Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 6, 1994 TAG: 9402060028
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
His shop doesn't actually fix things, Harrington explains with the dull, sweet patience of a veteran bureaucrat. "We tell them who they need to talk to."
For such counsel, the Acting Chief of the Delegation Management Branch of the Real Property Management Division of the Public Building Service of the National Capital Region of the General Services Administration earns $76,733 a year.
Harrington, 58, is one of 140,000 middle managers the Clinton administration wants to cut from the federal government during the next five years. Even he thinks eliminating his job is a good idea. But five months after Vice President Al Gore pledged to "reinvent government" - starting with a fast, dramatic cut in the federal work force - Harrington is still there.
Things may be about to change. President Clinton's 1995 budget, which will be released Monday, calls for cutting 118,000 workers - both managers and line workers - from federal payrolls by Sept. 30, 1995. This time the order may stick, since there's no money in the budget to pay them.
Still uncertain is whether agencies will be able to offer employees buyouts of up to $25,000, as Gore's government reformers intended, or whether layoffs will be required. Representatives of nine departments have warned Congress that layoffs would devastate their agencies.
However, Congress twice has refused to provide $518 million needed for buyouts. The debate resumes after Clinton's budget is released.
No one doubts the bureaucracy is bloated. Overall, there's a supervisor for every seven federal workers nationwide. By contrast, in the private companies that Gore considers worthy models for federal workplaces, the ratio of managers to workers is one to 25 or higher.
"The federal civil service is not participating in the American working culture, which has been shaken up, downsized, reorganized, and is responding strongly," says Constance Horner, White House personnel director in the Bush administration.
Fully a third of the government's 268,000 federal supervisors and managers are simply "alter-ego deputies," says Paul Light, a specialist in public management at the Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. "They're the people who take over when the Deputy Assistant Secretary goes to the bathroom or leaves town."
Thousands of federal workers have been made managers because civil service salaries top out at about $55,000 for most non-managers. "You wind up with a lot of people in supervisory positions, because that's the only way you can reward them," says Archer Durham, personnel chief for the Energy Department. His agency now has one manager for every four workers.
"And sometimes you create organizational entities to make jobs for political appointees," confesses a senior career official. These add new layers to decision-making systems that may already entail 30 or more managers.
Once the new appointees are in place, he says, "You've got to clear decisions and everything through them, even though, if there are questions, they can't answer any questions."
As a result, everything federal happens slowly.
When Charles Hilty, a senior Agriculture official in the Bush Administration, managed to get a modest departmental initiative approved in seven weeks, "that was considered to be moving with intergalactic speed," he says.
"Most line employees feel they have the authority to say no, but not to say yes," says Dennis Kasten, 50, a contracting specialist for the General Services Administration.
Robert Stone, the genteel career bureaucrat who directed Gore's reform-minded National Performance Review, sympathizes. "Working people in the government are hamstrung by their managers. It's not their fault; it's the system they work in."
Stone's staff had some wild ideas about how to cut the bureaucracy. One was an annual Sadie Hawkins day, when federal workers could dismiss permanently 1 percent of their managers.
Another was limiting a manager's tenure to 15 years. To make a full career of federal work, a manager's performance at mid-career would have to impress another government employer.
In the end, the proposals Gore offered in September to trim management layers were the same as private industry's: dramatic down-sizing through attrition, early retirements, retraining, reassignments and buyouts of targeted managers.
The mere mention of buyouts had an unintended consequence. It persuaded thousands of federal workers who would otherwise have retired to hold out for a departure bonus.
And they're still waiting. A bill authorizing the buyouts stalled last fall when the Congressional Budget Office estimated buyouts would cost $519 million over five years, mostly in added pension costs. Last week, deputy CBO director Jim Blum amended the forecast, telling lawmakers that buyouts promised "enormous long-term savings."
Layoffs, the only other option, would "simply destroy the quality of our service to the American people" warns Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy says they'd be "disastrous."
Tom Harrington's case shows why. He'd retire now, except he has a stepdaughter in college. A $25,000 bonus would meet that obligation, he figures. Without it, he'll stay on.
With 34 years of seniority, Harrington can weather any management layoffs by bumping less-senior managers from lower ranks. Under civil service rules, he'd keep his current salary.
Because senior managers are disproportionately white and male, "there will be a disproportionate loss among women, minorities and younger workers," Espy warns.
Moreover, rancorous layoffs would probably undo Gore's efforts to reform the bureaucracy, says ex-White House personnel director Horner. "The whole theory of reinventing government is that employees support the cultural change."
Meanwhile, federal agencies "accustomed to sloughing off the enthusiasms of the moment," in Horner's words, have been ingeniously working around the latest White House directives.
Instead of actually cutting managers, for example, the Energy Department wants to rename many of them "team leaders," with the same responsibilities and salaries.
Other agencies have sought and won exemptions. Managers of IRS agents, air traffic controllers and food inspectors have persuaded the administration that they're too vital to be cut. Also spared is the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration, best known for its dense concentration of political appointees.
by CNB