That is the title of this op ed in today’s Washington Post. The authors are John J. DiIulio Jr. and Paul R. Verkuil. DiIulio is best known as the original Director of the Office of Faith Based Initiatives in the administration of George W. Bush, in which position he once described many of the staff in the White House as the “Mayberry Machiavellis.” He is also co-author of the most widely used textbook for Advanced Placement American Government & Politics. Verkuil is a former chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States. Both are authors, DeIulio of Bring Back the Bureaucrats, published in 2014, and Verkuil of Outsourcing Sovereignty, published 7 years earlier.
They start by noting that the budget proposed by Republicans, if enacted into law, would allow only 1 of 3 retiring federal workers to be replaced. They provide a contrast between the remaining Republican candidates who are outspoken about cutting the federal workforce, often as a mean of controlling spending (it does not), while Bernie Sanders is outspoken about expanding the federal workforce. Senator Clinton is not mentioned.
The authors offer ten facts people need to know about the federal workforce.
Fact one is that we have roughly the same number of federal workers as we had in the administration of John F. Kennedy, who had 1.8 million non-uniformed federal employees. Obama began office in 2009 with about 2 million, about 200,000 more than at the beginning of the administration of George W Bush 8 years earlier. The peak was in the middle of Reagan’s years, at 2.2 million.
Fact 2 offers us some information about federal spending — real spending adjusted for inflation is 5 ½ times up, pages in the Federal Register 6 times as many, and 5 new cabinet departments have been added (I did a mental checklist to realize that we actually got 6: Housing and Urban Development and Transportationunder Johnson; Energy and the splitting off of Education under Carter; Veteran’s Affairs under George H. W.Bush; and Homeland Security under George W. Bush).
Fact 3 points out that we cannot save money simply by eliminating Federal jobs and transferring the costs through contracting out:
Eliminating every last full-time bureaucrat — from the Agriculture Department to the Department of Veterans Affairs — would save $250 billion a year in wages and benefits. Compare that with the more than $300 billion a year that Washington spends on defense contractors and the more than $600 billion a year it spends on Medicare beneficiaries.
(NOTE throughout the piece there are many hyperlinks. You can go to the original for those. I hope that the information I provide here might intrigue you enough to read the entire op ed.)
You will, if you read the entire piece, realize how many people are paid through the Federal budget but not employed by the Federal government: for example, while DoD has about 800,000 civilian employees, it also employs the equivalent of 700,000 private sectpr employees. In addition, there are lots of employees of non-profits and lower levels of government whose work is funded through our Federal taxes.
I found three key points worthy of quoting in their entirety:
Seventh, there is no evidence that outsourcing federal administrative work saves money. For instance, a 2011 study by the Project on Government Oversight estimated that the contractors were paid roughly twice as much as federal workers would have been paid for the same work.
Eighth, the federal government’s worst and most persistent performance problems are concentrated among its most outsourced programs. For example, in his book “Escaping Jurassic Government,” Donald F. Kettl reports that 28 of the 32 federal programs on the Government Accountability Office’s 2015 list of programs at high risk for waste, fraud or abuse involved private contractors and other administrative proxies.
Ninth, the most catastrophic federal government performance failures have occurred when federal agencies had too few full-time workers. For instance, in 2013, the problematic launch of the Affordable Care Act’s health exchanges involved the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, an agency with fewer than 5,000 full-time employees that is tasked with overseeing about 20 percent of the federal budget while monitoring scores of contractors and grantees.
Consider the key facts: contractors receive twice as much pay as would federal employees (although I caution that those seeking to shrink the federal workforce complain about the cost of federal retirement and health benefits, at a time when private sector employees increasingly lack defined benefit retirement programs and where what is offered even in “cadillac” health care plans is not as complete coverage as exists for federal workers, something my wife and I know as a result of dealing with her cancer); waste, fraud and abuse are far more likely when programs are outsourced/make heavy use of contractors (something for which I find a striking parallel in what has happened with the explosion of charter schools); and we see a partial explanation for the startup problems when “Obamacare” was rolled out.
The last point explores the fact that many federal agencies are already facing a crisis of a shortage of workers that will already get worse. The authors focus on Social Security. I was born in 1946, which puts me at the leading edge of the Boomer generation. We leading Boomers have a retirement age of 66, which means many of us are already drawing benefits. As we continue for the next few years, the number of recipients will explode: the authors use a date of 2025, which would not include the entire span of the Boomer generation, by which time the number of recipients will be 85 million, Five years earlier the Social Security Administration will have some 30,000 additional workers eligibie for retirement, and is already unable to replace retirees because of Congressional restrictions. All this for a program that by 2025 will be distributing $1.8 Trillion annually.
We know that there are those of the ilk of Grover Norquist, whose mantra of wanting to shrink the size of government in order to be able to drown it in a bathtub came to tragic visibility at the time of Katrina, where much of the city of New Orleans and far too many of its residents did drown. We know that there are those who seek to delegitimize the programs of the social safety net: cutting the workforce to make it impossible for those programs to meet the needs of those intended to serve is one way of achieving that goal. Making them more expensive to administer through the use of private contractors is another.
These are critical issues. The real costs to America are not that the Federal work force is too big — it is, as the authors contend forcefully, too small. Which is why they offer these final words:
So here’s hoping that the next debates, town halls and interviews reveal which, if any, candidates for chief executive understand that the federal government became outsized as it became more outsourced — and that, by every measure, today’s full-time federal workforce is overloaded, not bloated.
Sadly, I do not know how many of those conducting debates, town halls, and interviews are willing to get into such important issues, because they are so consumed with process, with “gotcha” journalism, with horse-race issues of results of polls; numbers of delegates, states and votes; money raised and spent; and trying to instigate controversy between candidates.
We are electing someone to be chief executive. It might be nice that we had some evidence that the persons before us demonstrate their understanding of the costs — not just financial, but certainly those — of the decisions made and to be made about how we fund, staff and structure our government.
Is that too much to ask?