he average voter may imagine federal bureaucracies as overstaffed, full of people leaning on their rakes and sharpening their pencils. But the truth is, most agencies are, if anything, understaffed. The government has grown tremendously in its spending and scope since the 1960s, and the population of the nation has grown by a margin of 100 million people, but the size of the federal workforce has remained remarkably static at about 2 million. Since coming into office two years ago, the Obama administration has bumped up staff levels by about 100,000, in part through “in-sourcing”—bringing back into the civil service inherently governmental work that had been farmed out to contractors. If this leads to better management, it could well mean a stanching of some of the cost overruns and regulatory failures that have been causing the government to bleed red ink. Today’s mindless demands for austerity, however, could reverse this trend. This is not to say that there aren’t big bureaucratic reforms that need to be made that could lead to people losing their jobs. Many agencies, for instance, exhibit excessive layering in their management ranks (think job titles that start with “deputy-” or “under-”). And if Congress and the administration could agree to lift some of the outdated procedural requirements and redundant reporting demands that are the bane of the average civil servant’s life, it might be possible for agencies to fulfill their mission as well or better with fewer people.
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.
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