Two recent stories from the Houston Chronicle which deserve attention; one from today's paper which details the wasteful and potentially deadly bloat of bureaucracy in the Bush administration, and the second from a few weeks back noting gender disparity in White House salaries.
NUMERO UNO:
From today's H*Chron:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/politics/2723279
Government adding layer upon layer of bureaucracy
Such a buildup may seem absurd, but an expert says the ramifications can prove deadly
By PATTY REINERT
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Here's the latest on obesity in America: Your government is fatter than ever. Taller, too.
Paul Light knows this, and it bothers him.
"Government is like kudzu," he warns. "It's just going to grow and grow and grow unless you hack it down -- and you have to hack at it every day."
Light, a public service professor at New York University and a bureaucracy expert at Washington's Brookings Institution, takes a plodding walk through the federal telephone directory every six years. He measures government's height (the number of levels in the bureaucracy) and its width (the number of titleholders at each level).
Along the way, he records the proliferation of new and ever more cumbersome titles, such as deputy deputy assistant secretary and deputy assistant deputy administrator, not to mention chief of staff to the associate deputy assistant secretary.
Testifying about the Sept. 11 commission's report on Capitol Hill this week, Light said fat government is not only inefficient and costly. It can be deadly.
"The September 11th families continue to complain that nobody has been held accountable for the decisions made prior to September 11th, and my answer to them is that nobody canbe held accountable because it's impossible to know who did what," he told the Chronicle. "These hierarchies are so dense they not only frustrate efficiency and accountability, they seriously reduce government's ability to understand threats and information and to connect the dots as information flows through the hierarchy."
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Under the Bush administration, government has gained in both girth and height.
Don't blame homeland security or the war on terrorism, Light said.
Between 1998 and 2004, 14 federal departments added new executive titles. Treasury was the only department to flatten its hierarchy, dropping three executive titles. The Defense Department also eliminated three titles, but it created seven more, for a net gain of four.
NUMERO DOS:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/politics/2698257
July 25, 2004, 1:34AM
Bush salary list tilts toward men
But most on staff could make a lot more elsewhere
By DANA MILBANK
Washington Post
WASHINGTON - The president's men are doing very well. The president's women are doing slightly less well, but still not bad.
With new White House salary figures leaked to The Washington Post, and using a spreadsheet, Washington Post researcher Margot Williams determined that men in the Bush White House earn an average of $76,624 a year. Women earn $59,917 on average. That means Bush women earn about 78 percent of what Bush men earn.
As it happens, that's almost exactly the national average for the gap in pay between the sexes, although it's a good bit below the 88 percent for the nearly 1 million professional and administrative employees in the federal work force.
Also, the White House has the advantage of making all its hires from scratch after the 2000 election.
At the White House, the gap has nothing to do with wage discrimination: Women and men with similar titles receive similar pay. Rather, it comes from the dominance of men in high-end jobs; of the 17 White House staffers earning $157,000 -- the top of the pay scale this year -- 12 are men. That's roughly comparable to the 26 percent representation of women in the federal government's 7,000-person Senior Executive Service, according to the Partnership for Public Service.