Public servants? Free shoe shines and hair cuts on our dime.
Via Weekly Standard:
The barbershop of the U.S. Senate has run deficits of approximately $350,000 a year for each of the last 15 years. So Senate sergeant at arms Terry Gainer has decided to try out a new model, one that has looked rather unfashionable during the Obama era: privatization.
Gainer has tried to trim Senate Hair Care Services for the past few years. Now the political climate troubling everyone else on Capitol Hill is allowing him to move faster than he anticipated towards privatizing it completely.
“I’ve accelerated my goal to get there through leveraging sequestration,” Gainer explains. “The only real way we’re going to change this thing around without pricing ourselves out of the market is by reducing the number of fulltime employees.”
The sequestration’s required spending cuts provide convenient cover. Gainer is offering early retirement to all eligible employees, hoping to replace them with independent contractors. Four employees have already accepted the offer, and they plan to retire in the next 60 days. Gainer likens these “buyouts” to those that corporations often make. He has no timeline for complete privatization, but is determined to see it through.
If previous efforts to end taxpayer funding of the Senate barbershop are any guide, it will take much longer than one might expect. According to a report from the Office of the Sergeant at Arms, Senator Paul Douglas (D-Ill.) spoke out against the federally funded barbershop back in 1951, suggesting that taxpayers need not pick up the tab for their legislators’ haircuts. Arizona senator Carl Hayden quickly rejected Douglas’s efforts, gaining support by arguing that the barbershop was an important institution passed down from the great statesmen who came before them.