Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
February 11, 2008
Our Big Fat Federal
Government
If you want to be president of the United States, it is a
good thing to tell the electorate the federal government is too big and
you will shrink it. Yet if you are president of the United States, you
may find this impossibly hard to achieve.
The problem has two dimensions. First, the great sprawling
bureaucracy that is the U.S. Civil Service has, on average, very low
productivity. Second, the population is always calling for more
government services, not fewer.
In the private sector, the size and cost of the federal
government could be reduced by demanding higher productivity and
dismissing poor performers. But in the federal bureaucracy, it is nearly
impossible to do so. In the private sector, the possibility of losing
your job is an ever-present factor. Federal employees have de facto
lifetime employment. Unable to introduce the fear-of-firing as a
disciplinary tool, reformers have instituted performance bonuses to
shake up the federal bureaucracy. But they have not worked.
The problem inside the federal government is that those who
calibrate performance are the immediate superiors of employees. These
managers have found it nearly impossible to hand out poor grades. Poor
grades do not cause the under-performers to leave government service –
they simply affect morale. Most federal government managers, who have to
live cheek-by-jowl with those who they supervise, know that pointing out
incompetence only builds up department-wide resentment against
themselves. Most working groups in the federal government are communal
operations, and they are not subject to the normal managerial discipline
that abounds in the private sector.
The tolerance of incompetence in the federal government is
particularly hard on those who strive and care about what they are
doing.
If you work in Washington, it is very difficult not to know
something about the incompetence factor in the federal government. An
acquaintance of mine who works in national security shakes her head
despairingly about what she sees every day – sloth, indifference,
incompetence and defeatism. An auditor acquaintance in the Department of
Health and Human Services decided that he would make a lot more money in
the private sector. He did not. He was fired twice. He went back into
the federal government, drawing a salary of more than $100,000 a year.
Now, in retirement, he is consulting to the federal government for even
more money.
Political appointments do not solve the problem. They
complicate it. Only in the Department of State can high-performers
really rise to the top positions. Many ambassadors are drawn from the
ranks of career Foreign Service officers.
But there is no such ladder of opportunity in most of the
federal government. Ergo, the only incentive to perform well is to
improve your grade, but you cannot hope to manage an agency. In that
way, it is a little like working for a family corporation.
It is hard from anecdotal evidence to gauge how overstaffed
the federal government is and where the overstaffing exists. Air traffic
controllers are overstressed and do a superb job. But there is evidence
that the departments of Labor, Education and Housing and Urban
Development have a high percentage of the slothful.
Yet they are all politically protected. If they work in
Washington, and live in Maryland or Virginia, federal government
employees are catered to by their elected political overseers. The same
thing happens if you get a concentration of federal employees elsewhere.
If you want to see how it works, look at base closings. Federal jobs are
good jobs – and jobs are the opium of the political class.
The larger question of reducing the federal government
divides over what people say they want and what they demand. They say
they want smaller government, but they demand more federal services year
after year. Every national crisis spawns a new bureaucracy: a buildup of
personnel that becomes permanent and immutable.
Today the buildup is in national security, immigration
management, border security, safety standards for Chinese imports,
global warming and arcane but real problems like the shortage of
honeybees. As society grows more complicated, the demand for the
government to do more increases exponentially.
So if you were president, what could you do to reduce the
size of the federal government? You could close the departments of
Education and Energy, and eradicate more than 1,000 programs. But most
of the functions of the axed departments would be glommed onto other
departments, and most of the programs would reappear elsewhere in the
bureaucracy.
Every president tries to reduce the size of the federal
government, and mostly they fail.
© 2008 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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