Tom Frank Quote of the Day: Starving the Bureaucrats

One of the most impressive achievements of The Wrecking Crew is the clarity and punch with which it pulls together the complex story of the conservative sabotage of the civil service.

It started, of course, with Reagan. If workers were "'program loyalists,' one bureaucracy scholar wrote"—in other words, if they were there to do their jobs—"'the offices they supervised were stripped of functions, or they were sent on assignment to a U.S. trust territory or given an office in an empty suite with nothing to do.... In 1984, morale was gratifyingly low in the 'permanent government': a full 72 percent of senior public servants said, in response to a poll, that they would not encourage their children to take a career in public service."

It was also, of course, one of those fiendish vicious circles at which the right's wreckers so excel at assembling.

In 1975, federal workers earned 10 percent less than people doing comparable work in the private sector, which was not worrisome given federal employees' benefits and job security. By 1987, though. the pay gap had widened to around 30 percent.... By 2008, starting salaries at top Washington law firms for kids straight from law school were higher than the highest ending salaries for career civil servants.

And guess what? I hope my readers who are hard-working civil servants, whose work I obviouly honor deep, won't be offended when I observe that the market worked. We got what we paid for: "federal employees, for example, had won seven Noble prizes in medicine since 1968. HOw many have they won since conservatives really went ot work on them? I wondered. The answer: one."

Writes Tom: "The professional civil service is an organizational form that every advanced society adopted a hundred years ago for the same reason: to ensure the state would not be the tool of money. That its wrecking has coincided with the greatest wave of political corruption in living memory is no mere coincidence." That been a frequent theme here at The Big Con, because with George W. Bush, it has gotten so, so much worse. "Indeed, a favorite conservative tactic has been to shut down offices that supervise the outsourced operations—in 2006, the General Services Administration actually tried to contract out the job of supervising contractors."

Once again, it all fits: a vicious circle:

What this has meant in practical terms is that the pay of govenrment workers has stagnated at the same time that Washington has risen to the wealthiest tier of cities, making the carrots of private sector success that dangle in every inhabitant's face that much juicier.

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