This week, the going rate to retain your job as Iowa Worker’s Compensation Commissioner became $36,000.

The rate to become President Pro Tem of the Board of Regents, Gov. Terry Branstad revealed, became some $115,000.

At least that’s what it looks like. After Commissioner Chris Godfrey refused Branstad’s request that he resign, his salary was cut by one third, to the minimum salary for his pay grade. And after the working relationship between the Governor and the Board of Regents was damaged, now-former President David Miles and President Pro Tem Jack Evans resigned their positions.

Branstad’s office cited hostility and a lack of cooperation from the regents, naming the approval of the Harkin Institute of Public Policy at Iowa State as a source of that hostility. But that is not a matter for the political process to decide.

While a governor is entitled — and now, expected — to ask for the resignation of department heads when he comes into office, positions such as commissioner for workers’ compensation and the Board of Regents should be insulated from political games and partisan action.

Some agencies are dedicated to pursuing specific public interests and ought to be exempt from political gamesmanship.

The regents are not political figures. They do not run for election, send out flyers, or call constituents. They do not cast votes on bills that become law for the whole state of Iowa. Their job is to improve the quality of higher education in the state. They are not supposed to enact whatever rules the governor or legislature want.

Since Branstad can request changes in law from the legislature, from workers’ compensation rules to the powers of the Board of Regents, his motives for appointing his own top campaign donors to office and then advocating their appointment to leadership are highly suspect. Similarly suspect is his decision to cut the salary of one man — Commissioner Godfrey — when the legislature could have made a more meaningful move.

In the Commissioner’s case, Branstad’s office said he disagreed with the policy direction of the Commission. Policy is changed by either rewriting laws or changing appropriations. Both those actions are accomplished by legislatures, not governors.

We have to ask, how can cutting the salary of Commissioner Godfrey alter the larger policy of his department? We should also ask whether that is what Branstad really wants. The salaries of Godfrey’s deputy commissioners were left intact, and, as far as we can remember, next to no mention of the Workers’ Compensation Commission was made in the news while the legislature was in session.

Branstad is entitled to make his own ideas about the executive direction of this state known to his department heads, and to ask the legislature for changes in policy and appropriations. But this arbitrariness smacks more of a desire to increase the governor’s power at the expense of other state executive departments and the legislature, and of Branstad’s desire to have his own way with state agencies.

One of the best things about Iowa’s constitutional arrangements is that certain executive offices, such as the position of Attorney General and Secretary of State, are filled independent of the Governor’s input. Others, such as the Board of Regents and Workers’ Compensation Commission, are appointed for terms that span multiple gubernatorial terms.

The whole rationale for having independently elected department heads, (and department heads with fixed terms of office that carry over from one election cycle to the next), is to allow officials to run their departments according to the laws the people of this state have enacted through their legislature. Such officials should never be  the instrument of one person’s will.