Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 29, 1993 TAG: 9311260206
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: EXTRA-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JANE BRYANT QUINN WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
An organization called the U.S. Savings Bonds Foundation was formed recently to promote the savings bond program. The group claims savings bonds are in imminent danger of extinction.
Thanks to the foundation's efforts, its recent letter said, this frightful peril has been averted, but "the crisis is not over." Would I please send my generous tax-deductible contribution to help save the savings bonds that we all know and love?
In fact, the savings bond program is not in danger of extinction. What is in danger are the jobs of some of the people who sell the bonds. They were targeted during Vice President Al Gore's Reinventing Government investigation as employees the government might do without. The Veep's advisers thought the savings bond program might be handled in a more efficient way.
This tax-exempt foundation, then, is raising money to fight cuts in government bureaucracy (to prevent the "immediate danger" that jobs will be abolished, the letter says). It is masking its purpose behind the inflammatory claim that, if the bureaucrats go, your savings bonds go with them.
And last Wednesday Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen announced plans to merge the Savings Bond Division into the Bureau of Public Debt and the elimination of five of nine political jobs at the U.S. Mint.
"The Bureau of Public Debt is responsible for every aspect of the savings bonds program except marketing," Bentsen said in a statement. "The Savings Bond Division handles that.
Bentsen also said he planned to send legislation to Congress to replace political appointees in charge of the four Mint field offices with career civil servants. The Mints are in Philadelphia, Denver, San Francisco and West Point, N.Y.
The savings bonds foundation's fund-raising letter wasn't mailed to the general public, says the group's president, Thomas Anfinson, a former executive director of the Savings Bonds Division, but only to people connected with the savings bonds program. He says it wasn't a scare tactic, but he plans to "make the public aware any time the program is in jeopardy" - as it would be, he asserts, if the current structure for selling bonds is changed.
U.S. Savings Bonds are sold chiefly through banks and corporate payroll-deduction plans. To get institutions to offer them, the Treasury employs 220 workers in 62 field offices around the United States.
It was Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman's interesting idea that this marketing could be done by mail, phone, fax and travel, by 10 employees housed in the Bureau of the Public Debt.
That sounds to me like an idea worth trying.
Anfinson's goal, apparently, is to tie so many political knots around the program that no president will ever be able to change it. He says Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., is the "point guy" for legislation that would, among other things, give the program more congressional protection and end the Treasury's authority over the budget of the Savings Bond Division. Dreier's office didn't respond to questions.
The division, incidentally, has 62 official field offices but five extra "regional" ones, all located in cities where field offices exist already. "It's a turf thing," Anfinson acknowledges cheerfully. When some higher officials moved into the field offices, the local savings bond directors didn't like the supervision. So they and their secretaries moved somewhere else. The additional cost to taxpayers? Maybe $20,000, Anfinson claims, but that's "immaterial, compared with the total cost of operation," he says.
There's the bureaucratic mind: Keep all the jobs you've got already, add new offices and costs, get congressmen to protect you and make the public think you're advancing their interests. The world is full of organizations that deserve your money; the U.S. Savings Bonds Foundation isn't one.
by CNB