Big bucks are paid to high-ranking officials, despite agency complaints that money is tight. One example found by The Washington Post: Before paying $48,823 in cash bonuses to its chief of regulatory affairs in 2005, the FDA asked Margaret Glavin to sign a simple declaration: “If I am unable to receive a retention allowance, I am likely to leave the federal government for a higher paying position in the private sector.”

No specific job offer was detailed, but the payment was made. Over the past 4 1/2 years, she collected more than $178,000 in cash bonuses on top of her $159,840 annual salary. FDA officials justified this by saying her pay should be close to the salaries of those employed by companies she regulates, namely Washington lobbyists, according to an analysis by the Post.

The private-sector comparison has prompted large cash bonuses for top FDA officials to quadruple since 2002, to $13.6 million in 2005, according to FDA officials and salary information provided to Congress. The payments, which have attracted bipartisan criticism from lawmakers, offer an unusually detailed look at how the administration has implemented a cash bonus program that Congress expanded in 2004 to attract and retain talented federal employees, the Post writes.

Lawmakers say many of the FDA bonuses went to the highest-paid officials rather than scientists, inspectors and doctors most at risk of jumping to the private sector. To critics, the Post reports, the payments bore little relationship to the FDA’s performance and reputation or to the likelihood that someone might depart. Agency officials disagree and call the program a success.

But the FDA investigator who won the agency’s top national award last year received a much smaller bonus. “I was nominated for a cash award for $2,500, but after taxes I got just $1,400,” says Rebecca Parrilla, a chemical engineer who’s worked at the FDA for more than eight years and was unaware how much her bosses in Washington were collecting in bonuses.

In fact, the bonuses have disproportionately gone to those who already have large salaries (look below for a nifty chart)…

The House committee’s analysis of FDA bonus data shows that 33 of the most senior career managers - who earn more than $165,000 a year because of their special talents and experience - received a total of $900,000 in bonuses last year.

Federal workers in Washington make an average of about $88,000 a year. As a result of the bonuses, scores of FDA managers and employees earn double that and more - pay in some cases greater than that of members of Congress, federal judges and Cabinet secretaries, according to the data shared with Congress.

The bonuses appear to have spiked in 2005 - to $13.6 million, from $7.2 million in 2004 - when the embattled Lester Crawford was fighting to win and then keep his job as FDA commish. One program aimed at doctors accounted for $4 million of the increase, the FDA records show. The commissioner’s office - which mostly includes policy officials and not practicing scientists - nearly doubled the amount of its retention bonuses, from about $415,000 in 2002 to nearly $800,000 last year, the data also show.

Glavin, an English major who rose through the ranks of the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service before joining the FDA in 2003 as assistant commish for counterterrorism policy, collected $44,614 in bonuses in 2006 alone, according to the records. That accounts for 11.1 percent of all the cash bonuses exceeding $5,000 that were awarded to her entire 3,500-employee Office of Regulatory Affairs.