Republicans have seized on the salacious stories of a federal agency’s spending spree in Las Vegas and of Secret Service agents partying with Colombian prostitutes to punctuate the party’s central argument against President Obama, Democrats and big government: The federal bureaucracy is bloated by waste, corruption and fraud.
The twin scandals, erupting nearly simultaneously, help put a human face on issues at the heart of the Republican Party’s push to downsize government, making it easier for the party to convey its message to voters. Ronald Reagan benefited in a similar way in 1976 when he dubbed a Chicago woman busted for welfare fraud a “welfare queen” and used her example to paint the entire welfare system as corrupt, said Craig Smith, a speechwriter for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford.
“Like Reagan’s ‘welfare queen,’ this gives Republicans a terrific, telling example for an attack on cutting down government weight,” Smith said.
Obama is blaming the scandals on “a few bad apples” at the General Services Administration, which spent nearly $1 million on a lavish conference in Las Vegas, and in the Secret Service, where 11 agents are accused of hiring prostitutes while they were making security arrangements for Obama’s trip to Colombia.
In both instances, the federal employees involved — professional permanent staff within the bureaucracy rather than transient political appointees — were too low in the chain of command for Obama to know anything about their misconduct, White House officials said.
“Congress is just as culpable here as the president in terms of oversight,” at least when it comes to the GSA, said Jamie Chandler, a political scientist at Hunter College.
It’s not clear yet how much of the blame for the scandals the public will lay on Obama. But, said Smith, “whether he deserves it or not, any president gets hit for what happens on his watch.”
Republican lawmakers are suggesting that the scandals reflect a broader problem with waste and corruption within the federal government, fanning their argument for deeper cuts to social programs and cuts to the federal work force.
“There’s a culture problem,” said Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C. “There’s a more systematic problem than just a few bad apples.”
Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, lumped the GSA scandal in with what he called other wasteful Obama administration initiatives, including an economic stimulus package and a government-backed loan to a now-bankrupt solar panel maker, Solyndra.
“After wasting nearly a trillion dollars on a failed stimulus package, President Obama’s GSA decided to double down, spending another million dollars on a lavish taxpayer-funded getaway,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul.
The suggestion of widespread impropriety on the part of federal employees is not only putting Obama on the defensive. It’s also stoking Americans’ growing dissatisfaction toward the government and its work force, analysts said.
Federal employees say they are feeling the backlash.
“The reckless behavior of these individuals [in the GSA scandal] is a slap in the face to all rank-and-file federal employees who have taken cuts to their pay and retirement benefits these past several years in the name of deficit reduction,” said William R. Dougan, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. “Rank-and-file federal employees make sacrifices every day to get our country’s fiscal house in order, but episodes like this only undermine those sacrifices.”
