If the federal government hired one employee for every three that retired or quit, it could trim $35 billion from the budget over the next half-decade without firing a single worker.
That’s the idea behind a House bill introduced by Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., Tuesday called the Federal Workforce Reduction Through Attrition Act.
The measure is “an effort to try to draw attention to the fact that the the government is growing in size much too quickly,” Mulvaney told the Washington Examiner.
“The number of government employees, especially non-military employees, shouldn’t be growing faster than the population and private workforce,” he said.
In the early years of the Obama administration, the number of government employees jumped, with the federal workforce growing by 237,000 between 2008 and 2010.
Civilian personnel alone climbed from 1.86 million in 2007 to a peak of 2.13 million in 2011. While the civilian workforce saw a slight dip in the following two years, it still hovered at 2.06 million in 2013, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Lummis and Mulvaney’s bill came one day before the Government Accountability Office released a report that found the Department of Defense doesn’t base its personnel decisions on any kind of systematic requirements.
Statutory limits to Pentagon personnel were waived in 2002, but if they had been in place in 2013, the Army’s workforce would have exceeded them by 17 percent and the Navy’s by 74 percent, the report said.
The proposed measure would give agencies until Sept. 30, 2016 to slash the entire workforce by 10 percent and would require the government to maintain the reduction from that point forward. Though it would not apply to postal workers, the bill would impose a hiring freeze on any agency that didn’t comply with the personnel limits.
Objections to the effort are “usually couched in terms of whether we can effectively deliver government services with a smaller workforce,” Mulvaney said.
The Internal Revenue Service is one of several agencies that frequently cites a lack of personnel as an obstacle to its productivity, he said.
Mulvaney pointed to the growth of the federal workforce during the recession, when he said the government hired additional employees but didn’t expand services.
His co-sponsor highlighted the $18 trillion debt the government has amassed “because Washington has no idea when to stop spending.”
“Instead of blindly filling empty desks, this bill forces agencies to take a step back, consider which positions are crucial, and make decisions based on necessity rather than luxury,” Lummis said in a statement.
Mulvaney said a similar proposal has appeared in the Republican Study Committee Budget in the previous Congress.
“What we will do this year is look for appropriate places to add it as an amendment to another bill,” Mulvaney said.
J. David Cox, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, criticized the “reckless downsizing” of the federal government.
“The politicians advocating a smaller federal government fail to understand the critical role the government plays in ensuring a vibrant economy,” he said.
Cox said there is now one federal worker for every 155 Americans, compared to one for every 102 in 1965.
