“Drain the swamp.” The phrase went from catchy rallying cry to grating cliché in the space of a year. But phrases often become clichés because they signify some important truth. The swamp does, in fact, need draining: Our federal bureaucracy has become so expansive, power-hungry, and unaccountable as to require some traumatic and probably destructive measure to reduce its power and size.
The latest revelation comes from Open the Books, a government transparency watchdog. For the last 11 years, the organization has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Office of Personnel Management for the names, titles, agencies, salaries, and bonuses of all federal employees, and then posted this information online. But this year, something shocking happened when they got the data: 254,839 federal salaries, representing over $20 billion in spending, were redacted from the federal civil service payroll. By comparison, 3,416 salaries were redacted in fiscal year 2016. That’s a 7,460 percent increase in redactions.
We are all forbidden from seeing how much one out of every five federal employees is paid. Over 68 federal agencies are now withholding salary information from the public. Most of these agencies have little or nothing to do with national security. That so many federal salaries have gone into hiding is, we suspect, not unrelated to the populist revolt through which the nation is passing.
The average federal bureaucrat makes approximately $127,000 a year in salary and benefits—compared to an average of $70,000 in private-sector compensation. Even after controlling for factors such as age, education, experience, race, and gender, the data pretty clearly show federal workers are overpaid. Federal compensation has also risen at a drastically faster rate than private-sector compensation.
Federal salaries started exploding a decade ago, thanks to raises and rule changes under Presidents Bush and Obama. From December 2007 to June 2009, the federal workforce saw a 46 percent increase in employees with salaries over $100,000, a 119 percent increase in the number making over $150,000, and a 93 percent increase in the number making in excess of $170,000. The broader economic climate under which this salary explosion happened makes these numbers even more remarkable. As USA Today’s Dennis Cauchon pointed out in 2009, the Department of Transportation had only one employee earning a salary better than $170,000 when the recession started. A year and a half later, 1,690 employees topped 170 grand.
Citizens have a right to know what federal employees are paid. We’d also be entirely justified in demanding that they be paid less.
The whole subject of the civil service deserves to be rethought.
As the Veterans Administration scandal showed, it is nearly impossible to fire unionized federal employees even when their negligence is lethal. A year after the VA scandal broke in 2014, the New York Times reported that “at most, three” people had been fired from their jobs. To its credit, the Trump administration is cleaning house and has fired a further 500 VA employees. Alas, the very recent scandal involving VA secretary David Shulkin’s taking a 10-day trip to Europe with his wife on the taxpayers’ dime is eroding any goodwill these firings may have generated.
President Trump mentioned civil-service reform in his State of the Union address. “Tonight,” he said, “I call on the Congress to empower every cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers—and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.”
Easier said than done. Thanks to civil-service protections passed by Congress decades ago, the president has direct control over just 2 percent of the federal workforce. The constitutionality of these protections is dubious, however. Philip K. Howard has argued that sweeping civil-service reform could be accomplished by executive order.
While the Trump administration needs time to come up with a comprehensive plan for reform, a swift and immediate rebuke is also in order. If acting OPM director Kathleen McGettigan doesn’t immediately produce an acceptably transparent account of the federal payroll, there’s no reason the president shouldn’t replace her with someone who will, and remind these entitled bureaucrats that they are civil servants, not overlords.
