JONATHAN CHAIT NOVEMBER 12, 2010
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Stan Collender identifies the biggest hole in the center of the debt commission's plan -- it wrenches billions of dollars out of the domestic discretionary budget without saying what functions will be sacrificed:
The plan calls for a substantial reduction in federal employees. A reduction in employees generally results in the government relying on more outside consultants to get the work done but, in addition to the recommended reductions-in-force, Bowles-Simpson also calls for a significant cuts in the use of contractors.
The combination of those two seems to indicate that the now smaller number of federal employees will have to do everything that was done before, that is, that they will have to be much more productive. But Bowles-Simpson also calls for a three-year freeze on federal employee salaries and that almost inevitably means an increasing number of federal workers will quit. That will reduce rather than increase productivity as new and less experienced workers replace the more senior folks who will have left for greener pastures.
In other words, Bowles-Simpson projects substantial savings based on the expectation that a less experienced and much smaller federal workforce will be more productive and just as effective than the more experienced and larger workforce it replaces. That makes absolutely no sense.
Bowles-Simpson seems to have been put together backwards. Instead of starting with a plan about what the federal government should no longer do and then determining the savings from the smaller number of employees that would be needed to do what's left to be done, with limited exceptions the plan focuses on the reduced workforce but makes few assumptions, suggestions, or recommendations about what services the government should no longer provide. The assumptions it does make don't appear to justify the cuts in the number of employees and contractors.
The type of proposals that are needed are: Should the government stop prosecuting and jailing as many criminals and should the sentences be shorter for those it convicts? Should it fund less or no research on cancer and similar diseases? Should the FBI no longer investigate white collar crime? Should the military not be prepared to conduct as many operations? Should veterans health care be eliminated?
Here is the deeper problem. Conservatives are convinced the federal budget is filled with waste and useless bureaucrats. Yet they have a very difficult time articulating functions that the government is fulfilling that it shouldn't be. There certainly are some -- farm subsidies is one of the biggest examples. The government should get out of that business altogether.
But for the most part, the domestic discretionary budget has been squeezed for savings for several decades on end. Virtually all of the programs remaining represent important public functions. That's why the commission is reduced to proposing charging visitors to the national zoo and implementing phony schemes to cut government staff and pay without changing any of government's mission. If you want to treat this portion of the budget reasonably, you need to either actually agree on some functions the federal government will stop performing, or else just recognize that you need to start paying for the functions it is performing. Catering to airy conservative prejudices against government without translating that into a specific re-conception of the federal role is useless.
To be clear, I think the revenue increases, defense spending cuts, cuts to assorted programs like farm subsidies, and entitlement cuts are a coherent and useful contribution to the deficit problem. The treatment of the discretionary budget is not.
10 comments
These proposals are not well-thought out. The deficit commission is coming at federal employees from both ends. Please revisit these matters, Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson, et al.
- liberal reformer
November 12, 2010 at 12:57pm
My money says before the end of the day he pivots. Any takers?
- rayward
November 12, 2010 at 1:00pm
"My money says before the end of the day he pivots. Any takers?" who he? (or, more to the point, "he who?")
- Tgossard
November 12, 2010 at 1:32pm
Bowles and Simpson, apparently without the support of the rest of the members of their Commission, brought forward a set of proposals that are not going anywhere. Dead on arrival. Jonathan knows this, admits as much in his earlier post, but wants liberals to be more open-minded to the proposals. Why might we liberals be unwilling to accept these proposals as a starting point for negotiations? The proposals may seem a blend of solutions that require sacrifices and compromises from everyone, across ideological/partisan/class lines, but in fact they reflect a coherent and biased philosophy - one apparently shared by the two men who brought them forward - of small government, a reduced social safety net, and a commitment to low tax rates. Gee, what does such a philosophy leave out? Concerns about increasing income inequality, the shrinking middle class, the increasing economic insecurity of those barely hanging on to middle class status, the shrinking of pension and post-retirement benefits, the persistence of high unemployment and the need for infrastucture and climate/energy investment -- none of this seems to be keeping irksome Erskine up at night. If the President ever gets back to his day job, I hope he will give this piece of trash a swift, if belated, kick. Neil
- purcellneil
November 12, 2010 at 1:35pm
There is another way to address the matter and that is to impose user fees for all federal regulatory activities. Some programs already have user fees that fund a portion of their budget. Pharmaceutical company fees cover just over 60% of the FDA's drug review budget. The only way to squeeze savings out of the bureaucracy is to transition to increased fees since these activities have to continue because of the various Federal statutes.
- agoldhammer@yahoo.com-old
November 12, 2010 at 1:51pm
@Tgossard I think Ray means Jon Chait.
- tnmats
November 12, 2010 at 2:46pm
To be fair, the proposal calls for a 10 percent reduction in federal staffing levels--to be achieved through attrition over 20 years. So it's not like they'd go through and fire everybody tomorrow.
- ulexamp
November 12, 2010 at 3:37pm
David Brooks is expressing dismay that Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats are adamant in opposition to this plan -- we have just lived through two years of Republican obstruction and a mid-term election season in which the GOP made great gains despite their stubborn resistance to anything and everything that the Dem's offered to address the nation's economic problems. All the while these Republicans have pretended to be worried about the deficit and the debt, they have been plotting to make permanent the Bush tax cuts. With that as background, why would any Democrat be interested in this set of half-baked proposals from out of the blue -- especially proposals that would cut social security and medicare (cuts that primarily affect the middle class and working poor) to fund further tax cuts (cuts that mainly fall to the benefit of the wealthy elite)??? Unlike health care reform, which played out in a public debate over many months, this set of proposals came out of the blue. The two guys who offer it to us appear to be a couple of nutjobs -- Alan Simpson, he of the 310 million tits, for god's sake, and Erskine Bowles? One is a crackpot from Wyoming, and the other is a mysterious Clinton-era hack whose resume in no way suggests he would be someone we would look to for such recommendations. Aside from all of the above, the proposals are simply garbage. Reduce the federal work force by attrition/non-replacement? In other words, make no informed choices - let the workers who choose to leave decide where we allocate resources. Is this a responsible way to govern? Is it even governing? How about the brilliant proposal to freeze salaries for federal workers for three years? No exceptions, right? That will generate plenty of attrition among the most marketable and motivated employees - most organizations seek to shed people at the bottom of the talent and performance pool, but Simpson and Bowles will shed the folks at the top, and demoralize those who are left to pick up the slack. If we lose more than our attrition goals, we'll be in a tough spot to try to hire good people after such an exercise. The Bowles / Simpson proposals have been designed without consideration of income inequality, or the need for short-term stimulus, or of the need for substantial infrastructure investment. It is as if these were not important concerns for the economic future of America - they simply were ignored. How much confidence does any of this inspire? Dead on arrival. Neil
- purcellneil
November 12, 2010 at 4:20pm
We should have been more specific. We asked them to cut spending, so they cut spending. Nobody said they had to say where they were cutting spending.
- Nusholtz
November 12, 2010 at 4:22pm
The whole thing is upsetting. Some "bi-partisan" commission; strikes me as right wing vs far right wing.
- Sophia
November 13, 2010 at 2:50am