75-01-B5
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Civil Service
TranscriptThe civil service is growing like topsy and mostly at the top too. I'll be right back. Yesterday, I talked about the growing power of the federal bureaucrats, the New Mandarins as one national news magazine has called them. They affect our lives in more and more ways, from deciding which broadcasting stations will get licenses to counting the number of toilets in our homes. They are the people who formulate and enforce the maze of regulations that go along with virtually every bill that Congress passes. Not only does this have frightening and dangerous implications for the future of your liberty and mind but the size of the bureaucracy is also becoming so great that it's become a powerful political force with Congress. In terms of pay and fringe benefits, the 2.7 million civilian employees the federal government represent the largest single employee group in the economy today and benefits paid to the bureaucracy are definitely contributing to inflation. For example, the pensions of retired civil servants go up every time the percentage of inflation exceeds a certain figure, a three percent cost of living increase begets a four percent automatic boost in federal pensions so this group even makes a little profit in the bargain. In private business you'll find few companies that automatically tie pensions to the government's cost of living index and probably none that build in a profit on top of the inflation rate. Congress, of course, must shoulder much of the blame for institutionalizing inflation in this way, for its Congress which must approve such federal employee benefits in the first place. We have to ask if the political clout of the civil service is getting so great that Congressmen are more concerned with it than with the desires of the people they represent. The civil service system was created to remove government workers from the insecurities and ravages of the political spoils system. Theoretically, that should work to the taxpayers benefit too for it should mean a more productive efficient federal workforce. Well it ain't necessarily so, there's an alarming amount of mushrooming type growth at the upper levels of the bureaucracy. Government employees are classified as to stature in salary for example a gs-18 is a top civil service grade today for every gs-18 there are three people in the next lower grade gs-17 then there are three gs-16s for each gs-17 and seven gs-15s for each gs-16. Now that sounds like a proper kind of a pyramid, but below that level the pyramid reverses itself and the lower you go and grade, the fewer employees you find. Apparently as a result of the security of the civil service system people have just continued to creep upward in pay scale regardless of ability or efficiency. That's costing all of us a lot of money at a time when we should demand maximum efficiency for our tax dollars. Civil service salaries, in general, have been going up too. How many pay raises have you had in the last 12 years? Well, federal white collar workers have had 14 across the board wage increases in 12 years. One recent survey comparing administrators in private industry with gs-15 level civil servants found the federal government employees averaging more than two hundred dollars a month better pay. The civil service system has become solidly entrenched but like so many human institutions that have been created to solve problems it's created some new ones. It needs a review, a fresh look. Housewives have to make their budget stretch more these days. Business asks for an extra measure of work from employees to keep production going. is it too much to ask the federal government to trim the fat from its payrolls to ask fewer workers to do the work there couldn't be a better time. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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