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Editor's Note: Ned on Feds appears each Monday on GovExec.com. Ned Lynch brings to the column decades of experience in seven federal agencies and on Capitol Hill, most recently as a senior staffer on the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Service. We don't expect that our readers will always agree with Ned's opinions, but we hope he'll encourage a broad debate on key issues of interest to federal employees, managers and executives.

When the next President takes the oath of office on January 20, 2001, he will immediately benefit from the salary increase that was tucked into the Treasury-Postal Appropriations Bill during the 1999 session of Congress. As a result, the next President will be paid $400,000 annually, double the $200,000 salary that has prevailed since Richard Nixon was inaugurated in 1969. The Constitution prohibits changing a President's salary during a term of office, and Congress enacted no adjustment for more than 30 years.

This process of adjusting pay has multiple advantages. By establishing the pay scale in advance, it is not an issue during an election campaign. The constitutional prohibition prevents a sitting President from petitioning for a raise by currying favor with the Congress, while preventing a punitive Congress from inflicting personal damage on a President who incurs its wrath.

When James Madison proposed twelve amendments to the Constitution in 1789, one amendment would have barred the Congress from enacting a pay raise until an election intervened, thus making Representatives face the electorate before any raise took effect. Ten of these amendments (numbers three through twelve on Madison's list) are known as the Bill of Rights. Madison's congressional pay amendment, was finally ratified as the 27th amendment in 1992. Consistent with this amendment, Congress could bring itself under the same standard that governs the President by enacting an increase for itself that would also take effect in January 2001. It's not too late.

It would improve on current procedures, under which the Congress has chosen to retain a provision of the Ethics in Government Act of 1989, adopted before the Madison amendment was ratified, that denies Congress straight-forward pay increases in favor of periodic "cost of living adjustments" that violate the spirit and eviscerate the substance of the amended Constitution. Rather than vote for a pay raise that would become effective after the next election, the Ethics in Government Act authorizes COLAs, unless Congress specifically rejects this "non-raise" pay increase.

In what has become a biennial pattern, Congress allows the COLA to take effect in non-election years, then goes through the ritual of denying itself the backdoor pay increase during an election year - when voters might be more attentive. Apparently very few members of Congress have the confidence to go back and say to the voters, "I think that what I do for you deserves a $350,000 salary. And, if you don't think I deserve it, then vote for my opponent." Sadly, the ones who seem most self-assured in advocating such salaries are among the least deserving.

Congressional compensation is central to the pay structure for all federal employees, because members equate their monetary value to the public at the equivalent of Level II of the Executive Schedule - the compensation provided to deputy secretaries of Cabinet departments, and the heads of major agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Executive Schedule, in turn, functions as a cap on salaries for senior executives, and to the General Schedule.

Many senior executive positions deserve compensation above current levels, but not all of them. The salary compression that currently results from the congressional salary cap, however, leaves little room to identify the more deserving and provide additional compensation. The recent path of least resistance - creating agency-specific "personnel reforms" with fatter salaries for senior executives - is unlikely to produce a resolution that will satisfy many people. Congress finds time to restructure only about one IRS per year, so an agency-by-agency approach would stretch well into the next century. This would be the year to attempt a different approach.

First, Congress should raise its own salary, comparable to the level that it passed for the President last year. Perhaps it doesn't want to go all the way to $350,000, but $300,000 would be a reasonable number. It would still keep congressional compensation below the minimum salary for major league baseball, and the entrance qualifications are much stiffer.

Second, Congress should raise pay levels for Executive Levels I through III, and consider reducing several of the current Executive Level III agency heads to a new arrangement for Executive Level IV. A Cabinet secretary probably deserves annual compensation of $350,000, if the department should be retained at Cabinet level. Executive Level II could remain at the congressional equivalent of $300,000, with the positions remaining in Level III at $250,000.

Congress should simply get itself out of the business of establishing a single salary for all of the positions piled into the Executive Schedule at Levels IV and V. Instead, agency heads should be given responsibility for negotiating reasonable compensation packages for these subordinates, within a range of $150,000 to $200,000. Within each annual appropriation, the agency head could receive funds sufficient to pay each employee at this level at the midpoint of the range, and salary negotiations would shape the compensation package used to recruit the executives capable of the responsibilities.

Ideally, this reform would include the elimination of Senate confirmation of these positions, a change that would strengthen the management authority of the higher-level appointees while speeding the process of putting an administration together.

Congress does not have much time this year, but the challenge of developing effective compensation programs for senior officials deserves more serious attention than the current backdoor evasions of the Madison amendment. This is not the scope of change that should be deferred to a commission. It should be one of the core tests of congressional performance this year. There is no reason to spend another 30 years watching executive salaries creep up to the presidential level.

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