One of the unfortunate legacies of the cold war, courtesy of President Truman, was the loyalty oath. It was mandatory for all government workers. Truman's reasoning was that on-the-record loyalty would scare off many of those communists trying to take over the country while giving the government leverage to punish workers who performed in un-American ways.

The loyalty oath is back, dressed as a dollar sign. The Bush administration has approved giving cash bonuses of up to $25,000 each to the almost 2,000 political appointees in the federal work force. Many of the 1.7 million civil servants on the federal payroll receive bonuses, but bonuses to political appointees were banned during the Clinton administration because of the way they were used as favors in the first Bush administration.

Restoring the practice opens the door to ethical and financial abuses, of course. Such bonuses are entirely subjective, depending on the whims of department secretaries or even the White House as opposed to the kind of job-performance criteria that apply to regular civil service jobs. But the practice will also create a rift between political appointees and civil servants, because the pool of money available for bonuses is unchanged. Employees will compete for the bonuses, which can then be used as tests of loyalty. Those who toe the party line get them. Those who don't, won't. Call it loyalty for cash.

The administration doesn't agree, seeing bonuses in the context of "results-oriented government," or just another management method. "Political employees should be judged and rewarded in the same manner as career employees," a memo from the Justice Department stated in defense of the new practice. But the memo misses the point. A political appointment is the bonus. It circumvents the civil services' normal pathways to plum and powerful jobs because its chief criteria are not professional abilities, necessarily, but friends in high places. It is patronage by another name.

Both parties accept the practice. Loyal party operatives have to be rewarded, and many levers of power in the federal bureaucracy have to be manned by politically dependable employees. But both parties also recognize that political appointments are fundamentally different from career service jobs because of the ways they can be used (or misused) by the administration in power and because they are temporary. That's why a federal law bans bonuses to political appointees during the eight months preceding presidential elections (when an appointee's overtime and zeal may have nothing to do with running government). That law is still in effect for now, so is the ban on any kind of appointee bonuses in at least some federal agencies, where department secretaries are rightfully uncomfortable with restoring the old practice.

Buying loyalty aside, the administration's motive is easy to discern when the cash-bonus decision is seen in the context of the recent presidential order to open more than half the federal work force to competition from the private sector. If the loyalty of career service employees cannot be bought, their job security can at least be threatened, or the jobs themselves more easily filled with friends and supporters of the reigning administration.

One way or another patronage is making a big comeback. Loyalty may follow. Good government won't.

© 2002 News-Journal Corporation

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