Privatization of government work has not been the cost-saver the Cato Institute and its fellow travelers on the right have claimed it would be, for reasons that are blindingly obvious to those who don’t wear ideological blinders.
So argues Donald F. Kettl at the Washington Monthly, in a preview to a new book he’s written.
Cato has put out a study which makes no bones about it: the Institute wants to further cut government, because all the efforts it has advocated have so far not been successful.
Since the 1990s, federal workers have enjoyed faster compensation growth than private-sector workers. In 2014 federal workers earned 78 percent more, on average, than private-sector workers. Federal workers earned 43 percent more, on average, than state and local government workers. The federal government has become an elite island of secure and high-paid employment, separated from the ocean of average Americans competing in the economy.
Spurred by the large budget deficits of recent years, policymakers have trimmed the growth in federal wages. In particular, they imposed a partial freeze on federal wages from 2011 to 2013, which saved billions of dollars. To find further savings, policymakers should turn their attention to the generous benefits received by federal workers. They should also reduce the overall size of the federal workforce by terminating and privatizing programs.
Don’t you appreciate how Cato wants to go after workers’ benefits? “Disallow that vacation time! Take away their health care!”
What Cato fails to recognize, says Kettl, is that
From 1960 to the present, the average level of federal employees in the General Schedule has risen from 6.73 in 1960 to 10.33 in 2014. That alone accounts for half the difference in the public-private comparison that Cato found.
And why has the GS level risen? The nature of federal jobs has fundamentally changed. As the federal government contracted out more work, the number of clerical jobs in the federal government shrank 78 percent from 1973 to 2014, and the number of blue-collar jobs fell by 61 percent. It’s almost impossible to find a federal custodian, cafeteria worker, security guard, or mechanic because almost all of those jobs have been contracted out. In fact, at the now-shuttered Department of Energy’s Rocky Flats plant, which once manufactured the plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons, security was higher even than the White House—and the most dangerous stuff on the planet was carefully guarded. By Wackenhut.
Kettl goes on to argue that Federal workers are more highly paid now because they are often contract administrators, and those contracts are worth billions. He cites one agency, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), in which “each employee is responsible, on average, for $144 million in spending.” That’s on average!
Given that kind of scope, is it any wonder there’s Medicare fraud? How can one employee monitor spending of that sort and not miss payments diverted to crooked doctors, pharmacies, and clinics?
It’s in the military too. If you go to an Army mess hall, you’re not going to find Cookie the sergeant in his white apron and you’re not going to find Corporal Beetle Bailey doing KP by slicing potatoes. Nope, you’re going to find companies like Fluor which includes these jobs in its military contracting career opportunities:
construction jobs, construction engineers and superintendents, project controls, project managers, quality, site managers, HSE managers, logistics support, supply assignments, security jobs, firefighting opportunities, laundry service, food services support, water works, vector control sanitation jobs, billeting positions, maintenance jobs, and power generation support.
We need more government workers, not fewer.