It started in the first month of his presidency, when he included $300 billion in tax cuts in the stimulus without extracting any Republican concessions in return. He followed earlier this year by announcing a three-year freeze in non-security discretionary spending, a goal of Republican so-called deficit “hawks”. (They now insist on cuts to the 2008 level of spending.)

During negotiations over climate change legislation, Obama gave in to Republican demands for expanded offshore drilling, incorrectly assuming that conservative support for such legislation would then grow. Republicans gave nothing in return, and hope for climate change legislation has since collapsed. In an ironic twist, only a few weeks after the president’s announcement, an oil rig exploded in Gulf of Mexico, beginning what would become the infamous BP Gulf oil spill.

Only last week, Obama conceded to yet another Republican demand, again without eliciting any compromises from the other side of the aisle, when he called for a temporary pay-freeze for the federal work force.

Besides being an ineffective negotiating tactic, the pay freeze announcement is bad policy.

Capping government worker pay does not change the amount of work that the government must carry out; it merely changes the quality of the work. By refusing to pay federal workers what they deserve, the nation will lose the high quality thinkers that we are in desperate need of at this critical point in our history. (And where do those talented college graduates go? To work in the bowels of Wall Street.)

The Clinton administration is a case study for what happens when the federal government tries to do the same job with a less effective workforce. Clinton cut the number of federal workers substantially, but the smaller workforce couldn’t handle the workload. This led to a massive surge in the number of private contractors employed by the government. Spending on contractors more than doubled in the six years following the end of the Clinton administration.

Remember Blackwater, the trigger-happy private military contractors that quite possibly committed war crimes in Iraq when they lit up a plaza full of civilians in 2007? These are the private contractors that government work is being outsourced to.

Not only are such private contractors at least as expensive, they don’t necessarily provide higher quality service and more importantly, are totally unaccountable. Blackwater, for example, got off scot-free for that 2007 murder of 17 Iraqi civilians. They’ve since changed their name to Xe Services to avoid the negative publicity.

Besides resulting in increased dependence on private contractors, the pay freeze will not come close to making a dent in deficit. The savings over the next two years would be $5 billion, not even nickels and dimes when the combined deficit of the next two years will be in the range of $1-2 trillion. On the other hand, extending the Bush tax cuts for the highest income levels, a top Republic priority, would cost over $100 billion in the same time frame.

And, contrary to popular belief, federal workers are not overpaid. Federal workers do take home larger salaries than the average American, but this is only because they are older and more educated than the average American. In fact, when compared to private-sector counterparts with the same level of education and same work experience, the federal workforce is underpaid.

According to all reports, Obama is on course to again concede to Republicans, this time on the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The President needs to get his act together and to drive for hard negotiations with his opponents instead of continuing to unilaterally throw bones to the other side.

Federal workforce pay would be a good place to start.