From an article in the New York Times earlier this month, "Bush Restoring Cash Bonuses for Political Appointees":

The White House has decided that several thousand political appointees across the federal government will be eligible for cash bonuses, abandoning a Clinton-era prohibition that grew out of questionable practices in the first Bush administration.

Administration officials said the policy shift, ordered by the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., earlier this year but never publicly disclosed, seeks to correct the inequity of political appointees' working side by side with civil servants who routinely receive bonuses.

The new policy is being instituted at many federal departments, and a few agencies have already begun distributing awards of several thousand dollars each to political appointees. For example, the Justice Department has given bonuses to political appointees who were deemed to have played important roles in counterterrorism and the Sept. 11 investigation, officials said.

The policy is causing rumblings of discontent from some career officials. They say the policy threatens to reward employees for political loyalty and could force career civil servants to compete against well-connected political appointees for the millions of dollars in bonus money that their bosses distribute each year. The Bush administration did not help matters last week with the announcement that it was setting pay increases for career federal employees below what Congress was seeking.

[. . .]

The Bush administration has moved in recent weeks to place as many as 850,000 government jobs up for competition from private contractors. On Friday, the White House announced that the raise for federal civil servants next year would be 3.1 percent, lower than the 4.1 percent sought by Congress.

The administration's effort to reward political appointees threatens to increase tensions, particularly because civil servants will apparently be competing with appointees for the limited bonus pools, some civil service advocates said. Administration officials said no extra money was planned to pay for the political bonuses.