THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, December 21, 1995 TAG: 9512210010
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
It's time for Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary to consider other employment. She has committed conduct unbecoming a public servant at a time when heavy deficits make taxpayers especially sensitive to wretched excess.
First it was learned that O'Leary paid more than $40,000 to monitor the department's bad press. The better to manage her public relations. Your tax dollars at work.
The latest flap involves luxurious travel arrangements and bloated entourages. The secretary has apparently been flitting around the globe on chartered jets sufficiently posh to have once been used by Madonna. On at least one junket to South Africa, she was accompanied by a cast numbering over 50. O'Leary, that is, not Madonna. She should have been alone in coach.
The O'Leary extravagances are grist for the mill of those who like to grind on about government waste. But the O'Leary tale is news because it is so exceptional. Too many government bigwigs treat themselves too well at taxpayer expense, but few operate on the oil-sheik scale of O'Leary.
Jack Kemp, as Housing secretary, got a note from his doctor alleging his old football knee injuries required him to fly first class rather than jam himself in the cramped back of the plane with the rest of the cattle. That's a more normal level of finagling. O'Leary's gold-plated style is a whole 'nother ballgame.
In fact, the irony in the O'Leary case is not that she's been behaving like the typical government bureaucrat. She hasn't. She's been behaving like what she was before joining the Cabinet - a corporate executive.
Perhaps as a utility executive O'Leary got in the habit of spending thousands of dollars to monitor and research her company's bad press. As we learned in the aftermath of her case, it's the kind of thing quite a few CEOs have been known to do. Undoubtedly she got used to first-class travel and accommodations in the private sector.
O'Leary's error was failing to break the habit when she joined government and accommodating herself to the more austere lifestyle expected of public servants. The public pays for corporate luxury too, of course, but it stings less when hidden in the price of widgets, soft drinks or electric power.
When the champagne lifestyle is paid for by the tax dollars of folks on a beer budget, they are moved to fury. No surprise there! Making an example of O'Leary would send a useful message to others in government service and gratify long-suffering taxpayers. Downsizing government ought to entail not just cuts in programs and entitlements but cuts in conspicuous consumption by those who are running the show. by CNB