President Barack Obama boasted recently that he was going to freeze cash bonuses for political appointees in his administration.
“(L)ike households and businesses across the country, we need to make tough choices about how to spend our funds,” he wrote in a memo spelling out the bonus freeze.
The president said the move would save taxpayers roughly $1.9 million by halting new bonuses to about 2,900 people.
But at the very end of the Associated Press story announcing the freeze, there was this reminder: “The move does not apply to federal workers who are not political appointees.”
That’s important because the costly, well-compensated civilian federal workforce is rising to a stunning 1.43 million employees this year.
Freezing bonuses for a mere 2,900 of those employees is hardly the “tough choice” on the spending of federal dollars that President Obama claims it is. The real issue is the explosive growth of the federal government at a time when the private sector continues to lose jobs and when unemployment is painfully high.
If Mr. Obama wants to be taken seriously when he talks about cutting spending, it will take more than “just-for-show” freezes on a handful of federal employees’ bonuses.