Editor's Notebook

EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK

Dear Readers:

As it became apparent that a second government shutdown would put pay at risk during the holiday season, some people took out home equity loans to tide them over. Some offered loans to secretaries in their office, paid from their own pockets. As the shutdown stretched into its fourth week, at least 100,000 federal employees applied for unemployment insurance. Mortgage payments were at risk, bills were going unpaid, and those who live from paycheck to paycheck were suffering. Promises were being made in Congress that people would eventually be paid for not working, and so the short-term financial damage for employees stood to be redressed. But the greater and longer-term damage was to the reputation of government and the morale of its work force, and that could not be remedied so easily.

It was evident as the furlough wore on that the plight of federal workers was of precious little concern to the country's political leadership. Only when the shutdown began to have visible consequences for people and businesses in the private sector did the politicians begin to flinch. The Clinton Administration spread the word about such consequences. OMB on Jan. 2 issued a nine-page list of examples of reductions in services flowing from the shutdown. Still the impasse continued. And some influential House Republicans weren't flinching at all. House Republican Conference Chairman John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, on Jan. 4 acknowledged that federal workers and beneficiaries of federal programs might be suffering, but added that "there are 260 million other Americans . . . facing another crisis" involving higher interest rates and lower economic growth as a result of continuing federal borrowing. As if to endorse Boehner's point, The Washington Post reported on Jan. 5 that every American family would benefit by about $1,000 a year if the government does stop running up its debt.

Even after the prolonged shutdown finally ended in early January, it left open the question of the essential worth of federal work. Only workers deemed essential, important, excepted-you pick the word-were allowed to report to work. The rest, more than a third of the 475,608 people in agencies without appropriations, weren't working. The Justice Department, with 87 percent of its employees excepted from furlough, could be seen as doing the most "essential" work. EPA, with 96 percent of its work force laid off, was at the bottom of OMB's major-agency essentiality ranking.

The worth, the pay and the permanence of federal employment all are called into question by developments of the last year. Employees must think anew about how government is likely to operate in the future, and about their own careers.

--Timothy B. Clark
Editor and Publisher, Government Executive