Despite prohibition, Clinton appointees got bonuses

Despite a presidential directive designed to keep mid- and high-level political appointees from getting cash bonuses, some appointees in the Clinton administration did receive such bonuses in the last year of the administration.

In a September 2001 report, "Personnel Practices: Monetary Awards Provided to Political Appointees" (01-1081R), the General Accounting Office found that at least 50 political appointees at the GS-13 to GS-15 pay levels and in the Senior Executive Service received cash awards for performance, or for a special act or service between September 1999 and May 2000.

A recent move by the Bush administration to reinstate cash bonuses for political appointees has been criticized by some congressional leaders. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and House Minority Leader-elect Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., last week called on the White House to rescind its policy.

"These kinds of cash bonuses to political appointees were banned because they were abused in the past," Daschle said. "The fact that the Bush administration has decided, in secret, to bring them back is just the latest demonstration of how misplaced this administration's priorities are."

In 1994, the Clinton administration banned the practice because political officials in the first Bush administration were given monetary awards before leaving office, prompting criticism that the practice recognized loyalty and not job performance.

"It was stopped by President Clinton because President [George H.W. Bush], in a remarkably sleazy way, abused it," Paul Begala, a former Clinton adviser, said on CNN's Crossfire last week. "In the last five minutes, literally-- I'm not speaking figuratively now--literally, in the last five minutes of Bush's presidency, he was handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars of bonuses to political hacks and cronies."

A 1994 memo from Leon Panetta, then White House chief of staff, outlined the Clinton administration's stance on the issue.

"The Clinton administration wishes to maintain a more rigorous standard for granting cash awards than previous administrations," Panetta wrote to Cabinet and agency chiefs. "We therefore ask that agencies refrain from giving cash awards to political appointees paid a salary level that exceeds that of a GS-12 and to grant monetary awards to others only for performance that is clearly exceptional."

A spokeswoman for Panetta said he was unavailable to comment on the GAO report, but last week he told The Washington Post that the political appointee bonus system was at high risk for abuse.

"It's just a system that is very hard to monitor to make sure it's done based on merit as opposed to friendship," Panetta told the paper.

John Palguta, vice president of policy and research at the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington advocacy group, said that some agency heads may have forgotten about or even ignored Clinton's policy since it was a presidential directive and was not law.

"It would appear that in some cases at some agencies, the appointees in those agencies were either unaware of President Clinton's policy against these awards, or they forgot about it or simply ignored it, and of course there is no way that we can tell," Palguta said. "It was a presidential directive, it didn't have the same force of law, so there was nothing illegal about it," he said. "But clearly this was somebody who was ignoring or overlooking their boss' prohibition, since they were all working for the president."

But Palguta, who retired from the federal government earlier this year after spending 22 years at the Merit Systems Protection Board, said he was not opposed to political appointees receiving bonuses if they deserved them.

"I'm not in favor of anyone getting an undeserved award, but I do favor recognizing good performance," he said. "There are violations, but the response to that is not to make the folks who are deserving [of bonuses] suffer for the sins of the smaller numbers. We know that there are folks who are going to drive drunk, but that doesn't mean we try to take all the cars off the road."