News headlines are filled with phrases like government return to office, cuts coming, RTO, layoffs in disguise, etc., etc. With Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, speculation is rampant. People want to know how cuts will be made, what cuts will be made, and if everyone will be forced back into the office. Despite the logic or the research, that shows that remote workers are about 4% more efficient and 11% happier, personal preference and bias are likely to drive the solution going forward. It’s a common theme in government reorganizations and it resurfaces every few decades. This is my second time down the rabbit hole.
Back to the future
There was a period in 1992 when Al Gore and I were frequently in the same place at the same time. One of the things I’ve learned is that when you follow Al Gore in a speaking setting most of the audience leaves, you finish early and you get to spend a fair amount of time talking to Al Gore. The last time I saw him he blew me off for a 4:00 meeting for something more important. The next day he was introduced as the vice-presidential candidate at a rally in Arkansas. I guess he gets a pass on that one.
A few months into the new administration he introduced the Reinventing Government plan. There were a variety of initiatives through different parts of the government. Initially, I was one of the trainers on the military side and I facilitated one of the projects for about a year and a half. We did almost everything right. That was until politics reared its ugly head. What should have been an objective change in processes turned into a consolidation of power, with no regard for the original proposed changes. There were some successes of the program. But in my particular case, higher powers intervened and changed things to their liking. The resulting structure had nothing to do with the 18 months of research and benchmarking that went into it. I can feel some of those same winds blowing as we speak.
Surveying the Landscape
Does the federal government need to be downsized? Not necessarily. The Federal government workforce has grown by over 140,000 employees just in the last four years, but that’s not significant. In 1944 there were 3.1 Million federal workers. It went up and down and last peaked at 3.4 million workers in 1990. Over the next 10 years, that number was reduced to 2.8 million. (I was one of them, and now am a consultant – which doesn’t get counted.) And now we are back up to 2.95 million. Overall this is just under 2% of the U.S. population.
Interestingly, the identified key targets in the media seem to be Agriculture and HHS which are two of the smallest agencies by workforce in the top 10 agencies. Veterans Affairs eclipses all of them yet there doesn’t seem to be any interest in addressing issues there. It’s a bit of a sacred cow, even if it does need some overhauling. Overall the cost savings that are being projected don’t fit within the realm of simple staffing cuts.
The Old Guard
The federal government is generally an expensive, top-heavy organization with 43% of the workforce being over the age of 50. This is about 30% more than the U.S. labor force as a whole. State governments are not that different. People come in at the bottom and have a predictable, rather linear career path that generally lasts a couple of decades or more. They find a desk, plant their flag, and short of committing a crime, people don’t get fired, they just get reassigned. Somewhere along the way we lost the “service” aspect of government service. It’s not that people aren’t doing good work, it’s that there’s nothing that says it’s time for someone else to do it. Presidents have term limits. Senators and Congressmen should have term limits, and government workers in general should have them as well.
In the military, you can essentially SERVE for a certain number of years and then it’s time to go unless you’ve reached the upper ranks. It ensures new ideas and new talent are entering the system. And it prevents homesteading or empire-building. It also results in a lower-cost workforce that is more flexible and has fewer layers. This is more the direction we should be going. Unfortunately, it would require a phased approach over several years and leaders often want to show real results right now.
Common Mistakes
Unlike private sector reorganizations which generally turn into a game of musical chairs, cutting people in government is difficult. I’ve seen organizations work around individuals who wouldn’t retire. You end up with structures that don’t make a lot of sense after they are gone. Sometimes the easiest way to get rid of someone is to promote them. It is counter-intuitive, but it happens all the time. Or you give them a larger staff to deal with the damage they tend to do on their own. We aren’t talking about new employees here. These are generally the career people who needed to move up, but they were never trained for the next level, or they just didn’t have the skills.
I don’t want to paint this picture with too broad a brush. I know lots of great government workers. But I also know more than a few instances where someone who should have left or got booted, forced organizational structure changes because they wouldn’t go away. These are the types of things we should try to fix.
Then there’s the reorganization that is going to fix everything. You cut a program here, and move a program there. Flatten out the organization so there are fewer layers. They all sound good when they are presented. However, they tend to be a top-down paper view of the organization and not the actual work that is being done. In government, funding sources and organizational structure don’t always directly align.
Years ago I was in the middle of a large organizational change. A program was moved from one organization to another. They never dug into the details of how it worked within the existing organization. They just looked at it in terms of how it looked on an org chart. After the transfer, the new owners started asking “Where’s the money?” They had estimated the operating budget and expected that to be transferred from the incumbent organization. However, the reality was that the costs were absorbed based on the scale of the incumbent. The result was two administrative organizations with higher operating costs rather than one that took care of both programs at a lower cost. Not only did it not save money, it cost more money and didn’t work as well. Look for some costs to go up even as the reorganization fun gets into full swing.
What almost everyone misses
Why do so many people stay so long in government? Some love the power. Some love the job. And some identify with their job so strongly, that they can’t see themselves doing anything else – including retiring. A friend of mine wanted to be the most senior person in his career field in the state before he retired. He died in the number 2 position. There should be more programs to help workers in their 50s mentor younger workers and plan for their own transition. While mandatory retirement may be an ugly term, there needs to be more opportunities for younger people, and older people need to have opportunities outside of their service to their state or country.
Whether you love or hate unions in government, you can’t ignore them. You can’t make wholesale changes to organizations without addressing the union implications. Union agreements tend to follow organizational structures, practices, and job classifications from the 1990s. These are complex legal agreements that need to be more flexible. That’s not a dig against the unions or the governments that utilize them. Work has changed in the post-Covid world and everyone can benefit from worker protections that match the current landscape. As an example, it makes no sense to guarantee a worker XX square feet of working space in an office that he or she rarely goes to. Or force them to take a 15-minute break at a specific time when work is distributed. Job descriptions in IT that still use mainframe terms are one of my personal favorites.
Organizational structures are outdated based on command and control and not necessarily function or technology. If you took off the labels, government org charts don’t look dramatically different. They also tend to be designed around the senior people assigned, and not the functions and processes of the organization.
Government buildings are also similarly interchangeable. I’ve worked in different agencies in different states. Short of the sports teams represented on the desks and walls, you wouldn’t know what state you were in. And within states themselves, you could swap buildings with different agencies and not necessarily know the difference either. They are also largely vacant thanks to remote work. The charge we are hearing is “We need to show the taxpayers we are using our resources correctly and get people back into the office.” Or something like that. It might play well in headlines. With roughly 4% higher productivity and 11% higher worker satisfaction in remote and hybrid situations shouldn’t we be asking a different question? Why do we still have all these buildings?
Remote work is in the public’s best interest. Get rid of some of the buildings, or put them to new uses. One of the FCC’s buildings in Virginia is now a school. Win Win! There’s enough vacant or under-utilized commercial and government real estate to provide a modest apartment to every homeless person in the United States. (Structurally, that can’t happen, but you could make a dent in the problem.) The bottom line is that we don’t simply have to play the hands we are dealt. We can start over and do something different.
The Final Reorganization Challenge
In business, nature, or the universe, all systems are self-organizing. We can cut people, add people, create a new department or a new org chart. Eventually, it will adjust itself based on how things work. Telling people to do more with less, or return to the office might have a short-term impact. But over time things change in ways you hadn’t anticipated. The people you want to stay leave. The work you want to get done doesn’t get done. Sometimes things completely fall apart. It doesn’t happen as often in government as it does in the private sector. But all forced structures eventually become inefficient or self-destructive if they don’t evolve in their natural direction.
Trends in business or government are like ocean waves. You can stand up to them and potentially get knocked down, or you can try to ride them. We need to accept that to move forward with a new model for government work.
