Time out, please! Can we all take a deep breath, stop all the hyperbole and partisan advocacy, and just give the American public the facts so we can decide for ourselves, without the help of social media influencers, whether the cuts in the federal workforce are good, bad, or TBD? To offer a real accounting of the impact of federal workforce cuts, we need the following information:
- How many Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) federal employees, including probationary and trial period employees in both the excepted and competitive service, as well as in Senior Executive Service (SES) and its equivalents, has the federal government employed each year for the last 25 years?
- Of that number, how many of those employees would have left at some point anyway, through OPM-approved voluntary early retirement (VERA), discontinued service retirement (DSR), ‘regular’ retirement, and/or voluntary resignation. In other words, how many would have eventually left anyway through natural attrition?
- How do those numbers compare with the agency staffing levels in the latest president’s budget submission to the Congress, with particular attention to those cabinet departments (Education, State) and executive agencies (CFPB, FEMA, USAID) that have been in the news. What’s the target compared with the past?
A few things to consider as we look for these numbers:
First, the federal government experiences attrition at a rate of 6 percent or more each year, and with a workforce of about 2.0M, that adds up to over 120,000 departures annually, give or take. Granted, many (if not most) are in the wrong occupations or locations. After all, we already know that the government’s best employees (those with the most marketable skills and work ethic) are typically those who leave—especially if they are not close to reaching some form of retirement eligibility.
We also know that many of those who do leave, whether they’ve earned a federal pension or not, are replaced. Unless of course there’s some sort of hiring freeze going on. And that’s the case now.
But it’s not the first time that a White House has ordered such a freeze. I have been intimately involved in two massive ones. One (imposed by a Republican president) at the end of the Cold War, mainly for Department of Defense—where we lopped off over 300,000 jobs in DoD and related agencies—and one (imposed by a Democratic president) as a result of Reinventing Government, both when I was the defense department’s director of civilian personnel. And while both reduced federal rolls precipitously, they did so without nearly the emotional frenzy that has accompanied the current effort.
The cynic in me would ask “where were all those ‘hand wringers’ back then” but I won’t. And for the same reason, I won’t point any accusatory fingers at the current administration, which could have achieved the same end-state but so much more effectively, and without all the pain and carnage...not to mention the horrible impact on public service generally.
If we truly want to understand the implications of federal workforce cuts, we must start with data. Transparency is the first step to accountability and only with facts in hand can we have an honest national conversation about what kind of government we want, and what kind of workforce it takes to run it. Maybe NAPA can help?
