Here’s an inconvenient truth. For all the caterwailing, wailing, pearl-clutching, and gnashing of baby teeth, Donald Trump has not yet achieved the kind of planned executive branch attrition achieved by William Jefferson Clinton.
During the 1990s, President Bill Clinton reduced the size of the federal civilian workforce from roughly 2.2 million to 1.8 million, largely through federal buyouts. Upper estimates put the figure at 426,200 federal jobs eliminated. That reduction stands as the largest cut to the federal headcount since World War II.
Just The News reports that 75,000 federal employees accepted the Trump Admin’s original buyout proposal. Pay and bennied until Sept 30th, then buh bye. It didn’t get the kind of attraction they hoped for, but since the slash and burn antics have amplified, individual agencies have been authorized to offer the same deal. Voluntary recruitment gets you a paycheck until 9/30 while you look for other options.
Early retirement or a severance is a common practice in the corporate world. A way to balance the balance sheet in future quarters without leaving people in the lurch. Given the slash-and-burn tactics, you’d expect a few more to sign on rather than risk abrupt termination, but there are no numbers yet on who has stepped up.
The ongoing battles in the courts are in part to blame. Asses once comfortably planted in civil disservice jobs may be inclined to accept the risk but tenure does not appear to be a bulwark against dismissal. Trump’s secretaries have been tasked with addressing bureaucratic bloat, and more senior seat warmers are the higher-paid, lower-hanging fruit. That seems the likely target if you can save taxpayers twice as much with one termination. These grifters also represent the old way that Trump was elected to dismantle – even if they were passably competent or capable.
How dare you, you say, but here’s the thing. The odds are good that similarly capable people are working at the state level (possibly more competent), where the money and responsibility belong. If you want to return that to them, you need to cut the federal jobs that were wasting those resources on duplicative processes.
And there’s the rub. Most, if not all, states have a seat warmer on staff who can do the work, and constitutionally speaking, it is the state’s obligation, not the general government, to decide if it is warranted, to what ends, and at what price.
Democrat state, in particular, have their own bureaucratic excess and should be more than able to handle tasks left to them, yet they whine the loudest. Is it because their staff are incompetent and incapable, or that they do not want to lose the buttress of blame that a fourth branch of the federal government allows? If the dysfunction is local, they are more likely to be held to account, while being on the hook for funding things with state taxes instead of laundered grants from DC.
New Hampshire is as much on the hook as any blue state. We’ve been railing against the federal dependency culture for two decades. The last Republican governor didn’t see a grant he didn’t love. And with rare exceptions, neither did the state’s executive council. It is an addiction that will need to be addressed as the “free money” dries up and budgets need to be cut or other sources of revenue actualized.
The actual cost or “programs” are coming home to roost.
And let’s not forget to remind those whiny Democrats that Trump hasn’t fired nearly as many federal workers as President Bill Clinton.
But let’s hope he fires a lot more.
