The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

SINCE DEFEAT IS AN ORPHAN AND VICTORY HAS MANY fathers, it is virtually impossible to discern parentage of a lousy idea. Consider George Bush's proposal to cut the salaries of top federal employees. In a round of calls, the relevant players deny authorship of the President's scheme: The Bush- Quayle campaign refers you to the White House, which sends you to the Office of Personnel Management, where the buck is passed to the President's budget office. No one knows, and no one wants to know. Most claim they first learned of this idiocy when they watched Bush's domestic policy speech to the Economic Club of Detroit two weeks ago. Off the record, there is widespread chagrin -- and considerable sympathy for those in the bureaucracy's upper reaches who have taken to sporting buttons that say BUSH HATES ME.

Despite being widely hailed as a first (if late) expression of the President's vision for America in the 21st century, Bush's Detroit address was little more than a gussied-up rehash of old ideas. One of the few new notions was his call to slash by 5% the pay of career government workers earning more than $75,000 a year. (The White House won't say whether the boss would gut his own $200,000 salary.) "Other Americans have tightened their belts, and so should the better-paid federal workers," Bush told his Detroit audience of business heavyweights, whose own belts, of course, couldn't be looser.

At first blush, Bush's plan strikes a chord: few who deal with the government regularly have a good word for those they encounter. On reflection, though, the President's scheme is a heartless swipe at a defenseless group of dedicated civil servants, designed to capture the knee-jerk support of an economically strapped electorate. "It may not be good policy," concedes a Bush adviser, "but it's damn good politics."

"How could it be?" wonders former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. "It's another complete reversal of a previous Bush position." In the late '80s, Volcker's bipartisan Commission on the Public Service found the disparity between private sector and government compensation so large that many key federal jobs were either filled by mediocrities or not filled at all. Bush moved quickly to right matters. In his first speech after assuming office, the President told a group of senior employees that "government service is the highest and noblest calling . . . You work hard, you sacrifice, you deserve to be recognized, rewarded and appreciated . . . I want to make sure public service is valued and respected, because I want to encourage America's young to pursue careers in government." Giving content to his rhetoric, Bush pushed for large salary hikes, echoing the Volcker report when he said the "pay gap is affecting the Federal Government's ability to attract and retain the skilled and motivated senior executives necessary to direct . . . complex, wide-ranging and critical functions."

Bush's new stance is unfathomably pernicious. It erodes morale; it sends a signal to those who might aspire to top government positions that their service is barely valued; it could cause the quick resignation of the very employees the government most needs, since many are eligible for retirement right now and their pensions would be adversely affected if they stayed; and it would do almost nothing to trim the deficit. If passed by Congress, Bush's plan would cut the pay of 45,914 federal workers. The President could also unilaterally trim the salaries of 8,188 Senior Executive Service employees. The net savings would be about $270 million, a figure the President could easily cover if he expanded what one wag has called "George Bush's Going out of Business Sale" by offering the Saudis just four more $70 million F-15s -- which, needless to say, the kingdom would gladly buy.

If the President is serious, his scheme is wrongheaded for another reason: it undercuts his professed desire to "right-size" government. Immediately after proposing the pay cut, Bush called for "a streamlined reorganization of the Executive Branch through a consolidation of agencies and bureaus that will enable us to do our job better." He struck at the right culprit -- the bloated bureaucracy -- but his method is madness. "As Presidents have sought control of the governments they oversee, they have added increasingly redundant layers of middle managers at the expense of those who do the real work," says Paul Light, a public affairs professor at the University of Minnesota. "In government the classic organizational pyramid has become a pentagon, and it's moving toward becoming a diamond. The place to cut is in the middle, and if you do that you need even better-skilled and therefore better-paid senior managers to make sure the business gets done."

Campaigns routinely spawn impossible promises and nonsensical ideas, and no matter how cynical you are, it's hard to keep up. The best that can be hoped for Bush's pay-cut plan is that the President doesn't intend it to be taken seriously, and that if he is re-elected it will be forgotten. In the meantime, the scheme should be seen as one more reason why so many doubt that Bush deserves a second term.