Firemen First or How to Beat a Budget Cut
Peters, Charles
Firemen First or How to Beat a Budget Cut by Charles Peters Since parsimony is becoming almost as fashionable among politicians today as patriotism was in the 1940s, a wave of budget-cutting...
...To avoid the latter possibility, it is essential to understand how the Clever Bureaucrat reacts to the threat of fiscal deprivation...
...The 150 were, of course, reinstated...
...The more reliable year-round tactic is to threaten the loss of essential services that affect almost all voters...
...John Lindsay was a master of this technique...
...C. B.3 concern about loss of others’ jobs is a deeply personal one...
...The victims are invariably combat troops...
...Thus, Mike Causey of The Washington Post tells of a National Park Service C. B. who, confronted with a budget cut, quickly restored congressmen to their senses by eliminating elevator service to the top of the Washington Monument...
...who has bluffed by saying that he will have to fire essential employees, he may-to preserve his credibility-actually have to fire them, instead of the middlelevel newspaper-readers who are the real fat...
...Similarly, a Social Security Administration C. B. faced with a budget cut is certain to announce that the result will be substantial delays in the mailing of social security checks...
...Rank in the civil service is also determined in part by the number of employees one supervises...
...J OJ...
...Chicago-Seattle, running through the homes of Senator Mike Mansfield, Senate Majority Leader, and Senator Warren Magnuson, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee...
...If, for example, a Secretary of Defense from Massachusetts insists upon eliminating useless and outmoded bases, the Navy’s C. B. will promptly respond with a list of recommended baseclosings, led by the Boston Navy Yard...
...A recent decision by the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that a college that fires a tenured professor because too few students are taking his course to pay for it must find another job for the professor, even if it requires dismissing other more competent but untenured professors...
...Firemen First On the other hand, there are the teachers we don’t want to fire-those in the public schools, for example, where teacher-pupil ratios of 1 to 40 are common...
...Another approach, which might be called “How Can You Guys Be Such Scrooges,” was tried on the Council by Joseph Yeldell, the director of the city’s Human Resources Administration, who proclaimed that yes, he knew exactly what’ the budget cut would do to his department, it would mean the cancellation of the foster parents program for 2,000 orphans...
...In its first flush of victory after the 1960 election, the Kennedy Administration embarked on two ill-fated missions...
...These are the ones C.B...
...Byrd, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he will ‘either introduce an amendment providing sufficient funds to continue the West Virginia route or try to get language adopted which would guarantee funding for the route for Amtrak.’ ” In the Amtrak case, C.B.’s budgetcutting enemy was President Ford...
...will be deliberately non-specific about the jobs that mght be cut...
...Sometimes it is a frugal superior in his own department...
...The other was an effort to fire 150 AID employees, all of whom wrote their congressman, as did their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and in all probability their creditors and the creditors’ relatives...
...The reason of course is that the more big ships with big crews we have, the more admirals we need...
...When the City Council of the District of Columbia recently proposed a $67.2-million cut in the city’s budget, Mayor Washington responded with an announcement that he would have to fire 4,000 city employees, but with no indication of exactly where the axe would fall...
...There’s the rub...
...C. B.’s initial response is much the same...
...Another Bay of Pigs An irate constituency is, of course, a threat to all elected officials and to every other official who dreams of converting his appointive status into one blessed by the voting public...
...Charles Peters is editor-in-chief of The Washington Monthly...
...And in a triumphant stroke that netted four birds with one roadbed, Norfolk-Chicago, running through the home states of Senator Birch Bayh, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Transportation subcommittee, Senator Vance Hartke, chairman of the Commerce Surface Transportation . Subcommittee, Rep...
...Thus, C. B. always picks on teachers, policemen, firemen first...
...Harley Staggers, chairman of .the House Commerce Committee, and Senatdr Robert Byrd, . Senate Majority Whip...
...If a Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan does become President, he might also ponder the lesson of Gail Parker, who found that to keep Bennington College afloat she would have to deprive teachers of tenure and rehire them each year on the basis of their merit and of what the college could afford...
...Thus a threat to reduce the number of one’s employees is a threat not merely to one’s ego but to one’s income as well...
...Thus Amtrak, recently threatened with a budget cut, immediately announced, according to Stephen Aug of The Washington Star, that it would be compelled to drop the following routes: San FrancisceBakersfield, running through Stockton, the home town of Kep...
...In the headquarters bureaucracies of the New York City and the Washington, D. C. school systems there are concentrated some of the most prodigious, do-nothing, time-servers of the modem era...
...always says he will have to fire when he is menaced with a budget cut...
...In the end, he didn’t have to fire anyone...
...This tactic is based on .the principle that the public will support C. B.’s valiant fight against the budget reduction only if essential services are endangered...
...The tenured employee can even go to court...
...Louis-Laredo, running through Little Rock, Arkansas, the home of Senator John McClellan, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee...
...Abe Beame was not so lucky...
...He threatened to fire 67,000 similarly essential employees, and-when the bastards actually cut his budgetfound that he really had to drop 35,000...
...Confronted, for example, with a 1971-72 budget of only $8.6 billion, he said he would have to fire 10,000 policemen, 2,500 firemen, 3,600 garbage workers, 12,000 hospital workers, and 10,800 teachers...
...Not long ago Jack Anderson discovered that the Navy, trying to adjust to less money than it had requested, was depriving the fleet of essential maintenance, while continuing to waste billions on useless supercarriers and transforming small Polaris submarines into giant Tridents...
...This tactic is designed to arouse all city employees who don’t want to be among the 4,000-which of course means aZZ city employees-to write the City Council protesting the outrageous cuts...
...Similarly, the Army, when faced with a budget cut, never points the finger at desk-bound lieutenant colonels...
...One was the Bay of Pigs...
...Every constituent whose children insisted on his walking all the way up was sure to place an outraged call to his congressman’s office...
...No administrator threatens to fire them...
...The very first thing C. B. does, when threatened with a budget reduction, is to translate it into specific bad news for congressmen powerful enough to restore his budget to its usual plenitude...
...If we really cut the budget of the C.B...
...The effectiveness of this device is suggested by a story that appeared in the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette a few days after Amtrak’s announcement: Continued Rail Service Byrds Aim “Senator Robert C. Byrd, D-WVa, has announced that he intends to make an effort today to assure continued rail passenger service for West Virginia...
...This is particularly unfortunate, since in government, as in human beings, fat tends to concentrate at the middle levels, where planning analysts and deputy assistant administrators spend their days attending meetings, writing memoranda, and reading newspapers...
...We could end up with a government of planning analysts, friends of congressmen, and trains running to Bakersfield via Stockton...
...Sometimes, however, the C.B...
...Even a small irritation can suffice...
...If they are “the fat,” and if he is to fight the budget cut, it would of course damage his cause to admit their existence...
...The threatened employees are sure to write emotional protests to their congressmen...
...The results could be salutary, but might be disastrous...
...Firemen First or How to Beat a Budget Cut by Charles Peters Since parsimony is becoming almost as fashionable among politicians today as patriotism was in the 1940s, a wave of budget-cutting seems likely at all levels of government...
...And, as the National Rifle Association has proven, even a tiny minority, if sufficiently vigorous in its expression of opinion-vigorous meaning that they make clear they will vote against you if you fail to help themcan move a legislator to take the desired action in the absence of an equally energetic lobby on the other side...
...Mc rau, c n m a n 01 tne House Appropriations transportation subcommit tee...
...But such appeals are guaranteed to work only during the Christmas season...
...He must concentrate on threatening a loss of muscle...
...The threatened faculty stirred up such a storm that the Board of Trustees, which had originally backed Gail Parker, deserted her and she had to resign...
...Whenever possible, a C. B. will assert that the budget cut is certain to result in the loss of jobs...
...He knows you can’t be a commander unless you have troops to command...
Vol. 8 • March 1976 • No. 1
