The head of the federal Office of Personnel Management, John Berry, has become unhinged by a few recent critiques of federal worker pay. Berry is an Obama appointee who apparently views his role as being a one-sided lobbyist for worker interests, rather than a public servant balancing the interests of taxpayers and federal agencies.

Here is an 11-minute audio interview with Berry on Federal News Radio on Friday, where he lashes out at USA Today, Washington Times, and the Cato Institute. Berry is defensive, emotional, and unwilling to accept that new data might indicate a possible problem with the underpaid federal worker thesis that is constantly pushed by the unions.

What do I mean when I say he is unhinged? An investigation by the USA Today found that in 83 percent of 216 occupations examined, federal workers earned more than comparable private-sector workers. Here is Berry’s response when asked whether he thinks the USA Today analysis is a good one: “It is absolutely not! It comes straight out of the Cato Institute!” But, believe it or not, the nation’s largest newspaper is not part of some libertarian plot.

The most troubling aspect of Berry’s performance is his deliberate effort to wrap himself in the flag and deny that anyone should even ask questions about federal workers during a time of national security concerns. It is strange that an Obama administration official would so vigorously use the Bush administration tactic of “waving the bloody shirt.”

Here are excerpts from the interview starting at 1:48 minutes and then 5:54 minutes (my transcription):

Interviewer: “There was a line in this [Washington Times] editorial, one of the first lines, it was the first line of the second paragraph, and that is: ‘Consider how much money a bureaucrat can make for successfully sitting at his desk for a year.’

Berry: …You know, this is the kind of, it’s just a denigration of public service and, and it is, there should be no place for it in our country… And to be denigrated and say that they’re bureaucrats sitting at a desk pushing paper there should be no place in American society for such hyperbole.

Interviewer: I wonder if this is something that comes because of the economy. Where is this upswell of anger coming from?

Berry: …And that’s why I just get steamed when I read something like this because it denigrates that incredible motivation, and like I said to denigrate those who even put their lives on the line day in and day out so that the rest of us and our children can be safe, there should be no place for it. And I think my hope is that a lot of people, not just me, will rise up and respond to this with the anger and the facts that it deserves. Because as long as people can get away with denigrating that level of service, then we are putting at risk the future of our country.”

Have you got Berry’s message? We simply cannot allow people to use their free speech rights to question the operations of government because that will undermine national security. So people need to “rise up” and get “angry,” grab their pitchforks, and head to the homes of anyone who dares question high government worker pay because it puts “at risk the future of our country.”

Good grief!

More from me on federal worker pay here.

(Thanks to Solomon Stein and Justin Logan)

In a highly symbolic gesture, the Federal Communications Commission published the executive summary of its “National Broadband Plan” in one of the most opaque formats going: It’s a PDF scan of a printed document.

This means you can’t cut and paste the bullet point that says:

“Increase civic engagement by making government more open and transparent, creating a robust public media ecosystem and modernizing the democratic process.”

Can an agency that publishes documents in inaccessible formats be relied on to deliver transparency? Did you know that this is Sunshine Week?! Let’s segue from symbolism to substance … 

That bullet and the many that accompany it explode the FCC’s proper authority and propose an industrial policy fit for . . . well, the industrial age—not that industrial policies were any good then.

The executive summary is 56 bullets broken into four sections, and six “goals” carefully crafted to avoid measurement with nebulous concepts like “affordable.” (We all want it, but affordability is subjective. Nothing is universally “affordable” while it bears a price tag.)

The one goal that is measurable is telling in its own way:

“Goal No. 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.”

(Why should it take broadband to monitor your energy consumption? Does the FCC plan to send out scanned PDFs of photos of your electric meter?)

Whether we should have a network-managed energy system or not, note how the Federal Communications Commission’s “broadband” plan would make it a player in the energy business. It would also be a player in health care. And education. And “economic opportunity.”

As to the latter, maybe the FCC has a leg to stand on. Expanding the current “universal service” tax-and-subsidy scheme would provide economic opportunity of a sort to the better lobbied firms in the telecommunications industry.

As I wrote before, in an even more summary way, “The Federal Communications Commission should be shuttered.” That’s still the gist of what I have to say about the “National Broadband Plan.”

Related to my post below on whether last-second shots with time expiring, while good for basketball, might be bad for governance, Steven Horwitz offers a compelling hypothetical in academic governance at Coordination Problem:

…Nonetheless, the leadership insists this curriculum change is crucially important to the future of the institution and if only the Faculty Senate would pass it and put it in place, the faculty and students would then realize just how good it is. In fact, the faculty leadership, working with the clear approval of the president and VPAA, are now scouring Roberts Rules of Order to find a series of sure-to-be controversial parliamentary maneuvers to get the Faculty Senate to approve the new curriculum without it ever going to the full faculty, and possibly without the Faculty Senate ever actually taking a clean vote on it. The president, meanwhile, is going around to students and alumni telling them how important this new curriculum is and, in the process, criticizing the faculty opponents by charging they have self-interested reasons for defending the status quo, even as the new curriculum proposal contains the aforementioned special deals for some of the faculty supporters.

The faculty as a whole and the student body continue to oppose the new curriculum by a consistent majority.

Having considered this hypothetical scenario, here are my questions for you my friends:

Would you consider this a legitimate way to pass a new curriculum? If the faculty leadership in conjunction with the administration were to ram this through by questionable parliamentary procedure and over the objections of a clear majority, do you think this new curriculum would have any legitimacy? …

• Alan Reynolds: The truth about health insurance premiums and profits.

• An overview of the many hurdles the health care bill still faces in the House.

• Study: Public schools dishonest about the true cost of education. This video explains it all in less than three minutes.

• Will conservatives ultimately oppose the war in Afghanistan? Join us for a lively discussion this Thursday at Cato featuring Joe Scarborough, Grover Norquist, Rep. Tom McClintock (R‑CA) and more. Registration free. Will be broadcast online live Thursday at the link.

• Podcast: “Documenting Human Rights Abuses in Venezuela” featuring Ian Vásquez. (Don’t tell Sean Penn.)

The Pentagon has informed Congress about another of its procurement projects that is plagued by cost overruns. In other news, the sun will rise and set today, and the pope is Catholic.

Pentagon officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that costs for the F‑35 Joint Strike Fighter have jumped more than 50 percent since the program began in 2001. Testifying before the committee, the Government Accountability Office noted that it has reviewed the JSF effort five times and the findings haven’t been positive:

We have consistently reported on the elevated risk of poor program outcomes from the substantial overlap of development, test, and production activities and our concerns about the Government investing in large numbers of production aircraft before variant designs are proven and performance verified in testing.

In our March 2009 report, we again noted development cost increases, additional delays in manufacturing and testing schedules, and the government’s increased financial risk from plans to increase procurement in advance of testing.

The GAO reports that just since 2007 the “total estimated acquisition costs have increased $46 billion and development extended 2 ½ years.” Incredibly, the GAO says that the Pentagon still “does not have a full, comprehensive cost estimate for completing the program.”

In private industry, it would be hard to imagine that a company and its contractors would put in such a poor performance, at least as a matter of routine, which it is with weapons procurement.

Bungled weapons procurement is not just the Pentagon’s fault. Congress is often at fault as well, as a Cato essay on cost overruns points out:

Still, Congress, not the Pentagon, deserves the main blame for cost overruns since it holds the purse strings. Rather than looking out for taxpayer interests, most members of Congress fight attempts to reduce defense spending in their districts, including spending on weapons that the Pentagon doesn’t even want.

Defense contractors exploit this parochial self-interest of legislators, and they skillfully spread out research and production work across many states and districts to maximize congressional support. The $70 billion F/A‑22 fighter program provides an example. The Washington Post noted in 2005 that the F/A‑22 “is an economic engine, with 1,000 suppliers — and many jobs — in 42 states guaranteeing solid support in Congress.” In 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates wanted to cancel further orders of the aircraft, but hundreds of lawmakers and state governors lobbied President Obama to keep the production lines going to preserve the 95,000 related jobs.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Comcast-NBC Universal merger, here’s a reason to: A good fight has broken out!

It starts with Mark Cooper, Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America, who testified against the merger to the House Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet on behalf of CFA, Free Press, and Consumers Union.

The merger has so many anti-competitive, anti-consumer, and anti-social effects that it cannot be fixed,” says Cooper.

Cato Adjunct Scholar Richard Epstein lays into Cooper’s testimony with aplomb: “Dr. Cooper has achieved a rare feat. The evidence that he presents against this proposed merger suffices to explain emphatically why it ought to be approved.”

And in a second commentary, Epstein ladles out another helping of humble pie to Cooper, concluding:

The cumbersome Soviet-style review process that Mr. Cooper advocates does no good for the consumers who he purports to represent. It only shows how far out of touch he is with the basics of antitrust theory as they relate to the particulars of the telecommunication market.

Maybe Cooper will have a rejoinder. But until then, I’ll just note that the best fights are the ones that your guy wins.

Last week, I posted a series of questions that I hoped would get supporters of ObamaCare thinking.

I received a brief response from the Center for American Progress’ Matt Yglesias on Twitter. The Guardian’s Sahil Kapur provided a thorough response, and even posed a question in return.

I appreciate Kapur’s effort, and plan to respond. But before I do, I wonder if he (or any other thoughtful ObamaCare supporter) would answer just a few additional questions:

• What does it say that Democrats are having this much trouble getting their health care legislation through Congress even after hiding 60 percent of its cost?
• What does it say that Virginia’s legislature, including its Democratically controlled Senate, has approved legislation blocking the Obama plan’s centerpiece? Or that 31 other states are considering legislation or amending their constitutions to do the same?
• What does it say that veteran and centrist health economist Alain Enthoven writes, “The American people are being deceived...the bills in Congress…do little or nothing to curb [health care] expenditures. When the American people come to understand that ‘reform’ was not followed by improvement, they are likely to be disappointed.”
• What does it say that some Democratic pollsters are in open revolt against ObamaCare?
• What do you make of Yuval Levin’s observation that, in order to enact ObamaCare, Democrats must “amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it”?
• What does it mean if Democrats decide that ObamaCare will die if it faces a simple, up-or-down, majority vote in the House?