The use of the word “sacrifice” by the political class is most frequent when the next election is most distant. The word is much in use these days. Some taxpayers who are not in a sacrificing mood insist that, in the lexicon of the political class, the word “sacrifice” means that citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it. Perhaps it was to counter such grumpiness that Clinton last week imposed “sacrifice” on the White House, as that word is understood when Washington is doing the sacrificing. Because Washington has adopted a stern moral tone about the citizenry’s past sins and coming penances, it is interesting to examine Clinton’s attempt to be exemplary with White House sacrifices.
Last autumn he promised a 25 percent cut in the White House staff. Last week, while slashing the fleet of White House cars from 108 to 104, he exempted from his staff cuts two large parts of the executive office of the presidency-the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the Trade Representative, which have between them 800 jobs. Then he cut to 1,044 from the total of 1,394 (exclusive of OMB and the Trade Office) that worked at the Bush White House on Election Day. However, the Bush staff was the biggest in history. Reagan’s was 785. So, having defined the White House staff narrowly, and having begun from an unusually high base line, Clinton trimmed 350 employees. But 117 of them have been on detail from other agencies, to which they will return. And the many consultants being hired by other agencies to serve Mrs. Clinton’s health care task force are not counted as White House staff.
All this will “save” $10 million, 5 percent of a $200 million budget. The $10 million “saved” will be spent on upgrading White House telephones and computer systems. The cuts are due by October. Meanwhile, the staff will grow as personnel workers are hired to hire new executive branch employees. In fact, Clinton may be the first president in recent memory to ask Congress, in his first six months, for a supplemental appropriation.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a Democrat in good standing, a historian of high stature and a member of President Kennedy’s staff, notes that since the explosive growth of staff under President Nixon, presidents’ wives have had larger staffs than FDR had while wrestling with the Depression, and vice presidents have had larger staffs than FDR had while waging a world war. But “tumescent” staffs (Schlesinger’s delicious description) seem normal to people with a weak sense of the past.
Self-styled “agents of change” often have their gaze fixed so firmly on the future that they have little sense of how much the federal government has recently changed. So they can hardly imagine, let alone undertake, serious change. So it is that Clinton, having been in government all his life, and now living in the belly of Leviathan, has ordered a piddling cut of one third of the 700 advisory boards and commissions that cost $150 million annually. He suggests a few that are expendable, such as the Advisory Panel for the Dictionary of Occupational Job Titles.
Today’s political class has been so socialized by, and is so acclimated to, today’s gargantuan government, that the class is incapable of stepping back and asking such obvious questions as: If the deficit is such a menace that “sacrifices” (beyond the Beltway) are imperative, should the federal government be running a railroad? Of course not. Sell Amtrak. Before taxpayers are compelled to work even more days each year for Washington, should not Washington stop subsidizing academics, playwrights, the price of ballet tickets, the television fare of the middle class? Terminate the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Rural Electrification Administration was born in 1935 when only 10 percent of rural America had electricity. By 1970, 98 percent did. Must the REA be immortal?
Thousands of such questions should be asked, and would be if the president were really an “agent of change,” rather than a conventional product of the political class. What we need is a president with a radicalism rooted in the past.
Until well into this century, the federal budget reflected a particular understanding of the Constitution. The budget dealt with a few fundamental undertakings–defense, revenue collection, public works that neither the private sector nor lower governments were able to provide. Today the budget reflects the federal government’s swollen sense of its purview and competence-its eagerness to promote prosperity, fine-tune “fairness,” administer “compassion,” nurture the arts and sciences, and so on, everywhere.
For about 150 years after the Founding, many political controversies at the federal level were apt to begin with debate about constitutional principle-whether the federal government’s enumerated powers entitled it to act in a particular field. Only after that came debate about the proper policy for that field. Today nobody-nobody-in either the legislative or executive branch believes that there is any subject, any sphere, from which the federal government is constitutionally excluded. However, the eclipse of that idea does not mean that prudence should not do what constitutional principle once did-restrain the federal government’s itch to be active everywhere, in the process discrediting itself and making a mockery of federalism.
A few days before Clinton trumpeted his $10 million White House “saving” that will be spent on the White House, the National Endowment for the Arts advisory council approved another $67 million in grants. And so it goes as Washington warns taxpayers that they must steel themselves to make “sacrifices.”
