Reinventing Government II: Let's downsize it! (My title)

The Washington Times ^ | Nov. 20th, 2002 | Cal Thomas

[End The Hypocrisy]

Government agency halls are filled with people who do not appear to be working. Partially overheard conversations are about break time, vacations, sick leave and other benefits. In federal bureaucracies, it still takes an average of 18 months to hire someone and far longer to fire that person. Meanwhile, more qualified employee candidates are turned away. Mediocrity loves company and is the enemy of efficiency. Competent workers embarrass the mediocre by exposing their laziness and incompetence. It doesn't have to remain this way...

[End The Hypocrisy]

This week, our national debt reached a record high $6.3 trillion dollar level: http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm . Our debt did nothing but grow during the Clintonian years, even as left-wingers rant and rave about federal surpluses then (while predictably ignoring the growing debt). Isn't it time to fire any and all wasteful bureaucrats?

[End The Hypocrisy]

Here's a great article by Linda Chavez (whom the media targeted to keep from becoming the new Secretary of Labor back in January of 2000)

Perpetual pursuit of government reforms

Al Gore tried it and failed. Ronald Reagan had some modest success when he attempted it. Even Jimmy Carter gave it a shot. Now President Bush is trying his hand at reforming the federal government. Let's hope he has more luck than his predecessors did. Mr. Gore tried to "reinvent government." Mr. Reagan's Grace Commission pledged to eliminate "waste, fraud and abuse." And Mr. Carter introduced "zero-based budgeting" for federal agencies to try to reduce the size of government. Despite their efforts, the size of the federal work force grew, but productivity didn't. Now Mr. Bush wants to cut the work force and improve productivity. Good luck.
The president's plan, announced during his weekly radio address, would create incentives for some current federal employees to take early retirement, out-source more jobs to contractors and base pay increases on performance rather than longevity, allowing managers to reward the best workers. If enacted -- and it will not be an easy task, especially with government employee unions fighting reform every step of the way -- the Bush plan could save a bundle.
The president complained that the federal government spends $45 billion a year on computers and technology, a huge sum, but "unlike private sector companies, this large investment has not cut the government's costs or improved people's lives in any way that we can measure."
It's no wonder why. The problem isn't lack of equipment, it's the people who are expected to use it. I've worked in government and headed two federal agencies during my career and still have many friends in government. I've encountered bright, dedicated federal workers over the years -- but unfortunately, I've encountered almost as many incompetent and just plain lazy federal employees as well.
Back in the days before voice mail, I had a secretary who refused to answer the phone. She'd let it ring 10 or 12 times, lift the receiver off the cradle and drop it back down again, disconnecting the caller. And this was in the congressional liaison office of the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare. This same woman filed a grievance against me when I asked that all members of Congress receive a response to their letters within two weeks.
When I was head of the Civil Rights Commission, I had a secretary who could barely speak English, much less read or write it well. Her job was to type the annual report to Congress on the commission's activities. When I discovered that much of the typed report was gibberish -- she didn't know what she was typing, they were just sequences of letters -- I offered to send her to classes to improve her English. That offer prompted a visit from the agency's solicitor, warning me that I shouldn't even suggest such a thing and certainly could not force her to take lessons.
Another woman in the agency -- a division manager -- would invite her assistant into her office every afternoon at 3 p.m. to play "Boggle," a board game involving dice the two would play noisily until quitting time. Now, federal employees can play computer games or surf the Internet to their heart's content all day long.
I estimate that about a third of the federal employees I worked with were hard-working, another third were competent but lacked initiative, and fully one third were unable or unwilling to do their jobs. The problem is, there's almost no way under the current system to adequately reward the first group or get rid of the last.
Mr. Bush's proposal attempts to deal with this problem, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. If we want accountability from federal employees, we've got to overhaul the entire system. It means getting rid of job protection for federal employees.
If an employee doesn't perform, there's no reason to keep him. If a program is reduced or eliminated, the staff should be cut accordingly, not just reshuffled within the agency.
If the government could hire and fire like much of the private sector does, agencies could do with fewer employees -- and afford to compensate the best ones commensurate with their talent. But don't count on it happening anytime soon.
Linda Chavez is a nationally syndicated columnist

Article formerly maintained at: http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20010830-99647884.htm

[2banana]

A friend of mine recently applied for a federal job. He finished near the top of his college class with straight As. He has a strong work ethic, is honest and should be an asset to anyone, especially the federal government, which claims it wants high-quality people.

Probably has the wrong skin pigment and wrong plumbing...

[End The Hypocrisy]

If anybody opportunistically claims that to downsize the bureaucracy in D.C. is "racist", why not show them these and ask them if preserving the status quo isn't what's actually racist:


Washington Post.com article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49287-2002Oct18.html

"A former Pentagon agency director and his top aide were charged yesterday with extortion and bribery for allegedly demanding payoffs, prostitutes and expensive watches in exchange for government contracts. Robert L. Neal Jr. headed the Defense Department's Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization from 1996 to June 2001, and Francis D. Jones Jr. was his executive assistant. In a 52-page affidavit unsealed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria yesterday, federal agents said the two men instructed contractors to make payments to companies friendly to Neal and Jones to obtain or maintain lucrative federal jobs. The money would then be laundered through a sham company or a secret trust in the small principality of Liechtenstein, the affidavit said... The Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization was created to help small and minority businesses obtain defense contracts. The office awards few contracts, but it exerts influence within the Pentagon, officials said... The office also directly controlled $28 million annually for the Mentor-Protege Program, in which small businesses find a large Defense Department contractor to serve as a partner and receive both training and contracts. One small business in the program told investigators that in 1997 and 1998, Neal and Jones demanded several payments of $8,000 to $15,000, "or they would take certain adverse actions or cease taking helpful actions" for the participant's company, according to Stroot's affidavit."


Washington Times article:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20021019-77594800.htm

"According to the affidavit, Mr. Neal and Mr. Jones, both of whom are black, engaged in a wide range of criminal activities during their tenure at the Pentagon, using their positions as leverage to receive illegal extortion payments, bribes and gratuities from minority or disadvantaged Defense Department contractors seeking to participate in the preference programs....Mr. Neal has been awarded the Secretary of Defense's Outstanding Public Service Medal and Outstanding Achievement Award, the OMB's Special Performance Awards, OMB's EEO Award and OMB's Divisional Awards for Special Performance."

[End The Hypocrisy]

You've got that right. A statistical analysis was recently done and here's an excerpt of what the Washington Times published:

"Now comes an astonishing report from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management: "Annual Report to Congress, Federal Equal Opportunity Recruitment Program, Fiscal Year 2000," released in April 2002. This report to Congress makes brutally clear that despite the "equal opportunity" name of the program, the purpose of the federal program is to make certain there is no equal opportunity for whites in federal employment. The report uses tables and bar charts to make unmistakably clear that federal discrimination against whites goes far beyond merely achieving proportional representation for blacks. In all 22 independent federal agencies and in 16 of 17 federal executive departments, blacks are massively overrepresented."

Here's the dated thread: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/729875/posts

[camle]

hows about the following 20 year plan:

5% across the board funding CUT in each year
5% across the board tax decrease in even numbered years
buydown of national debt on odd numbered years (5%)

When National debt is half, then buydown spread to every third year.

[End The Hypocrisy]

Reassuringly enough, President Bush is already making considerable progress regarding downsizing the bureaucrats either into productivity or completely off of the tax-subsidized payrolls. For more details:

http://www.spaceprojects.com/bureaucrats


Go W Go! :-)

[End The Hypocrisy]

Sounds like an intriguing approach, that's worth considering.

[End The Hypocrisy]

AP news article: "President Bush plans to subject as many as 850,000 federal jobs to competition from the private sector, administration officials said Thursday, a sweeping reform long sought by Republicans and stiffly opposed by labor unions. Nearly half of the government's civilian work force could be affected by the plan to be published in the Federal Register on Friday. After a 30-day public review period, Bush can impose the new rules without congressional approval."

Source: http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAXWINYI8D.html

[End The Hypocrisy]

Newt Gingrich has a neat idea for how to EFFICIENTLY replace the purportedly essential central planners (i.e. deadweight):

http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20020121/3789392s.htm

National woes? Dangle prizes, solutions will follow
By Newt Gingrich


Many Americans know that Charles A. Lindbergh was the first aviator to fly the Atlantic alone. But how many know that his 1927 flight was prompted by a $25,000 prize offered by a wealthy New York hotelier as a way to advance aviation?

For much of this country's history, prizes motivated sharp minds to innovate quickly while avoiding the dual demons of massive paperwork and entangling bureaucracies. Today, when the country needs breakthrough solutions in a wide range of pressing issues -- among them, health care, the environment, security and space -- prizes could serve the U.S. government well.

If President Bush were to offer prizes for important contributions to the public good, the first beneficiaries would be the successful innovators. But we all would be the bigger ultimate winners, as history shows.

In the early 18th century, for instance, a navigational error caused the British Navy to lose four warships and 2,000 sailors. In response, the British Parliament offered 20,000 pounds (more than a million U.S. dollars today) to anyone who invented a way to determine longitude at sea with accuracy. The answer didn't come from scientific or academic elites, but from a determined working-class joiner with little formal education, John Harrison, who invented the chronometer.

In another instance, utility companies in 1992 formed the Super Efficient Refrigerator Program, which offered $30 million in prize money for the manufacture and successful marketing of a high-efficiency refrigerator. Whirlpool won the contest, but in the long run, consumers won, too.

Government needs innovators

The federal government should embrace the idea of prizes for technological and scientific advances that help it achieve its policy goals because:

* It often lacks innovative solutions to problems to meet its needs that have no natural market in the private sector. This has always been true, for instance, in meeting our defense objectives; there is no private-sector need for combat aircraft or heavy weapons. Even more urgently needed today are technologies to frustrate the efforts of terrorists and to avoid the devastating results of biological, chemical or nuclear attack.

* Offering prizes expands the number of minds that will be working on a specific problem at the same time, thereby likely shortening the time before breakthroughs occur.

* Prizes reward those who give up their own time and resources to meet the challenge of a national scientific or technological need. That should be a point of pride for all Americans, who could stop cheering for television contestants and start rooting for amateur and professional scientists and researchers as they race toward a cure for AIDS or Alzheimer's or profitable space travel. (It should be a source of national embarrassment that the first American space tourist had to go to Russia to fulfill his dream.)

Space and technology options

Nanotechnology -- which deals with atom-size materials and components -- is a good candidate for such a contest because it will change virtually everything. Nanotechnology will change manufacturing by creating lighter and stronger materials, supercomputing by using quantum behaviors, and health care with methods that can detect a single cancerous cell.

There are plenty of other contest options. We're probably going to spend $25 billion -- perhaps even more -- to try to develop the space station in the usual bureaucratic way. Why not offer a prize of $1 billion to the innovator of a working system that would get people and equipment into orbit for 10% of the current cost? That could dramatically lower the cost of all future space flight.

I am not suggesting that we slow the momentum of any current scientific activities. I am suggesting that relatively modest amounts set aside for prizes might lead to dramatic breakthroughs made by a wide range of inventors and developers, many of whom would never make it through the current red-tape-ridden system.

Surely it is worth at least trying this bold approach. After all, if no one produces the breakthrough, no one gets the money.


Newt Gingrich, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a former speaker of the House.

---

Newt's competitive prizes procurement idea is already being seriously considered by NASA:

http://www.spaceprojects.com/prizes

[unixfox]

I like to describe government this way...

Government is a giant host, and those working for the government are like viruses. Viruses have to have a host to survive, they won't kill it, but they will certainly try to suck the very life out of it.

[Our man in washington]

I work for the Federal government. We desperately need reform of the civil service system. Here's my law of civil service reform: if no one is getting fired, then no real reform is happening. Keep that in mind when judging Bush's efforts.

Tens of thousands of Federal employees deserve to be fired. I have fellow employees who brag about how little work they do. A little fear would be good for the whole system.

[End The Hypocrisy]

An as the Cato Institute would add, taxpayers produce while the government consumes.

[End The Hypocrisy]

>>>Keep that in mind when judging Bush's [reform] efforts.<<<


Any predictions?

[JennysCool]

Keep up the good fight!

[camle]

it spreads the "pain" evenly, has no sacred cows, no bias. It also forces each agency head to decide whether to cut staff or services, for example. In other words it forces agencies to prioritize.

It also feeds the economy, helps restore freedom, and provides instant rewards for taxpayers, whilst buying down the debt.

[Our man in washington]

My prediction? Privatization will lead to a few dismissals. Minorities will be overrepresented among the dismissals, or at least the Federal employee unions will claim that. The networks will show sob stories of Federal workers feeling "betrayed" as they get their pink slips, complete with claims about discrimination against minorities.

The Bush administration will then issue a stern warning against discrimination in the privatization process. Much of the contracting out will cease while someone "studies" the issue of discrimination.

But the process will probably get rid of a few bad employees and will at least annoy the Federal employee unions. These are both good things.

[End The Hypocrisy]

The abovementioned study on how African Americans are greatly over-represented should be rehashed if such a smear campaign emerges. As for sob stories and feelings of betrayal among bureaucratic deadweight though, I think that Americans tend to feel that such thinking's credibility was ruled out by the fall of the Soviet Union. Americans are not pleased with seeing others getting a free ride at their expense. Good luck and please keep the Freepers informed. We're here for you. Maybe somebody should create a civil service reform ping list.

[anymouse]

Bump for a good idea.