Booo! Sequestration is coming! Our military will be hollowed out! Toddlers will be ejected from Head Start classrooms! Our food will immediately spoil in the absence of federal inspectors! All medical research will be scrapped!
That’s what politicians and the news media are saying. Do you believe them? I don’t.
How drastic are the cuts? We’re talking about a 7 percent cut to defense and a 5 percent cut to federal agencies — most of which received double-digit budget increases in the last few years.
In the private sector, budget cuts of this magnitude are not a big deal. When I was a manager in a Bell Telephone company during the telecommunications reorganization of the 1970s and 80s, annual budget cuts were routine. My group was chronically understaffed and absorbed additional responsibilities as the company downsized. In one case the department where I worked was cut by half.
But here’s the difference: Private companies need to compete for business and cannot afford cuts to customer service. So the telephone company I worked for cut thousands of jobs while leaving its service centers and installation-repair force at full strength. We eliminated layers of management, contracted-out support services and slashed headquarters staffs. It was a big change for us but our customers never noticed the difference.
There are many ways to cut an organization’s budget and managers have choices. So it’s always puzzled me that government agencies are unable to make cuts that won’t inconvenience the public. Can government bureaucrats be that inept as managers? Or, do they deliberately choose cuts that will have the most impact so that taxpayers will pony up? That’s the impression I get when my local school district cuts teaching positions without reducing administration, or when the state government cuts funding for daycare centers while leaving bureaucrats’ jobs intact.
So the coming federal sequestration is no catastrophe. It will pinch the Department of Defense, which has already taken budget cuts and is constrained by long-term commitments. But I suspect the decision to cancel deployment of an aircraft carrier is more showmanship than austerity.
Some government employees will be furloughed temporarily but will still have jobs – unlike the millions of private sector workers who lost jobs while the federal government added 250,000 employees between 2007 and 2011.
But this modest dent in the massive federal budget will play out as high drama. National parks will close. Programs for disadvantaged children will be curtailed. TV reporters will have a field day covering a daily drumbeat of public pain. And President Obama will travel around the country, at $181,000 an hour on Air Force One, to make his pitch for higher taxes.
No one is forcing the government to inconvenience the public. There are many other ways to save money. The government could declare a moratorium on travel and conferences. (The President could set the example by staying in Washington for a while.) Federal agencies could furlough their headquarters staffs and postpone issuing new regulations. The State Department could delay aid payments to places like Egypt and Palestine. Entire agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, could shut down completely for a month or two. But that won’t happen because nobody would notice.
Budget cuts and bureaucrats
Booo! Sequestration is coming! Our military will be hollowed out! Toddlers will be ejected from Head Start classrooms! Our food will immediately spoil in the absence of federal inspectors! All medical research will be scrapped!
That’s what politicians and the news media are saying. Do you believe them? I don’t.
How drastic are the cuts? We’re talking about a 7 percent cut to defense and a 5 percent cut to federal agencies — most of which received double-digit budget increases in the last few years.
In the private sector, budget cuts of this magnitude are not a big deal. When I was a manager in a Bell Telephone company during the telecommunications reorganization of the 1970s and 80s, annual budget cuts were routine. My group was chronically understaffed and absorbed additional responsibilities as the company downsized. In one case the department where I worked was cut by half.
But here’s the difference: Private companies need to compete for business and cannot afford cuts to customer service. So the telephone company I worked for cut thousands of jobs while leaving its service centers and installation-repair force at full strength. We eliminated layers of management, contracted-out support services and slashed headquarters staffs. It was a big change for us but our customers never noticed the difference.
There are many ways to cut an organization’s budget and managers have choices. So it’s always puzzled me that government agencies are unable to make cuts that won’t inconvenience the public. Can government bureaucrats be that inept as managers? Or, do they deliberately choose cuts that will have the most impact so that taxpayers will pony up? That’s the impression I get when my local school district cuts teaching positions without reducing administration, or when the state government cuts funding for daycare centers while leaving bureaucrats’ jobs intact.
So the coming federal sequestration is no catastrophe. It will pinch the Department of Defense, which has already taken budget cuts and is constrained by long-term commitments. But I suspect the decision to cancel deployment of an aircraft carrier is more showmanship than austerity.
Some government employees will be furloughed temporarily but will still have jobs – unlike the millions of private sector workers who lost jobs while the federal government added 250,000 employees between 2007 and 2011.
But this modest dent in the massive federal budget will play out as high drama. National parks will close. Programs for disadvantaged children will be curtailed. TV reporters will have a field day covering a daily drumbeat of public pain. And President Obama will travel around the country, at $181,000 an hour on Air Force One, to make his pitch for higher taxes.
No one is forcing the government to inconvenience the public. There are many other ways to save money. The government could declare a moratorium on travel and conferences. (The President could set the example by staying in Washington for a while.) Federal agencies could furlough their headquarters staffs and postpone issuing new regulations. The State Department could delay aid payments to places like Egypt and Palestine. Entire agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, could shut down completely for a month or two. But that won’t happen because nobody would notice.
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