James P. Cochrane earns $250,335 annually as chief marketing and sales officer for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), making him the highest paid public relations employee of the federal government. The USPS lost $5.1 billion in 2016.

 

Right behind Cochrane is Stephen Katsanos, who pulls down $229,333 as a public affairs official for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). And the third highest-paid federal public relations employee is Titus Simmons, also of the FDIC, at $215,248, according to "Mapping The Swamp," a new report compiled by Open The Books, an independent nonprofit that tracks federal spending using the government’s own numbers.

 

These three individuals are among the 3,618 federal workers who get an average of $101,827 annually to put the best possible "spin" on government every day. That comes to $368.4 million a year. A big reason for such a huge sum is that 1,807 of the federal government’s public relations workers are paid $100,000 or more, up from 1,501 in 2012.

 

In fairness to Cochrane, the USPS is a semigovernment corporation and had to contribute $5.8 billion to pre-fund postal retiree health care costs. Without the pre-funding, the USPS would have shown a $200 million profit, according to official postal data. The pre-funding is the focus of an intense and long-running debate between USPS officials and Congress.

 

Even so, the 3,618 government spinmeisters are a tiny segment of the 1.97 million career federal civil servants the report tracks. The review doesn’t include more than 700,000 civil servants employed by the Department of Defense, any of the uniformed members of the U.S. military, or those working in the U.S. intelligence community.

 

"Mapping The Swamp" may be the most comprehensive and creative report ever compiled on the true size and cost of the federal government.