How to End the Federal Pension Scandal
Noah, Timothy
How to End the Federal Pension Scandal By Timothy Noah Testifying before a congressional committee this past February, David Stockman blew his famous cool over the generosity of military...
...Both these figures are more than double the comparable figures for the population at large...
...The result is a view of the nation like Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker map, with a Washington twist: beyond the Potomac lies a scattering of wealthy suburbs, not a smokestack or unemployment line among them...
...But Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan rejected the findings of their PATC surveys with good reason: the process provides a distorted comparison of pay scales...
...Washington has almost no industry, and hence few blue-collar employees, to round out the Washington bureaucrat's picture of the American workforce...
...Ohio, $167 million...
...It's a scandal...
...When those [comparability] raises began," recalls a veteran of the Kennedy-era Peace Corps, "we felt as though we were stealing it because we were having so much fun...
...A nagging suspicion that federal pay was trailing behind the private sector persisted, and in 1970 Congress established an elaborate procedure to remedy the problem...
...If OPM can demonstrate that a federal worker is less inclined to quit his job than his counterpart at IBM, surely that suggests the federal worker feels better "compensated," either in terms of pay, pension benefits, or in the more intangible sense of security federal workers enjoy (to a great extent because they're so difficult to fire...
...Because of a deliberate policy of encouraging workers to retire at an early age, civilian employees typically leave the federal government, pensions in hand, at age 55...
...But in recent years, federal workers have not received the full amount of this "comparability" increase...
...The services have not always recognized this in awarding aviation career incentive pay...
...Stockman caused a minor furor in defense circles by accusing the military of caring more about its pensions than about national security...
...Next, let's examine the recruitment argument...
...One arm of the government tells them they are underpaid...
...By lowering pay in some job categories where turnover is noticeably more sluggish than it is outside government, we could begin to acknowledge federal workers' own seat-of-the-pants measurement of "comparability"—that is, the comparable benefit of staying put as opposed to moving into the private sector...
...Smith Goes to Washington...
...Those with the highest scores got out first...
...The inclination to remain silent or acquiesce in the presence of the great man—to live to fight another day, to give on this issue so that you can be 'effective' on later issues—is overwhelming...
...When the civil service retirement program was launched in 1920, part of the idea behind it was that it would compensate for what were widely recognized as low salaries...
...But saving money isn't the only reason to care about these costs...
...During this time, government workers unionized in unprecedented numbers...
...Constituencies are created across the country that translate anxieties into demands that are then passed along to elected representatives in Congress...
...It was a far cry from "ask what you can do for your country...
...This is especially true in the military, where enough of the rough-and-ready ethic remains to render such considerations especially remote...
...For example, a congressional task force chaired by Reps...
...Even excluding salaries and pensions for the judicial branch, congressional staff members, and members of the intelligence agencies, compensation amounts to at least 20 percent of the federal budget...
...Another way to make the system more flexible would be to broaden the use of pay as recognition of merit...
...Just take a look around Washington...
...Of the $49.2 million committed in fiscal year 1981 to pay bonuses to Navy pilots," the GAO reported, "$27.9 million is being spent unnecessarily...
...Things quieted down a few days later when Ronald Reagan told The Wall Street Journal that he felt soldiers deserved the special treatment they received upon retirement...
...In fact, Washington's standard of living ranks among the highest in the country...
...skilled pilots are badly needed, and the Air Force must compete with the airline industry for the best of them...
...since 1949, the average GS grade has risen from 5 to 8 (on a scale of 1 to 18), and more than 70 percent of white collar personnel are graded at or above GS-11...
...In other words, the PATC survey covers only an elite slice of the American workforce...
...Quit rate calculations could inject some badly needed flexibility into federal employee compensation...
...But when the Air Force had the option to go with the same targeting plan back in 1981, it instead persuaded Congress to award a 50-percent, across-the-board increase in aviation career incentive pay...
...There are two reasons why such statistics should worry us...
...to cite just one example, Edward Luttwak, author of The Pentagon and the Art of War, estimates that there are "maybe ten times more lieutenant colonels than battalions...
...Timothy Noah is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Currently, the Pentagon can spend only about 5 percent of the military personnel budget on bonuses...
...By the time Jimmy Carter came to Washington, Watergate had lowered the public's estimation of the government even further...
...Mary Rose Oakar: "We know that these are issues that are very near and dear to you, but we want witnesses to be treated with eminent courtesy...
...It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the average federal worker is doing quite well in comparison to other Americans...
...Inevitably, the message the union preached to its members had less to do with Cincinnatuslike sacrifice than it did with asserting employee rights...
...Matronly rebuke from the chair, Rep...
...Remember, however, that while the federal bureaucrat's self-image is shaped largely by Washington—the capital is where the union leadership resides, along with the greatest concentration of federal workers Washington is not the only place where federal workers live...
...Some would argue that this reflects the government's greater need for highly skilled management...
...New Jersey, $94 million...
...Carl Albert, former Speaker of the House, annually receives a staggering $87,000, while former Senator Harrison Williams, now serving time on an ABSCAM conviction in Allenwood Federal Prison, gets $42,000...
...A handful of advocates have sought to paint a less rosy picture of federal pensions...
...And Causey's statistics do not include pay raises granted to federal workers this past January...
...This line of reasoning makes a certain amount of sense when you consider how difficult it is to fire a federal worker...
...Given the divisiveness today over nearly every issue in our society that touches on fairness, it now seems extraordinary that back in 1945 more than 90 percent of the men interviewed by the War Department agreed on these basic principles...
...Military retirees, by contrast, make no such contribution, while that of civil service employees is shrinking...
...In 1982, OPM sought to clarify the question of pay comparability, which the PATC survey had confused for years...
...Suddenly the machinery of government, which had seemed so well-oiled, was incapable of putting the brakes on policies that were failing abroad...
...Watching this process year after year, federal workers have come to feel like, well, patsies...
...The most obvious is money...
...Furthermore, the PATC survey falls victim to the tendency of federal workers to inflate their job descriptions so that they can attain a high general schedule (GS) grade...
...And the problem is not confined to the military...
...I didn't think anyone would accept what I turned in, but it was...
...The sense that civil servants were public servants, doing work that was important, was widespread among government workers...
...Just as we need to discriminate among different people and different jobs when it comes to pay, we also need to discriminate between the rigors of different work experiences in rewarding early retirement...
...in the non-manufacturing sector, 18 percent...
...Who you callin' patsy...
...The proliferation of conspicuously high-paid professionals has created a deep sense of envy in the federal bureaucracy, not to mention a distorted view of what the private sector is like...
...Does this look like a city in which the local industry underpays its workers...
...Early retirement offers a way to trim fat in the middle and upper ranks...
...A slightly modified system was applied to officers...
...what matters is that they are unhappy and are able to effectively communicate that unhappiness to Congress...
...Even in the likely event of a "freeze" on federal pay this year—that is, a freeze on comparability raises—the step increases and promotions will continue...
...There is that— coupled with the sacrifice that is made by the military...
...Bright young graduates of the best colleges flooded into the newly established agency...
...Make all of us work longer...
...Retirement is the best way to get rid of the deadwood...
...In the federal government, the "quit rate" is demonstrably lower than that of the private sector...
...But the tools we use to make these judgments can also change with the times...
...The trouble with this view is that it overlooks vast distinctions between different parts of the military...
...Deadwood reconsidered Federal workers usually will concede that their pension benefits are more generous than those received by most employees in the private sector...
...The World War II point system did exactly that...
...Such bitterness is markedly different from the attitude held by federal workers just a quarter-century ago...
...Even when we count a shift from one federal job to another as a "quit," the federal quit rate hasn't risen in recent years much above 6 percent, while in the private sector quit rates have never fallen below 10 percent...
...It would also be important not to encourage so much turnover that government offices suffered a substantial loss of institutional memory...
...and West Virginia, $19 million...
...Georgia, $113 million...
...Federal workers might argue that such calculations reflect the bias of an anti-government administration looking for a rationale to cut federal pay...
...Today, however, the city is overrun with restaurants like Le Pavillon and The Palm, where the customers are almost never federal workers...
...even most Fortune 500 companies fail to provide so well for retirees...
...Troops around the world were interviewed in order to determine what they thought would be the fairest way to demobilize...
...Quit rates could be used to thin out the bosses (by paying them less) and to bring in more workers (by paying them more...
...Outlays for civil service pensions have in recent years exceeded the combined cost of the two most important poverty programs, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Food Stamps...
...A 1976 Pentagon compensation report even toyed with the notion of factoring in sexual deprivation: "Faced with the immediate possibility of personal annihilation amid the vast impersonal destruction of war, hedonistic drives and socially derived needs combine to make sexual deprivation a major stress...
...Mike Barnes and Vic Fazio ran it through a computer to calculate what it would cost congressional districts around the nation...
...The quit rate is precisely what it sounds like—the rate at which employees quit their jobs (or are fired...
...Twenty years ago, a middle-level federal bureaucrat could afford to go to all but a handful of restaurants in Washington without too much worry...
...At least aviation career incentive bonuses are based on the right theory of what the military needs...
...for many, it was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to public service...
...Rather than quibble about the generosity of federal pensions, defenders of the status quo more often make these four arguments: • Federal pensions compensate for low pay...
...Grade creep infects the entire civil service...
...With his admonition to "ask not what your country can do for you," but "what you can do for your country," John F. Kennedy bestowed upon the federal bureaucracy a sense of mission and purpose, and sometimes even glamour...
...Florida, $125 million...
...For years, countries such as Britain have attempted to calculate this je ne sais quoi into their military pay scales, but in this country the Pentagon has never been able to wrestle the concept to the ground...
...The result of this dispersal should be obvious to anyone familiar with the political process...
...Today, on the basis of more recent studies, OPM estimates that the figure is more like 14 percent for federal workers located throughout the country and that in the Washington area 30 percent of all federal jobs are overgraded...
...John Chancellor recently reported on the "NBC Nightly News" that the average congressional pension comes to $34,000 a year...
...And that's without figuring in the value of pension benefits...
...Recently, Causey invited his civil servant readers to write in with their reactions to the administration's latest proposals to cut federal pay by 5 percent (there will probably be a freeze instead) and trim back benefits...
...In 1968, James C. Thomson Jr., a refugee from the State Department's East Asia desk, described "the 'effectiveness' trap" in The Atlantic: "To preserve your effectiveness, you must decide where and when to fight the mainstream of policy...
...They go into a profession in which they know that, in a matter of a certain number of years, the physical requirements are such that they're going to be out...
...Paradoxically, the federal government's generosity leads to the premature loss of talent...
...But if we want to get rid of an incompetent federal employee, and find that the machinery of the appeals process makes this forbiddingly difficult—as it often does—then the answer is to streamline the process so that incompetents can be fired...
...Similarly, if the middle ranks of the bureaucracy are bloated—and they are—a more direct solution than providing a golden handshake is to promote fewer people...
...The PATC (pronounced "patsy") survey is presented to the President's Pay Agent, a body whose members include Donald Devine, director of the Office of Personnel Management, Stockman, and the secretary of labor...
...A generous pension plan is a good recruitment incentive...
...And that's just this year...
...While military pensions gobble up more than $18 billion a year, civil service pensions cost an even higher $22 billion...
...Compared to the stupendous fees this new professional class commands, the pay of federal workers does indeed seem modest...
...The most formidable argument on behalf of generous pensions is that they make up for the government's inability to pay salaries comparable to the private sector...
...Add up military and civilian pensions, throw in the cost of present salaries, and an extremely conservative estimate of the annual labor cost of running the federal government comes to about $170 billion...
...But the president is not formally bound to grant that raise, and in every year since 1977, the Pay Agent has rejected the PATC survey recommendations in favor of more modest increases, typically 5 percent...
...Mike Barnes and Vic Fazio argues strenuously, in a booklet entitled "Ten Myths about Civil Service," that federal pensions are not the most generous in the country, as some critics allege...
...It's hard to see why these noncombat personnel should be treated any better than civilian employees when it comes to retirement...
...You would think it was a redo of that of the Parliamentarian of the House and Senate with the attributes of the Librarian of Congress thrown in, plus a touch of Clark Clifford and Thomas B. Corcoran for good measure...
...Now let's consider the deadwood argument...
...The average salary for federal workers in Washington, as reported last December by Mike Causey, civil service columnist for The Washington Post, is $30,784...
...Then we should reform the way we perform the comparability survey...
...In the end, the reality that federal employees are well compensated doesn't seem to matter much...
...In 1981, for example, the quit rate among manufacturers of durable goods was 13.2 percent...
...Here is how one former employee of the Agriculture Department describes the way the game is played: "By bullying and wheedling and whining, I was allowed to write my own [job description...
...And when COLAs were incorporated into pensions in 1963, the idea, once again, was to make up for low pay...
...I have made no big advances in my career, or any big marks to be remembered...
...The ratio of bosses to workers in both the military and the civil service is already distressingly high...
...The result: 11 million soldiers came home in a reasonably orderly fashion, despite the fact that each of them desperately wanted to be the first...
...Congressmen, in turn, have a natural empathy for their federal worker constituents because they, too, receive generous federal pensions...
...Long-range estimates of what the federal government is presently committed to paying out in pension benefits add up to $528 billion for the civil service and $709 billion for the military...
...Military employees, eligible for full pensions after 20 years of service, typically retire even earlier, at age 40—and frequently as early as 38...
...But intuition and other evidence support OPM...
...Anyone who isn't satisfied by having real responsibility in the federal government, not to mention the lavish perks that go with it, probably shouldn't be in a position of power in the first place...
...In many cases, especially in the military, once youth is gone, so is your usefulness...
...With the federal deficit exceeding $200 billion, Congress must figure out a way to cut spending without harming the most vulnerable recipients of federal funds—welfare recipients, for example...
...Indeed, federal workers frequently provide their own job descriptions...
...As of 1982, about 900 officers were receiving "responsibility" bonuses of up to $200 a month...
...The same can't be said of the Pentagon's "responsibility pay," which rewards officers for doing what officers are supposed to do—lead other men...
...A 1982 GAO report complained that bonuses averaging more than $18,000 and as high as $39,000 were being awarded to the wrong people...
...Irresponsibility insurance How can the system be reformed...
...Carter got elected by deliberately running against Washington, and when he arrived he spent a great deal of time trying to reform the civil service...
...Take the Air Force's aviation career incentive pay...
...First, we must link pay to retirement benefits before deciding whether military and civil service compensation is "comparable" to that of the private sector...
...Matching census data for occupations in the federal government to corresponding occupations in the private sector, OPM concluded that PATC had it exactly backwards...
...The point system succeeded because it managed to approximate something in a reasonably fair way that the military has since had trouble quantifying: the unusual rigors of being a soldier...
...To be sure, there are limits to this strategy...
...Federal workers and military personnel are then supposed to get raises based on the BLS calculations...
...exclaimed the budget director, sounding like Jimmy Stewart in "Mr...
...It helps to remember that the people who assign the grades are themselves civil servants, and thus have little reason to want to tighten up the procedure...
...Bribery shouldn't be the only tool at our disposal to make the bureaucracy lean and efficient...
...Employees on most private pension plans retire not at age 40 or 55 but have to wait until they're 63...
...Reagan says that because military life is uniquely rigorous, soldiers shouldn't have to wait so long to get out of the service and shouldn't have to kick in a contribution toward their retirement...
...Moreover, if we start paying federal executives what executives in the private sector earn, they will soon find themselves, like their corporate counterparts, lacking the moral authority to demand sacrifices from those who work below them...
...This reflects the common view of military life that one encounters at the Pentagon, which a skeptical investigator for the General Accounting Office characterized to me as "a soldier is a soldier is a soldier...
...Pennsylvania, $172 million...
...We can help the budget and fill the halls of government with people with walkers and put benches in so the elderly employees can keep working and not draw retirement...
...At times, the pettiness and the self-pity of federal workers seem to know no bounds...
...They are all over America...
...Helicopter pilots, for example, tend to stay in the service longer than jet pilots, who frequently jump to lucrative commercial jobs...
...But no one can deny that federal pensions are among the most generous...
...The self-pity trap Unfortunately, federal workers don't feel that way...
...and in the federal government, 4.6 percent...
...We have done so much for so long with so little we are not qualified to do anything with nothing...
...President . . . cut my retirement...
...The most prominent example was the Peace Corps...
...One result is self-pity and a greater concern about salaries and pensions...
...The Bureau of Labor Statistics was instructed to conduct an annual survey of professional, administrative, technical, and clerical jobs in the public and private sectors...
...Here were some of the responses: "My career is about over in the federal service...
...The Navy and the Marine Corps recognize this by sometimes varying pay according to airline industry pay levels...
...Early retirement is a good way to prevent too many people from hanging on—or getting kicked upstairs...
...How to End the Federal Pension Scandal By Timothy Noah Testifying before a congressional committee this past February, David Stockman blew his famous cool over the generosity of military pensions...
...There's no use pretending that every federal worker is underpaid so that those few who really are can be brought up to the proper level...
...If the federal government needs to be "comparable" to anything, it is to the same standard of fairness that applies to everyone else...
...This is the time in life when workers in the private sector ascend to their highest positions of responsibility...
...The worker complained bitterly to her comrades: "That just goes to show you the duality of the system...
...This immediately cuts out of the sample the 70 percent of the workforce employed by small businesses...
...Quality employees will be lured into federal service by the superior guarantee of security that it provides in its retirement plan...
...When he took the stand, the members of the audience wearing red, white, and blue baseball caps bearing the initials of the American Federation of Government Employees hissed loudly...
...for those jobs that require heavy training, the desirability of maintaining brisk turnover must be weighed against the cost of getting each new employee up to speed...
...To understand why we let this happen, we need to consider the arguments federal workers and the military use in defense of their pension benefits...
...It shouldn't take a war for us to agree on rational ways to treat people who work for the federal government according to their special needs and merits...
...When it has tried, the results have often been comical...
...Please, Mr...
...Instead of granting virtually automatic step increases, the government should tie these raises to evaluations of actual performance...
...Sixteen states each have more than 80,000 federal workers or retirees...
...If we're going to raise anybody's pay, it ought to be those at the rock-bottom of the GS schedule...
...There are currently about 370,000 general schedule employees in grades 12 through 15 earning between $32,000 and $68,000, as opposed to about 85,000 in the bottom three grades, where salaries range from $9,000 to $15,000...
...Meanwhile, the establishment of annual comparability raises, combined with routine "step" or seniority increases and a brisk rate of promotion, conditioned workers to expect as many as three raises a year...
...Finally came Ronald Reagan, who embraced the far right's brittle hostility to the whole notion of government service...
...For example, "effectiveness" became, to some, a dirty word...
...In theory, it is a good idea...
...If I had it all to do over again, I would have second thoughts...
...The "point system" used at the end of World War II to bring the boys home provides an interesting precedent...
...rather than lagging behind their private-sector counterparts, federal workers earned, on average, 11 percent more...
...It's an outrage...
...the federal government has been taking up the slack...
...And private pension plans insist that the employee make a contribution toward his retirement fund through payroll deductions...
...By law, the Bureau of Labor Statistics each year conducts a survey to find out how pay in the federal government compares to that in the private sector...
...More important, we need to grasp how changing attitudes toward government work, both within and without the federal workforce, have shaped the way we pay federal employees...
...Shouldn't that be factored into the equation...
...According to the GAO, as of 1975, 93 percent of enlisted personnel were working in non-combat jobs, and 31 percent had never worked in combat-related positions...
...Give 'em points Once we reform pay so that it conforms more closely to both true "comparability" and merit, there will be no need to use pensions for anything more than what pensions are supposed to do: provide a reasonable income for retirees at a reasonable point in their lives...
...Under John F. Kennedy, the morale of federal workers was high, but it has hit bottom under Reagan...
...Serving in the Navy, for example, can involve more sacrifice than the Air Force if you're sent out to sea for long periods of time...
...There are two points to make here...
...The federal worker's self-esteem began to fall during the Vietnam war...
...Let's deal first with the argument about hardship...
...Rather than grant bonuses this carelessly, the Pentagon should provide incentives in those areas where it really is hard to retain the best...
...I talked to a retired military officer...
...Assuming that OPM's quit rate proposal would not set off excessive departures from government service, the only significant flaw in the plan is that OPM initially would survey only three broad categories of federal employment...
...Still, we will have to recognize the hardships of those few who deserve early retirement, especially in the military...
...Not to put too fine a point on it, what kind of wimp spends his twenties and thirties fretting about pension benefits...
...The federal government already uses quit rates in this way to determine premiums to be paid above general schedule rates for jobs such as engineer and doctor, where employees tend to be lured away from the government and into the private sector...
...Those at the top, no less than those at the bottom, are public servants...
...Following predetermined guidelines established by law, the President's Pay Agent translates the PATC survey results into a recommended "comparability" raise that will theoretically bring federal wages in line with the private sector...
...What's more, many of the military's existing bonuses are poorly targeted...
...Tapscott assured me that further raises would make it easier to attract top executive talent from the private sector...
...One reform OPM would like to institute that we should not permit is the granting of raises at the very highest levels of government...
...Here is how the plan was put into effect: Every enlisted man received one point for each month of service, one additional point for each month of overseas service, five points for each medal received, and 12 points for each child under the age of 18 waiting for him at home (with an upper limit of three...
...As for those who do seek to join the federal bureaucracy because they find the pensions enticing, are these likely to be the best people...
...Quit rates vary widely from job to job—think of the turnover among busboys as compared to maitre d's...
...Moreover, pilot shortages tend to come only when the airlines are doing well, as they are today...
...But in practice, shortages occur only in certain specialties...
...The membership of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) rose from 71,000 in 1960 to more than 260,000 by the end of 1977...
...As Leonard Reed put it, "Anybody who has ever worked in a government agency knows that job descriptions will endow a file clerk with responsibilities before which a graduate of the Harvard Business School quails...
...About 1,500 federal retirees are expected to collect more than $1 million each in pensions, either during their retirement or, after death, through surviving dependents...
...The first is that not many people begin their working lives wondering about their pensions...
...The bright young Ivy Leaguers who had once gone into the Peace Corps were now coming to Washington to work for Ralph Nader as adversaries of government...
...And it's dishonest to assume that every soldier has had to endure 20 years of combat duty and painful separation from hearth and home just to ensure that the few who do suffer hardship can get out early with a pension...
...The problem is less a matter of avarice than of morale...
...During the late seventies, the Civil Service Commission (predecessor to the Office of Personnel Management) conducted random audits of the federal agencies and found 11 percent of the jobs overgraded...
...The portion that remains within the PATC survey represents a minority who work for big companies that can pay their employees a higher wage than smaller (and, most likely, more efficient) companies can...
...But he told me that in the call of duty, for 20 of his 31 married years, he and his wife had not been together...
...Overall, it's important to remember that the majority of military jobs are desk jobs...
...then another arm tells them they may not have the raise they seem to deserve...
...the rest is rigidly dictated by salary schedules...
...It hurts my sinuses...
...Quit rates could be an effective tool for keeping too much fat from collecting in the middle ranks—indeed, a much better tool for this purpose than pensions...
...To put this comparison in perspective, there are only about two million civil service retirees, compared to more than 20 million participants in these welfare programs...
...By the time David Halberstam's The Best and The Brightest was published in 1972, the glamour of government service to which Halberstam's title made ironic reference had dimmed considerably...
...Military pensions compensate for hardship Here is how Ronald Reagan argued this point in his interview with The Wall Street Journal: "I have to think [the military pension program] is a little different than any other pension program you want to name...
...Most private pension plans, for example, do not provide the full cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) that public employee pensions do...
...How does grade inflation occur...
...The Pentagon should abandon its efforts to come up with a magic percentage that quantifies the hardship endured by soldiers and instead put those few soldiers who have endured real hardship at the head of the line for retirement...
...We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful...
...He had found other employment...
...The law's just for the peons...
...One intriguing suggestion that OPM has put forward is to use what it calls the quit rate as a guideline in determining pay...
...But such raises should be unnecessary...
...To have meaning, a federal quit-rate survey would have to be calculated for each job category...
...In this present crisis," he declaimed in his first inaugural address, "government is not the solution: it is the problem...
...Except for a Burkean here and there, conservatives had never held much regard for the bureaucracy, so there was little opportunity for the civil service to recoup its dignity during the Nixon and Ford administrations...
...When the Reagan administration proposed its 5 percent pay cut this year, Reps...
...The principle should be extended to every level of the bureaucracy...
...I just did my job...
...Massachusetts, $70 million...
...The result of the Pentagon's failure to quantify what it calls the "X-factor" has been the use of the idea as a vague rationalization for high compensation across the board...
...A substantial portion of the federal budget now goes to paying past and present employees...
...that is, it nearly quadrupled...
...Carter-era reform did introduce a merit-pay program, which has expanded under Reagan, but it applies exclusively to managers at the GS levels 13, 14, and 15—less than 10 percent of the civil service workforce...
...Even in peacetime, the military is not the place where one would expect to find people whose highest priority in life is security...
...They found that California would lose $431 million in wages...
...the opportunities range from pillow talk with your wife, to private drinks with your friends, to meetings with the secretary of state or the president...
...The result: federal workers have, according to BLS, fallen 18 percent behind their counterparts outside the government...
...The Pentagon could achieve a similar flexibility in the military by broadening its bonus system, through which extra pay is awarded to personnel in areas requiring special skills or the endurance of unusual hardship...
...For one thing, the PATC survey focuses almost exclusively on companies that employ a minimum of 250 workers...
...The median federal salary is $27,252...
...He was out in the world someplace...
...When I met with Mark Tapscott, OPM's spokesman, he enthusiastically reported to me that the Reagan administration had raised the pay cap from $50,000 to $68,700...
...Last February, I went to Capitol Hill to see Donald Devine present the administration's proposals for trimming federal compensation...
...In fiscal 1984, for example, nearly half of the full-time, permanent federal employees in the GS or equivalent schedules received a step increase, and almost a quarter got a promotion...
...some employees should remain for the long term to provide continuity...
...But Stockman is not alone in his concern about military pensions...
...Even those qualities that had increased the prestige of public service began to seem less than benign...
...However, as Leonard Reed, a former civil servant and a contributing editor to this magazine, has noted in these pages, the responsibilities of most GS-15s are less than those of a Safeway manager...
...One federal worker noticed during a break that despite a no-smoking rule, Devine was puffing on a cigar...
...In government, it is when experienced employees head for the door...
...many others have criticized the system, including the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Les Aspin...
...The final factor that has changed the attitudes of federal workers has been the explosion of trade associations, consulting businesses, and law firms in Washington...
...In contrast to the federal worker who tells Mike Causey that he has left no mark on the world, "We felt proud of what we were doing...
...Bonus pay serves both to recognize the difficulty of certain jobs and to keep some specialists—most notably, pilots— from being lured away by prevailing wage levels in the private sector...
...Their feeling, that the men who have served longest, have fought hardest, and who have children are the ones who should leave the Army first, is the touchstone of our program," announced Henry Stimson, secretary of war, at a press conference held two days after the victory in Europe...
...According to the Grace Commission, the civil service employee contribution fell from 36 percent of the total pensions paid in 1970 to 13 percent in 1982...
...To be sure, work changes over time, and people's values change, too...
Vol. 17 • May 1985 • No. 4
