Maggie's Farm

I'm one of those evil feds that makes around $120k. Shoot, I'm paid three times what the average private sector worker makes. What a swine, eh? I'm reasonably certain that I'll go back to private sector if forced to take a 20% paycut - going to be tough making the $1200/month law school loan, paying for the shabby townhouse and two crappy cars at that point. My less accomplished colleagues have left and seem to hire for about $250k on the low end. I have stuck with the job because investigating white collar crimes and abuses against the public committed by government employees, and sticking it to those SOBs is more satisfying than defending similar crimes in the private sector, though the government work is a lot less lucrative. It just happens to tickle me, to abuse the people who abuse The People.

I'm sure I could be easily replaced - there are probably many attorneys with ~10 years prior service as a federal agent, and >10 years practice in the white collar crimes area, with extensive IT and high level policy advising experience. We're a dime a dozen, really...

In all seriousness, we may want to consider actually comparing the job classifications of Feds, and not running too far with that "Feds are paid more than civilians" talking point that Mark Tapscott is getting so much mileage out of. Some feds are paid more than their civilian counterparts, but most aren't and the agencies are getting pounded for not being able to hire decent technical staff. For instance, you've got a law degree or your CPA or masters in computer science, and prior military or law enforcement experience, the FBI is happy to take you on, as a GS-10. That's about $50k/year. You know many people with a CPA or JD willing to try to live in Manhattan or D.C. on $50k? You can do it, but it ain't pleasant; that's a cut above post-internship salary for a kid with a bachelor's degree. It would also help if we didn't conflate California's ridiculous situation, and the non-unionized white collar high level professionals who work for the fed gov. Few federal employees above GS-13 are unionized; most of us are some type of at-will employee, primarily because we are paid to exercise independent professional judgment and to make policy / decisions - docs, lawyers, CPAs, senior law enforcement managers, etc. Adding insult to injury, the Executive Branch is regularly getting hammered by the Inspectors General and the GAO for a failure to hire and retain top technical (IT, mathematics, engineering, science) talent. Oddly enough, bringing salaries in line with the private sector - or at least 2/3ds of the way - seems to help. Who do you want administering your SSA benefits - a new GS-9 or a GS-14 hired away from a big company's IT department, who took the wage cut in exchange for better hours and a cool mission? Serious question, I'm not being snarky there. You want the skilled people, they don't come free because skilled people have options.

Whack-a-fed is an easy game to play, but few people want to take on the big problem which is killing redundant programs, or cutting entitlements. Medicare/Medicaid/Obamacare is going to swallow the entire budget, if Social Security doesn't eat it first. But you guys are going to make cutting my salary a priority? I guess I'm pleading with the alligator to eat me last, but I think it's a valid point. If you let Congress construct this huge administrative state, who do you want running the difficult bits - really qualified people, or a bunch of low-paid monkeys who don't give a crap? You want to get rid of us, cool, I'll land on my feet, but you should probably do it by shutting down programs first, then getting rid of me, rather than by getting rid of me and letting the zombie badly run program live on. I'm going to support libertarians and conservatives no matter what, but seeing the world from inside the People's Republic of Wonkery it's pretty clear to me that whack-a-fed will be a nice political feather in the Republicans' cap but it ultimately won't do a damn thing to shrink the reach or expense of federal government; gotta kill programs if you want to do that but I think the R establishment thinks you'll settle for some symbolic fist-raised-at-an-angry-sky sorts of gestures.

Our benefits are good compared to small business, decent-not-great compared to big business. The retirement plan for federal law enforcement officers is pretty good - better than most state & local departments, with an early retirement at a high percentage of salary. They lock horns with MS-13 or AQ or organized crime or get shot at across the border from Mexico regularly, and frankly I don't begrudge them that. Retirement for old school federal civil servants was really high - around 50% pay if you did 30 years. That made sense when salary was nothing near market levels. Salaries are now near market levels, so most newer non-law enforcement feds (post '91?) get( (years of federal service) x (average of top three years' base pay)). So a CPA who maxed out at $100k in the last three years of his career before retiring after 30 years would be eligible for $30k/year. That is a pretty good deal, not great though and you can't live in the DC or NY or LA area on that post-retirement; you have to move. It's also nothing like the scandalous mid-six figure stuff we've heard coming out of California and New York.

I think the reason most of the feds I know well - senior attorneys and enforcement types - do the job is because they care about the mission, doing the people's work. Yeah, even the really liberal ones think that way, though there version of what the people need usually diverges from my own when talk about areas outside their core professional competency. The thing you need to ask yourself is if the stuff they ask us to do is simple, and if it can be done more cheaply by lower paid talent. In a lot of cases, you probably can find a cheaper administrator; it's just that you'll have trouble hiring them in the big markets because where the median household salary is $70k, that's what accountants and project managers of rudimentary skills will work for. It's hard to get even mediocre white collar talent in a big market like D.C. unless you're offering fairly high pay by the rest of the nation's standards - and yes, some of the jobs out in the boondocks are graded as if they were D.C. jobs, rather than jobs for which high mid-grade pay would be perfectly adequate and reasonably competitive w/t private sector employers. As for good white collar talent - I think I'm topnotch at what I do and the only reason for me or somebody like me to take a fed job is because the mission is really worthwhile. I will point to some friends of mine, attorney pals who work at DOJ who left extremely lucrative big firm partnerships - these are $600k - $1.5m / year jobs - to work as $135,000/year attorneys at DOJ. Sounds high, but that is equivalent in lifestyle to maybe $80k in most of the rest of the country. These guys work close to the same hours as they did with Dewey Cheatham & Howe, do the same work, and more than a few of them gave up over a million a year (when the firm is doing alright) to do it. You can kid yourself and think you can hire a GS-11 or GS-12 attorney right out of law school and they will do just fine running a Microsoft antitrust case or to defend the U.S. against a tort claim by some anti-U.S. foreign government, but at the end of the day, I don't think that will work very well.

Truly, if you want to cut the fed payroll, the right way is to cut the programs employing all of us, and then have reductions in force. Cutting the payroll without eliminating the mission will only ensure, in many cases, that you get less qualified (experienced, judicious, credentialed) people doing the exact same work. I cringe to think about the messes that will cause.