Bush's New Spoils System

Bush's New Spoils System
Tom Paine: Common Sense
Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator.

Just in time for the anniversary of 9/11, the Bush administration has given a poisonous gift to the government employees who are supposed to be protecting us from a re-occurrence of similar attacks: he's privatizing their jobs. And, as usual, he's employing the Big Lie technique: he's evoking "national security" as a weapon to gut the civil service system.

As the great Helen Thomas, doyenne of the White House press corps, reported for Hearst, "The administration's sales pitch is to raise the specter of terrorism and 9/11 -- a surefire way to scare Congress into backing" the plan. Thomas reported that the Office of Management and Budget has given federal agencies until October 31 to designate 15 percent of their jobs as "not inherently governmental" and thus available for "outsourcing." First on the list are, incredibly, air traffic controllers.

But that's only the tip of the iceberg. The eventual goal, announced by the White House last November to little public outcry, is to privatize half the federal work force. It's an attack on the very essence of the federal government, replacing the notion of public service for the common good with the profit motive. By eventually turning over at least 850,000 civil-service jobs to private contractors, the plan -- which might require no congressional approval -- will destroy the firewall that protects federal jobs from political influence, taking the U.S. government back to the 19th century and the everything-for-sale days of, for example, the administration of Ulysses S. Grant.

How, exactly, will it happen? The jobs will be opened up for so-called "competitive bidding" -- but, as the Associated Press has reported, under Bush's plan "the lowest bid won't automatically win." Other kinds of bidders will -- those who play the insider game. The ones connected to the political appointees and the high-dollar donors.

This means turning half the federal government into the civilian equivalent of the military-industrial complex, until now the most corrosively corrupt symbiotic relationship in government. It also means that federal employee unions and the worker protections they ensure will begin evaporating as quickly as did the budget surpluses. The religious right loves the plan, by the way, because it renders null and void the Clinton executive order against discrimination in federal employment on the basis of sexual orientation.

Given these sweeping changes, the White House has been trying to calm nerves, saying that, for the moment, only "low-level" jobs, like computer programmers or secretaries, will be privatized. But does anyone really expect corporate lobbies to stop there, especially once the principle of a politics-free civil service is eliminated?

Moreover, as a consequence of the civil-liberties shredding aspects of the war on terrorism, the government is now permitted to compile life dossiers on Americans without so much as a court order. Just imagine how valuable that information could be to Corporate America.

The plan could also lead to greater corruption of government, even worse than the slimy sewer that was the federal government in the 19th century because now government and corporations will officially be blended into one. Imagine having your food monitored by meat inspectors who are in the pay of private corporations rather than watchdogs of those corporations? Would you want your prescription drugs evaluated for safety and monitored for quality by corporate-employed "low-level" lab technicians (another category to be privatized, and whose salaries, will be even lower than those in the civil service, thus rendering the underpaid employees even more susceptible to corrupt influences. And the list goes on.

In these days of go-go merger mania and the erection of giant multitasked conglomerates whose corporate divisions are related only by the profit motive, the potential for hitherto unimagined conflicts of interest is essentially built into the Bush plan to corporatize American government. A corporate entity with a division that hires out its mercenaries to staff a government department may have financial interests that conflict with the public good. Information is money in post-industrial America, and the Bush plan offers an unparalleled feeding at the government information trough to corporate executives whose questionable moral and ethical standards might not be able to stave off their desire to throttle quarterly profits.

Of course, the privatization of parts of the federal service began under Bill Clinton, whose dedication to corporate campaign cash knew few bounds; and most of the senior congressional Democrats have been nurtured by corporate money. Perhaps that's why the Party leadership failed to use Labor Day as an occasion to launch an all-out attack on the proposed spoils system.

In an interview in the May 12 New Yorker magazine, Karl Rove laid out the real reason why the Bushies have put federal civil service workers on their hit list.

"Bigger government strengthens the Democratic Party," he said, adding, "It generates federal employees who will mostly vote Democratic... conversely, smaller government helps the Republicans."

And, so, the Bush plan is nothing less than a flying leap toward the institutionalization of the Republican Party. If the opposition party does not full-throatedly oppose this new and unprecedented power grab, it will have pitifully acquiesced not only in its relegation to permanent minority status, but to the fulfillment of the old Republican principle -- as enunciated by Calvin Coolidge -- that "the chief business of the American people is business."