In late April, after a bruising battle in which he was forced to fend off a series of challengers, Mitt Romney finally won a set of primaries that put him over the top in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. He stepped up to a microphone, thanked his supporters and then launched into his general election campaign against President Obama with a speech attacking the “unfairness” of many of the president’s policies.
High on Romney’s list was the compensation of federal employees.
“We will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve,” he declared. Of President Obama, he said, “Government is at the center of his vision. It dispenses the benefits, borrows what it cannot take, and consumes a greater and greater share of the economy.
“This president is putting us on a path where our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards, commissions and czars,” Romney added. “He’s asking us to accept that Washington knows best—and can provide all.”
With those words, Romney set the stage for this fall’s election, putting the issue of the size and scope of government front and center. That issue is divisive, to say the least, especially for the people who work in government. A brief story on Romney’s comments drew more than 700 comments on GovExec.com in a discussion that went on for weeks.
The size-of-government issue also tends to put Obama on the defensive, because, as Editor at Large Timothy B. Clark points out in this issue of the magazine, the debate over how much government we should have, how we should pay for it and how much the people who work for it should be compensated is playing out not only at the federal level, but in states and localities across the country.
For those not familiar with Tim’s work, he brings a lot of experience to bear in analyzing where government is headed, having spent decades observing its operation at all levels. In the 1970s, Tim founded Empire State Report, a monthly magazine covering New York’s government. He later worked at Congressional Quarterly and was among the founders of National Journal. He became editor of Government Executive in 1987, and eventually served as its publisher and president as well.
During that time, Americans’ attitudes toward their government have waxed and waned, as the polling data featured in Tim’s story show. But since 2008, when the economy entered into a downward spiral that it has struggled to pull out of, waning has won the day. As a result, government is shrinking.
More than 600,000 public sector jobs have been eliminated since the start of the recession. Most of those cuts have been implemented at the state and local levels, where the economic crisis has devastated the tax base—and where public officials, unlike their federal counterparts, lack the ability simply to borrow or print money to fill gaps.
But now the cuts have hit the federal sector too. In advance of looming budget reductions scheduled to take effect automatically at the beginning of 2013 in the absence of a major budget deal, federal agencies have begun to trim their workforces. From June 2011 to June 2012, the federal government shed 52,000 workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That may be just the beginning. Because in this year’s presidential race, Americans will be presented with a stark choice about how much government they want—and what they’re willing to pay for it.
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