The circus is in town, but it’s no fun for fed workers
In the very entertaining circus going on in Washington, we have at least two main acts – exposes of President Trump’s increasingly precarious mental state and the Kavanaugh confirmation farce—in full swing for you to sit back and enjoy.
Aside from those high-wire acts, take a look at the sideshow going on in the midway that is the president’s full-on attack on federal workers and public unions.
“On Labor Day, we celebrate the American worker: The bulwark of our national prosperity and the cornerstone of our national greatness,” the president wrote in his canned Labor Day proclamation.
“America’s workers pay our taxes, support our values, serve in our military, raise our children, protect our Constitution, and build our communities,” he wrote. “They deserve, in return, the unwavering fidelity of their government.”
Yes, yes they do, and that goes for federal employees, whom Trump and his minions seem to regard as just a bunch of freeloading losers.
Having given that proclamation and just before toddling off to one of his golf clubs for Labor Day, he announced a pay freeze that would eliminate a scheduled (and piddling) 2.1 percent across-the-board pay hike as well as additional 25 percent cost-of-living or “locality” pay hike for civilian workers.
The pay raises would cost the government $25 billion and increase the deficit, he said.
That’s a pittance compared to his tax cut giveaway last year – 83 percent of the benefits of which will go to the uber-rich 1 percent. Those cuts will balloon the deficit by $1.5 trillion over 10 years.
So federal workers become the first in line to pay for that giveaway. Next up, Social Security and Medicare.
It was no coincidence that the announcement came just six days after a District of Columbia federal court shot down his three executive orders aimed at busting the federal unions.
And it’s no coincidence that $25 billion is the total cost estimate for Trump’s wall across the southern border.
He is threatening to shut down the government at the end of September if he doesn’t get that money. Looks like he’s found a way to fund it.
People think the federal government is overstuffed with do-nothing civilian employees ripping off the taxpayers, but in fact, the actual number of civilian employees is 2.1 million, down 600,000 from 2014 and fewer than at any point since July 1966 – 56 years ago.
Let me qualify that: That’s employees who work directly for the government.
Those are the folks that process your tax returns, calculate your Social Security benefits, pay your doctors’ Medicaid and Medicare bills, police your national parks, investigate financial fraud, serve sick veterans and back up our 1.3 million uniformed military around the world.
It’s not civilian government employment that has gotten out of hand, it is the jobs that have been outsourced, the private contractors, that are at an alltime high.
CNNMoney estimates the number of federal contract employees at about 3.7 million. Edward Snowden and Reality Winner, who both revealed national security secrets, were employees of private contractors.
Those are the workers that make our missiles, feed our troops, paint our government buildings, spy on our enemies and build the government’s computer systems under contracts with private companies.
Nobody talks about cutting back on contractors.
They are, after all, the ones who make fat donations to political campaigns to get our Congress critters re-elected, so they can continue to hand out the lucrative contracts.
Trump did say he’d reconsider killing the federal pay raise, though I haven’t heard him say anything since.
In any case, Congress is debating whether to include a slightly smaller 1.9 percent pay raise in a government funding bill that Trump would have to sign.
That’s all going to be part of the temper tantrum Trump will throw at the end of September, threatening to shut down the government.
We’ll buy some more popcorn and watch that show when it happens.
I asked a friend who is a government employee how morale is in his office.
“It’s horrible between the administration bashing us, the president threatening our pay raises, the executive orders and the possibility of another government shutdown,” he said.
I hear you saying, “So what, doesn’t affect me,” but there are 62,000 federal employees in Pennsylvania and many thousands of retirees among your friends and neighbors.
They and we are the middle class that Trump promised to help.
The cancelled pay raise isn’t the only front in this war against federal workers.
The Office of Personnel Management is urging House Speaker Paul Ryan to pass legislation that would reduce the benefits of current and future retirees by more than $400 million.
And those three executive orders – directed at the public employee unions – may come back to haunt workers.
A federal judge enjoined the government from enforcing the worst aspects of the three orders, but the government can appeal, and many agencies have already implemented them and will be slow to roll them back.
Over at the VA, an arbitrator ruled Aug. 31 that the agency must rehire hundreds of lowlevel employees who were fired for petty offenses under a harsh new federal law because management violated a collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees.
That ruling came as news stories continue to surface that the Veterans Administration, our second-largest federal agency after the Department of Defense, is really being run by three of Trump’s millionaire golfing buddies out of Mar-a-Lago.
It may be a worthy experiment to try to run the government like a business, but only if the business is a publicly owned business with a board of directors and stockholders to answer to.
That’s not Trump’s one-executive, privately held, non-union business whose offshoots frequently file for bankruptcy.
You can run a circus like that, but not the federal government, not for long.
Jodine Mayberry is a retired editor, longtime journalist and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Friday. You can reach her at jodinemayberry@comcast.net.