My concern is that even if quitting doesn’t go up by much, we could still see a significant decline in workforce quality for a few reasons:
1) The best employees will be more likely to find equivalent or better jobs in private industry and thus the least “inertia” keeping them with the feds. Any increase in quitting will be biased towards the best employees.
2) Federal jobs will be less attractive to new hires. Getting someone into the job is harder than keeping them there, and more likely to be impacted by ideology.
3) Hiring and pay raises will probably be restricted by this administration, which may or may not ever be fully compensated for by a future admin.
4) Current DOGE cuts are very slash and burn - they aren’t really correcting the overpaid or shirking issues, just doing pretty indiscriminate layoffs (e.g. canning all probationary employees i.e. new hires somebody probably really really needed to be onboarded)
On the margin, this makes federal jobs less attractive which will affect people with options the most - and those tend to be the best employees (or at least the ones with the most in-demand skills).
I worked 20 years on projects associated with the Defense Department. I can attest I encountered many highly qualified civilian employees who did valuable work. I can also attest that as the size of government increased, the quality of new hires was less. A big reason was the culture was changing and it was more difficult for high achievers to stand out - the best and brightest quickly left and joined contractors or went to the private sector.
It is possible the Defense Department has a similar number of quality workers as it had 20 years ago. But this number is highly diluted by the many more employees who simply fill seats and are not engaged in productive work.
Having worked with (although not directly for) various DoD and NASA organizations, that’s pretty much my impression as well.
Their best are as good as anyone. However their percentage of low performers is much higher than in the private contractors.
The really insidious bit is that doesn’t necessarily mean they are “overstaffed”, because the productive employees are kept insanely busy, not only pulling their comrades along but also by Byzantine processes and requirements that make everything longer and more expensive than it needs to be.
Carefully targeted cost reductions could be really successful, there is a lot of fat to trim. Unfortunately we’re getting the “wood chipper” approach and it’s going to break a lot of useful stuff.
Agree. The DOGE cuts will break useful things. I offer in defense of DOGE that there is no clean way to prune government. Best to hope those things really useful don't get tossed into the incinerator.
The last defense project I worked on was also crippled by "cost savings". The prime funding contract was rebid and won by a new firm. This new firm then demanded all contractors be repriced at lower rates. Entire teams of contractors left, including those on my project. This project was operational but new development was planned. The first team handed this project made zero contributions as the learning curve was too steep. I moved on and to my knowledge, the project is being maintained but barely. Whatever cost savings realized by "firing" the original developers were more than wasted by money spent on replacements who couldn't do the work.
There’s no clean way, but this way seems maximally dirty.
For example we are dealing with an office that has been understaffed for awhile. They had finally hired a new civilian to fill the empty slot but they just got DOGE’d (probationary employee) so now we’re kinda screwed.
“Agency X you have 6 months to cut staff by Y%” seems more effective and way less disruptive vs just arbitrarily eliminating whole categories of employee.
Was that project really all that useful? What would've happened if it failed? The only truly essential projects in the DoD are those related to nuclear weapons manufacturing and delivery, the rest hardly matters for National Security in practice.
The private sector, especially business owners who've been making a living for years, are far more competent than anyone who needs Not A Space Agency to feed their brainwashed kids.
Stuff currently getting broken in slash-and-burn is not going to hurt more than it will help.
It's time we see the independent as the sovereign rank she is instead of playing like every day is Oppsite Day. The insane cope of taxpayer dependent "workers" is absolutely beyond all other cope. The highest level you can be is INDEPENDENT. There is no higher, regardless of compensation. Most people who are productive but aren't compensated highly are not underpaid because they *couldn't* have been paid more. They just have more integrity than to take a check for bending over. Everyone knows that's the real name of the game. Let's stop playing pretend and gtfo of WONDERLAND.
1) It could work the other way around: with less lazy workers around, good workers will find the environment more rewarding to stay in
2) Lots of people don't like ideologically-charged workplaces. Trump's current efforts will balance things out to be more neutral.
3) With less workers around you could presumably pay the remaining ones more. Whether that will happen is up to Congress. I agree that it might not happen
4) They've fired a tiny percentage of the workforce so far. It doesn't really matter whether its indiscriminate or not given the small number fired.
Lastly: AI is actively getting rid of a large chunk of work previously requiring humans. We're going to need a lot less 'paper pushers' a few years from now, possibly up to 3-4x less. The cuts will encourage a faster transition towards automation.
1) but the really lazy workers aren’t going to quit, because gov’t is where they can get paid the most to be really lazy. You would have to preferentially fire the bad workers - good idea, but they aren’t doing that.
2) Could be a plus. However I don’t think the current admin can be described as “not ideologically charged”. Perhaps it will settle out.
3) Seems unlikely since the goal is cost cutting.
4) Firing randomly and suddenly all over the place creates chaos disproportionate to the actual scale of the RIF. Hopefully temporary chaos, but short term it will be a mess.
1) So far they’ve fired what, 1% of the total? It doesn’t really matter what’s done in Phase 1. We have to see Phase 2, assuming it ever happens of course.
2) It’s about how charged the overall mood is not what the administration does. The workforce will still be overwhelmingly Democrat for a long time.
4) I’ve talked to people actually working in DC and as far as I could tell the scale of “chaos” is hugely exaggerated in the media. The only ones in a state of chaos would be USAID or the Consumer Protection Board. Otherwise it’s business as usual for people who don’t watch the news. And no, even the famous HR email was toothless and nothing happened to those who didn’t respond.
This overlooks a different possibility. The federal worker may be doing something that they enjoy and is not doable elsewhere, the prosecutor who like putting "bad guys" in prison, the EPA employee that believes in cleaning the air and water.
I think it's also worth the idea that the people that choose the federal position aren't randomly selected.
The intangible value of the ironclad job protections will be worth different amounts to different people. So the people who value it the most will be some combination of unable to find alternative employment in the private sector or extremely risk averse.
The takeaway is that trying to get people to leave by making it unpleasant will mean the people who are more willing to take calculated risks and the most competent who can find jobs elsewhere will be the first to go so what's left will be less competent and even less willing to rock the boat.
It's like nobody thought of the survivorship bias in all of this.
Other than four years in the Navy, I have always worked for small companies, some of them from near their first days (10 employees). I turned down one and quit another over dress codes. Several went bankrupt. The worst transition was a 100-employee company bought out by a 30,000-employee company, which was fine for a couple of years, then went full retard -- two co-bosses who assigned conflicting tasks and told me to sort it out, among other stupidities. One company, at around 100 employees, hired some guy who thought we, a small court reporting company, were going to put him through an aeronautics PhD program. He didn't last a month and we never did figure out why they hired him or why he took the job.
So I may not be very objective about the quality of employees in a huge workforce. But I think the absolute best way to "fix" government employment would be to get rid of civil service protections. Make them all "at will", just like private non-union employees. And yes, ban government employee unions; their contract negotiations are a sham.
The few times I have dealt with government employees, whether at the DMV or local planning office, they gave the impression of just filling in the hours. Not especially dumb or smart, not especially lazy or hard working, and competent enough to answer my questions, but oh lordy! they just did not care. No curiosity, no interest in improving their jobs or their bureaucracy, didn't want to hear any suggestions or answer stupid questions like "why do I have to fill out both these forms with the same answers?"
I've never been a boss, other than a technical lead. I've interviewed people and given my impressions to my boss. I would not hire a single one of the government employees I have had to deal with.
OK, and... what? How much of what they do is actually net-beneficial to society? I.e. all the people reviewing environmental reviews would be best replaced by completely incompetent personnel that just rubber stamps everything.
No, that wouldn’t help, the problem isn’t the employees, the problem is the laws. When that employee rubber stamps your environmental report and then an environmental group sues, they’re going to win because the employee didn’t follow the proper steps. Firing all the government employees will just mean even less gets done unless you actually change the laws they are helping to enforce.
Why do you think they’re overpaid? My dad was a federal government lawyer for forty years. He certainly had slow periods, but he also had periods where he worked very hard. This is a guy who went to Harvard Law School — private sector would have paid him 4x as much.
A lot of federal workers stay in government to hit 20 years so they can get a pension, and then hop over to private sector. If they’re over ten years, the pull gets stronger and stronger to complete the 20. If that wasn’t a factor, I think you’d see much more attrition.
Another contributing factor to the low quit rate is what the “ask” of the employee is. The expectation for tangible output is much lower in government than in private sector.
I've read the author's writing on tenured college faculty and his own admission on being part of it. Being in the federal work force is like tenured faculty but without need for the credentials. It is more of a drag on the economy than tenured college faculty, both being unproductive.
I worked for the Federal government all while the odious President Biden had issued an edict that I should be fired for not participating in his non-randomized drug trial. Why?
1) I enjoyed the work and my team members
2) I enjoyed the pay
3) While quitting is easy, finding a new job with similar upside takes time and incurs financial and emotional costs.
There is no reason for Federal workers and contractors to rush to the exists. There is considerable distance in the org chart between the President and the offices where most people work. Only if the current job was crushing one's soul would I recommend quitting and I don't think that is the case with Federal workers.
On a similar note, I have never quit a job voluntarily without having a new job lined up. Just think of it in terms of options, a bird in hand is better than two in the bush.
So how has it turned out relative to your expectations? (Wish I had seen this 2 months ago. Though maybe I'm underestimating the PS here - maybe you mean to say people who quit and take DRP or VSIP aren't "really" quitting, in which case your prediction was almost true by definition this year.)
What do we know about the biological sex of federal civil servants? To the extent to which they may be overpaid, they would also be a higher percentage male than those of similar educational attainment.
Feeling a little schadenfreude for your neighbors, Bryan? No, they probably won’t quit in droves. There’s a quality spread in the Federal government, as in most places. One gets used to the revolving door of good idea fairies and big thinkers when working in the USG. Most have done the risk/reward calculus and decided there’s something to be said for job security and will opt to stay. Presumably, others did the same analysis and chose otherwise. Having been in both public sector and private, I didn’t see glaring difference.
My concern is that even if quitting doesn’t go up by much, we could still see a significant decline in workforce quality for a few reasons:
1) The best employees will be more likely to find equivalent or better jobs in private industry and thus the least “inertia” keeping them with the feds. Any increase in quitting will be biased towards the best employees.
2) Federal jobs will be less attractive to new hires. Getting someone into the job is harder than keeping them there, and more likely to be impacted by ideology.
3) Hiring and pay raises will probably be restricted by this administration, which may or may not ever be fully compensated for by a future admin.
4) Current DOGE cuts are very slash and burn - they aren’t really correcting the overpaid or shirking issues, just doing pretty indiscriminate layoffs (e.g. canning all probationary employees i.e. new hires somebody probably really really needed to be onboarded)
On the margin, this makes federal jobs less attractive which will affect people with options the most - and those tend to be the best employees (or at least the ones with the most in-demand skills).
I worked 20 years on projects associated with the Defense Department. I can attest I encountered many highly qualified civilian employees who did valuable work. I can also attest that as the size of government increased, the quality of new hires was less. A big reason was the culture was changing and it was more difficult for high achievers to stand out - the best and brightest quickly left and joined contractors or went to the private sector.
It is possible the Defense Department has a similar number of quality workers as it had 20 years ago. But this number is highly diluted by the many more employees who simply fill seats and are not engaged in productive work.
Having worked with (although not directly for) various DoD and NASA organizations, that’s pretty much my impression as well.
Their best are as good as anyone. However their percentage of low performers is much higher than in the private contractors.
The really insidious bit is that doesn’t necessarily mean they are “overstaffed”, because the productive employees are kept insanely busy, not only pulling their comrades along but also by Byzantine processes and requirements that make everything longer and more expensive than it needs to be.
Carefully targeted cost reductions could be really successful, there is a lot of fat to trim. Unfortunately we’re getting the “wood chipper” approach and it’s going to break a lot of useful stuff.
Agree. The DOGE cuts will break useful things. I offer in defense of DOGE that there is no clean way to prune government. Best to hope those things really useful don't get tossed into the incinerator.
The last defense project I worked on was also crippled by "cost savings". The prime funding contract was rebid and won by a new firm. This new firm then demanded all contractors be repriced at lower rates. Entire teams of contractors left, including those on my project. This project was operational but new development was planned. The first team handed this project made zero contributions as the learning curve was too steep. I moved on and to my knowledge, the project is being maintained but barely. Whatever cost savings realized by "firing" the original developers were more than wasted by money spent on replacements who couldn't do the work.
There’s no clean way, but this way seems maximally dirty.
For example we are dealing with an office that has been understaffed for awhile. They had finally hired a new civilian to fill the empty slot but they just got DOGE’d (probationary employee) so now we’re kinda screwed.
“Agency X you have 6 months to cut staff by Y%” seems more effective and way less disruptive vs just arbitrarily eliminating whole categories of employee.
Was that project really all that useful? What would've happened if it failed? The only truly essential projects in the DoD are those related to nuclear weapons manufacturing and delivery, the rest hardly matters for National Security in practice.
"[DoD and NASA's] best are as good as anyone."
Lmfao. Hahaha. No.
Dear god, no.
The private sector, especially business owners who've been making a living for years, are far more competent than anyone who needs Not A Space Agency to feed their brainwashed kids.
Stuff currently getting broken in slash-and-burn is not going to hurt more than it will help.
It's time we see the independent as the sovereign rank she is instead of playing like every day is Oppsite Day. The insane cope of taxpayer dependent "workers" is absolutely beyond all other cope. The highest level you can be is INDEPENDENT. There is no higher, regardless of compensation. Most people who are productive but aren't compensated highly are not underpaid because they *couldn't* have been paid more. They just have more integrity than to take a check for bending over. Everyone knows that's the real name of the game. Let's stop playing pretend and gtfo of WONDERLAND.
Good, as fed workforce quality declines, will become politically easier to justify further cuts.
Their "quality" is irrelevant. Few of their jobs are jobs that ought to exist, and they have always been legendary for not doing them well.
1) It could work the other way around: with less lazy workers around, good workers will find the environment more rewarding to stay in
2) Lots of people don't like ideologically-charged workplaces. Trump's current efforts will balance things out to be more neutral.
3) With less workers around you could presumably pay the remaining ones more. Whether that will happen is up to Congress. I agree that it might not happen
4) They've fired a tiny percentage of the workforce so far. It doesn't really matter whether its indiscriminate or not given the small number fired.
Lastly: AI is actively getting rid of a large chunk of work previously requiring humans. We're going to need a lot less 'paper pushers' a few years from now, possibly up to 3-4x less. The cuts will encourage a faster transition towards automation.
1) but the really lazy workers aren’t going to quit, because gov’t is where they can get paid the most to be really lazy. You would have to preferentially fire the bad workers - good idea, but they aren’t doing that.
2) Could be a plus. However I don’t think the current admin can be described as “not ideologically charged”. Perhaps it will settle out.
3) Seems unlikely since the goal is cost cutting.
4) Firing randomly and suddenly all over the place creates chaos disproportionate to the actual scale of the RIF. Hopefully temporary chaos, but short term it will be a mess.
1) So far they’ve fired what, 1% of the total? It doesn’t really matter what’s done in Phase 1. We have to see Phase 2, assuming it ever happens of course.
2) It’s about how charged the overall mood is not what the administration does. The workforce will still be overwhelmingly Democrat for a long time.
4) I’ve talked to people actually working in DC and as far as I could tell the scale of “chaos” is hugely exaggerated in the media. The only ones in a state of chaos would be USAID or the Consumer Protection Board. Otherwise it’s business as usual for people who don’t watch the news. And no, even the famous HR email was toothless and nothing happened to those who didn’t respond.
What does "3-4x less" mean, if "1x less" means zero?
1x less = zero change
2x less = 50% cut
3x less = 75% cut
etc
"Loath" is an adjective, "loathe" is a verb.
This overlooks a different possibility. The federal worker may be doing something that they enjoy and is not doable elsewhere, the prosecutor who like putting "bad guys" in prison, the EPA employee that believes in cleaning the air and water.
I think it's also worth the idea that the people that choose the federal position aren't randomly selected.
The intangible value of the ironclad job protections will be worth different amounts to different people. So the people who value it the most will be some combination of unable to find alternative employment in the private sector or extremely risk averse.
The takeaway is that trying to get people to leave by making it unpleasant will mean the people who are more willing to take calculated risks and the most competent who can find jobs elsewhere will be the first to go so what's left will be less competent and even less willing to rock the boat.
It's like nobody thought of the survivorship bias in all of this.
Other than four years in the Navy, I have always worked for small companies, some of them from near their first days (10 employees). I turned down one and quit another over dress codes. Several went bankrupt. The worst transition was a 100-employee company bought out by a 30,000-employee company, which was fine for a couple of years, then went full retard -- two co-bosses who assigned conflicting tasks and told me to sort it out, among other stupidities. One company, at around 100 employees, hired some guy who thought we, a small court reporting company, were going to put him through an aeronautics PhD program. He didn't last a month and we never did figure out why they hired him or why he took the job.
So I may not be very objective about the quality of employees in a huge workforce. But I think the absolute best way to "fix" government employment would be to get rid of civil service protections. Make them all "at will", just like private non-union employees. And yes, ban government employee unions; their contract negotiations are a sham.
The few times I have dealt with government employees, whether at the DMV or local planning office, they gave the impression of just filling in the hours. Not especially dumb or smart, not especially lazy or hard working, and competent enough to answer my questions, but oh lordy! they just did not care. No curiosity, no interest in improving their jobs or their bureaucracy, didn't want to hear any suggestions or answer stupid questions like "why do I have to fill out both these forms with the same answers?"
I've never been a boss, other than a technical lead. I've interviewed people and given my impressions to my boss. I would not hire a single one of the government employees I have had to deal with.
OK, and... what? How much of what they do is actually net-beneficial to society? I.e. all the people reviewing environmental reviews would be best replaced by completely incompetent personnel that just rubber stamps everything.
No, that wouldn’t help, the problem isn’t the employees, the problem is the laws. When that employee rubber stamps your environmental report and then an environmental group sues, they’re going to win because the employee didn’t follow the proper steps. Firing all the government employees will just mean even less gets done unless you actually change the laws they are helping to enforce.
Why do you think they’re overpaid? My dad was a federal government lawyer for forty years. He certainly had slow periods, but he also had periods where he worked very hard. This is a guy who went to Harvard Law School — private sector would have paid him 4x as much.
A lot of federal workers stay in government to hit 20 years so they can get a pension, and then hop over to private sector. If they’re over ten years, the pull gets stronger and stronger to complete the 20. If that wasn’t a factor, I think you’d see much more attrition.
Does that DoD bar include active military? If so, does the figure cited for turnover correct for those for whom “quitting” would be a crime?
Another contributing factor to the low quit rate is what the “ask” of the employee is. The expectation for tangible output is much lower in government than in private sector.
I've read the author's writing on tenured college faculty and his own admission on being part of it. Being in the federal work force is like tenured faculty but without need for the credentials. It is more of a drag on the economy than tenured college faculty, both being unproductive.
My guess is they will not leave as they cannot get commensurate pay and healthcare in the private sector.
"erratically lashing out his entire workforce"
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE (TWO-LETTER) PREPOSITION? Too short to matter?
Probably less intentional THAN SHOUTING.
I worked for the Federal government all while the odious President Biden had issued an edict that I should be fired for not participating in his non-randomized drug trial. Why?
1) I enjoyed the work and my team members
2) I enjoyed the pay
3) While quitting is easy, finding a new job with similar upside takes time and incurs financial and emotional costs.
There is no reason for Federal workers and contractors to rush to the exists. There is considerable distance in the org chart between the President and the offices where most people work. Only if the current job was crushing one's soul would I recommend quitting and I don't think that is the case with Federal workers.
On a similar note, I have never quit a job voluntarily without having a new job lined up. Just think of it in terms of options, a bird in hand is better than two in the bush.
So how has it turned out relative to your expectations? (Wish I had seen this 2 months ago. Though maybe I'm underestimating the PS here - maybe you mean to say people who quit and take DRP or VSIP aren't "really" quitting, in which case your prediction was almost true by definition this year.)
What do we know about the biological sex of federal civil servants? To the extent to which they may be overpaid, they would also be a higher percentage male than those of similar educational attainment.
If a worker has the option of quitting or taking a buyout, why would they quit? The bet seems to be on tilted ground.
Feeling a little schadenfreude for your neighbors, Bryan? No, they probably won’t quit in droves. There’s a quality spread in the Federal government, as in most places. One gets used to the revolving door of good idea fairies and big thinkers when working in the USG. Most have done the risk/reward calculus and decided there’s something to be said for job security and will opt to stay. Presumably, others did the same analysis and chose otherwise. Having been in both public sector and private, I didn’t see glaring difference.