Federal Pay Jam

Crowding at the top

R. Max Peterson, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, earns $50,112.50 a year. So does Associate Chief Douglas Leisz. So, in fact, do the five deputy chiefs below Leisz, the eight associate deputy chiefs below them, and almost half of the 35 staff directors below the associate deputy chiefs. In all, 177 people at the Forest Service are at that salary level. Says Kenneth Rashid, a Consumer Product Safety Commission official: "Only a committed Marxist could love a system where everybody makes the same amount of money. It simply stifles ambition and creativity and hard work."

The problems began in 1978, when Congress, anxious to display its inflation-fighting zeal, put a cap on salaries paid to career bureaucrats. The unforeseen result: 6,000 senior managers now earn the same amount as some 30,000 subordinates who reached the limit by annual cost of living increases. Unless the ceiling is lifted, within two years 135,000 federal employees will be bunched together at the top scale. Says Acting Comptroller General Milton J. Socolar: "This situation is absurd."

Frustrated career executives are leaving federal jobs in droves for better pay in the private sector. The retirement rate among senior supervisors between 55 and 59 alone was an astonishing 95% for the year ending last August, compared with a 15.5% rate in March 1978. C. Roy McKinnon, 51, was assistant director of the FBI for administration, one of the highest posts at the bureau, when he quit. "Hell," he says, "the assistant special agent in charge at the smallest FBI field office was making the same as I was." Adds Robert L. Van Ness, 40, who resigned as director of the Energy Department's office of financial incentives in June: "It didn't make much sense to spend my most productive years depending on the whim of Congress for whatever modest increase they might provide at erratic moments."

The salaries of senior bureaucrats are tied by law to congressional paychecks, and lately the lawmakers have been voting down their own pay hikes to avoid offending constituents. Federal judges have been able to avoid the pay cap, but only through a legal technicality. Salaries for U.S. district court judges, for example, have risen from $54,500 to $67,100 since the ceiling was imposed.

Assistant Senate Majority Leader Ted Stevens has scheduled hearings next month to examine the problems. Even David Stockman, President Reagan's budget cutter, acknowledges that something must be done. But the stingy 97th Congress may not want to listen.

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