Pay increase is Trumped

US President Donald Trump is cancelling pay raises due in January for most civilian federal employees, citing budget constraints.

Mr Trump said he was nixing a 2.1 per cent across-theboard raise for most workers as well as separate locality pay increases that averaged 25.7 per cent.

“We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases,” he said.

The President last year signed a package of tax cuts that is forecast to add about $1.5 trillion to federal deficits over 10 years.

As workers across the country headed into the Labor Day weekend, Mr Trump cited the “significant” cost of the federal workforce, and called for their pay to be based on performance and designed to recruit, retain and reward “high-performing federal employees and those with critical skill sets”.

Unions representing the 2 million-member federal workforce urged Congress to pass the pay rise.

“President Trump’s plan to freeze wages for these patriotic workers next year ignores the fact that they are worse off today financially than they were at the start of the decade,” said a spokesman for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 700,000 federal workers.