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Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

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Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#31

Post by cyanydeez »

sneak wrote: post #21
beanjuiceII wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the gs pay scale also means these agencies use more contract workers who end up costing way way more. It's a dual world that exists

You’re telling me that an organization that has zero incentive to be efficient with money is being penny wise and pound foolish? This is the same problem with violent and criminal cops - the lawsuits against the department are paid by taxpayers, not the offenders. The people who make these bad decisions aren’t wasting their own money - they’re wasting the money taken from you and I by force. They have no incentive to…

That's not what's happening guy. The people setting the pay scale are bought out by corporations who want that money spent on themselves.

This isn't some avocado toast incident, not matter how much such a simple budget you understand

Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#32

Post by xyzzy4747 »

sealeck wrote: post #9
xyzzy4747 wrote: post #6

The FBI is too big... hopefully this will be a disincentive to not look for jobs there. Every state already has its own police force. There's no need for a massive federal agency to do the same type of stuff.

What about crimes which transcend state jurisdiction (try getting 12 different state police forces to co-ordinate and run thousands of investigations together and see how well it goes)? Or issues like counter-intelligence? Or areas where local police forces are corrupt and won't investigate?

We also have the CIA and NSA

Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#33

Post by Kalium »

the__alchemist wrote: post #25

I'm floored they don't get a military-style cost-of-living-allowance. Similar situation of being assigned to live in arbitrary places, but (pending short term problems caused by slower or inaccurate COLA adjustments than rent changes) it's not a problem for US military members, since their pay varies by location, specifically to avoid the problem the article highlights.

The GS schedule has location adjustments. They don't always keep up with the actual cost of living in a location. The NYC area means there's a 37% boost to pay, but NYC is not just 37% more expensive to live in than baseline.

Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#34

Post by sidewndr46 »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #12
i_like_waiting wrote: post #3

>In New York, for example, starting salaries for FBI agents hover around $73,000. But a nonprofit group in the city reported people need to earn at least $100,000 to afford food, housing and transportation there. Does this hold truth? I know it's expensive city, but 73k is also median salary here, do they want to say that more than half people here cannot afford basic needs? That doesn't sound right

In NYC, you typically need to earn 40x the monthly rent in annual income to not need a guarantor. 73k / 40 = $1825/month in rent. The median 1 bedroom apartment in NYC is $3,263 according to Zillow https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york...

you're saying people look at gross income to determine if someone can rent a place rather than net ?

Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#35

Post by Kalium »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #32
sealeck wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about crimes which transcend state jurisdiction (try getting 12 different state police forces to co-ordinate and run thousands of investigations together and see how well it goes)? Or issues like counter-intelligence? Or areas where local police forces are corrupt and won't investigate?

We also have the CIA and NSA

Those are not law enforcement bodies. This is on purpose. We do not want them to be law enforcement bodies.

Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#36

Post by sillysaurusx »

Inflation has been a killer. Someone I know wants to move out, but her old apartment went from $750/mo to $1250/mo in just a few years. That’s almost double. It might sound like an outlier, but I’m not sure there’s even anything sub-$1k anymore, and this is Missouri we’re talking about.

As for the rest of the country, $200k is the new $100k. It’s kind of shocking because I remember a coworker telling me how sweet it felt to earn $100k as a 23yo. That was back in 2008, and he was talking about five years prior to that, so 2003ish.

Grocery prices have also gone up substantially. $300 per trip isn’t unusual, and I remember it being around $200 max just over a year ago. I don’t think our spending habits changed much.

Employees should probably band together and force the market upwards. I’ve done a lot of thinking about whether to embrace the invisible hand of capitalism, and I’ve wondered whether unionization does work. It doesn’t seem to have massive downsides. And what other choice is there when your salary doesn’t match inflation? Go somewhere else? Well, that works for programmers, but the vast majority of the country aren’t.

Things will only get worse when AI does start mowing down jobs. I don’t think we’re close to that yet, but it’s one of those inevitabilities that we should try to plan for.

Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#37

Post by koolba »

metamet wrote: post #29
koolba wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that’s a much bigger problem then Mulder and Scully not making rent. It’s only a problem if you want the government to be spending even more money. They already spend approximately 1/3 of the GDP and that’s plenty big enough for many. If they want to pay people more, change the denominator.

I believe their point was that FBI agents struggling to cover housing are more susceptible to external payments.

That’s true for all government employees and elected officials.

For Congress specifically, I’m in favor of raising salaries to $1M/year while simultaneously taking a zero tolerance policy on all lobbyist funded excursions. That’ll attract plenty of honest folks as the base salary would be more than enough.

Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#38

Post by polski-g »

beanjuiceII wrote: post #15
master_crab wrote: post #4

The problem is the FBI uses mostly the same GS pay scale as the rest of the federal government. So if the pay stinks for them, it also stinks for every other government agency. And that’s a much bigger problem then Mulder and Scully not making rent.

Yes the gs pay scale also means these agencies use more contract workers who end up costing way way more. It's a dual world that exists

Not really. The problem is that pay is just capped. There's just a shortage of highly competent people across the entire planet and the only carrot you can offer is money. The federal government is banned from paying them market rate but not banned from subcontracting out the entire task.

NIST is trying to start up an AI wing with "accelerated" pay scales to attract talent. But even if they come in at the maximum allowable salary (~$317k), it's still about 600k short of being able to woo employees from OpenAI.

Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#39

Post by tomrod »

mooreds wrote: post #17
master_crab wrote: post #4

The problem is the FBI uses mostly the same GS pay scale as the rest of the federal government. So if the pay stinks for them, it also stinks for every other government agency. And that’s a much bigger problem then Mulder and Scully not making rent.

I ran into this when applying for the US Digital Service. Their pay scales simply weren't competitive with the private sector (and I don't even live in SV).

USDS gives you an enormous network into tech/govtech though. As an intangible benefit it can be worth a stint if that is the direction you want to take your career.

Re: Many FBI agents are struggling to make ends meet. Housing costs are to blame

#40

Post by wizzwizz4 »

leereeves wrote: post #10
fifteen1506 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the free enterprise????

Housing isn't a free market; it's heavily regulated, subsidized, and politicized.

Houses are also not fungible. If people have a reason to live in a particular area (e.g., work, jurisdictional issues), and housing isn't regulated, you get places like Kowloon: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/a/a7/...
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