In decades of thinking about reform of bureaucracy, the idea of broad employee buyouts never occurred to me. And yet here we are. The new Trump administration has sent an email to two million, three hundred thousand federal employees with the subject: A Fork in the Road. The content: if you resign before Feb. 5, you get 8 months of severance, which is all that is available without Congressional spending allocations.
Type the word resign and it is done.
The email further explained why now is a good time to leave. There are budget cuts coming. There will be changed reporting relationships. There will be less job security. There will be upheaval all around. It might be the best time to find another path in life. The Trump administration is strongly encouraging people to take the deal.
That’s beautiful, peaceful, and we are waiting to see if it works. Some estimates are that some 200,000 people are going to accept the offer but it could be vastly more. They can move on to better lives, hopefully in the private sector and not in lobbying organizations. The service industry would be ideal: far more rewarding.
What’s striking is how mainstream news coverage of this innovative idea was met not so much with outrage but awareness that something has to change. The public-sector workforce is wildly bloated, as we have found out in the post-pandemic period when most employees managed to prolong work-from-home arrangements indefinitely.
Vast numbers know they do not do anything at all. The marble palaces that fill D.C. have been largely empty. I only realized this last year when I went to Capitol Hill for the day and discovered a city wholly changed from when I lived there years ago. The restaurants, bars, and shops were gone. Street traffic was low. Pedestrians were just not really around.
When I asked what was going on, people said it was because Congress was not in session. But in the years I was there, I never recall that this was an issue that affected commercial life. I left my visit in shock. The vast and valuable real estate of this city was being deployed for purposes that were not even in use. It was like an industrial carcass.
Why had no one told me about this? How come there weren’t stories about this strange reality in the press?
What that means is that while Trump might be president, he cannot actually serve as their boss. Or rather, he is boss only in the abstract but cannot direct their work. He cannot manage them. He certainly cannot terminate them.
To be sure, he has issued a perfect executive order, which points out that any employee of the federal government who is doing policy is necessarily a political employee. Therefore, that person needs to be classified in a way that is different from the career service. That change is done. It will undoubtedly be subject to court challenges and this question will ultimately land in the Supreme Court. The Court has been scrupulous in recent years in adhering to the U.S. Constitution, which nowhere creates some 4th branch of government called the administrative state.
What to do? Well, Elon Musk faced this problem when he took over Twitter and wanted to bring new efficiencies to the place. He had to because he was facing a terrifying debt that financed the takeover and had to work at a furious pace just to make the place viable. His strategy was to create chaos and the appearance of vulnerability and offer buyouts to everyone. In the course of weeks, he had cleared out 4 out of 5 employees. Operations dramatically improved.
There are clearly diminishing returns to forever adding additional labor resources at the same problem. For bureaucracies, it becomes an end in itself. The building of empire is more important than the mission.
Musk has already given the proof of concept. No question that his example is being deployed by Trump to get hold of the bloated and deprecated bureaucratic structures in D.C. And yet this approach to dealing with creaky and old establishments has a very long history.
In the years after socialism collapsed in Eastern Europe and Russia, many stakeholders in the old systems were essentially paid off to retire and go away so that the systems could begin anew. This approach is far more efficient and effective than outright terminations, much less wars and revolutions, because it draws on people’s self-interest.
Parliamentarian Edmund Burke advocated something very similar in his economic reform proposals of 1780. The empire had been plunged into economic crisis due to the American war and the far-flung burdens and obligations of the sprawling royal properties and debts. He railed against the status quo in a famous speech:
“When the reason of old establishments is gone,” Burke said, “it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them. This is superstitiously to embalm a carcass not worth an ounce of the gums that are used to preserve it. It is to burn precious oils in the tomb; it is to offer meat and drink to the dead: not so much an honour to the deceased as a disgrace to the survivors. Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there ‘Boreas, and Eurus, and Caurus, and Argestes loud,’ howling through the vacant lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guardrooms, appall the imagination, and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants—the Saxon, the Norman, and the Dane—the stern Edwards and fierce Henrys,—who stalk from desolation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless chambers. When this tumult subsides, a dead and still more frightful silence would reign in this desert, if every now and then the tacking of hammers did not announce that those constant attendants upon all Courts in all ages, jobs, were still alive—for whose sake alone it is that any trace of ancient grandeur is suffered to remain. These palaces are a true emblem of some governments: the inhabitants are decayed, but the governors and magistrates still flourish. They put me in mind of Old Sarum, where the representatives, more in number than the constituents, only serve to inform us that this was once a place of trade, and sounding with ‘the busy hum of men,’ though now you can only trace the streets by the colour of the corn, and its sole manufacture is in members of Parliament.”
Burke’s plan was rejected but the speech made his career and became a model later for dealing with the problem of the slave trade and British slaves. A half-century after his speech, the British put a final end to slavery through precisely the kind of buyouts that Burke had suggested, and did it without a costly war that the United States faced 30 years later.
For years I’ve wondered how Washington would adapt itself to modern times. How precisely can it reform itself to match the digital age, accommodate the loss of trust in light of the last five years, and adopt efficiencies the same as any large company has to do? I could not see a way but, in fact, we are seeing mighty attempts to do that right now.
Will this work? It very well might.
