The Washington Post reports on a new survey of 221,400 federal workers and their pay and performance.
Among the survey findings are that only 22 percent of federal workers agreed with the statement “pay raises depend on how well employees perform their jobs.”
Despite eight years of Al Gore’s “reinventing government” and six years of similar efforts under President Bush, the federal bureaucracy is still a very ill-functioning “bureaucracy.” Indeed, that will always be the case. Here are some reasons why:
- Poorly performing federal agencies do not go bankrupt, and thus there is no built-in mechanism to eliminate failures;
- Government managers face no profit incentive, giving them little reason to proactively reduce costs. Indeed, without profits to worry about, managers favor budget and staffing increases to boost their power and prestige;
- Without the profit motive, there is little incentive for government workers to innovate and produce better services;
- The output of much government work is hard to measure, making it difficult to set performance goals for managers and workers;
- Even if performance could be measured, federal pay is generally tied to longevity, not performance;
- Disciplining federal workers is difficult, and they are virtually never fired, resulting in agencies carrying heavy loads of poor performers;
- To prevent corruption, governments need complex and costly regulations and paperwork to carry out routine functions such as procurement;
- Because of the frequent turnover of political appointees, many agencies experience continual changes in their missions;
- Congress imposes extra costs on agencies in carrying out their duties, such as resisting closure of unneeded offices in the districts of important members;
- Agencies get influenced or “captured” by special interest groups that steer policies toward satisfying narrow goals, rather than broad public interest goals;
- The large size and overlapping activities of federal agencies makes coordination of related functions very difficult. Sadly, we saw the results of this problem with the failures of U.S. intelligence agencies to effectively communicate with each other prior to 9/11.
For these reasons, and many more, the federal government ought to radically downsized with as many functions as possible left to the private sector. See http://www.downsizinggovernment.com/
