Combined General and Maryland "Freak State" PING!
GOOD! THIS is how you drain the swamp.
There are HUGE swaths of the federal government that have no Constitutional authority to exist.
A former workout buddy is employed in the largest of Florida’s departments, which handles welfare and Medicaid payments. Governor Bush was going to privatize it and lay people off. What really happened was the department built up a long list of requisitions for open positions, then pruned those unfilled requisitions as “layoffs” or jobs not filled. According to my buddy, most or all of those were fake positions created so that nobody would be laid off. Then, many of the remaining people whose jobs were outsourced were made supervisors of the new outsourced positions. In net, he said nobody was actually laid off. As people retire their supervisory position is not being refilled. So, the government is shrinking, but at nowhere near the rate Bush imagined.
Bush was nowhere near the manager Trump is. So, I doubt anybody will get away with the same tactic under him.
The way to actually cut is to give the department, say, 85% of its previous actual budget and tell them to make do with it. Then, the next year, do the same, until the department is down to what he thinks it should be as set by his measured metrics. It’s astounding how new technology and increases in efficiency can substitute for people if the manager is forced to do it.
Of course, the other thing to do is ask, should government even be doing the function of this department? If not, hand it off to whoever is appropriate and let them rehire any employees they feel they need.
Up until about 0905ET on 9/11, my DoD agency was constantly threatened with RIFs. After that, never, except as a joke.
But going by what happened before, if RIFing people is what gets the bean counters promotion points, they will do it with gusto and glee.
Hahaha. No more watching porn all day at taxpayers’ expense. Cry me a river...
Good, welcome to the real world where money doesn’t just magically get appropriated into a paycheck.
I work on the DOD side, RIFs are no strangers to us.
You could actually reduce fed employee burden quite a bit by simply reducing their benefits to that of private industry.
When you add up leave, sick day, etc. many gov folks have about 2 mo a year. Limit that to three weeks and you’ve got about a 10% reduction.
Get rid of cadillac insurance, and it drops even more.
Excepting the Armed Forces, Border patrol, INS and airport security, all other government entities need to cut the workforce by 10% within one year. That will kick start MAGA like you won’t believe!!!
I worked for the NIH when I was young. Gov. workers will not cope well with any degree of uncertainty.
I’m a retiree receiving a pension check from the Office of Personnel Management and I went out when they offered an Early Out. No extra money involved as a bonus to get you off the rolls but your pension check was based on your high three (average salary of your high three consecutive years) and total years of service including military time. They told people that if you don’t go and the decision to cut your job was made, they could transfer you to a facility up to a hundred miles away. That was your incentive to retire, the loss that they could make your working life very unpleasant. Once they cleared as many older workers off the rolls this way, then in the next Early Out offered a few years later, they offered a $25,000 bonus to retire. It would have been nice to have that, especially for those retirees like me who are ineligible for Social Security because our time was federal. I’m living on a modest pension and look forward to hopefully getting a small COLA for 2018. See my next post.
As I recall the government doesn’t lay people off. The government has a reduction in force, a RIF.
“Suzy and Trianisha aren’t here any more sir, they got Riffed.”
Riffs and rumors of Riffs are making folks over at EPA very ill.
This is not a good time to be working at an unemployment office.
Combined General and Maryland "Freak State" PING!