Pay for Performance

People who choose to make their careers in government are not in it for the pay, or so the popular wisdom holds. And indeed, Shawn Zeller's cover story on pay-for-performance reforms in the Senior Executive Service offers evidence that the 6,272 career SES members are motivated far more by the spirit of public service and the importance of their jobs than they are by the pay they earn.

That would distinguish them from many in the private sector, where pay is more important as a measure of worth and achievement. Now to be sure, many in the commercial world-from investment bankers to lawyers, doctors, nurses and journalists-also believe they are playing a vital role in building our society. And pay in some of these occupations, including journalism, can lag behind compensation levels in government. (A speechwriter at NASA, for example, can earn more than a Washington bureau chief for a provincial newspaper.)

Still, the point remains that you can't get rich in government. And for people in the SES, that has been particularly true. As Zeller reports, executive pay has grown by only 16 percent in the past decade. During the same period, pay in the General Schedule rose 28 percent. Salaries in the private sector, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment cost index, rose 37 percent during those 10 years. And evidence suggests that people at the top of the ladder, including corporate executives, did much better than that. A final statistic: The consumer price index increased by 25 percent over the decade, indicating that executives' standard of living has continued to decline.

SES reforms increase the salary cap from $145,600 to $158,100. There's a big range below-down to $105,000 in the new system. Now, most executives are clustered at the top, and so the maximum increase they can hope for is 8.5 percent. That's not enough to provide much added motivation, I would suspect. But SES members apparently don't mind and seem cheerful enough about the performance requirements that go with the new pay-for-performance system agencies are now devising. Or so they told us in an informal Web-based survey we conducted.

Good for them. They are doing tough jobs and don't mind being held accountable. That's essential because the measurement of program performance is going to be increasingly important to agencies' prospects. For a decade, little more than lip service has been paid to the Government Performance and Results Act. But extreme budget pressures, sure to result from record-setting deficits, will put programs under scrutiny as never before. Weak ones will fall by the wayside. Efforts to link executives' performance goals with the results of the programs they oversee can only help government improve the services it delivers. The SES seems to recognize that, to the credit of its members.

Before we uncork the champagne for everyone, though, let's take a look at the Navy Marine Corps Intranet project (page 32), where customer satisfaction is a key determinant of the contractor's pay. In the face of questions about the validity of the survey, why won't officials tell us how they are really measuring satisfaction? I'd say we've uncovered an accountability gap at NMCI Gulch.