Question Not, but Enjoy

Has Scrooge met Tiny Tim and been won over at last? President Reagan announced this week that federal employees will get Friday, Dec. 26, off as a federal holiday so that they can enjoy a four-day Christmas weekend with their families.

Has the President gone soft on the bureaucracy, or has he learned over the past 20 years that there’s nothing like a little benevolence now and then to win the hearts, and maybe even the minds, of the Civil Service?

It was just about 20 years ago that a freshman California governor asked California state bureaucrats to labor on their Lincoln and Washington birthday holidays to help the state solve a budget crisis. The Ronald Reagan appeal was met with a notable number of empty desks on those two days.

We’ll not wonder if White House ghosts have been rattling chains, or suggest that the President is getting to be an old softy these days. Question not, but enjoy, federal workers. But the President should realize, too, that after the yule log has burned and all the leftover turkey has been devoured, there will come a cold day in January when he must submit his new federal budget. And then some of those same bureaucrats will remember Dickens’ words: “Oh, but he was a tightfisted hand at the grindstone. Scrooge!”