WASHINGTON — For years, Republicans in Congress have been eyeing an overhaul of the federal workforce —by reducing the number of workers and curtailing benefits and pay while making it easier to fire bad employees.
Now, with a president-elect who has promised to do much the same, 2017 could be the best time in recent memory to make sweeping changes affecting those who work for the bureaucracy.
One major plan is being readied by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The Utah Republican calls it “high on our agenda.” While details remain sketchy, it would likely mean big changes to the generous retirement benefits given federal workers, mainly by looking to shift new employees from a defined benefit into a market-based 401(k).
He is also interested in making it easier to fire workers who perform badly and wants to reduce the federal civilian workforce, which currently numbers 2.1 million employees, not including U.S. Postal Service employees.
Republican leaders have long made it clear they’d like to see major changes to the civilian workforce. In fiscal 2016, the House and Senate budget resolutions called for a reduction in the number of civilian employees using a formula that would allow agencies to hire one new employee for every three who leave, reducing the workforce by roughly 10 percent while exempting “national-security positions.”
Republicans would likely exempt those employees deemed essential for national security, or roughly 50 percent of the total workforce, according to some experts. Chaffetz said he’d seek to increase the number of Secret Service employees. If President-elect Donald Trump wants to institute a hiring freeze, as he has promised, he can do so via executive order or other actions.
Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University who studies the federal workforce, said federal workers shouldn’t necessarily be afraid of potential changes, but “should be very uncertain about what the future holds.” He said some revisions are needed but called the attrition proposals he’s seen “irresponsible.”
“It’s not only a blunt ax, it’s a rusty, damaging ax,” Light said. The main problem he sees with most attrition proposals is that they offer no safeguard to prevent a stampede out the door of the most experienced and highest-performing workers.
Sen. James Lankford, the chairman of the Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management subcommittee that deals with federal workers, said that “we’re not necessarily looking at ways to reduce the federal workforce, we’re looking at the effectiveness of how it actually operates.”
The Oklahoma Republican said his committee is focused on ways to overhaul the Office of Personnel Management and its perpetual backlog of processing retirement applications, and speeding up the hiring process, among other issues.
In 2011, GOP Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah offered legislation aimed at thinning the workforce by 15 percent over a decade. He said he did not have any new legislation to offer, and said only last week: “I’m going to support President-elect Trump as much as I can. We’ll do whatever we have to.”