That's *your* staff. In other government sectors there is an enormous amount of redundancy and dead weight and waste.
This is really irritating.
Yup. Notice I did qualify with "current". Almost every staff I've been on before typically had ONE that was beyond useless.
Those people are often - "traded" - around - because the work still has to get done, and you can't just hire another person - you're limited by the staff budget, which means the more deadweight you carry, the harder it is to get the task done, since everyone ELSE is carrying the load. If you have a staff of five, and one of them is totally useless, it means the other four have to do the work, because the agency is NOT going to let you hire anyone else.
Trust me - we DO feel it.
I do however hate the immediate dumping on federal employees when these conversations come up. I ALSO know hundreds of very dedicated employees who work on their days off, come in after hours - and because there's no overtime budgeted for the project - it's on their own dime. In Obama's administration, they decided no automatic pay increases (and no new hires, which meant no promotions, no increase in pay), no training budget, no new equipment and so on down the line - and this went on for three years. We do seem to be everyone's favorite whipping boy when people want to complain.
Thing is - the civilian federal workforce (as opposed to all the military personnel who are - technically - federal employees) has a yearly budget of about 280-300 billion dollars, out of a typical budget of 6-7 trillion. So, about 4% of the entire budget. If you eliminated half of the federal employees, you might save the cost of what we've already sent - to Ukraine. And at least you get some - return - for people working. Giving money away doesn't do anything.
WHAT DOES need to be examined - are the actual projects they oversee. If say, the Dept of Agriculture or Dept of Education hands out grants of just plain good old money. Getting rid of the employees saves a little but it does NOTHING for the programs which waste orders of magnitude MORE money. THOSE are what need to be addressed. There's an ENORMOUS part of each division's budget which consists of little more than grants to groups and persons around the country.
There is the - uncomfortable - issue with the tax code. For example, something the left likes to call "corporate welface" which is their term for tax breaks for corporations as long as they do things the government WANTS. I am ambivalent on this. The government doesn't have a lot of leverage on the corporate level - how do you hinder a company from exporting jobs, and how do you reward them for bringing them back?
If we DIDN'T do this - that's probably a trillion.
THEN - there's the entitlements, which are expanding to consume the entire budget and - can't be touched. Medicare is expensive because in short, - we've allowed the medical profession to be bloated. Even WITH health insurance, we spend (with insurance and out of pocket) more than twice than what most Western nations spend, per person. And that's just - waste. I don't know where the problem is. I don't want to trade being able to get my wife's MRIs, specialty care and my daughter's surgeries - for years long waits.
Social Security is a whole nother system. We have to find incentive for people to invest in their OWN retirement, because we're never going to get the government to ever privatize SS or put it on SOME path where it actually EARNS money.
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BUT - I do feel that busting on federal employees is the popular go-to - but it's penny-wise and pound foolish.
