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President Bush Signs Defense Budget for a Nation at War
December 2, 2002 |
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Phone: 202.863.8500 | Fax: 202.863.8820 |
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President Bush Signs Defense Budget for a Nation at War
December 2, 2002 |
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Phone: 202.863.8500 | Fax: 202.863.8820 |
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BOLD EMPHASIS MINE!
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Congress Gives Itself A Pay Raise
By Jim Burns
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
December 10, 2001
(CNSNews.com) - Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russell Feingold says he'll return his $4,900 pay raise to the U.S. Treasury, the same pay raise senators approved late Friday night. House members had approved the 3.4 percent pay hike earlier this year.
Under a 1989 law, Members of Congress get automatic salary increases every year unless Congress votes to block it. Feingold and Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.) did try to block it, but their proposal, which was attached to the defense appropriations bill, was defeated 65-33.
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) both voted to let the pay raise take effect.
Reports said fourteen of the 30 senators running for re-election voted to block the pay raise. Two who will retire in January, Sens. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) and Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), voted for the raise, while Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), another retiring senator, did not vote.
Neither Gramm nor Thurmond had any further comment Monday when contacted by CNSNews.com.
Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) voted for the raise because he did not think Feingold's actions were "germane" to the defense spending bill, according to a spokesman who did not want to be identified.
The 3.4 percent raise will boost members' annual salaries to $150,000. The January increase will be the third congressional pay raise in the last four years.
The National Taxpayers Union had tried, through a letter-writing campaign to senators, to block the congressional pay raise.
"On September 27th, we wrote to both the House and the Senate leadership, reminding them that previous congresses have actually cut their pay in times of economic crisis. They froze their pay during World War Two and even suspended their pension plan in 1942," said Pete Sepp, a spokesman for National Taxpayers Union.
Sepp added, "We were asking Congress to do far, far less -- to simply forego a scheduled pay hike and they couldn't even bring themselves to that."
The Libertarian Party thinks Congress is being greedy and thinks the raise should be repealed, according to spokesman George Getz.
"It's appalling that politicians are so quick to demand sacrifices from the American people and are unwilling to sacrifice their own pay raise. This is both hypocritical and unpatriotic," said Getz.
Feingold called for an end to the current congressional pay raise system, because he thinks it automatically raises congressional pay with little public accountability.
"Because Members of Congress have the power to raise their own pay, and because they are paid with taxpayer money, the congressional pay raise process always deserves the highest level of scrutiny," Feingold said.
"We are spending the hard-earned tax dollars of millions of Americans to recover from the horrific events of September 11 and to ensure that it does not happen again," Feingold said. "This is not the time for Congress to accept a pay raise. Let's stop this backdoor pay raise, and then let's enact legislation to end this practice once and for all."
Taking Charge of Federal Personnel
by George Nesterczuk, with Donal J. Devine and Robert E. Moffit
Backgrounder #1404
All too often, people who come to Washington with the goal of reforming government have little appreciation for the immense power and political sophistication of the federal employee network and its allies and the intensity of its resistance to serious change. They also lack a clear conception of federal management approaches and the best model of government administration that would make the federal government work better. For all of the Clinton Administration's rhetoric about "reinventing government," the federal establishment and its powerful allies on Capitol Hill--both Republicans and Democrats--continue to resist serious reforms that connect employment or pay to performance. As the Clinton Administration conclusively proved, the federal establishment will find the rhetoric of reform tolerable, even as the workforce shrinks, only if there are no real consequences involved for managers or employees based on job performance and only as long as federal benefits remain generous and untouched.
Washington's notorious Iron Triangle--the alliance of the federal bureaucracy, congressional staff, and interest groups based inside the Beltway--is perhaps at its strongest in resisting civil service reform. Members of Congress and their staffs are self-interested judges in their own cause; public employee associations are generally staffed with former big-government liberals from Capitol Hill who took their generous benefits with them when they left; and federal unions are committed to strengthening their political clout. Although business groups may identify with improved government management, most are concerned with buying access to Capitol Hill and often hire well-connected, senior-level liberal congressional staffers to represent them. And conservative advocacy organizations, which often talk about the need to get "government off our backs," find the social and economic issues far more attractive than mastering the boring details of civil service laws and regulations governing the functioning of the bureaucratic system they dislike.
In terms of federal personnel management, challenging the bureaucratic culture will mean taking on powerful congressional interests, regardless of party or ideological inclinations. It makes no difference whether Congress for the most part is friendly to an Administration. The levers of legislative power on federal personnel issues too often rest in the hands of Members who give more weight to political support from the "permanent government" 2 than to the philosophical importance of serious civil service reform. This is, of course, the greatest single psychological advantage enjoyed by the permanent government.
The federal civil service is overwhelmingly comprised of fine, capable, and competent individuals. They also are financially well-off: The average annual salary for a full-time federal employee in Washington, D.C., is over $60,000. They are generally opposed to making changes in federal pay and benefits to bring the civil service more in line with the private sector in terms of competitive job rates and management practices. 3 Such an establishment understandably favors the perpetuation of its own bureaucratic power. 4 Jealously guarding paychecks, pocketbooks, and power, the permanent government has too much at stake to offer anything less than stout resistance to change. Those who hope to change the way Washington works will be educated quickly to the influence, power, and resourcefulness of this sophisticated network.
To overcome the permanent government's resistance to change, serious reformers must be prepared--as President Jimmy Carter was during his campaign for passage of his historic Civil Service Reform Act of 1978--to expend serious political capital, to sweat the details of personnel policy, and to demonstrate political resourcefulness. Only with a clear agenda and the willingness to pursue reform can the new Administration and the 107th Congress accomplish major changes in the way government is run.
Every recent Administration from President Carter's through President Clinton's, in fact, can offer the new Administration key lessons for reform. In order to succeed at his agenda, the new President must base his management approach on clear policy objectives and sound management principles, reinforcing political leadership and accountability from the White House and Cabinet. He must be willing to call public attention to the weaknesses of the current system and to the importance of basing personnel management decisions on performance in carrying out the mission of the President. He must demonstrate a desire to eliminate duplicative programs and functions across the federal bureaucracy and to create a smaller, leaner federal workforce to manage the remaining functions. He will need to gain public support for transferring functions to the states, communities, and the private sector. And to make significant but necessary changes in federal pay and benefits, including more portable private-sector-style benefits, the President will need to gain the support of federal employees as well.
Because of the closeness of the 2000 election and subsequent legal challenges, President Bush has lost precious time in making the transition into the Oval Office and faces unprecedented pressure in getting his team quickly into place to do the necessary spade work for new policies in federal agencies and departments. Under the intensity of these historically unique pressures, the President and his advisers may be tempted to name fewer political appointees to various positions within the agencies and departments and rely instead on senior career civil servants to carry out the responsibilities that would otherwise belong to his appointees. Because this is not the responsibility of the career civil service, it is unfair to impose this burden of political accountability on them. Meanwhile, of course, political appointees of the previous Administration can be expected to use every loophole available in civil service law to burrow into the career bureaucracy and secure permanent civil service protection.
For the new President, succumbing to temptations to rely on the career civil service to begin implementing his political and policy agenda would be a profound mistake. Career civil servants should not be tasked with formulating and executing the details of an agenda for major policy change. Political appointees, personally loyal to the President and fully committed to his policy agenda, are essential to his success, especially in the crucial early months of his Presidency. No President can or will advance his agenda alone or with a small handful of staffers in the White House or the federal departments. The President needs a full cadre of personnel committed to him and his agenda in the federal agencies that execute the details of national policy.
Lessons from the Past
The task of improving the way the federal bureaucracy operates, however complex, will require that the new President has vision and the willingness to fight the status quo. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan demonstrated those qualities; their experiences and those of other Presidents who established strong cabinet governments provide ample lessons for reformers in the new Administration. Among them:
The new President must make liberal use of his power of appointment, get a loyal team in place to carry out his agenda, and insist on accountability while maintaining a clear distinction between career and non-career employees.
Political appointments to key policymaking positions must be made in a timely fashion.
Political appointees must be in charge of implementing the President's policies and readily available to speak for the Administration.
Political appointees should make key management decisions; such decisions should not be delegated to the career bureaucracy.
The new Administration should provide a clear rationale for continued reductions in the size of the federal workforce and for management changes; workforce reductions should be well planned and systematically implemented.
The new Administration should use the Civil Service Reform Act to improve accountability to the public and improve management of the workforce.
The new Administration should use good management and contracting-out of government services to save the taxpayers billions of dollars.
Strategies for the New Administration
President Clinton's effort to "reinvent government" resulted in significant changes. Their net effect, however, has been to undermine strong political management and cabinet government. In order to make the sizable reductions in staffing levels he promised, he formed an alliance with federal unions. He issued an executive order (E.O. 12871) that established "labor-management partnerships"--federal councils which were new entities that elevated the status of federal unions to a level of equality with agency management. Federal unions, as political entities accountable only to their members, had thus become a counterweight to the political management appointed by the President.
The new President will need to revoke President Clinton's executive order and demonstrate from the outset that his approach to reforming the federal bureaucracy will emphasize political responsibility and accountability to the taxpayers. To be successful, the new Administration should:
Build public support for a more flexible and modern federal personnel system;
Advance a core-spoke-rim model as the ideal federal workforce structure;
Reform federal retirement benefits to make them fully portable and fully funded;
This straightforward strategy to redefine the role and functions of the federal government will build on successes and failures of past Administrations. The result will be a far more effective and efficient federal workforce and greatly improved accountability to the American taxpayer.
It would be a profound mistake to view the recurring struggle between reformers and the permanent government as merely a contest over pay or power. Like most political struggles, this conflict exists on a higher level. It is a battle between proponents of very different theories of public administration and styles of management.
The Public Administration Model
Apologists for the permanent government, regardless of their partisan affiliation, are animated by a well-established theory of government administration known as the public administration or scientific management model. This model is identified most closely with Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover. It emphasizes the Progressive ideal--a value-free "scientific" program of government administration, based on objective management and policy principles, which is technically administered by neutral career public officials. In such a system, the career officials lead the political appointees, including the President, teaching them the "scientific" solutions residing within the wisdom of the expert civil service and then engineering the solution into a program of action. In other words, theory determines practice. In spite of America's democratic political tradition, many senior career officials in government and their allies in academia believe this ideal is appropriate.
The public administration model has dominated discussions of government reform since the rise of the modern administrative state. Professor Woodrow Wilson brought the new administrative theory, learned from studies in Germany and Great Britain, to Princeton University, where it provided a vision for how the new welfare state could be managed. Wilson believed the separation of powers was "manifestly a radical defect in our federal system that it parcels out power and confuses responsibility." He sought instead a system that centralized power in the national government, particularly in the hands of the President, with an Administration staffed by the nation's top experts who would determine the proper "scientific" answer to the nation's problems. With the exception of a hiatus under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the public administration model remained largely unchallenged until the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
The Political Administration Model
Policymakers today should be guided in their efforts to downsize the government and improve management practices by an alternative model of government management: the cabinet government or political administration model. Advocated in recent years by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, this model was the norm for presidential government throughout most of American history. It emphasizes political responsibility--providing presidential leadership to committed top political officials and then holding them and their subordinates personally accountable for achievement of the President's election-endorsed and value-defined program. These Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officials then suffuse this program throughout the labyrinth of a bureaucracy that is often resistant to change.
The Pitfalls of the Clinton Approach
President Clinton followed neither approach, opting for what appears to have been a model based on power sharing among constituent interests. As a result, his Administration has at times lurched from a "high-spoils" approach (a crude version of the political management model epitomized by the firing of long-time employees in the White House Travel Office, the use of a political trickster to head the Office of Personnel Security, and the planting of political operatives into senior-level career civil service positions) to turning the Administration over to federal labor unions, as in the President's October 1993 executive order creating "partnership councils" (a bizarre distortion of "public administration" giving de facto daily management and policymaking authority in federal agencies to labor-management councils).
Although the size of the federal workforce was reduced substantially during Clinton's tenure, nearly three-fourths of that number is attributable to downsizing the Department of Defense, reflecting the end of the Cold War rather than a government "reinvention" initiative. 5 The vaunted Clinton management reforms did little, meanwhile, to downsize the bite on the taxpayer. In that crucial respect, government has grown. Total federal spending is $425 billion more in 2000 than it was in 1993--a 30 percent increase. More important, since 1993 the number of civilian Full Time Equivalent positions (FTEs) has declined by 19 percent, while the total cost of the civilian workforce has increased by 14 percent, from $111 billion to $127 billion. 6
The new President will need to implement a careful strategy to carry out a serious agenda for change. A serious agenda of managerial change, changing the way government works, will necessitate the President's adoption of the cabinet government model, the model of political administration championed by Eisenhower and Reagan, rather than the public administration model promoted by Wilson.
The new Administration can draw on an ample supply of historical experience for why reform of the federal bureaucracy is necessary and how best to achieve it. Since the Hoover Commission of 1947 and World War II, numerous blue-ribbon panels have been assembled to propose ways to streamline or downsize the federal government, but their impact has been disappointing. As Joseph A. Califano, Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) under President Carter, observed in Governing America: An Insider's Report from the White House and the Cabinet:
The key commissions of the 1960s and the 1970s that had studied government organization--groups chaired by Ben Heineman, Sr., for Lyndon Johnson and Roy Ash and John Connally for Richard Nixon--had recommended essentially the same structure: consolidation, fewer departments and no Department of Education. 7
Yet the initiatives embodied in these commissions, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 and the experience of the Reagan Administration in attempting to implement it, and the successes and failures, mistakes, and missed opportunities under Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton provide clear lessons for reformers. Among them: When contemplating administrative changes, if existing law allows it, "just do it." Delay is the enemy of change. If doing it requires a change in law, make proposals for legislative changes early. And make sure that legislative decisions advance the cause of smaller and limited government, not merely reshuffle, reorganize, or "reinvent" agencies and programs. Reformers must be prepared to fight the resistance of the permanent government, because the benefits of achieving real reform will be well worth the effort.
The failure to understand or appreciate the distinct functions of career and political appointees is a recurrent source of pain and embarrassment for executive branch officials. The so-called Travelgate affair surrounding the abrupt firing of seven long-established employees in the White House Travel Office under the newly elected President Clinton provides an example. Evidence has shown that the White House misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate and the Department of Justice to indict these employees.
Commenting on an early internal Administration report on Travelgate, veteran political columnist David Broder wrote in The Washington Post: 8
The report can be commended for candor. But what it revealed was a saga so shoddy, so saturated with petty manipulations, snooping and spying, rampant cronyism and tacky deceits that it made you cringe. It also confirmed an abuse of the FBI's role--in summoning agents into a situation without even so much as a by-your-leave to the attorney general, and then pressuring them for action--that it made you wonder if anyone on that young staff had learned the hard-earned lesson of Watergate.
While the motives behind the firings are not known, it is known that politically important friends of the President and his wife had asked for changes and that an innocent, long-serving federal manager was falsely accused of engaging in criminal acts. Travel Office chief Billy R. Dale, who was later exonerated by the court, had been fired for what appeared to be purely political and unnecessary reasons. No one has a right to hold on to job in the White House; and since the Travel Office is within the White House, its occupants are not formally subject to civil service hiring or protection procedures. But from the outset, the Clinton White House team did not openly assert the right to appoint its own people to this office. Contrast this with the Reagan team, which early in the President's first term made clear that it would use its right to do so even to fill far more sensitive inspector general positions charged with investigating waste, fraud, and abuse in federal agencies.
The Clinton team actually encouraged the remarkable view that the only legitimate reason for decisive action regarding personnel in a White House office is corruption. Thus, the long-time occupants of the White House Travel Office were not removed according to the assumed--and legitimate--right of a new Administration to bring in its own people. That apparently sounded too Reaganesque, and charges were soon circulated that widespread corruption existed in the financial affairs of the Travel Office, and personnel who were not involved in financial matters were dismissed along with those who were. The underlying problem is that there was no personnel theory--unless it was simple spoils--guiding any of these personnel decisions.
Another Egregious Example
Another garish example was the appointment of a personal friend, Craig Livingstone, as head of personnel security at the White House. This position, too, can be filled properly by a political appointee, yet it does not appear that any previous Administration had filled such a sensitive position with so partisan a person. Livingstone was a low-level political operative who dressed in costumes to ridicule opponents and who has been accused of "dirty tricks" in a Democratic nomination contest. Was it prudent to appoint such a person to a job that included reading sensitive FBI personnel files? Livingstone secured at least 900 FBI files on Republican White House appointees, an act that generated great outcries of invaded privacy and possible political abuse and caused major political damage to the President. Hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives on June 26, 1996, forced Livingstone to resign. The lesson: This position is best filled by a career functionary who is able to handle sensitive information in a professional manner.
One of the principles of President Reagan's management that agency heads found to be the most difficult to follow was the President's insistence on a clear dividing line between political and career functions so that each was respected. This policy was neither brazenly political nor mindlessly bureaucratic, but a balance of both political and bureaucratic missions. At least during his first term, Reagan's team was comfortable justifying the role of political appointees as leaders and protecting the Chief Executive's appointment authority against congressional attempts to usurp or subvert it. As a result, the Administration was comfortable in limiting job shifts to the career service by political appointees.
Nonetheless, Reagan's Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the agency tasked with establishing hiring policies based on merit principles, periodically came under great pressure from various quarters to politicize the career service by allowing political appointees to convert to career civil service status. This happens in every Administration, Democrat or Republican. The Reagan OPM generally was successful in limiting this in the first term, arguing that it was proper to create more political positions and respect the professional autonomy of the career service. The prevailing view within the OPM at that time was that once a political appointee received career protection, he or she often became a careerist in outlook, with new institutional loyalties to the permanent government and less interest in achieving presidential objectives. This management philosophy proved key to enabling the Reagan Administration to promote its policy agenda while reinforcing sound administrative principles.
This, unfortunately, was not the policy of the Clinton Administration. So-called careering-in abuses at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) led House Civil Service Subcommittee Chairman John Mica to request in July 1996 that the General Accounting Office (GAO) probe 50 agencies. Instances included a former law school classmate of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton who transferred from a career position to a political one at the PBGC but remained a career official. At the CPSC, the sister of President Clinton's former campaign manager apparently tailored a career job for a politically connected former assistant to a Democratic Congresswoman. And at OPM, the political chief of staff of the director was "competitively" selected from a list of career applicants to fill a newly created and arguably redundant Senior Executive position in charge of labor-management councils. A clearly political policy position was filled by a newly minted "career" employee chosen from the highest political ranks in the agency.
In addition to fostering such abuses, the Clinton Administration agreed to federal union demands to weaken the Hatch Act prohibition on political activity by career employees, creating a major breach in the division between career and non-career status by politicizing careerists, permitting them to become more politically involved in partisan political campaigns. This allows them to be subjected to increased political pressure from unions and politically active supervisors. 9 It increases the likelihood that political careerists will be tempted to use government power to threaten clients. (For regulators of business, such pressure could be very threatening indeed.) Political appointees will be more attracted to "careering-in" for their own protection, since they will not lose the ability to act politically.
While the Clinton White House was expending enormous energy and political capital on filling minor positions in the small Travel Office, peering into hundreds of FBI files, and politicizing career positions and laws, it was, incredibly, leaving the management of the most important government agencies in the hands of permanent career officers. New Yorker columnist Sidney Blumenthal noted in June 1993 that "Bruce Lindsey, Clinton's close friend and constant companion, has been sentenced to the personnel office, where piles of resumes literally towered to the ceiling and sometimes fell over. Lindsey would slowly send appointments up to Clinton who would roll many of them back down." The result of this process was extended vacancies in key policymaking political jobs.
Because vacancies in appointments give more power to career officials, this approach might be adequate in the parliamentary systems of Europe. There, the career-dominated model of government permits very few political positions below the cabinet ministers. One could square it within the framework of the American political tradition were President Clinton consciously following Presidents Wilson or Hoover and attempting to restructure the government along those lines. But in not following a model consistently, the Administration was set adrift, stumbling on policy, maladroit on the selection of key individuals, frequently crossing the line between political and career officialdom, and confusing the basic function of hiring and dismissing career personnel. 10
The first step for a new Administration is to avoid the Clinton Administration's mistaken approach and take steps early to implement one of the two standard Administration models. As noted, the political administration, or cabinet government, model is the preferred model for a President seriously seeking to transform the way the federal government operates.