Bloat people.

• Author: Bennet, James
• Position: Downsizing in Washington, D.C. - Includes related information on Department of Public and Assisted Housing Chief of Tenant Management Carl Greene

It's bitter political irony that liberal Democrats like Sharon Pratt Dixon are the first leaders since the election of Ronald Reagan (under whom the federal workforce grew more than seven percent) to really grapple with the hard business of laying off public workers. But given the budget gridlock this summer, stretching from Maine to California, other officials probably won't be far behind. Which is why the model Dixon is forging is so alarming. As she tries to "downsize" her government, she isn't pausing to distinguish the civilians from the water buffalo from the real enemy.

Last fall, Dixon bravely campaigned on a promise to "cut 2,000 mid-management-level paper pushers from the government payrolls." The pundits thought she'd get creamed. Then they thought she wouldn't deliver. Now, less than a year later, she's poised to make good--or, sadly, to make mediocre. It's impossible to tell which workers will get the pink slips, but the mayor's firing strategy is likely to bring no lasting reform to the D.C. personnel system and, worse, no lasting reform to the D.C. government. Political compromises with the city council and fear of the civil service process have driven Dixon to adopt a firing strategy that counts only bodies, not brains or performance. Furthermore, her plan can affect barely one in 10 workers--and even among them, it's more likely to be demoralizing than motivating. In the end, as a trip through one D.C. agency shows, the mayor's plan will do nothing to wipe out the real enemies of District residents.

The fundamental problems lies with what is touted as the chief virtue of the mayor's plan: "We are not targeting people, but positions," Lorraine Green, head of the Office of Personnel, explained to reporters. As a matter of policy, an employee's skills or dedication can't be considered, only his job description--essentially the same approach that Mayor David Dinkins is using in New York City. This approach got a stern editorial endorsement from that good-government gadfly, The Washington Post: "No administration, even one with the best intentions, should be given an open license to target individuals, to decide who should be let go rather than which jobs should be abolished."

Roll that one around in your brain, and then recall the time you were standing in line to get your license renewed, listening to two city workers

chat while another three did all the work. Wouldn't you want to choose which of the five got the boot? Or consider this: If a manager has two "nonessential" employees working under him who are to be, in the New York parlance, "excessed," that means he's been wasting, say, $80,000 per year--as surely as if he were taking that public money and blowing it on live entertainment for his Friday afternoon meetings or on a Lamborghini for the staff. Maybe that manager's position is essential, but he sure isn't. Shouldn't he be shown the door? No, explains the Post, patiently. "The payroll bloat is the emergency, and the elimination of 2,000 employees is the immediate priority." That is, the deficit is the enemy, and counting to 2,000 positions, regardless of the quality of the people who fill them, is the goal. Any resulting improvement in dismal government services--any progress against the real enemy--will be pure serendipity: "Some deadwood will surely be cleared in this process, and that is good."

Homeless alone

Kevin E. could tell you a few stories about D.C.'s deadwood. In 1979, at the age of ten days, he entered the District's foster care system, a world run by bureaucrats who apparently love children so much that through assorted tricks (like losing paperwork and classifying tots as prepared for "independent living") they manage to hold onto them, as the kids learn in limbo to walk and talk and think, for as long as 11 years. According to court documents filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Kevin was returned to his mother at one point, but she abused him, so back he went to foster care. Two years later, thanks to a paperwork lapse, he was shipped back to his mother again--then, after being neglected and possibly abused, back to foster care one month later. By 1986, the Department of Human Services had settled on a great goal for Kevin: Have him adopted. But his caseworkers never tried to do so--even though two families, according to court testimony, expressed an interest. Under the supervision of at least 17 different caseworkers, Kevin has bounced from hospitals to group homes to foster homes to mental institutions. Rather than find him a family, the department finally came up with another way to comfort this needy little boy: powerful psychotropic drugs.

Then there's the deadwood at D.C.'s notorious ambulance service, still amazing after all these years. This spring, no D.C. ambulance was available to help an old friend of the mayor's when she went into cardiac arrest during an asthma attack. It took 29 minutes for a Montgomery County ambulance to reach her. She died. One woman whose husband had a heart attack recalled that, after waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she then had to wait again for the driver to find his keys. To cut its emergency response time, the District is now sending a fire truct to every medical emergency, which is a little like dispatching ambulances to put out fires. But the fire trucks aren't always so speedy, either. In February, a dispatcher goofed, failing to alert the station closest to a blaze in an abandoned building. Minutes were lost as trucks raced from further away. When they reached the scene, firemen found the body of a lone woman, apparently a vagrant who had taken shelter from the cold, a few feet inside the front door.

Those are the spectacular examples, the kind that make it all the way to the TV screen. The true horror of the way government functions, however, lies not in such shocking instances of incompetence, but in the everyday, banal ones. Whether you hold a government job or not, you must know people who "work to the rule." They never arrive early and they never stay late--they're the first to demand comp time and the last to make up for that two-hour doctor's appointment. This winter, a woman staying in one of D.C.'s homeless shelters grew increasingly deranged, refusing to come in from the rain. She had a history of mental illness, so workers at the shelter spent the day trying to reach her caseworker. The caseworker finally called back at 4:50. Too bad, she said, but I'm off work in 10 minutes.

A kindred spirit of that caseworker teaches fifth graders in the D.C. schools. She isn't selling drugs or fondling the kids, but she isn't teaching, either. "She might as well have been making canned tomatoes," fumes one parent who watched his son waste a year in the woman's class. She never prepared, didn't return papers, never stayed late to help students. "The kids became completely cynical, saying, 'She just wants us to copy the answers out of the book. She just throws them away, anyway,'" he says. "For the kids, it's about 20 percent of their conscious lives wasted."

Aside from the heartache they cause the people they're supposed to help, all these workers have something else in common: The mayor's downsizing plan can't touch them. Which means it can't even push them to work harder. The mayor won't fire people like the teacher, who works for an "independent agency" (the superintendent of schools has generously offered to pony up 300 administrative positions; a commission chaired by the economist Alice Rivlin that thoroughly evaluated the D.C. government last year conservatively asked for 800 slots). The mayor won't fire people like the dispatcher, who ranks below DS-11--the civil service level Dixon has established as her floor. She won't fire anyone who is a member of a union. That leaves her with a pool of 5,207--barely 10 percent of the District workforce--to pick from. And that pool includes people like the caseworker, whom Dixon won't fire because she holds an "essential" position. Now, cutting from those attenuated ranks will certainly help. As Scott Shuger showed in these pages last November, each manager in the District supervises about three workers; consolidating do-little management-level jobs can only make the government more efficient.

But after the sense of a coming D.C. renaissance Dixon's campaign generated last year, that gain seems so slight, and it promises to be so fleeting. Even for the 5,000 who are blowing in the breeze, Dixon's plan is less a goad to work harder than an excuse to complain. After all, their efforts will have nothing to do with whether they get sacked. "They're scared generally, because they don't know, but they don't have the fear that 'If I don't do my job, I'll get caught,'" says one worker. Once the position to be cut are announced, the so-called "bumping" rule will swing into effect, guaranteeing that the cuts will have nothing to do with performance. Through bumping, managers with little tenure in their slots can be shoved out by anyone fired from their division who has the same rank but more years of service. "That doesn't...