http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20111103/PERSONNEL03/111030301/1051/PERSONNEL03 The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday approved a bill along party lines that would cut the federal workforce by 10 percent by fiscal 2015. HR 3029, passed 23-14 with one Democrat in favor, would allow agencies to hire only one new employee for every three who leave. Republicans such as Reps. Darrell Issa of California and Dennis Ross of Florida said the federal workforce is growing too large and the nation cannot afford 2.1 million employees while facing massive budget deficits. "Taxpayers can no longer be asked to foot the bill for a bloated federal workforce," said Ross, one of the bill's co-sponsors. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., was the sole Democrat to vote in favor of the bill. Democrats, such as Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, said that if the government is going to trim its ranks, the cuts should be made strategically and not by imposing "arbitrary" limits. "If they're not done carefully, these cuts could have a widespread and detrimental impact on the agencies' ability to carry out their constitutional and statutory function to provide services to the American people," Lynch said. The committee approved Lynch's amendment to also cut contract spending by the same amount that spending on federal employees is cut each year. Lynch said it would be disingenuous to cut federal employees while ignoring the government's roughly 10.5 million contract employees. Federal employee unions and management groups strongly oppose the bill. The National Treasury Employees Union said that despite lawmakers' claims, the bill would not prevent the shifting of federal work to private contractors. "In reality, it offers a giant loophole to move important federal work into the hands of more costly, less accountable and less effective contractors," NTEU President Colleen Kelley said. The committee also approved HR 3289, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which would strengthen whistle-blower protections. Issa, who sponsored the bipartisan bill with Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said the bill would extend whistle-blower protections to about 40,000 Transportation Security Administration screeners and intelligence employees, close loopholes in existing protections, and create a pilot program to extend whistle-blower protections to non-defense contractors. Issa said the bill would also permanently prevent agencies from using poorly defined security labels — such as classifiable, sensitive but unclassified and sensitive security information — to gag whistle-blowers. But the committee voted down an amendment from Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, that would have given federal and contract whistle-blowers the right to jury trial if they are retaliated against for exposing waste, fraud and abuse. The Senate's version of the bill contains the right to a jury trial. Federal unions and groups such as the Project on Government Oversight and Government Accountability Project applauded the House bill. But the National Whistleblowers Center objected to the bill's exclusion of the right to a jury trial.
So weird. If you compare the size of the federal government to the size of the population (seems reasonable), we are NOW at our lowest level since the 1960's. I guess, as per everything else, the GOP wants to take us further back in time. Still would take bets on the over/under for the restoration of child labor in the US. 2017?
Blanket across-the-board cuts are never a good idea. All it does is penalize agencies that were already efficient and reward agencies that were bloated. And it incentivizes that type of behavior going forward.
This will be a good way to throw the economy back into recession & increase unemployment. Kudos House republican morons.
23- 14? Sounds like a football score. Morons like a FOX! They got ONE democrat to vote on it, so obviously any ill effects, that can't be ignored or completely lied about, can be attributed to democrats and the current administration.
Our nation is sinking and these cretins are playing politics. The same self serving swine who continue to support expensive and counterproductive wars in the middle east.
What's left out here is that I'm sure the sponsors of this bill know a huge number of Feds are eligible for retirement between now and 2015... some sources suggest numbers as high as 50% of Feds fall into this category (even though not all will immediately retire once eligible). This House Repub proposal would not be gradual, but dramatic and likely much higher than a 10% cut.
Just another wrinkle in the whole starve the beast campaign. Guess what types of services and programs would be most affected by these types of cuts? In a piece titled “More Bureaucrats, Please,” Washington Monthly editor John Gravois proclaims, “Washington’s budget hawks want to decimate the federal workforce to shrink the deficit. It will have the opposite effect.” His argument is pretty straightforward: The problem is that, as employers go, the federal government is in fact pretty exceptional. A corporation can shed workers and then revise its overall business strategy accordingly. A strapped city government can lay off a few street sweepers and then elect to sweep the streets less often. But federal agencies are governed by statutory requirements. Unless Congress changes those statutes, federal agencies’ mandates—their work assignments—stay the same, regardless of how many people are on hand to carry them out. Medicare checks still have to go out within thirty days of a claim, offshore oil wells still need to be inspected, soldiers in Afghanistan still need to be provisioned, Social Security databases still need to be maintained, and on and on. “It raises the hairs on my neck when I hear people say we’ve got to do more with less,” says John Palguta, a vice president for policy at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit focused on the government workforce. “The logical conclusion is we’re going to do more with nothing.” In practice, cutting civil servants often means either adding private contractors or—in areas where the government plays a regulatory function—resorting to the belief that industries have a deep capacity to police themselves. (This idea, of course, has taken some dings in recent years.) And though contractors can be enormously useful, they too have to be, well, governed. “You can cut and cut and cut and try to streamline the government workforce, but at some point you lose the ability to oversee the money that you’re spending, and that puts everything at greater risk,” says Don Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. “The opportunities for program failure and waste of public dollars grow exponentially.” http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/cutting-federal-workforce-costs-money/
I'm not so sure it's reasonable. We've had a lot of automation since the '60s that should enable us to have a much leaner bureaucracy than ever before. I don't think comparing to the past is the right benchmark. It probably makes more sense to look around at other countries and businesses for benchmarks (though that has plenty of complications of its own).
This is absolutely true. I have worked in and around several government agencies - this analysis is spot-on and, sadly, probably the precise intention of the "budget hawks" on the committee. I can't believe that folks still think this kind of stupidity is going to make any sort of difference...as we sit on a 680 billion dollar DoD budget.
There are many sources to the deficit. Not enough revenue. Too much spending. Capital gains tax needs to be the same as regular income. Spending needs to be cut. I do not like a blanket cut, but the workforce is one place to make cuts.
I see your point, but that argument can be used on the global workforce as well, meaning we should simply have fewer jobs available per capita as time and technology progress. Yikes. As government has to confront new complexities, I would argue that efficiencies realized in some areas and then offset by new initiatives, so that the ratio of government to population size could really more or less remain constant. If you say government will only "collect taxes, fight war, and sweep streets" (or some such), then I agree with you.
Yup, fewer jobs and more socialism. GOP has a similar plan, with a slight nuance -- fewer jobs and more poverty.
A lot of government is customer driven. A larger population means more people to deal with who might have SS, Vet, Ag, Energy, etc. kinds of quetions or issues or situations where action needs to be taken. Then there's other stuff... CDC can't very well monitor and address what's going on in a growing population here and across the globe with a shrinking workforce. Neither can the Commerce Department keep track of the global economy with fewer people and a few extra computers. Even in my little backwater of givernment, we talk to about 10 miners each day because the price of gold is so high lots of people wnat to see if they can find the scraps left over from the Gold Rush days, we have more people building homes in the woods and so they petition for road and utility right-of-ways across federal lands, we have an increasing amount of communications infrastructure being built on the tops of federal mountains, we provide fire wood, Christmas tree, and mushroom gathering permits to hundreds of people each year, we work with private landowners to address noxious weeds and invasive species that can harm local agriculture, we interact with thousands of people who want o go on a hike or take a horse or OHV on our trail systems, we give thousands of boaters a safety briefing when they float local rivers, we interact with local officials, business owners, contractors, and such every day, we hold neighborhood meetings and sometimes visit individual homeowners when we're doing an Rx burn, etc. Contrary to the caricature, the average Fed is not some green-shaded paper pusher. You're more likely to find folks talking or meeting with members of the public than slumped over a spreadsheet.
It's a trap. The Corporate Dark Side is signing you to an arms reduction treaty while they build the Death Star behind Jupiter.
