DOGE vs Bloat

James Freeman, in the WSJ, reports on findings from the Cato Institute on the lack of government efficiency.

Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Bourne argue their case for reducing the bureaucracy, of which there are 2.3 million executive branch civilian employees with an estimated compensation totaling $403 billion in 2025.

Of these workers, 800,000 are in the Pentagon, and 1.5 million are spread throughout hundreds of other agencies. The US Postal Service employs an additional 550,000 workers.

From the Bureau of Economic Analysis: 

The average federal civilian worker made $157,000 in wages and benefits in 2023, much higher than the average US private-sector wages and benefits of $94,000”.

Lucrative compensation and high job security induce federal employees to stay in their jobs for decades, which can create a sclerotic culture infected with groupthink. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the quit rate in the federal government is just one-quarter the rate in the private sector.

As Msrrs. Nowrasteh and Bourne note, federal employees are rarely fired. Instead, they are terminated for poor performance and misconduct, but only at one-sixth the rate of private-sector workers.

For the federal senior executive service, the firing rate is just one-twentieth the rate of corporate CEOs. Current civil service protections make removing underperforming workers very difficult.

Surveys of federal workers find that most agencies take insufficient action to deal with poorly performing employees. Supervisors are reluctant to initiate disciplinary actions because of bureaucratic hoops. A Merit Systems Protections Board report found that just 41 percent of federal supervisors felt that they could remove an employee for serious misconduct, and only 26 percent thought that a poor performer could be removed…