CNSNews.com - Taxpayers Paid Federal Workers More Than $400 Million to Stay Home on Last Week's Snow Days

CNSNews.com - Taxpayers Paid Federal Workers More Than $400 Million to Stay Home on Last Week's Snow Days: "(CNSNews.com) – When the federal government closed for four days and two hours last week because of snow and ice in the Washington area, U.S. taxpayers still had to shell out an estimated $425 million to $670 million in wages and benefits to those workers.

According to Dennis V. Damp, author of “The Book of U.S. Government Jobs” and founder of the Web site federaljobs.net, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data show that as of December 2008, the average annual salary for a federal worker was $79,197. When all benefits were included, the full average annual compensation for a federal worker was $119,982.

These figures do not reflect pay increases that were given to federal employees in January 2009 and January 2010.

The upper end of approximately $670 million that taxpayers may have paid to D.C.-area workers when they missed work due to snow last week is based on the daily aggregate cost of all benefits and wages paid to the more than 340,000 federal employees who work in the Washington metropolitan area, according to the Office of Personnel Management."