The Blog of Record

“Federal bloat, and not “earmarks,” looms as the real disaster of Obama’s first budgets”. It’s not a bug – it’s a feature:

Those worried about whether the Dem stimulus plus Obama’s budget will produce an irreversible, costly, increase in the size of government–potentially crowding out future expensive Democratic initiatives such as universal health insurance–won’t be cheered by this Washington Post story. Estimates of the additional federal workers soon to be hired range from 100,000 (from Prof. Paul Light)  to 260,000 (from the Heritage Foundation). For example:

Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs … said they expect to hire more than 17,000 new employees by the end of the year, many at hospitals and other facilities to fulfill Obama’s pledge to expand veterans’ access to health care. The agency — whose budget will grow by 11 percent, to $56 billion, under Obama’s plan — will add about 7,900 nurses, 3,300 doctors, 3,800 clerks and 2,400 practical nurses, spokeswoman Josephine Schuda said.

That’s just one agency. … And what if in the future we decide to shrink the veterans’ health system in order to save money and beef up the system for the rest of the population? Good luck. My impression is that the average citizen has no idea how difficult it is to get rid of federal workers once they have been hired. Here are the relevant rules for federal “reductions in force,” or RIFs, complete with elaborate rights of employees with seniority to “bump” lower level employees, causing a chaotic cascade of job switches. Ronald Reagan came into office with a huge head of steam to cut the bureaucracy. He succeeded in RIFing the equivalent of fewer than 80,000 full-time non-defense workers–105,000 counting all part-timers–a reduction that didn’t last long. (Here’s a Heritage report on the subject.)

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