The Crisis of Organizational Bloat in our Government
"Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.” ~ Musk and Ramaswamy
“The proposition of these two guys is that to make the government more efficient we gotta fire a bunch of people and take away a bunch of funding … they are not coming at this on the right foot and not coming at it from the right place.”
~ Rep Maxwell Frost (D-FL)
I can tell you first hand after I was given an assignment in the Pentagon in 2011, the organizational bloat was beyond description and this was with the Department of Defense (DoD), one of the most efficient departments and agencies in the federal government.
The first working group meeting I attended took place in a very large conference room with a very large conference table and at least 20 people sitting around the table. Behind the seats at the table were seats on the back walls going all around the entirety of the room, leaving just a small opening for the door and the capacity for people to enter and exit. There were approximately 40 people in the meeting, most very senior in rank or standing. Being a Lieutenant Colonel I was the equivalent of a coffee boy so I sat on the back wall.
The meeting started with the Senior Executive Services representative addressing a policy. I am paraphrasing now but recall him saying something like, please pull up policy XYZ and look at page 457, paragraph 11, and the second sentence, does everybody see the word “happy?” Everyone around the table nodded in robotic unison, yes. He then went on to say, well, we want to change that word “happy” to “glad,” what do you think?
There the conversation began. One person said, happy is a very good word, but glad, I like it even better and so on. I remember the policy being of little importance and that it is doubtful, anyone would ever read it, and if they did, it would not make a difference.
Then I started looking for a camera in the room thinking this has to be some kind of joke right? No, it was not a joke and no camera was found. I continued to look around the room and everyone seemed to be happy with the discussion on this highly irrelevant topic.
My career up to this point had been almost solely in operational roles, leading Marines in combat. Not that I was a warmonger, but it was where I felt I could do the most good and felt the most comfortable. I loved training, preparing Marines for combat, but I despised busy work without a purpose.
After witnessing this discussion about a word for over an hour, and hearing the leader of the meeting say, great job, this was a great meeting; see you next week, at the same time and place, it was clear to me this was busy work without a purpose.
The worst part is that the vast majority of everyone in the room was completely comfortable with what just took place and saw nothing wrong with this considerable waste of time, resources, and money based off the lost working hours.
As I got more familiar with the building and the work being done within, it became clear to me that less than 20% of the work force was doing the lion’s share of the work, the rest were professional bureaucrats, looking for ways to fill their day to collect their pay.
We are talking many bureaucrats considering the Pentagon is the third largest office building in the world and can house over 25,000 people. It should also be noted that the entire DoD has more than 3.4 million personnel, ranging from active duty, reserve and National Guard service members, to civilians and private sector employees, with similar inefficiencies.
Regrettably, the news only gets worse on this subject as we learned recently that only 6% of the federal workforce “report in-person on a full-time basis” while almost one-third of federal workers are remote on a full-time basis, in a sharp turn-around from the pre-pandemic era in which only 3% teleworked daily.
I think of the millions of hard working Americans working two to three jobs sometimes just to make ends meet and pay their taxes only to have their tax dollars being treated with such irreverence.
There was a time when Americans looked at work in the federal work force as an opportunity to serve their beloved country in a selfless manner. Let us pray we get back to welcoming the opportunity to serve our country not ourselves.
If Elon Musk can take Twitter, a publicly traded company, which are normally more efficient than the federal government and cut 80% of the workforce making it more efficient, then the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), should be able to eliminate the entire Department of Education and cut 10% to 50% across every department and agency making it more efficient.
As for Rep Frost and any other elected official pushing back on making the government more efficient by cutting costs and people, they are disingenuous and should be out of elected office immediately, for America and their constituents deserve better.
Now let’s go MAGA!