Matt Yglesias

Are Government Workers Overpaid?

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards seems to think so and offers this chart:

The obvious problem here is that we have no idea what these federal workers are actually doing. When you think about what it is federal employees do, it seems to involve a relatively large amount of high-skilled professionals—lots of lawyers, for example—and relatively few people in low-skill job categories. It would be much more meaningful to look at the compensation of government workers compared to other people with similar jobs. It’s rough and anecdotal, but it is worth considering the fact that while you regularly here about people leaving the public sector to “cash in” at private sector firms, you basically never hear of the reverse thing happening. People leave jobs at law firms to go work in the civil service, but they don’t do it in order to earn more money.

Given the high level of unionization in the public sector, I do think it’s plausible that low-end government workers are earning more money than comparably skilled people might be able to garner in the private market. But one look at the 2009 General Service Pay Scale should disabuse you of the notion that a government job is a cash cow. People at the higher levels of the civil service are earning a living, but it’s much less than senior managers or highly skilled professionals can get in the private sector.

The Case of the $632,000 Education Attaché

A late April Washington Post item answers the question of why the UNESCO education attaché costs $632,000:

That includes the following: one GS-15 salary, plus benefits; one Paris apartment, plus parking; travel and moving expenses; education costs for children of up to $60,000; and $170,000 for International Cooperative Administrative Support Services, an expenses-sharing mechanism used by agencies for overseas staff.

I think there’s probably something to be said for the idea of a comprehensive review of housing allowance policies. In many cases, I think we pay senior civil servants too little. The government needs to be able to recruit top notch scientists, lawyers, economists, etc. so ought to be able to pay people something vaguely competitive with the private sector. At the same time, it seems to me that you could probably recruit well-qualified people for a job like this one even without the free Paris apartment.

100 Days

The Daily Beast put together a compilation of various folks’ thoughts on Obama’s First 100 Days. Mine is here.

I would also affiliate myself with Reihan Salam’s remarks. Separately, but also at the Beast, I have a column about Obama’s difficulty getting his nominees confirmed and why (a) the Republicans should stop acting like whiny toddlers and (b) the country should rely less on political appointees and more on civil servants.

Needed: More Bureaucrats

Alyssa Rosenberg makes an excellent point about the missing Treasury Department subcabinet officials:

It’s hard to argue that it’s in any way a good thing that Obama hasn’t filled a lot of key posts at Treasury. But that kind of misses the point. Obama shouldn’t have to appoint that many people in the first place. There are far too many positions that the president has to fill personally that could be easily and competently done by career employees. Of course the president needs people who can implement his agenda and set policy. That’s what department heads and a layer of political appointees immediately below him or her are for. But agencies and departments would be vastly better served by having high-ranking career employees bringing their institutional memory and experience to high-level positions in departments and ensuring that they can continue to function no matter how far along the president is in his vetting and appointments process.

Americans tend to assume that however we happen to do things is just the way things need to be done. But in reality, compared to other democracies we’re an extreme outlier in terms of how “deep” into the org charts of our agencies political appointees go. If you don’t like to think about foreigners, one way of thinking about how to build effective public sector institutions is always to look at the United States military where, unlike on the civilian side, political consensus has generally existed that effective institutions are important. You’ll see that while the president has discretion about which senior officers go where and do what, he doesn’t get to just pull new three- and four-star flag officers out of the ether (back in the day, things didn’t work that way, and during the Civil War there were plenty of “political generals” who did worse than the professionals). And what’s more, though a new president could shake things up right away, the expectation is that he won’t and that commanders will generally stay in place and provide continuity. They’ll report to a new commander-in-chief, and eventually they rotate to new assignments or into retirement, but the general assumption is that you don’t start everything from scratch. In addition to the various direct, practical benefits of greater professionalism this also greatly enhances the prestige of the low- and mid-level officers. The way you get to be an extremely important military commander is to start out as the most junior possible kind of commissioned officer and work your way up.

One potential model for civilian agencies might be the State Department where there are a ton of offices that are technically political appointments but where strong norms and traditions suggests that you fill them with career civil servants. Christopher Hill, for example, is a career foreign service officer. As such, he served on the team that negotiated the Dayton Accords. Based on that, he was given a “political” appointment as Ambassador to Macedonia. In 2000, he became Ambassador to Poland and he stayed in office until 2004 across a Presidential transition. Then he became Ambassador to South Korea, and in 2005 he became Assistant Secretary for East Asia. Soon, he’ll be Ambassador to Iraq. In general in the State Department it’s considered normal for the Undersecretary for Political Affairs and almost of all the Assistant Secretaries who report to him, and the policy-relevant ambassadorships to be occupied by career people.

Of course it’s worth saying that Timothy Geithner is essentially a person along this model—a guy who was working in a civil service job who, starting in 1995, got tapped for a series of increasingly-important political appointments in the Treasury Department who then left at the end of the Clinton administration. If the Bush administration had been inclined to make more Geithner-esque appointments at Treasury—elevating senior civil servants to subcabinet posts—it might have been more feasible to have a smooth transition.

The Other Jobs Program

The country’s still awaiting not only a Commerce Secretary but a great many subcabinet appointees, deputy directors of agencies, etc. etc. etc. And this points to a paradox of presidential power. Politically, Obama is going to be at his strongest for the next several months. But organizationally, an administration tends to be weakest at the beginning—with many jobs vacant or filled by holdovers and some filled by people who don’t work out. Maximizing effectiveness requires Obama to pick good people and do it quickly. To that end, two documents out from CAP:

• Six Ways that the Obama Administration Can Improve the Political Appointment Process
• Presidential Appointments by the Numbers

A couple of factoids from the “numbers” report—it took Bill Clinton on average over 450 days to fill deputy agency head and inspector-general positions. That’s not good.

In Praise of Bureacrats

One underappreciated aspect of the American system of government is that we have way more political appointees in the executive branch than is common in most democracies. Political appointees will go three or four levels deep into the org charts of agencies, and the top administrators are also staffed by a lot of political appointees rather than by career professionals. In the State Department, it’s customary to give a lot of the political positions (usually at the Assistant Secretary level) to career foreign service officers, but in some agencies there are politicals everywhere.

And as Shankar Vedantam explains in The Washington Post they do a way worse job than the bureaucrats do:

The United States has a far larger number of political appointees in government than any other industrialized democracy. Growing evidence suggests that while presidents and political parties appoint partisans in the belief that loyalists will drive the president’s agenda forward, appointees may actually damage the long-term interests of both presidents and their parties. [...]

In an unusual new analysis, another political scientist compared the Bush administration’s own evaluations of more than 600 government programs with the backgrounds of the 242 managers who ran those programs. David E. Lewis, who is now at Vanderbilt University, found that three-quarters of the managers administering the programs were political appointees while a quarter were career civil servants.

The political appointees were better educated, on average, than the civil staff. Many had stellar records in the private sector or on the campaign trail. Side by side, the political appointees just looked like a much smarter bunch than the careerists.

When it came to performance, however, the bureaucrats whipped the politicals: Programs administered by civil servants were significantly more likely to display better strategic planning, program design, financial oversight — and results. These findings, remember, were based on the Bush administration’s own evaluation system — the Program Assessment Rating Tool, administered by the Office of Management and Budget.

It would be nice to see some efforts made to scale back the quantity of political appointees. My understanding is that the Department of Homeland Security, which was born under the horrific misrule of George W. Bush, has an especially large problem in this regard. That said, when thinking about this it’s important to recall that conservative administration generally don’t want the government to be administered effectively. It was not incompetence that led the Bush administration Justice Department to stop enforcing non-discrimination law, it was deliberate malice. Conservatives think it should be easier for businesses to get away with racial and gender discrimination, just as they stand foresquare behind efforts to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Similarly, labor law was enforced poorly under Bush by design not by accident. The administration went out of its way to prevent the EPA from doing it’s job. The examples are almost endless.

And of course this is part of the problem with having so many political appointees. But it’s also why they’re hard to get rid of. Career bureaucrats tend not to go work for an agency unless they believe in its mission. And to conservatives one of the main tasks of a president is to ensure that many rules go unenforced so that the conservative donor class can better trample the public interest. It’s easier to do that the more political appointees you have, and if an occasional Katrina happens, that’s a small price to pay.

Congressional Dormitory

It’s quite true that members of congress who aren’t independently wealthy are placed under some real financial strain by the modern-day need to maintain two residences. My understanding is that it used to be the case that most members would simply move to DC. Congress works in DC, and people normally live in the metro area where their job is located. But moving oneself and one’s family to the dread Beltway has become a political liability, so people don’t do it. Thus, Atrios’s plan for “the construction of some sort of Congressional dormitory type thing” has some real merit to it. At the same time, it sounds hilarious — I’m imagining fun pranks and keggers.

The larger issue here, however, is that members of congress and high-level executive branch officials need to be paid more. These people make decent salaries — they’re not poor. But at the same time, folks like a backbench member of the House of Representatives or the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America are supposed to be important actors in American society. It’s not a good idea for them to be making orders of magnitude less money than important people in the private sector. Somewhat less, sure. But over time the relative salary of a cabinet secretary versus a corporate executive has eroded enormously for no good reason — it’s not as if the budget savings involved are large enough to make an appreciable difference.

Meanwhile, this becomes a problem when you get deeper down into the regulatory agencies. If the EPA is supposed to be able to assess the level of pollution somewhere and take a bad actor to court if he violates the law, then the EPA needs to have good scientists and good lawyers working for it. That means those people need to be paid salaries that are competitive with what people in those fields can make in the private sector. If you don’t do that, then you either get people who are incompetent or, worse, the “revolving door” phenomenon in which the real value of government work is to cash in later by defecting to the private sector in a way that corrupts the regulatory process.

Government Good and Bad?

Reader J.F. has a question about my post on how not all government agencies are as bad as that one time the DMV really screwed up: “RE: AirForce, I agree with your broad point, but do you have any thoughts regarding the fact that the well run government agencies you mention are all military? Are civilian run agencies just never as good? And why is that? Further, should we ask the military to run our healthcare. I’m only half-kidding on that last one.”

First off, I would reject the premise. One of the examples I cited of an effective public institution is the Federal Reserve system. The very same conservatives who seem certain that the government would botch even the most minor regulatory tasks have pretty much no problem with the idea of the Fed setting interests rates that do an enormous amount to control the overall level of employment, GDP growth, and inflation in the country. And rightly so — the details of the Fed’s conduct over the past 20-30 years are certainly open to criticism, but they’ve definitely delivered shorter, shallower recessions than we had in the past and the very same Bush administration that put Michael Brown in charge of FEMA picked a new Fed chief whose decision-making regularly earns praise from Paul Krugman.

Beyond the Fed and the military there are lots of parts of the government that work quite well — we have bad schools and bad police departments in this country, but also good schools and good police departments. We fight forest fires with extraordinary skill and I’ve had great visits to any number of attractions run by the National Park Service.

And then, yes, there’s the military. But there’s no real mystery here as to why our very large military is also a reasonably high-performing government agency — it’s something our political leaders put a high priority on. This is similar to the Fed — political elites wouldn’t stand for staffing it with incompetents and know-nothings. Other agencies become patronage mills or suffer from funding shortfalls or deliberate sabotage. When the government is run by people who don’t want environmental regulations, civil rights law, or labor law to be enforced properly those things don’t happen. What’s more, a lot of the better public institutions — from the Fed to the Navy to state universities and so forth — are structured in special ways to try to insulate them from problematic forms of politicization.

This topic initially arose in the context of some snark about the evils of the government taking over the health care system, and my point wouldn’t be to say that government-run health care would necessarily be good but only that one could envision a wide range of outcomes. Were the government to start running American health care, it would be important to think about a lot of questions of institutional design to try to make sure that it ran health care well. In the real world, the government is already pretty heavily involved in the health care system in terms of regulating it and the main progressive legislative proposals all involve basically maintaining the current framework of a regulated-and-subsidized but privately owned-and-operated health care system so I’m not sure that this debate is all that relevant. In terms of the military running health care, though, the Veterans’ Administration provides excellent health care and I hear good things about the schools the DOD runs on military babes.