I remember back in the Bush administration days when the talk was all about reducing the federal workforce through attrition only. Anything beyond leaving a few vacant positions unfilled was considered too ambitious.
So when I see what the Trump administration has planned in terms of eliminating thousands of government positions, it’s really striking. The Washington Post today mentions the discussion of eliminating 2,300 State Department workers. Apparently this is to come not just from the larger pool of 75,000 overall (including foreign workers who serve at overseas facilities), but from among just the 24,000 American civil and foreign service positions. That’s actually almost a ten percent cut, and it involves a (probably wise) consolidation with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
This comes after Trump’s skinny budget called for reductions all over the government. Trump’s EPA is preparing to cut 3,200 jobs, and numbers like 200,000 overall are being tossed about.
The most reasonable-sounding justification for the current size of the federal workforce goes something like this, expressed earlier this month in Politico in a column by Timothy Noah:
But the federal bureaucracy is not growing. As of 2014, the most recent year for which data are available from the Office of Personnel Management, the civilian executive-branch workforce was 2.7 million workers. That’s slightly more than the workforce’s 2.5 million in 1962. The number of civilian executive-branch jobs remained stable, at 2.5 million to 3 million, over the past half-century, even as the U.S. population — the customer base served by those 2.7 million workers — nearly doubled.
That sounds okay, but it ignores a few key concepts. The most obvious one is the development of technology since 1962. What percentage of the federal workforce, back in those days, was engaged very simple tasks that the computer on your desk can do much faster and more accurately than 100,000 people could in 1962? The business of sorting, filing, storing, and retrieving paperwork in massive archives was once a very, very big and labor-intensive deal. It’s now mostly obsolete.
So where are the efficiencies in government employment that most private companies have experienced? Technology helps everyone else do more with less. Witness, for example, the explosion in journalistic content of all types (and quality), despite the loss of so many typesetters, copy boys, filing clerks, distributors, etc. But in a government labor market where economic incentives don’t really exist, downsizing (or even just right-sizing) doesn’t come naturally.
Another issue that Noah mentions but some of whose implications he fails to consider: Outsourcing to contractors. If you count the contractors, the civilian federal government has grown immensely over time, in spite of technology that should allow for a much smaller workforce.
Why is this? Certainly conservatives would argue that there’s been a lot of government mission creep. But even on its own terms, it’s hard to take the side that big government is a good value today. The various anecdotes about how federal employees spend enormous amounts of time at work serve only to reinforce the idea that a lot of not-work goes on each day. If there are 100 workers who actually got watching porn all day in a given year, there are probably several times as many who do so, and many, several times more still who find less controversial ways to malinger. Isn’t enough that they feel like they can get away with it, because no one will notice they’re not doing any work?
Third, there’s no such thing as a “customer base” for most federal agencies. The IRS and the Veterans’ Administration may represent exceptions, but the work that most agencies do just isn’t dependent on the size of the U.S. population. The Department of Defense, especially, has an enormous civilian workforce (about three-quarters of a million, or more than one for every two servicemen) within which various studies have found ample room for reductions.
Think of it this way: The government’s operations are certainly much more complex than those of Netflix, which serves 100 million households with a workforce of just 4,500. But are they so much more complex as to justify a workforce more than 600 times bigger — and much bigger still if contractors are thrown in? Remember, the government has access to a lot more computing power. Would we end up with anarchy if its workforce were only, say, 400 or 500 times bigger?
Maybe, with these plans to downsize, we’re seeing the start of something that’s been a long time coming.
