Occam’s Razor

The Outsourcing Madness has reached its logical end

As a career federal employee I am keenly aware of the Bush Administration’s outsourcing initiative. In case you don’t know it is, it means the Bush Administration would like to fire federal employees and hire contractors to do their work providing (they say) that they can justify a cost savings.

As you may recall I have discussed this topic before in an entry in January and an entry in May. What is new is that Congress is beginning to pay attention to this subject and it appears they are saying “Enough!” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) managed to attach a rider to a House spending bill that would essentially require the Bush Administration to play by the old rules on outsourcing. What is surprising is that a Republican controlled House, virtually always in line with whatever the Administration proposes, deviated from the Bush’s position on this issue.

There are similar rumblings going on in the Senate too, although nothing like the language in this bill has emerged yet. The Bush Administration promises a veto of the bill if it gets to the President’s desk in its current form.

Naturally I have a vested interest in the outcome of this fight. I don’t believe for a minute that my job is any safer from outsourcing than anyone else’s. I have twenty years in the civil service, have consistently earned top performance ratings and generally take pleasure in my job. It would be nice to be treated with a little more dignity for my long years and hard work, but to the guys in the green eye shades I’m not really a person, just a statistic in a political game that affects real people who are often doing very good work.

Yes, certainly the perception exists that there are lazy and incompetent federal employees out there. And there are. There aren’t nearly as many as critics would like to believe. There are also lazy and incompetent contractors working for Uncle Sam out there. I see them all the time in my organization. In some cases they are goofing off because of the inability of the government to keep them busy. (We federal employees are very multitasked and increasingly we have to delegate rather than micromanage.) In others they simply ARE being lazy and they find checking their Yahoo! Mail far more engaging that the drudgery of doing their assigned tasks. So it cuts both ways. But in general, and I have had SOME experience in private industry, despite my 20 years in the government, I have not seen a correlation that people working in the federal government are any more or less efficient than our private industry brethren. Just like our private industry brethren, we are making do with less … a LOT less. I have seen our own staff shrink year after year. Year after year I take on more and more complicated projects from people who are retiring, transferred or moved on. When a guy in my office transferred to the Social Security Administration I got stuck with two of his projects, at no extra pay of course. His slot vanished so that we could make some arbitrary administrative goal about keeping down the size of government.

The resistance to outsourcing is increasing for a variety of reasons, but rest assured it’s not because federal employees alone are complaining. We’ve been doing that for years and it hasn’t stopped the trend. What it has resulted in are all sorts of gimmicks like early out retirements instead. Outright layoffs are relatively rare, which is better than most private sector employees receive.

But the real reason things are somewhat different now is that Congress is starting to figure it out: the government is about as outsourced as it can get. To use one metaphor, the “low hanging fruit” was picked off long ago. Now the ladders are way up in the apple trees and people are extended out on weak branches trying to grab the apples. In real life this would introduce a lot of risk and take a lot more effort to collect apples. The same thing is happening with outsourcing. It has reached the point where in most cases going through the effort is more costly than any imagined benefits and negates any marginal cost savings that would result.

For example The Washington Post reported that much of the National Parks Budget, which would have otherwise gone to desperately needed improvements to the parks infrastructure, was instead spent this year on numerous and costly outsourcing studies. Can we get rid of a handful of park archeologists and geologists and outsource them instead? We certainly could and there are beltway bandits spending gobs of taxpayer dollars to prove it in official looking reports. But Congress is finally paying some attention to these increasing bizarre outsourcing stories. It just doesn’t make that much sense, unless you are trying to pay off some political contributors, to throw some GS-12 archeologist out of work to save a couple thousand bucks. Certainly park visitors have a more enriching experience when someone who has been around a while can provide education and insight that some fly by night contractor cannot.

Enough already! Yes, if government takes on a new function let’s look carefully to see if it can be done more efficiently by the private sector. But trust me on this: there is not an agency in the federal government that hasn’t been combed from top to bottom numerous times by various administrations trying to find spurious savings on jobs that can be outsourced. The low hanging fruit was picked long, long ago. There may be an agency or two that somehow managed to hide a pocket of people, but they will be the rare exception. There are no more GS-2’s cleaning restrooms, or GS-5’s maintaining motor pools. It’s been years since I’ve seen a federal computer specialist like myself actually program a line of code. Computers have squeezed out almost all the administrative and secretarial staff. Even my office director, a GS-15 who likely makes $100K a year doesn’t qualify for a secretary. He has to type his own darn memos.

This outsourcing madness has reached its logical end. It’s time to stop pretending we are shrinking the cost of government by transferring duties from federal employees to contractors, and to admit the government has grown much, much bigger because politicians have hidden the true size of government in an expanding contractor community. This shell game is over and even Congress is realizing it. Let’s hope the Bush Administration emerges from its ideological hole and stops this nonsense that no longer saves taxpayers any money.

September 15th, 2003 at 09:47am Posted by Mark | Politics 2003 | no comments

What’s Going on at NASA?

My friend Tom and I were big space program enthusiasts growing up in the 60s. It was hard not to be excited about the space program during that time, but we were something like fanatics about it back then. The space program embodied the best of American ingenuity at a time beset with otherwise pretty nasty problems like Vietnam, toxic waste and large city riots. In a country that at times seemed to be teetering on the edge of anarchy, it provided focus and pride.

What we accomplished in so short a time was amazing. Alan Shepard took his first suborbital flight on Freedom 7 on May 5, 1961. We landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, a mere 8 years, 2 months and 15 days later. We did it in an environment in which pretty much everything was unknown, including whether humans could even survive in weightlessness. In such a short time we created three types of manned space capsules (Mercury, Gemini and Apollo) and a number of manned launch vehicles (Redstone, Titan, Saturn 1, Saturn 1-B and Saturn V). Except for the Apollo 1 accident, which killed three astronauts testing on a launch pad, it was a casualty free.

Many of us who were alive then will remember those days as glory days. It was so damned exciting! Moving to Florida as I did in 1972 was something of a mixed blessing, because I was close enough to Cape Kennedy where I could actually see a few launches. I felt the pressure of a Saturn V rocket against my chest launching Skylab into orbit, fully nine miles away watching it from across the lagoon from Merritt Island. The future seemed pretty limitless.

Reaching the Moon turned out to be something of a problem because suddenly there was no goal to shoot for anymore. After Apollo 11 each subsequent lunar mission seemed less compelling to the public and Congress seemed less inclined to open its checkbook to NASA. That pattern has continued to the present.

I have never worked for NASA but my brother Jim worked for it for a while as an intern and as a post-graduate. My brother in law Jim joined NASA in the mid 1980s and has risen pretty far in the organization, and has been program director for a number of projects. More recently my sister Doris, who has been on the edges of the manned space flight effort for years, accepted a job with NASA.

But as you know these are not great days for NASA. The Columbia disaster on February 1st shook me but at the same time I was wondering why it took so long. It was remarkable, under the circumstances that no manned space flight fatalities had happened in our program since the Challenger disaster.

Perusing the compulsory blue ribbon report the other day, there were technical reasons for the disaster, but equally important were the policy reasons for the disaster. It is clear to me that the real cause of the disaster was that the manned space program has been short shrifted by Congress and ignored by the White House for many years. Apparently we haven’t learned much from the Challenger disaster. After that disaster there was a similar blue ribbon commission. There were pledges to make safety a number one priority then too.

But the space program wasn’t sexy any more, and there were tax cuts, and budget deficits, and a lot of silly ideology that NASA was saddled with that really never made much sense but which NASA had to follow anyhow. Over the years funding for the space shuttle was cut 40%. As a result there have been fewer flights, and each flight became more expensive, and despite assurances NASA lied even to itself and made numerous shortcuts around safety.

Perhaps the stupidest decision NASA made was to turn over much of the operations to a consortium. It resulted in decisions being made by contractors that should have been made by NASA. NASA employees were increasingly disconnected from the technical reality of what it took to run a space program. Cost concerns became the primary concern. As much as safety was considered the top priority, it is clear that Congress was not going to provide the money to fund shuttle safety properly. And NASA managers, being managers, weren’t going to tell Congress and the Administration they couldn’t ensure safety anyhow. They knew who provided the butter for their bread.

We wanted to run a manned space program on the cheap and it didn’t work. The idea of a reusable shuttle as a cost effective means of providing transportation to space has, unfortunately, been discredited. This is not to say it is not possible, but it wasn’t possible with the technologies we had available in the 1970s. And we continue to limp along with that because Congress doesn’t want to pony up the money to replace it. And so old hardware continues to deteriorate, accidents happen and people die. Congress will browbeat NASA, but if it wants to see the true cause of the problem, it only needs to look in the mirror. This is the consequence of underfunding, inattention, lax oversight and one size fits all agencies ideology from both parties.

I wonder now if there is the will to even continue our manned space flight program. I suspect it will survive somehow, but it will be a long time before our geriatric shuttle fleet is retired and replaced by something else. That something else, perhaps the National Aero-Space Plane, seems a long way away. It will require much more money than it is getting now to make it a reality. Its technology may be too advanced at this particular time in our history. Time will hopefully tell. But so far Congress hasn’t invested much money in a replacement to the space shuttle, beyond basic research.

I do hope our manned space flight program survives. It continues to inspire not just middle-aged people like me but plenty of youth. If it is killed it will be like sticking a knife into the soul of our country. You can probably trace the beginning of the decline of the United States from such a decision. A space program doesn’t look all that good to administrations driven by capitalist ideology and enamored with balance sheets. We need a new goal: a colony on the moon perhaps, or a manned trip to Mars. None of this is beyond us. But it costs money.

It would however continue to be an excellent investment in our human spirit and potential.

September 5th, 2003 at 05:43pm Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

The Rest of the Story

I try to keep this web log focused on my what I hope are interesting and perhaps even profound observations. I try not to put in it all the trivialities of life that I deal with on a day-to-day basis. But I thought maybe for a change I should fill in some of the gaps so you know just what it is I DO during the days and why this web log stays blank for days at a time.

I’ve been especially busy this week, although I did manage to take yesterday off as a day of much needed leave. But even on my day of leave I was busy keeping doctor’s appointments, shuffling my daughter to summer school, buying bulk items at the superstore and picking her up at a remote friend’s houses. I just didn’t have as many distractions, and for that I felt blessed.

My workdays start at 5:20 a.m. when the alarm clock goes off. I dress in the dark while my wife snoozes, eat a hurried breakfast and I am out the door by 5:53. I need to be at the Reston South Park and Ride commuter lot by 6 AM to catch a vanpool that takes me to work. We sail down the Dulles Toll Road and with luck and the wind at our back I am in my office at 6:45 AM.

This week though I had to relocate to a new office. We were abruptly moved to another building in February 2002 and since then we’ve been gypsies. For three months due to lack of space I shared office space with another guy. When a small office (no door) opened up I pressed my case and with some politicking I was able to inhabit it as long as the lady whose office it was (she was on a long term detail) wasn’t inhabiting it. It was a neat little office: I had a commanding view of the National Archives. I’m unlikely ever to get a better view in the remainder of my career.

But the lady is moving back and I had to relocate. The division that I work is currently scattered over three floors. Once upon a time we were all together in one place - imagine that! We were promised that we would be brought back together again, but strings of promises went unfulfilled. Now I hear that in about three months we’ll be consolidated back in the same area I just vacated.

But I elected to move upstairs to a nice cube along a window that had been long vacated and it seemed I had all the permissions. So Tuesday morning I moved up there only to discover someone else had plans for that cube. So I was shuffled to another larger area, with no window, that is pretty nice. But I also know it will be a transient place.

But if that weren’t enough no sooner had I moved into THAT space when I learned that my move was causing inter office political ripples of some sort. My boss wanted to know if I wanted to move back down to the sixth floor: several offices were vacant. I asked: if we’re moving back there permanently pretty soon would this be my permanent space? Well, no. So I opted to stay where I am and I’m still not even sure this space is semi permanent. But at least I am with my own kind. Room 702 is full of IT (Information Technology) folk. And knowing the way things work in our agency I could be where I am now for years so I might well be in my new permanent space, I just don’t know it yet. Clearly space management is not one of our organization’s strong suits.

As a project manager I shuffle a lot of projects. With a recent degree in Software Systems Engineering it would be nice if I did some of it. But no, my main task at the moment is honchoing an IT opportunity fair for the Department of Health and Human Services. So about 70% of my otherwise busy day is clogged with that: questions from vendors, watching our appointment and registration systems book up, attending meetings, holding conference calls and basically just trying to get other people to do things in a timely basis. What I really do is manage chaos (yes, I know that is an oxymoron but it fits). Ideally I like to get some exercise time during my lunch. But there was no chance for that on either Monday or Tuesday. And no chance to do it at home either.

Meanwhile, other projects are coming due. A long overdue assessment of some enterprise reporting solutions needs to come to a conclusion. So I spend time meeting with the testers and going over issues, pros and cons, and working on PowerPoint slides for my presentation on Monday. While trying to do that email streams in and the phone (once it was reconnected on Wednesday) starts ringing often. Usually phone calls are from vendors with questions about the IT Opportunity Fair. I am the casualty of the moment of the profit motive. As the new outreach coordinator (a position to which I did not aspire) every vendor smelling profits wants to talk with me. I really wish I wasn’t paid to talk to them because I got other crap to do which seems a lot more pressing.

In short there is almost no time for a respite. It’s go from the moment I get in to the moment I leave. And every day I have to sit and judge what I’m working on. What is really important today and what can I safely slack off on? I decided this week I can slack off on finishing the quotes I need to renew some service and support contracts. But that will hit the fan soon too.

The van comes by and picks me up about 4:30 p.m. I am usually home about 5:30. (And on Thursday I was drafted to drive the van; that meant long walks to and from the Department of Agriculture, where the van resides during the day.) But no rest for the weary for this parent. It’s usually something. One night it was take Rosie to see a doctor. The other night it was take her to church (both directions) where she is participating in a play. This usually means I grab a quick dinner by myself after I get home.

So when there is free time it is an hour or so in the evening to catch my breath. You’ll forgive me if I am not up to blogging; at that point I just need to veg a little.

Now I hope I don’t sound like I am whining. I am paid very good money and my days may be long but I have a good job and I tend to work pretty close to 40-hour weeks (although add on commutes and it is more like 60 hour weeks). I have time to attend to both my daughter and my wife and I’m grateful for this too.

Still, as busy as these weeks get sometimes, there is something about the awful franticness of it that invigorates me. I got home from work on Thursday close to exhausted but exhilarated in some sense. I wonder if a juggler gets the same thill when thrown one more ball and still managing to keep them all in the air. It is better to feel exhilarated I guess, than annoyed. Much of this sort of work is boring but if it comes fast enough I don’t have time to notice it.

So I’m recharging this weekend, or trying to. I will leave shortly to go running, but I have already spent close to two hours taking my daughter to the orthodontist and now she is at church again practicing for the play.

And that, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story.

July 19th, 2003 at 01:52pm Posted by Mark | Life 2003 | one comment

Outsourcing Madness

News item: 150 federal workers rally at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D. C. to protest zealous efforts to “outsource” their jobs to the private sector.

I had no idea about this rally. I suspect if the word had gotten around there would have been a lot more people at the rally. But hey, it’s a start.

It’s the same everywhere in here in Fed World. Today in my vanpool those who work in the Department of Agriculture were noting their “All Hands” meeting today. The primary discussion of course is outsourcing. How many of these good and hard working federal employees, many of whom have been employed for dozens of years, will still have a job in a year? How high do you think their morale is while this process is underway?

Maybe the way to keep their job in this economy is to surrender and to find out what contracting agency will fill their jobs and apply to them. At least they’ll have the requisite experience for the job. Anyhow, if airline employees can be continually downsized why not federal employees? What is sauce for the goose is good for the gander after all. Umm, all this IS good, right? Taxpayers are going to get a great return for their tax dollar right? Think again.

In the process of moving from federal employee to contractor they may give up some of those little fringe benefits they took for granted, like more than a week or two of vacation a year, or health insurance, or a 401-K plan. But at least maybe they will be employed, although for likely far less than they make now. These new contracting executives will need their Mercedes Benz and their cushy offices. That will require the usual deal: charge the government more than the true cost of federal employees but caveat it with “Hey, if you don’t need them they can be easily terminated”, take 50% of the margin for “overhead” and give the rest, or less, to the employee. Federal employee numbers go down. Bush can claim he has reduced the size of the government and made the government more lean and efficient.

Now I’m certainly not saying that some contracting doesn’t make sense. It would make no sense to have civil servants build B-1 bombers. It didn’t make much sense 20 years ago when I started working in the government to have civil servants cleaning restrooms or maintaining an agency’s fleet of automobiles. There are jobs that are so generic that there is nothing the least bit “federal” about them. The crux of the matter is whether a job is “inherently governmental”. Over the years as the politically inspired outsourcing pressure has increased the line between what is inherently governmental has gone from dubious at best to outright silly.

The latest example that I read about is this attempt by the Department of the Interior to outsource grants management specialists. What does a grants management specialist do? Their job is to ensure that when the federal government doles out the dollars to accomplish some mission on behalf of the federal government that the money is used according to law. But apparently the Department of the Interior thinks “Hey, we can hire a contractor to see if our contractors are doing the job correctly.” This is lunacy. What the hell is more inherently governmental than this?

But outsourcing is just one example of dubious management in the federal government. The Bush Administration, like those before it, is convinced there are too many supervisors in the federal government. The solution is to reduce middle management and “flatten hierarchies”. In my agency we’ve become so flattened that management has basically no idea what I actually do and no time to monitor my work.

No, I am not kidding. I wish I were. We were reorganized recently. Of course we’re not going to get any new people to replace those who left because in addition to flatting hierarchies we want to give the appearance that the federal government is not growing too. My new supervisor is a GS-15 who was given the job in addition to his previous job of being the information technology security officer for the agency. What is he actually doing day to day? Think he’s managing the people below him? Think again. Mostly what he does is spend 80% of his time working on some departmental security initiative that keeps him out of the office or unavailable to manage during that time. This is what his bosses are telling him. So he has almost no time to know what any of us are doing.

In short the hierarchy has been flattened so much that accountability has been squeezed out! There is no time to manage people and balance the resources and work among us. But in reality my boss, through no fault of his own but simply through circumstances, really has no idea what I do beyond “project management”. When it comes time to do my employee evaluation, assuming he actually has time to read my accomplishments, he will find out what I did for him last year. Hopefully it will be in line with what he would have wanted me to do in the first place, if he had the time to tell me, which he won’t. He won’t have time to even think through the problem in the first place.

In reality there is no accountability in my organization. I come to work and do my job but I could just as easily sit at my desk and play solitaire all day because it is unlikely anyone would notice. In fact I do come to work and put in a solid day’s work, but even so I have no idea whether I am doing good or bad. My performance evaluation criteria are so generic it bears little or no resemblance to my effort. There is no clear expectation of what I am supposed to be doing in the first place. I just keep doing what I’ve been doing and perhaps naively volunteer to take on new tasks from time to time feeling I should be a “team player”. These new tasks generally show up as a result of talking with people or from phone calls.

One would hope that our executives would understand the dichotomy of what they expect from their managers. In short they expect the impossible. If you tell my manager to spend 80% of his time doing something other than his job, which has supervisor in the title, then he is not going to be able to manage us. If in addition you flatten hierarchies so much that even if he had the time he wouldn’t be able to manage our time effectively then the obvious conclusion is that you need more managers, not less. If a manager can’t manage the people under them then they can’t hold them accountable and employees’ productivity is likely being squandered.

It is time to acknowledge the obvious: you get the government you pay for. We’ve collapsed hierarchies too much; we need to add managers, not subtract them. We need not just figurehead managers, but real managers, trained in actual management who read books by Jack Welch. And our executives need to set their managers free so they can actually manage their people in alignment with organizational goals.

And as for outsourcing, it based on the notion that just about any task can be neatly packaged and handed off and doesn’t require any real governmental oversight except for remembering to renew the contract when it comes up. No one will admit that, of course, but that’s the naked reality.

That’s not management, folks.

May 22nd, 2003 at 08:52am Posted by Mark | Politics 2003 | no comments

20 Years in Club Fed: A Mixed Blessing

This week at a staff meeting my boss called me up to the front and presented me with a certificate and a pin. Apparently I’ve been employed with the federal government for twenty years. Instead of making me feel better, it just made me feel old and depressed.

Perhaps it’s not good to have these things happen so close to your birthday. I turn 46 tomorrow. But 20 years in anything is a long time. In actuality I left the federal government for about a year in 1987 and came back in early 1989. So while I started work in 1981 a few weeks before Ronald Reagan came into office, because I worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for a while my “service computation date” is 1981, plus fifteen months or so. Sometime last year, probably in May, I hit the 20-year mark. The government being what it is, it took this long for me to get the obligatory certificate and pin.

Perhaps it doesn’t feel like 20 years because I’ve moved around. I started out as a lowly clerk typist for what was then the Defense Mapping Agency. In 1981 we were in recession and even a lowly clerk typist job was better than where I was at: selling lawn and garden stuff for Montgomery Ward. My friend Tim Bagwell from those Wards days who suggested I come to work for DMA. As miserly as the GS-4 wages were back then, they look liked a king’s ransom compared to my wages with Wards.

Things obviously improved since then. By the end of 1981 I was working as a production controller in the Graphic Arts Department as a GS-5. It was sort of related to my degree, which had been in communications;I had just never really studied printing. It was the Wang 2200T “calculator” (minicomputer) that we had the piqued my curiosity about all things computer related and I was soon using it and an Apple 2 Plus computer to manage my work. Every one else was using index cards. I had sort of liked the one programming course I had in college in the 70s, but it was such a pain to deal with punch cards and wait hours for jobs to be run that there was not much “fun” in the experience. A “real time” computer was a different story.

I took a COBOL course and used it to get an entry level programming job one floor up. I never looked back. My only deficiency was the lack of a degree in the field. I finally took care of that in the last half of the 90s when I went back to school and got a masters degree in software system engineering. Now I hardly ever touch a line of code, at least on the job. I do mostly project management stuff, which is not terribly inspiring. It does however pay well.

After being laid off by the Democrats and having scrambled on a contract for three months to make ends meet I ended back in Club Fed with the Air Force. I spent nine years toiling in the bowels (actually the third floor) of the Pentagon. I made minor and major changes to legacy budget systems written in PL/1 but eventually got put on a number of “cool” projects using something called a “client/server” architecture. And I guess I did well. In 1997 when that organization royally pissed me off and I shopped my resume within Club Fed, I was quickly picked up by HHS and here I am.

Things being what they are I wonder how much longer I will stay in Club Fed. The work is not terribly challenging, but at this point the benefits are good and the steady income stream is something I can appreciate after so many lean years. The biggest reason for me to stay though is not the money, but the time off. For the first time in my life I have the leisure to do things. I can take substantial chunks of time off and explore other areas of life, such as teaching. So I am grateful for the income (I am a GS-14) and I have often been proud of my accomplishments over the years too.

But the trend to replace federal workers with contractors seems to only be accelerating. There are really no cost savings to this contracting out business any more, but it is political anathema to suggest it. Politicians like the illusion that the government is shrinking when in fact it gets more and more bloated every year. So I may be offered an early out at some point, although 46 is probably way too early for such an offer. And then what will I do? I do know that by age 56 I could retire with a full pension should I so choose. And I probably will.

So the 20-year pin probably is just causing more denial of age feelings. I am sure I have plenty of company. I am sanguine now about the cost of completely following my heart. I work now not so much for the joy of having accomplished something significant, but to pay bills and provide for those I love. The current trends suggest that work for me will continue to be less and less interesting. But at some point, probably after I leave federal service, maybe work will become inspiring again.

January 31st, 2003 at 07:34am Posted by Mark | Life 2003 | no comments

The True Size of Government

My agency is going through another one of its periodic, politically required, staff reductions. My agency is hardly unique. Cutting the number of federal employees has become the key metric for demonstrating that government itself is smaller. In 1996 when President Clinton declared the era of big government was over there were approximately 1.9 million of us on the payroll. This follows a downward trend that President Bush is only accelerating.

If government is getting smaller why does it still feel so big? Our office space has not shrunk, and I don’t pass rows of empty cubicles every day. The answer becomes a lot clearer when I look at who is now occupying cubicles of the departed. Their badges are not white. Their badges are pink. In my agency this means they are a contractor. It should not be news that the federal government has relied more on contractors and less on civil servants to get its work done. Indeed in my agency the political imperative to contract out is written into the performance plan of every manager. These contractors are doing work that previously was done by federal employees. Those in favor of a leaner and meaner federal government should applaud. But is the government really any leaner?

Clearly the cost of a federal employee is not a trivial expense. We come with generous leave allowances and decent health care plans. Those of us who remain often have other benefits, such as flexible work schedules and, increasingly, flexible work locations too. And no civil servant I’ve run into can candidly admit they haven’t seen fellow employees abuse the civil service rules and get away with it. Clearly some reforms are needed. I can report after nearly 20 years in the federal trenches that the stereotype of the lazy government bureaucrat is a rare exception to the rule.

One motivation for hiring a contractor instead of a federal employee is that they are expendable. Or are they? I found a curious thing when I arrived at my agency in 1998. Many of the contractors had been working for and supporting the agency longer than many of the federal employees. On those infrequent occasions when contract companies changed, the new contractor invariably picked up these old time contractors. Even more alarming from my perspective is that they often had sole subject matter expertise. If all our contractors were to leave tomorrow it is not even clear that my agency could even function in any meaningful sense. In the information technology shop where I work, many of us “feds” would be hard pressed to modify a line of code, and would be harder pressed to find it. If a contractor looks like a fed, talks like a fed, and squawks like a fed, isn’t it a fed? Clearly the Bush Administration doesn’t think so, and Congress shares this opinion. To admit otherwise would be to admit that government is not leaner than it was.

A leaner government should be able to squeeze more value for the taxpayer. As a taxpayer I certainly hope this is the case, but I am skeptical. Most of the contractors I encounter work on services contracts. While there are exceptions most of them work in-house. My agency provides them virtually all the standard services it would provide a federal employee. Their cubicle may be a bit smaller, but they use the same phones and copiers. When they travel, they use government travel services and get the same discount airfares. But there are a few things that are different. Some of them have to take leave on federal holidays. And work cannot be directly delegated. It must go through contracting supervisors, which can create lag times. In addition the contract can be performance based.

I do know that of those contracts I have seen that the billing rates have raised my eyebrows. I know there are indirect costs (such as the cost of the infrastructure) that must be added to my direct costs that make my official salary nowhere near my true cost to the government. But these are mostly services we provide to our in-house contractors. So it is tempting, though perhaps not completely accurate, to compare direct federal costs vs. contract billing rates.

If our contractors were federal employees I’d guess their average grade would be a GS-13 making perhaps $65,000 a year. Let’s add a generous 70% for other direct employment costs such as employer contributions to social security and amortizing costs for retirement then if they were federal employees they would cost the taxpayer about $110,000 a year in direct costs. This amounts to about $53 per hour.

How much is the government being billed by the contractor for these services? If you were to add 50 to 100 percent you would be in the ballpark. Ah, but contractors are disposable! Congress could come by tomorrow and wipe out the program they support and off they would go. But of course Congress hardly ever wipes out programs. So contractors stay. And their meters keep running.

The true size of government is hard to calculate. Statistics are hard to come by because it appears that agencies don’t want to collect this information. The Brookings Institution published a persuasive book called “The True Size of Government” in 1999 that argue as of 1996 there were in excess of 12 million fulltime federal employee equivalents. Even if the true number is half that amount, the true size of the federal work force is growing.

Federal employees keep retiring at a brisk pace, often spurred on by early retirement options provided by agencies desperate to make the latest politically motivated head count. Those who remain grow grayer. It is increasingly difficult for agencies to bring in new employees to replace them. It is a safe bet that domain knowledge is being transferred to contracting staff. This assumption means that large numbers of government contractors are in effect federal employees performing inherently governmental functions. And contracting agencies are likely making very nice profits.

As a federal employee I am concerned about this trend. Congress needs to examine the true size of government and think about what it means if inherently governmental functions are being done by those who are not federal employees. New and meaningful metrics on the true size of government are needed. As a taxpayer you should consider that increasing the number of federal employees might well be in your interest, provided they are coupled with meaningful reforms in the civil service system. Be suspicious of numbers you are hearing about how the size of government has shrunk. Most likely you are being sold snake oil.

January 22nd, 2003 at 04:20pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2003 | no comments

Let’s keep doing more with less and less!

This is going to win me no friends on Capitol Hill, or in the White House for that matter. But isn’t it time we civil servants said “Enough with the downsizing crap!”?

I’m sick of it. Our agency is going through another one of its politically required processes to bring the number of federal employees down, down. Fortunately no one has been laid off (to my knowledge), perhaps because there are so few of us still around to actually do the government’s business. Anyhow there were “early outs” recently and it doesn’t take an abacus to figure out that this trend is going to continue until I find it worth my while to take an early out too. Since I am 45 though I would hope it wouldn’t be too soon.

But the real problem is that it’s all a numbers game. Guess what … the work load keeps increasing! Yes, fewer and fewer of us “federal staff” are expected to do more and more managing of tasks, and yet it’s not always true that we have the skill to manage the diverse stuff thrown at us. Working as a fed in my agency is like juggling balls without having any training. Okay you are doing two, now do three without even stopping. Now four! Five!

Guess what happens: less and less actually gets done. When you juggle lots of balls you have less opportunity to actually complete anything because you fight fires instead of trying to manage the big picture. So things keep getting delayed and delayed and guess what: that’s not really serving the public interest.

True we have contractors. In my office the contractors outnumber the federal staff about 5:1. It’s gotten to the point (actually it’s been this way for several years) that contractors are effectively doing things that should never be delegated to them, like making decisions on how to conduct the government’s business! There is simply no other way to do it other than to say “we can’t do it” and no one in the chain of command is capable of having spine like this.

Meanwhile middle management, who shall remain nameless but know who they are, are imploring us NOT TO QUIT. Their worst fear is that some other federal agency will hire us away. They know our slots won’t be renewed if we leave and that means even fewer people to do more and more.

It’s a vicious cycle to the bottom. Who’s at fault here? Why your leaders, of course. It’s a numbers game and has no basis in reality. What is the effect? Government is costing you more. It takes longer to do stuff and because contractors are doing the work instead of feds it costs more.

But I know you bought that soap Rush Limbaugh puts out about how “efficient” the private sector is. Yeah, right. Admittedly a federal employee comes with some long term costs: like pensions and stuff. But a GS-13 might cost, max, $50 an hour to the federal government with benefits. I can’t get into specifics here but I can tell you that contractors bill more than that per hour for the most junior level computer programmers. I know this for a fact. The same stuff I did as a GS-9 costs the government more than a fully loaded GS-13!

But you are afraid once a federal employee is hired they are hired for life? Well change the civil service law, dammit. I’m okay with making it easier to fire those of us who truly aren’t earning their salary, but the number is far smaller than people think. Otherwise a federal employee is a bargain compared to a contractor, unless perhaps we are talking about someone hired to clean restroom stalls.

Your tax money is being wasted by this politically correct nonsense. You should be up in arms.

December 16th, 2002 at 08:39pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2003 | no comments