Romney's View of Federal Pay

I'd like to draw your attention to -- if you haven't already seen it (and by the looks of it, many of you have) -- my colleague Tom Shoop's blog post on former presidential candidate Mitt Romney's withdrawal announcement. You can read the excerpt in Fedblog, but the gist is that government bureaucrats make too much money compared to their private-sector counterparts and that Americans should stand up to federal unions. Romney's comments have sparked a lot of heated responses from the federal workforce, to put it mildly. Please join the discussion and offer your viewpoint from an IT perspective.

As for the IT angle here? Federal IT executives and managers make far less than their private-sector counterparts. Top federal CIOs make in the neighborhood of $135,000. Private-sector CIOs running companies that rival the size of federal agencies make in the high-six-figure range, sometimes seven figures if they perform well enough to receive incentives. Differentials exist for lower level federal IT managers and their private-sector counterparts. Some CIOs in the private sector left their high-paying jobs to join the federal IT workforce out of a sense of duty, to serve the public. By doing so, they took huge salary cuts.