The problem is the FBI uses mostly the same GS pay scale as the rest of the federal government. So if the pay stinks for them, it also stinks for every other government agency.
And that’s a much bigger problem then Mulder and Scully not making rent.
And that’s a much bigger problem then Mulder and Scully not making rent.
This is the same problem with violent and criminal cops - the lawsuits against the department are paid by taxpayers, not the offenders.
The people who make these bad decisions aren’t wasting their own money - they’re wasting the money taken from you and I by force. They have no incentive to stop wasting it.
This isn't some avocado toast incident, not matter how much such a simple budget you understand
All of these pay limits are capped by Senator's pay of $180k ish.
No Senator (or House Member) is going to vote for typical FBI agents to have higher salaries than themselves. What we're seeing here is the American people refusing to give pay-raises to our executive class / leadership class, and then the natural degradation of our leaders and pay-scales all the way down the chain.
We're well past due of giving Senators / House members a proper pay raise. Maybe then we'll actually have smart people running for these important positions again.
> The people who make these bad decisions aren’t wasting their own money - they’re wasting the money taken from you and I by force. They have no incentive to stop wasting it.
No Congressman or Senator will think that FBI pay raises would be fair, when they themselves aren't allowed a pay aise to a sufficient level.
Top end executive level FBI (ex: FBI Head) will be close to Congressional pay or maybe just a little above that.
Then, the rest of the GS scale builds down from there. By the time we get to starting salaries, its insufficient.
Conversely, you could 10x the salary and no more people would try for the job.
The paycheck simply isn’t a significant factor in whether or not someone wants to be a senator or representative.
1. For those where this is true, this is a MAJOR problem.
2. For those where this is false, this means that we're underpaying lawmakers severely.
> The paycheck simply isn’t a significant factor in whether or not someone wants to be a senator or representative.
Should it? I think the primary pay of Senators / Representatives should be their paycheck. Not dark money pools from who knows where.
You're basically accepting blatant corruption as if its inevitable. Erm... no. Lets raise salaries so that Congressmen can take up two houses across the country (one at home for their families, and a 2nd home in the Wash. DC area so they can do their job). And then increase the wages high enough so that "normal people" apply for the position.
Its not like the uber-rich, the independently wealthy, or the paid off bribed people are who we want as Congressmen or Senators. We actually want normies.
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Once Senators / Congressmen are at like $300k, which is high but reasonable IMO given the overall budget of the country, then we can work on the GS scale and Executive scale as appropriate. The FBI Director making only $180k can be raised to $300k, and then the layman FBI agent can rise above $70k.
The GS Payscale is a fine idea but only when the top-of-the-ladder truly represents the top. And not "top for government employee" but "top for the country", so that we're actually offering competitive wages and attracting solid talent in all areas of government.
The corruption does feel inevitable here as we sit and watch the federal gov rob the country blind while shamelessly enriching their families. No, I wouldn't take a rep's job for even $500k/year, and neither will anyone with the moral mettle to make changes, exactly because they can see the impossibility.
More money is not a solution to greed and self-dealing.
Less money causes self-dealing behavior though. Because now there's widespread acceptance that the only way a $180k wage is worthwhile for our leadership class is if they take widespread bribes.
Drop the wages enough, and even FBI agents are going to have to self-deal to make their positions worthwhile taking. Be glad its only on the leadership class for now.
> Or we could just abolish representative government that was created to work around limitations in the predominant communication tech at the time, horseback.
That's not a serious discussion point until you say what you're replacing it with.
My discussion point is pretty simple. Raise wages on the top-end scale of government (ex: Senators, Congressmen, and executives like FBI Director) to $300k, raise the top end GS-scale to $280k, and let the rest of the GS scale flow naturally from that down to the bottom.
As I said before, the GS system and overall compensation of the government is actually fine. Its just that the top-end number is far too low, in part because of our ridiculously low wages that we grant to our top-level officials.
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> No, I wouldn't take a rep's job for even $500k/year, and neither will anyone with the moral mettle to make changes
I'd maybe consider it. But $180k is so low that I'd never consider it.
Contracts are gigantic and allow people to make great salary at a very low bar (because the bar is set by the low skill GS workers). What if I told you developers writing stuff like jquery, excel, ms access are making between 200-300$/yr. and I wont even get into what experienced people make. Basically the "official" system the one people see in public is extremely broke. What is crazy is I will see people say how high those GS salaries are, and then just chuckle if they ever really knew.
What is the alternative though? These orgs can't fall back to their GS paid workers, because they don't have the skills..so they are stuck. GS really does have to get a massive bump, and I fear anyone who thinks otherwise just lacks the experience in the matter, and I wouldn't expect them too because there's so many details that are unseen.
None of our bosses take anything less than what I'm asking for here. If anything, the numbers I've mentioned are lower than people should expect.
I think you have cause and effect mixed up. These positions would come with millions of dollars per year in job perks even if they paid $10M cash per year.
The perks come from the power, not the size of the paycheck. Making it bigger won’t reduce the financial value of the power they wield.
Also, even if it would, $300k is not a lot of money. You’re off by at least one order of magnitude.
For example, the CEO of Mozilla makes around $7M per year.
NIST is trying to start up an AI wing with "accelerated" pay scales to attract talent. But even if they come in at the maximum allowable salary (~$317k), it's still about 600k short of being able to woo employees from OpenAI.
It’s only a problem if you want the government to be spending even more money. They already spend approximately 1/3 of the GDP and that’s plenty big enough for many. If they want to pay people more, change the denominator.
For Congress specifically, I’m in favor of raising salaries to $1M/year while simultaneously taking a zero tolerance policy on all lobbyist funded excursions. That’ll attract plenty of honest folks as the base salary would be more than enough.
People would still love to hire someone with experience in the highest rungs of government and it would decrease the negative influence of lobbyists on currently serving members.
I don't think the scandal would be the main concern. The main concern would the life imprisonment that treason/spying, when discovered, usually leads to.
The only way to stop corruption is to make the incentive structure altogether unattractive. Singapore, for example, has done a world class job doing so and has one of the lowest corruption rates in the world.
So it's a bit bigger of a problem when you're talking about government jobs with large security concerns.