RENEGING

Excellent piece in today's WashPo about the effects of BushCo undermining the civil service:

New personnel regulations at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense will dramatically change the way 860,000 workers there are paid, promoted, demoted and disciplined. The plan is to spread the changes throughout all the land of federal government. No more automatic raises. No more simple pass-fail evaluations. No more Job for Life. The unions have taken it on the lip.

While the pay-for-performance changes won't take effect until 2009, workers are getting anxious. They don't know what their life will look like. And knowing what life would look like, after all, was always the point.

Gutting the civil service is one of these things that sounds fine to the Grover Norquist fan club, but it will have far-reaching repercussions.

Remember, it's always about cheap, unregulated labor with these Republicans. Everything else is just a cover story.
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