At a news conference last Friday, President Obama claimed that, “starting tomorrow,” the “folks cleaning the floors at the Capitol” had “just got a pay cut” because of the automatic federal spending cuts known as the sequester.The president very quickly earned Four Pinocchios for that statement, especially after senior officials at the Architect of the Capitol (AOC), the federal agency that employ janitors on the House side, and the office of the Sergeant at Arms (SAA), which employs janitors on the Senate side, issued statements saying the president’s comments were not true.
Still, the White House has kept up its spin offensive, claiming that a cut in “overtime” was a de facto pay cut and thus the president was right — or at least not wrong.
So, we wondered: How much overtime do Capitol Hill janitors actually make?
The Facts
First of all, we should note that the White HouseÂ’s story kept evolving as we reported last weekÂ’s column. ItÂ’s almost as if the presidentÂ’s aides had to scramble to come up with reasons why the president could be correct, without actually knowing the facts.
So, when we forwarded to White House aides an AOC memo saying no furloughs were planned, White House aides latched onto a line about overtime reductions. For a couple of hours, we were also told that the janitors were on contract — and contracts were being curtailed. But that line of reasoning turned out to be incorrect. Then, after the statements from the Capitol were issued, there was no longer any response.
But, as seen by the quotes above, the talking point about “overtime” did not fade away.
The WaPo completely dismembers the White House staff and - to a lesser degree - their fearless leader. Conclusion:
The Pinocchio Test
We don’t try to play gotcha here at The Fact Checker. When Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) was ridiculed for saying last week that 170 million jobs would be lost because of the sequester, we dropped our inquiry when we realized she had corrected her statement — to the official Congressional Budget Office estimate of 750,000 jobs — later in the same news conference. Everyone makes mistakes, and that’s understandable.
The quicker the mistake is cleaned up, the better. As Education Secretary Arne Duncan showed this week, a little humility, even a bit late, can be a good thing.
But a clean-up brigade shouldn’t simply try to deflect and obfuscate. Apparently, the president assumed — incorrectly — that the janitors on Capitol Hill would get a pay cut. Rather than admit an error, White House aides doubled down on their talking points about overtime being essential to their livelihood, without actually knowing the truth.
Clearly, the sequester is hurting segments of the government and will cut the pay of some government workers. It would be better to focus on those people rather than imaginary victims.