More bureaucrats, please: Washington's budget hawks want to decimate the federal workforce to shrink the deficit. It will have the opposite effect.

• Author: Gravois, John
• Position: Company overview

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In the preamble to its December report on how to wrangle America's fiscal crisis, President Obama's deficit commission conjured the image of a family hunkered down around the kitchen table, "making tough choices about what they hold most dear and what they can learn to live without." The attempt to make fiscal reform sound human sized--like something out of a very special episode of The Waltons--was understandable, given the colossal abstractions that followed in the report's recommendations ("Extend Medicaid drug rebate to dual eligibles in Part D"; "Move to a competitive territorial tax system"). But at least one of the bipartisan commission's ideas did possess a kind of after-supper, intuitive appeal: cutting the federal workforce by lo percent and freezing federal salaries.

In tough times, everyone understands downsizing. If the symbolism of belt tightening weren't so powerful, President Obama probably wouldn't have announced his call for a two-year freeze on federal salaries in November. The actual savings associated with the move are fairly trivial in the grand scheme, but the signal was bright and clear. "All of us are called on to make some sacrifices," Obama said to the cameras. "And I'm asking civil servants to do what they've always done--play their part."

The new Republican majority in the House has, naturally, been happy to take up this theme. In January, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas introduced the too cleverly named Cut Unsustainable and Top-heavy Spending (CUTS) Act, whose provisions closely mirrored the debt commission's plan for downsizing the federal workforce: a 10 percent cut through attrition, a three-year pay freeze. Then the Republican Study Committee, a congressional group crowded with Tea Party freshmen, upped the ante, calling for a 15 percent slash to the civil service amid a long menu of other spending cuts that, while drastic, would actually do little to ease the workload of the federal bureaucracy. In both cases, the sales pitch for gutting the civil service was more or less the same. "There's not a business in America that's survived this recession without right-sizing its workforce," Brady told the Washington Post after introducing his bill. "The federal government can't be the exception."

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."

In other words, if Congress and the White House agree to substantial cuts in the federal workforce but don't also agree to eliminate programs and reduce services, the end result could be more spending and deficits, not less. Strange as it may sound, to get a grip on costs, we should in many cases be hiring many more bureaucrats--and paying more to get better ones--not cutting their numbers and freezing their pay. Because in many parts of government, the bureaucracy has already crossed that dangerous threshold beyond which further cuts can only mean greater risk of a breakdown. Indeed, much of the runaway spending we've seen over the past decade is the result of our having crossed that line years ago--the last time there was a Democrat in the White House, a divided government, and calls for slashing the federal workforce in the air.

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