President may face trial, but government goes on

Last Friday, the Agricultural Marketing Service proposed that the assessment rate for dried prunes grown in California be raised from $2.16 to $3.28 per ton.

On Saturday, the National Park Service opened the Old Faithful Visitor Center in Yellowstone National Park from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The geyser erupted an average of once every 81 minutes.

On Sunday, the more than 100 crew members of the Coast Guard cutter Legare returned home to Portsmouth, Va. after a Caribbean patrol, during which the crew helped rescue a Jamaican patrol boat off Haiti.

On Monday at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, beef burgundy over noodles, barbecue smoked links, vegetable lasagna, steamed fish, and french dip sandwiches were on the menu at the center's cafeterias.

As the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the chief executive of the federal government faced, received and responded to his impeachment by the House of Representatives over the past four days, the business of government went on.

Bobby Harnage, president of the largest federal employees union, the American Federation of Government Employees, said the federal workforce is largely unaffected by its chief's impeachment ordeal.

"After the assassination of President Kennedy and the resignation of President Nixon, the federal government kept going without a hitch," Harnage said. "As far as having an effect on day-to-day operations, I don't think there is one."

Harnage also said civil servants are as varied in their views on Clinton's impeachment as the rest of the citizenry, but most appear not to be concerned with his ability to lead the government.

"I haven't heard a lot from our people concerning the President's effectiveness, but I have heard a lot from our people talking about congressional effectiveness," Harnage said.

On Friday, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the armed forces are equally unaffected by the impeachment proceedings.

"We all fully know and understand who the commander in chief is," Shelton said. "We are focused on the mission at hand. That goes from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs right out to every man and woman that's in the Persian Gulf at this time, and those throughout our armed forces."

Nevertheless, some experts, including Donald F. Kettl, a Brookings Institution scholar and public administration expert, worry that the ongoing scandal will have an adverse affect on Washington's ability to get things done.

"Most of the government will simply proceed as it always does. Social Security checks will go out, the air traffic control system will continue to work," Kettl said. "But it's hardly the case there will be no impact at all. It's hard to underestimate the preoccupation this will bring to the higher levels of the executive branch."

As the administration's political brass are distracted and preoccupied by an impeachment trial, career civil servants may also expect to see congressional business disrupted, Kettl said. Social Security and Medicare reform are likely victims, he said.

"If anything has come out of this, it's that there is a great deal of hard feelings in a partisan sense, raising the concern of how Congress is going to be able to get its job done. With the very narrow margin Republicans enjoy in the House, that could spill over into whether the budget gets through in a timely way," Kettl said. "Implementation of the Government Performance and Results Act could also become more partisan than it would otherwise."

Some observers also worry that the scandal will hurt the public's opinion of government.

"One of the most damaging, least visible potential consequences of this entire episode is an insidious erosion of public trust in government," said Patricia McGinnis, president of the nonprofit Council for Excellence in Government, earlier this year. "A decline would reverse the heartening upward trend of the past three years in the public's view of government. It might also discourage young Americans from pursuing public service and running for political office."

President Clinton's critics have charged that throughout this scandal, he has not adhered to the standards other federal employees must meet. In September, the Palm Beach Post criticized Clinton for not living up to a memorandum he issued on June 1 instructing federal employees to use plain English when communicating with the public.

"Maybe President Clinton can torture the language with lines like 'It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.' But his federal workers are still toiling in the warrens of government to bring us simple English," said an editorial in the newspaper. "The initiative to turn governmental gobbledygook into plain language is commendable, but it certainly has not reached the Oval Office."