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Washington's budget hawks want to decimate the federal workforce to shrink the deficit. It will have the opposite effect.
But reforms like this almost never happen. Instead, what you usually get are demands like what we’re now seeing in Congress for across-the-board cuts in the workforce. This is often accomplished through attrition and incentives for early retirement. But the people most likely to walk away in those cases are the ones most confident of their ability to land a job in the private sector—in other words, often the best employees. Another method is to leave decisions about cutting up to the leaders of the agencies themselves. But as some veterans of Reinventing Government learned, that can have the effect of simply consolidating inertia in the managerial ranks. “Headquarters isn’t ever gonna cut itself,” says John Kamensky. “Headquarters cuts field.”
Ideally, the White House ought to be able to keep agencies from playing such games. But just as agencies lack the manpower and expertise to oversee their contractors, the White House strains to oversee the rest of government. The Office of Management and Budget is meant to be the eyes and ears of the executive branch. But with its staff of about 500, it is simply incapable of knowing what’s working and what’s not out in the labyrinths of the federal bureaucracy.
The paradox, then, is this: if the aim is to reform the civil service in order to put a lid on federal spending, what we really need are targeted increases in the federal workforce. A wise first move would be to double the size of the OMB. More and better staff at revenue-producing agencies like the IRS would also make sense. The SEC will need a big boost in personnel in order to fulfill the new demands of last year’s financial reform legislation, which wisely calls for the agency to oversee derivatives trading and other potentially destabilizing aspects of the financial world. And our best hope for controlling the burgeoning costs of Medicare and Medicaid—the biggest drivers of long-term federal deficits—lies in new, yet-to-be staffed bureaucracies whose founding is authorized in last year’s health care reform law.
But of course, Republicans have not only vowed to block funding for the financial and health reform laws, they’re also making demands to cut the federal workforce by as much as 15 percent—all in the spirit of so-called fiscal responsibility. “The idea that we’re somehow going to balance the budget by cutting the workforce is absurd,” says John Palguta of the Partnership for Public Service. It’s absurd for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that, in today’s government, cutting civil servants is bound to prove an exceedingly expensive way to be thrifty.
Elizabeth Good on August 31, 2011 10:32 AM:
This is one of the most informative articles I have ever read,Explaining why we need good and appropriately educated and trained personnel on the oversight committees.I have past this on to friends and used it as info for debates with some Republican friends.Bravo