NASA Will Soon Enter Workforce Shrink Mode
White House tells agencies to come up with a plan to shrink their workforces, Washington Post
“The White House on Wednesday will instruct all federal agencies to submit a plan by June 30 to shrink their civilian workforces, offering the first details on how the Trump administration aims to reduce the size and scope of the government. A governmentwide hiring freeze the president imposed on Jan. 23 will be lifted immediately. But Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters Tuesday that agency leaders must start “taking immediate actions” to save money and reduce their staffs. Mulvaney also said they must come up with a long-term blueprint to cut the number of federal workers starting in October 2018.”
Many comments on this site have lately been political. Some commenters have noted the apparent political lens.
Maybe.
But does this move by the Administration not betray a fundamental cynicism? The view that somehow public employees are sucking the life out of taxpayers?
Would it not make more sense to identify the programs or services that are to be eliminated? What sort of efficiency is gained when an agency is asked to remove a fixed labor cost? Unless a specific service is removed concurrently, the answer is simple: none. All you get is a demoralized work force trying to do a good job in the face of Administration antipathy.
Budgets, government employment and policy are always political.
Any sort of lifetime job security will produce a certain amount of deadweight. That’s as true of the civil service as it is of the European titled aristocracy of two or three centuries ago. Some work to reduce that isn’t a bad idea. But such an effort should be handled carefully. I want to see what those plans look like.
I’m not Japanese, and have never lived in Japan, but my recollection is that during the Japanese economic “miracle” workers were assured lifetime employment… although I think some Japanese companies backed off that after a recession in the 80s, it seemed to work pretty well for them for a long time. Probably promoted company loyalty…
The aerospace industry probably has seen more than its share of layoffs over the years, and there certainly was no lifetime job guarantee, but in my experience there was plenty of dead weigh there. Maybe that’s just “old space”, but obviously there are more factors at play than job security.
While layoffs have not happened for some time in the civil service workforce, there are mechanisms to encourage you to leave if you really are not doing any work on a funded project.
There is a problem with applying this reduction to NASA.
If NASA keeps it’s current workload of projects, a good chunk of those “reduced” civil servants will come back as contractors, at 3-4 times the cost.
For the record, NASA had about 18,500 employees when President Obama took office and only about 17,700 today, a decline of about 4%.
The total number of civilian federal workers increased from 2,038,183 to 2,071,716 in 2015, an increase of about 2%. But the number of federal workers has been declining since 2011 when it was 2,130,289.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mis…