PROJECT 2025 –  #11 - July 10, 2024

BLOG DISCLAIMER
This blog was created as a public service. It is a Cliff’s Notes version of the actual 900 pages of text found in PROJECT 2025. It is not a commentary. Most importantly - It DOES NOT reflect my opinion in any way.


CENTRAL PERSONNEL AGENCIES: MANAGING THE BUREAUCRACY – PART 2


Market-Based Pay and Benefits
official studies claim that federal employees are underpaid relative to the private sector by 20 percent or more. 
        Base salary is only one component of a federal employee’s total compensation. In addition to high starting wages, federal employees normally receive an annual cost-of-living adjustment (available to all employees) and generous scheduled raises known as step increases.
            The obvious solution to these discrepancies is to move closer to a market model for federal pay and benefits.
 
Reforming Federal Retirement Benefits
            Career civil servants enjoy retire­ment benefits that are nearly unheard of in the private sector. Federal employees retire earlier (normally at age 55 after 30 years), enjoy richer pension annuities, and receive automatic cost-of-living adjustments based on the areas in which they retire.     
 
Reductions-in-Force
            Reducing the number of federal employees seems an obvious way to reduce the overall expense of the civil service. But it is a challenge even to know which workers to cut. As mentioned, there are 2 million federal employees, but since budgets have exploded, so has the total number of personnel with nearly 10 times more federal contractors than federal employees. Contractors are less expensive because they are not entitled to high government pensions or benefits and are easier to fire and discipline. In addition, millions of state government employees work under federal grants, in effect administering federal programs; these cannot be cut directly. Moreover, four fac­tors determine the order in which employees are protected during layoffs: Tenure, Veterans’ preference, seniority, and performance in that order of importance. A determined president should insist that performance be first. 
 
Impenetrable Bureaucracy
            The GAO has identified almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and effec­tiveness. Congress didn’t support them. OPM still needs to lead the way governmentwide in managing personnel properly even in any future smaller government.
 
Creating a Responsible Career Management Service
            The people elect a President who is charged by Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution with seeing that the laws are “faithfully executed” with his political appointees democratically linked to that legitimizing responsibility. An autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore, career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms. 
            Frustrated with these activities by top career executives, the Trump Adminis­tration issued an Executive Order  to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the com­petitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F. It ordered the Director of OPM and agency heads to set procedures to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, from which they can relocate back to the regular civil service after such service. The order was subsequently reversed by President Biden at the demand of the civil service associations and unions. It should be reinstated.
 
Managing Personnel in a Union Environment
            It was not until President John Kennedy that union representation in the federal government was recognized. President Carter created the Civil Service Reform Act. President Trump issued three executive orders in this regard: (1) encouraging agencies to renegotiate all union collective bargaining agreements to ensure consistency with the law and respect for management rights, (2) encouraging agencies to prevent union representatives from using official time preparing or pursuing grievances or from engaging in other union activity on government time, and (3) encouraging agencies both to limit labor grievances on removals from service or on challenging performance appraisals and to prioritize performance over seniority when deciding who should be retained following reductions-in-force. All were reversed by Biden Administration. They should be reinstated and Congress should consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place.
 
Fully Staffing the Ranks of Political Appointees
                  The President must rely legally on his top department and agency officials to run the government and on top White House staff employees to coordinate operations. Without this political leadership, the career civil service becomes empowered to lead the executive branch without democratic legitimacy.
                  After the 2016 election, President Trump faced special hostility from the opposition party and the media in getting his appointees confirmed or even considered by the Senate. Under the early PPO, the Trump Administration appointed fewer political appointees in its first few months in office than had been appointed in any recent presidency, partly because of historically high partisan congressional obstructions but also because several officials announced that they preferred fewer political appointees in the agencies as a way to cut federal spending.
                  Any new Administration would be wise to learn that it will need a full cadre of sound political appointees from the beginning if it expects to direct this enormous federal bureaucracy. If “personnel is policy” is to be our general guide, it would make sense to give the President direct supervision of the bureaucracy with the OPM Director available in his Cabinet.
 
A Reformed Bureaucracy
The specific deficiencies of the fed­eral bureaucracy—size, levels of organization, inefficiency, expense, and lack of responsiveness to political leadership—are rooted in the progressive ideology that unelected experts can and should be trusted to promote the general welfare in just about every area of social life. [To change this], the only real solution is for the national government to do less: to decentralize and privatize as much as possible.
 
 
Stay tuned for Blog #12 – Section Two – The Common Defense
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