Federal bureaucracy how many employees

Congress passed the Pendleton Act in , which created a system for hiring federal workers based on qualifications rather than political allegiance; employees were also protected from losing their jobs when the administration changed. To encourage a nonpartisan bureaucracy, the Hatch Act prohibited federal workers from running for office or actively campaigning for other candidates. Such limitations on civil liberties are considered by many the price that has to be paid for a professional, nonpolitical bureaucracy.

During the s, the size of the federal bureaucracy mushroomed due to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal agencies. Out of these agencies' programs grew the concept of the welfare state, under which the federal government rather than individuals, municipalities, or the states assumes the major responsibility for the well-being of the people. As with the New Deal, many Great Society programs became a permanent part of the federal bureaucracy.

The idea of the government seeing to the needs of its citizens carried on into the s: The Environmental Protection Agency EPA was created by the Nixon administration, the new Occupational Safety and Health Administration OSHA in the Labor Department transformed the workplace for most Americans, and new cabinet departments were established.

It is certainly the case that public servants are not elected and, therefore, cannot be held accountable and removed from office by voters in the same way as elected government officials. But, public sector employees are recruited on the basis of specific knowledge and expertise from the broader population. Public sector employees at the local and state levels reflect the overall American workforce.

They are also subject to frequent performance reviews and formal oversight. The data does show a different picture for the 2 million federal government employees outside of the military and postal service, and here there is grounds for criticism. The GAO called for reforms that would enable the federal government to weed out poor performers. Similar to members of the U. The location and composition of this group of senior executives also bear out some of the more pointed critiques of the federal government.

Although this is a mere 0. As a group, the SES is far less diverse than the rest of the federal government, as well as the U. In fact, the diversity of the federal workforce, particularly in terms of race and ethnicity, diminishes sharply beyond the entry-level pay grades. As the United States contemplates the devastating economic and social effects of the COVID pandemic, on top of the public health impact, we face the dilemma of how to reopen and rebuild.

In extremis, the federal government has expanded its role in shoring up the economy since March , but restoring trust in the federal government and increasing interest in public service remain significant challenges. This is a pressing problem because the federal workforce is aging rapidly. Government service has never ranked among the top job choices for college graduates. This means that more college graduates are seeking employment at the state and local government levels.

Finding out about permanent federal government jobs—rather than jobs at the state and local levels—is particularly cumbersome, and often requires sifting through huge numbers of vacancies on the USAJOBS website.

This is partly why government contractors have stepped in to fill many federal government positions. The deficiencies in federal government civilian hiring stand in stark contrast with the ease of enrollment in the U.

Although the U. Indeed, the military now plays an important role in training and underpinning the federal workforce. After retirement, a large number of former military service members re-enter federal service as civilians.

The uncertainty increased when Trump signed Executive Order in March. The order also asked the OMB director to pose three broad questions about government performance:. Congress would have to approve the proposals, but all things being equal transaction by transaction, the defense increase would almost certainly raise the number of contract and grant employees on the industry side of the federal workforce, while the domestic cuts would almost certainly reduce the number of federal employees on the government side.

Every corner of the federal budget is scrutinized, every program tested, every penny of taxpayer money watched over. Reinventing Government? These cuts are sensible and rational. Every agency and department will be driven to achieve greater efficiency and to eliminate wasteful spending in carrying out their honorable service to the American people.

And it is time to focus on obsolete functions and getting rid of them. On the government side of the complex, for example, his budget targeted nondefense federal employees for deep reductions in force.

The administration did not set a specific downsizing target, but it ordered all departments to identify opportunities for attrition-based workforce cuts. The budget also scheduled wholesale cuts in nondefense programs such as environmental protection and Medicaid.

On the industry side, the budget gave contract and grant employees cause for joy. It offered 40 percent more for defense operations and maintenance, 20 percent for research and development, and 6 percent for procurement. Meanwhile, the budget promised the Army, Navy, and Air Force increases of 55 percent, 49 percent, and 46 percent, respectively, foroperations and maintenance; somewhat smaller increases for Air Force and Navy research and development; and 16 percent for Navy shipbuilding and conversion.

These increases all promised large hikes in the contracting and grant workforce. The president endorsed dismantling when he appointed Stephen Bannon to the White House staff.

The third, broadly, line of work is deconstruction of the administration. Bannon had been forced out of the administration by August , but his deconstruction agenda was widely shared by other senior officials, including Mulvaney and his team of budget cutters. To the extent that we only do stuff within the executive branch—as with any executive orders—they can be overturned by the next administration if they see things differently. And that if we wanted real permanent change, the best way to go about that would be to do legislative change.

Trump had already started the deconstruction by using his pen to establish a travel ban on migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries; establish Regulatory Reform offices across the government; develop construction plans for a wall between Mexico and the US ; create an Office of American Innovation—led by his son-in-law and White House aide, Jared Kushner; and require every department and agency to develop reorganization plans.

Firms with violations could still bid for contracts, but the rule sent a clear warning that violations could matter in the final decision. Trump had promised to revoke the so-called blacklisting rule during the campaign, and he welcomed business leaders to the Oval Office on March 27, , when he sat down to sign the rollback:.

When I met with manufacturers earlier this year—and they were having a hard time, believe me—they said this blacklisting rule was one of the greatest threats to growing American business and hiring more American workers. It was a disaster, they said.

This rule made it too easy for trial lawyers to get rich by going after American companies and American workers who contract with the federal government—making it very difficult. Democrats and labor unions did not agree. She warned her colleagues that the risks would rise if contract firms took the rollback as permission to reduce employee protections even further. We have a lot more coming. Many appropriate reasons exist for using contract and grant employees to help execute the laws—not the least of which is the need for mission-critical skills—but convenience is not one of them.

As the following discussion suggests, however, convenience may be the only available criterion given the demographic, bureaucratic, and political pressures that weaken the case for using federal employees.

There is little opportunity for more thoughtful analysis in an antiquated federal personnel system. There are many ways to measure the hiring delays, but time to hire is the simplest statistic. In reality, the federal government continues to impose time penalties at every step of the process. Although the Office of Personnel Management OPM stopped publishing government-wide time-to-hire statistics when its priorities switched from hiring speed to candidate quality, the best available evidence suggests that the hiring process in the federal government is two to three times as long as that in colleges and universities, franchises, hospitals, and private and public companies.

Those seeking federal employment have long faced an opaque, lengthy, and unnecessarily complex process that ultimately serves the interests of neither federal agencies nor those seeking to work for them.

Weak recruiting, unintelligible job announcements, onerous application requirements, an overly long hiring process, and poor communications with applicants deter potential candidates from applying and cause many of those who do apply to abandon the effort before a hiring decision is made.

The Obama administration also took note of time when it launched the first of its threehiring reforms in May At least for now, USAJobs is more a disappointment than a source of pride.

The percentage of younger federal employees has fallen in recent years, while that of older employees has risen. Though older employees have shown remarkable staying power during good times and bad, they are moving closer to retirement. Left unchecked, these trends can lead to only one outcome: a significant drop in the capabilities of our public servants.

The retirement wave will also prompt employee shortages at the midlevels of government retirement, where so many contract and grant employees work. Service contract employees rarely reach the top of the federal hierarchy but often perform tasks that would have been reserved for younger federal employees as they moved up the chain of command toward more senior positions.

Absent a steady pipeline of committed employees, federal managers and supervisors have little choice but to call for help. The employees who show up are often well-qualified for the work, but they cannot take higher-level posts without breaching the dividing line. They also create dependency that managers and supervisors cannot easily break. As older employees move across the steps and up the ladder, they pull lower-level employees across and up, too. Promotion speed can be used to battle employment caps, cuts, and freezes through backdoor pay increases but also can give federal employees the titles and prestige to stay put, despite the opportunity for higher-paying positions in contract or grant positions.

Supervisors use constant upgrades as a retention strategy, especially for employees in technical and hard-to-fill positions. It also encourages the use of contract and grant employees to backfill vacated posts. All Above Average The federal performance appraisal system was designed to rate and reward employee contributions to department and agency goals.

In theory, the system would provide the guidance needed for disciplined reviews and maximum improvement. In reality, the guidance is so fuzzy and the discipline so weak that federal employees are almost all above average. In , 45 percent of SES members were ranked at the highest level of performance and another 44 percent were ranked just below.

Although the SES attracts many of the most talented employees in the world, its appraisal system is widely disparaged—even ridiculed—and suggests that performance ratings and actual performance are loosely coupled.

Many federal employees appear to share the assessment. In , for example, just 41 percent said awards depended on how well employees performed their jobs, 34 percent said differences in performance with their work units were recognized in a meaningful way, and 29 percent said steps were taken to deal with a poor performer who cannot or will not improve.

Federal employees are right to dispute the link between performance and discipline. They can be fired, but the process takes time, careful documentation, and persistence. According to a analysis by the US Government Accountability Office GAO , the process can take from to days, depending on the statutory authority used to support the dismissal.

In that reform you need to one, address poor performers and two, address skills that become outdated from otherwise good performers. There are just simply way too many hoops. Demography and history come together to reshape the federal hierarchy—employees grow older, missions expand and contract, personnel policies shift, new technologies emerge, and jobs evolve.

The changes are easy to track with the number of technical, administrative, clerical, and blue-collar positions at any given point in history. The big story overall is that federal employment has hovered around two million workers, but spending, after inflation, has risen sharply.

The same number of federal employees is leveraging an ever-growing amount of money, This is not to suggest that the federal government still employs large numbers of couriers and stenographers—those jobs are gone for good. However, the data suggest that the federal government still employees its fair share of lawnmowers, mapmakers, statisticians, accountants, repair specialists, and cafeteria workers.

Their checks may not come directly from the Treasury, but they will help the federal government execute the laws until Silicon Valley invents an app for that.

The federal government may not know precisely how many employees work in this hidden pyramid, but it does know that millions of employees show up every day to do work once performed by federal employees. The decision to separate these employees from the federal headcount perpetuates the conceit that government can do more with less ad infinitum, and encourages departments and agencies to create their own systems for managing the workload.

A number of different federal agencies are revenue agencies: They raise money by collecting taxes and fees. The most notorious revenue agency is the Internal Revenue Service, but it is not the only one. The Department of the Interior, for example, collects fees from people who use national parks. An independent regulatory agency is an agency outside of the cabinet departments that makes and enforces rules and regulations. The president nominates people to regulatory boards and agencies, and the Senate confirms them.

Generally, these bureaucrats serve set terms in office and can only be removed for illegal behavior. Regulatory agencies tend to function independently from the elected parts of government, which gives them the freedom to make policy without any political interference.

Scholars argue that some agencies have been taken over by the very industries they are supposed to regulate. The industries then dictate terms and policies to the agency rather than the other way around. Scholars use the term agency capture to describe this process. Agency capture causes decreased competition and higher prices. Some federal agencies resemble corporations in that they function in a businesslike manner and charge clients for their services.