of a child born on September 30, 2020 at 11:59pm will not get leave but if the child is born one minute later on October 1, 2020 at 12:00am then the parents will get leave!

While OPM has not published any official guidance on the matter, I believe it is important to try to get ahead of the issue. If you feel like this is something important to you, you should contact your HR representatives, OPM (https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/contact-policymakers/), and your local representatives (https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative) and senators (https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm). I put together a document that I will be sharing with some lawmakers such as Senator Charles Schumer who sponsored the Federal Employee Parental Leave Technical Correction Act and Representative Carolyn Maloney who sponsored the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act. The document is available at the following link and lays out an equitable solution for the effective date problem:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15hFss28N1By7orQZY_4DmdGxnfJfocVC/view?usp=sharing

I imagine the number of federal employees impacted by the wording of the effective date in the act is small so this is a first step in getting their voice heard. Feel free to share this. Thanks for hearing me out.

tl;dr: We are getting parental leave! Yay! It doesn't happen until October? Boo! So I wrote a long document arguing it should be retroactive. Share it!

[Anonymous]

Thanks!! Sent to my senators and will send to my house rep.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for your efforts! These changes would be so helpful.

[Anonymous]

I’ll be due a couple weeks before the current effective date and wild certainly want to have some of the leave, even if it is a reduced amount (like 10 weeks instead).

[Anonymous]

My company extended their 3 week paid family bonding leave to 12 weeks while I was still on maternity leave, so I feel your frustration. Good luck!

[Anonymous]

While I'm hopeful, but not holding my breath, has there been any progress on potentially amending the effective date?

[Anonymous]

Good luck. The date wasn't accidental. No way they are going to fix it. It's too bad it wasn't immediate but it's highly unlikely they're going to make it retroactive when it was a considered choice.

The more important issue is that OPM is pushing some weirdly restrictive regulations implementing the law, including mandating that if it's a two-fed family, the 12 weeks of leave must be shared between the parents. Which kind of defeats the bonding purpose. Apparently if you have two parents, neither needs to bond as much as one. Or something.