The Administration Takes on CATO on Pay

I was a little surprised, if not shocked, when Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag stepped up to defend federal salaries earlier this week. And now Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry has gone after the Washington Times for relying on data from the CATO Institute, which he says in influenced by an anti-government stance. He's also using the data from the Combined Federal Campaign to argue that federal workers are generous and charitable, especially consider what they're paid. Given that Berry strongly emphasized the CFC and federal community service last year, those efforts appear to have generated an argument for him to use in just this situation.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, and I'm not sure what the most politically effective way to push back against the argument that federal employees are paid too much is. The arguments on both sides are rooted in data that's difficult to explain clearly: there are questions of methodology in the surveys, job definitions, sample sizes, frequency that you've got absorb before the data becomes really clear.

If I were the federal government, or federal employee unions, I think this is what I'd do. I'd find a lot of specific employees in the public and private sectors, figure out what their salaries are, and run ads comparing their work and their pay on a very individual basis. People have a lot more difficulty saying that a specific person who caught a potential terrorist, or created a life-saving medicine are underpaid. Just from a strategic perspective, I think asking folks whether they think individual federal employees are undervalued might be an effective way of asking those questions if your interest is in preserving federal pay--or raising it.