In my last post, I wrote about the US being governed by executive order and the rapid pace of downsizing the US Government. Per Statista, 2.93 people are civilian employees of the federal government. Does this make the Federal Government the largest employer in the Country? It certainly does.
Consider the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) example that is in the news today. The estimate of those being fired is about 62,000. OK, I will admit my naivete and freely admit that this number is staggering to me. If you had asked me how many employees the Department of Health and Human Services had, I wouldn’t have guessed anywhere near 60,000. I would have guessed 10-15,000.
Bear in mind, this number of 62,000 is just the number being fired at this one department, HHS. This number of 62,000 is about the one-quarter of the staff at HHS. This means HHS employs around 248,000 people nearly a quarter of a million people. Wow. I clearly have no idea the breadth of HHS’s work.
The Department of Education on the other hand only has 4,133 employees. I would have guessed 1-2,000. The plan is to reduce the workforce there by 50%.
Is the Federal Government bloated? Are there too many people on the payroll? Are the various departments and agencies involved in programs and activities that are not essential and should probably be cut or reduced in scope? I am guessing the answer is probably yes to each of these questions. I believe the private sector, the corporate world, has many more workforce reductions as they must answer to investors. The economy expands and corporations hire workers. They grow their staffs. When the economy wanes or contracts, they reduce or right size the workforce to remain profitable or to minimize their losses. I do not recall the Federal Government ever being subject to such a cycle. Sure, the revenue from taxes expands or contracts with employment rates. I also suspect some programs are sunset due to their work being done or no longer needed, but other agencies and departments are created to help govern emerging areas of importance.
Joe average citizen, with yours truly as a prime example, is oblivious to this government bloat. When I ask friends and colleagues to guess the size of HHS, everyone underestimated the size by a factor of ten.
I am against the ‘Chainsaw Al’ approach to staff reduction. It works, eventually, but it is so disruptive and so 1990s. It could, in this case, be a tactic to drive a bit of fear of losing their jobs to the employees that remain which may be a new feeling for federal employees. I would have rather evaluated each of the programs or initiative by an evaluation process that rates the value of the program/department to the population and thus decide which programs to keep untouched, keep with smaller budgets, and which to eliminate altogether. For those departments to be reduced or eliminated a plan should be developed on how to achieve the reductions to minimize the impact to stakeholders, suppliers, grant recipients, and citizens outside of HHS.
The DOGE way is certainly quicker if it doesn’t matter what level of disruption and chaos is left in the wake.