Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Too Many Bureaucrats to Count


This past weekend at the Federalist Society National Convention in Washington, I became aware that some (who knows how many?) political appointees from the Bush administration are still on the government payroll.

One man, who works for one those cabinet-level departments that many conservatives would abolish, was appointed as Schedule C political appointee. After Obama's inauguration, this Republican expected that someone would thank him for his service and show him the door.

It never happened.

Four years later, the Obama appointees assume that he is a fellow "progressive" -- because he has been there so long.  Consequently, he hears candid discussions among Democrat political appointees.   For example, he knew, in advance, that the labor statistics before the Election would understate unemployment by not counting California's numbers.

That's the back-drop for the Fiscal Cliff negotiations:  we have so many people on the Federal payroll that people can get lost, for years.


1 comment:

Neel Joshi said...

While certainly an embarrassing oversight, isn't it a little silly to consider this the "backdrop" of fiscal cliff negotiations? In the grand scheme of things, while having people on payroll that shouldn't be is wasteful, it's going to take a lot more than cleaning that up to reverse the deficit.

The basic framework of the discussion has to be on the broad scale: how to raise revenue (e.g., taxes) and how to cut spending (e.g., ending programs).