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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5KB | 110 lines

                                                                                THE POLITICAL INTEREST, Page 46

Bush as Mr. Scrooge


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.