The Next Government: Workforce & Organizational Structure

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal government will lose over 40% of its workforce over the next ten years due to attrition and retirement. How (and whether) these employees will be replaced is surely an issue for the next administration. With Baby Boomers primed for a mass exodus from government service, the pool of qualified replacements will not necessarily be as large as it has been in the past.

Past administrations have sought to alter the size and function of the federal workforce. Cutting the federal workforce was the most widely publicized goal of the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative (alternately referred to as the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, or NPR). Between 1992 and 2000, the federal government shed 377,000 civilian employees, creating the smallest federal workforce in forty years. These numbers, heralded by some, were also called into question by scholars like Paul Light, whose paper “The True Size of Government” observed that many jobs formerly done by federal employees had merely been contracted out to private firms, or passed on to states and localities.

Another issue is the structure of government. In late 2002, President Bush signed into law the largest government reorganization in 50 years, folding numerous agencies into the newly-minted Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It is currently the third largest department in the federal government, with authority over the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Since its creation, DHS has been dogged by criticism. Particularly devastating to the department’s reputation was the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, which included a coordination failure between the agency and FEMA. Employee morale has been consistently low (as compared with other federal agencies) and there have been reports of inefficiency and misspending. Some have suggested that a departmental reorganization is in order.

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