Political Roundtable Quasar of Mayhem part III

[Zonkerbl]

Ok, here's a plan:

2) Create a mechanism that makes it possible to fire Federal workers who are incompetent, while preventing them from being fired for political reasons (don't know if this is possible, unfortunately).

Zonker - space purposes, edited most of your original post - but those are pretty good plans.

But for this one, above. There is a mechanism to fire incompetent Federal workers. I know. As a Federal employee and manager, I've done it. Twice.

To be fair, the frustration, headache, and stress of the process really ruins your life. You no longer want to be a manager. Essentially, two verbal warnings (documented) with granular things to do to improve; two subsequent written warnings (120 days apart) with granular things to do to improve; a 120 day formal PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) with specific tasks to do to achieve minimum performance levels and stave off firing. After that, if you can't manage it, you're gone.

But if you're the manager, you're faced with like a year of some out-of-control employee subverting your entire unit, creating chaos, the EEOC was called in on me for discrimination against a minority (I'm a minority), the union, the lies...Jeebus, I'm frustrated just typing this.

But it *is* possible.

(I note that during both processes, as my frustration and stress were at its worst, somebody decided to make the political talking point about how government employees were useless and didn't do anything. For every 2 a.m. justification writing session I had to undertake on my own, I wanted to throw a pie in the face at every politician that demagogued civicl servants.

<sigh>

Oh, and despite what politicians hint at. The problem among public servants isn't at the clerk, specialist, manager, or worker bee level. You know where it is? It's in the burrowers. The guys who get an appointee position in an agency and after a bit, apply for an "open to all applicants" new civil service job at the GS-15 level that magically appears and then they continue to exercise their lack of expertise (too many appointees lack the expertise of career senior staff - "Brownie, etc") in policy-level positions. Making decisions based on "expertise by job title" and frustrating any semblence of cohesion at the senior career staff level.

Yeah, and almost automatically get sued. I don't consider "having to spend a year and 80% of my time and incur $100,000 worth of legal fees" as equivalent to "being able to fire someone." You know? I know it's possible, and I also know how difficult it is. I know a guy in my office who just retired, his boss tried to get him fired for 5 years and couldn't do it. This was a guy who routinely fell asleep during meetings. Ugh! In the private sector, if you had cause like that you could fire them on the spot.

That's the primary reason you have so much deadweight in the government. There's a huge cost to firing people -- most people just get traded around. For a long time the place I work has been kind of a dumping ground for incompetents, and the only way to get rid of them is to wait until they retire. So not only do you have people like that sitting around, but the incentive to work hard is just not there. As a manager, what sort of credibility do you have? The only thing you can do is inspire the people under you to work because it's interesting, which I've been able to do with my own hires, but it doesn't work on everyone.

[popper]

The discussion about the ability of federal managers to fire ineffective employees is important to the overall goal of reducing federal spending.

I read that the private sector fires or lays off 3% of their work force each year. What about a program where each agency is required to lay off 1% of its workforce every year. Obviously they could only choose those who rank at the bottom of the performance continuum as measured by the annual performance reviews.

The 1% should be divided into 3 categories so senior people would have to be laid off at the same rate as junior people. Perhaps the following breakout might suffice.

GS-3 to GS -8
GS 9 to GS-12
GS-13 to SES

Severance package for those with 1-15 years of service and something more substantial for those approaching retirement. It wouldn't be fair to layoff a 54 year old person with 30 years of service and deny them a retirement.

[nate33]

Pine, Zonker,

Just reading those posts got me angry. I can't figure out why you guys won't join me in my hatred of big government. Clearly, any system that is that dysfunctional is a ginormous waste of taxpayer dollars and an inexcusable drain on our economy. Government should be able to do things they do with half the manpower if it could just be run efficiently.

In my idealized world, I would apply the following principles:

1. If it could be done in the private sector, do it privately. That would include regulation of many products. Use the Underwriters Laboratory model: have two or three independent laboratories test and vouch for the effectiveness of a consumer good, a food product or a drug. There is no need for an FDA, or the mess of agencies involved in verifying the safety of automobiles. Likewise, most education could be handled privately. There might need to be a backstop of public schools to handle deprived regions and the mentally handicapped, but 75% of kids in America should be privately educated with voucher and or tax/credit assistance.

2. If it must be handled by government, handle it locally or at the state level. This is basically what the Constitution says. This would include all roads and bridges, all entitlements and programs for the poor, and most regulation for things like workplace safety. Obviously, law enforcement and firefighting would be handled here.

3. If there's no possible way to handle it privately or at the local level, then it is done at the Federal level. This would include national defense, border security, coining money, and interstate regulation for things like environmental pollution and airline travel, etc.

The idea is to first minimize the amount of centralized government we have. Then we can focus on the ways to streamline our government so that they can provide services more efficiently.

EDIT: LINK TO PREVIOUS POLITICS THREAD

[pancakes3]

i'm pretty libertarian too nate, but i think education is handled mostly at the state level as it is. overall good guidelines though. i disagree that safety regulations should be held independently. if not federally mandated, safety measures would lack authority, unless you're suggesting that the actual grunt-work be sub-contracted in which case efficiency would go up but the cost is still theoretically there (albeit smaller due to the efficiency).

other "waste" federal programs that could be handled privately include (obviously) social security, FCC (the morality police part, not the bandwith aspect), and various research centers like NOAA. i still say defense is the first place to start when it comes to trimming fat. everything from physical bullets, tanks, and missiles to wayward research projects can all be reduced massively and so our diplomats can actually use diplomacy in international relations rather than falling back on Teddy R's big stick (phrasing?).

[Zonkerbl]

Alright, here's the fundamental problem. Your plan [edit: to regulate worker safety at the state level] puts the businesses that are located in states with stricter regulations at a competitive disadvantage, which is going to drive businesses to the states with the least costly regulations, which in turn is going to force all the states to compete with each other to have the most lax safety regulations.

It's an externality -- a state that lowers its safety regs would expect to get a boost from drawing jobs from other states. Because that state doesn't take the losses of the other states into account in its utility maximizing equation, there's a tendency in equilibrium for the resulting safety level to be lower than that which sets the marginal cost of safety equal to the marginal benefit of lives saved.

Only way to eliminate that externality is to regulate at the Federal level.

Wow, thanks for making me explain that! I have a paper where I try to explain this and I just couldn't quite figure out how to put it.

[nate33]

Zonker, i think your point is valid and worthy of further exploration. I agree completely that competition among state regulatory systems would result in somewhat less safety overall. Where I disagree is in your assertion that safety would be reduced to the point where the dollar value of lives lost would exceed the dollar cost of safety regulation. I think we are currently spending far too much in safety regulation, well in excess of the dollar value of lives saved. Competing regulations would bring that ratio down to a proper equilibrium, but not below. States would be motivated to have a cheap regulatory structure, but they also have a motivation to not be considered the nation's death capital.

[nate33]

i'm pretty libertarian too nate, but i think education is handled mostly at the state level as it is. overall good guidelines though. i disagree that safety regulations should be held independently. if not federally mandated, safety measures would lack authority, unless you're suggesting that the actual grunt-work be sub-contracted in which case efficiency would go up but the cost is still theoretically there (albeit smaller due to the efficiency).

i didnt mean to imply that enforcement be done privately. There's nothing wrong with the government saying that a product must comply with UL standards before it is sold. It happens in building codes. Fire alarms must be UL or FM listed.

[Zonkerbl]

Assuming you know how to measure the dollar value of lives saved, I can prove mathematically that what I said is true. I've done exercises like this before so I know how the math is going to work out. Game theory! Whee!

You fix it by correctly valuing the marginal costs and benefits of regulations when setting regs at the Federal level. Not by switching to a system you know is broken.

Problem is the economists in charge of all the assumptions that goes into the analysis are at OSHA, and their conclusions can be vetoed by OSHA's administrator. That's why I said you need a separate agency who does all the cost benefit analyses. Don't put the fox in charge of the henhouse -- don't give the OSHA administrator, who's got an agenda to make sure all the rules he/she wants go through, veto power over the CBA.

Tell you the truth, OSHA is not so bad. Their legislation says their rules have to be economically feasible, so it's easier to challenge OSHA rules in court than EPA's Clean Air Act rules, where the Supreme Court has interpreted the legislation to forbid EPA from considering costs when setting standards for criteria pollutants. That's why I said EPA needs to be razed to the ground -- they've been building an institution around this interpretation for the last forty years, so you have to basically blow the whole thing up now and start over with a completely different mandate.

OSHA *wishes* they had EPA's flexibility in setting rules. They complain all the time about how difficult it is for them to get rules out. They come out with a rule, it gets challenged and then spends ten years in court.

[DCZards]

Nate, Your idealized world doesn’t work for me (surprise, surprise).

Yes, we’ve got some serious problems with public education, but a system built around private schools would create an even more segregated, balkanized and inequitable school system than the one we currently have. In fact, your suggestion that we have public schools “to handle deprived regions and the mentally handicapped” confirms my fear of the inequities and ‘separate but equal” system your plan would create.

And how would we hold private schools accountable for academic achievement? How would we enforce laws related to discrimination and civil rights at these schools? Most, if not all, private schools relish their independence and vehemently resist sharing information like test scores and the makeup of their student bodies.

The idea of having the private sector do the food and drug testing is even scarier. How do we prevent big (and wealthy) pharma and food companies from bribing these private companies in order to get their drug or food approved? This kind of “bribing” already happens too much under the guise of “lobbying” and “political contributions” but at least we have some controls and oversight at the fed level. I’m not aware of any instances of govt. agencies (like FDA) being charged with taking bribes to approve a product. Private companies would be much more susceptible to payoffs and bribes.

The safety of our food and drugs is far too important to be turned over to private companies that will probably end up being controlled by the very companies they are paid to monitor.

[Nivek]

I agree with zonker about EPA. What they do is just preposterous at times. I may have given this example before, but I'll repeat because it's on point. A few years ago, I worked in the forest products industry. Paper companies deal with TONS of regulations, including Clean Air Act. The paper-making machines in the US are OLD. When I moved on in 2006, the last new paper-making facility in the US had gone into operation in the early 90s.

So anyway, someone came up with a piece of equipment that would make existing paper machines more efficient. For about $11,000 per facility, companies could reduce energy consumption and improve the quality of air emissions. To make a change to these facilities, it first had to go through EPA. EPA regulators told them that when they made the change, they would also have to install additional air quality controls that would further reduce air emissions by a small percentage (I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like the cheap thing would have reduced emissions by something like 8%; EPA's "also change this" thing would have further reduced emissions by another 2-3%). The pricetag? $11 million. Shockingly, not a single company was willing to pay for the multi-million dollar change. Especially since their profit margins were already ****.

It's that kind of stuff that's gotta change some way or another.

[nate33]

Nate, Your idealized world doesn’t work for me (surprise, surprise).

Yes, we’ve got some serious problems with public education, but a system built around private schools would create an even more segregated, balkanized and inequitable school system than the one we currently have. In fact, your suggestion that we have public schools “to handle deprived regions and the mentally handicapped” confirms my fear of the inequities and ‘separate but equal” system your plan would create.

And how would we hold private schools accountable for academic achievement? How would we enforce laws related to discrimination and civil rights at these schools? Most, if not all, private schools relish their independence and vehemently resist sharing information like test scores and the makeup of their student bodies.

The idea of having the private sector do the food and drug testing is even scarier. How do we prevent big (and wealthy) pharma and food companies from bribing these private companies in order to get their drug or food approved? This kind of “bribing” already happens too much under the guise of “lobbying” and “political contributions” but at least we have some controls and oversight at the fed level. I’m not aware of any instances of govt. agencies (like FDA) being charged with taking bribes to approve a product. Private companies would be much more susceptible to payoffs and bribes.

The safety of our food and drugs is far too important to be turned over to private companies that will probably end up being controlled by the very companies they are paid to monitor.

Dczards, ill explain things further when i have access to a keyboard. In short, you are not thinking this through. You have to consider the motivations of the private testing laboratories. What would be the best eay for them to earn money in the long term?

[pineappleheadindc]

Ok, here's a plan:

2) Create a mechanism that makes it possible to fire Federal workers who are incompetent, while preventing them from being fired for political reasons (don't know if this is possible, unfortunately).

Zonker - space purposes, edited most of your original post - but those are pretty good plans.

But for this one, above. There is a mechanism to fire incompetent Federal workers. I know. As a Federal employee and manager, I've done it. Twice.

To be fair, the frustration, headache, and stress of the process really ruins your life. You no longer want to be a manager. Essentially, two verbal warnings (documented) with granular things to do to improve; two subsequent written warnings (120 days apart) with granular things to do to improve; a 120 day formal PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) with specific tasks to do to achieve minimum performance levels and stave off firing. After that, if you can't manage it, you're gone.

But if you're the manager, you're faced with like a year of some out-of-control employee subverting your entire unit, creating chaos, the EEOC was called in on me for discrimination against a minority (I'm a minority), the union, the lies...Jeebus, I'm frustrated just typing this.

But it *is* possible.

(I note that during both processes, as my frustration and stress were at its worst, somebody decided to make the political talking point about how government employees were useless and didn't do anything. For every 2 a.m. justification writing session I had to undertake on my own, I wanted to throw a pie in the face at every politician that demagogued civicl servants.

<sigh>

Oh, and despite what politicians hint at. The problem among public servants isn't at the clerk, specialist, manager, or worker bee level. You know where it is? It's in the burrowers. The guys who get an appointee position in an agency and after a bit, apply for an "open to all applicants" new civil service job at the GS-15 level that magically appears and then they continue to exercise their lack of expertise (too many appointees lack the expertise of career senior staff - "Brownie, etc") in policy-level positions. Making decisions based on "expertise by job title" and frustrating any semblence of cohesion at the senior career staff level.

Yeah, and almost automatically get sued. I don't consider "having to spend a year and 80% of my time and incur $100,000 worth of legal fees" as equivalent to "being able to fire someone." You know? I know it's possible, and I also know how difficult it is. I know a guy in my office who just retired, his boss tried to get him fired for 5 years and couldn't do it. This was a guy who routinely fell asleep during meetings. Ugh! In the private sector, if you had cause like that you could fire them on the spot.

That's the primary reason you have so much deadweight in the government. There's a huge cost to firing people -- most people just get traded around. For a long time the place I work has been kind of a dumping ground for incompetents, and the only way to get rid of them is to wait until they retire. So not only do you have people like that sitting around, but the incentive to work hard is just not there. As a manager, what sort of credibility do you have? The only thing you can do is inspire the people under you to work because it's interesting, which I've been able to do with my own hires, but it doesn't work on everyone.

Yeah, the pain involved in my life during the firing process was huge. On top of that, one of the people was when I worked overseas with the DoD. So, out of my own program budget, I had to pay for a EEOC investigator out of San Francisco to fly out to investigate me.

At the end, I had an entire bookcase of binders just on this one personnel action. I musta been responsible for killing an entire forest of trees.

But I had to do it. I'm a taxpayer too and I can't have one of my peeps completely flaunting his lack of productivity, running a "home" business from his office, etc. I get paid the money to manage, so I gotta do it.

It woulda been nice if I had had a little backing above me. But I didn't - and that's a real problem for line managers (lack of backing from senior leaders).

Nate, I have thoughts on your post, but I gotta run. More late tonight.

[DCZards]

Dczards, ill explain things further when i have access to a keyboard. In short, you are not thinking this through. You have to consider the motivations of the private testing laboratories. What would be the best eay for them to earn money in the long term?

Funny Nate, I thought the exact same thing when I read your plan: "He's not thinking this through." And please don't assume that all or most private testing labs will be motivated by the money they can earn in the long-term when they can get "paid" in the short-term.

[Zonkerbl]

Pine, Zonker,

Just reading those posts got me angry. I can't figure out why you guys won't join me in my hatred of big government. Clearly, any system that is that dysfunctional is a ginormous waste of taxpayer dollars and an inexcusable drain on our economy. Government should be able to do things they do with half the manpower if it could just be run efficiently.

I guess the most surprising thing to me is, given the complete lack of incentive to work hard, most people I come across actually are pretty bright and motivated. I suppose a lot of folks have their eyes on private sector jobs at some point in their career, so the lack of incentive in this particular job doesn't prevent them from being motivated. We had a manager who was a bad fit, we threatened to put him on a PIP plan and he went somewhere else. Sometimes you have enough leverage to make things work. It's mostly the folks who have been around for thirty years, the institution has evolved away from what they do well, they've got no prospects for getting hired anywhere else, and they're just holding on until retirement.

I don't know about half the manpower. I guess it depends on the office. I know some offices where you could eliminate every last man and have one of my guys take the whole job over and do a better job. But I'm biased. Some offices are brutally underpaid -- I worked in USTR for a year, that was nuts. There was a six week period there where I never got home earlier than 10 pm and twice I had to take a cab home because the metro had stopped working. It was like being a lawyer. And the folks at OIRA should get medals.

Still -- it's nuts what you have to go through to fire people. I'd say you could shed about 10% off our payroll now and not feel it.

[nate33]

Dczards, ill explain things further when i have access to a keyboard. In short, you are not thinking this through. You have to consider the motivations of the private testing laboratories. What would be the best eay for them to earn money in the long term?

Funny Nate, I thought the exact same thing when I read your plan: "He's not thinking this through." And please don't assume that all or most private testing labs will be motivated by the money they can earn in the long-term when they can get "paid" in the short-term.

That's exactly where you have it wrong. Companies DO think for the long term. Its government that has a short term outlook (the next election). A private testing lab operating in a competitive environment would understand that its credibility is really its only valuable asset and would therefore be more resistant to corruption than a short term oriented government with a monopoly on regulatory control.

[Zonkerbl]

Hm. You know what really keeps the private standards making bodies honest is that there are usually private companies on either side of a standards debate making sure they don't get screwed. Like if you're establishing the international standard for wireless 3g networks you can bet your bum all the interested parties will be at the table defending their interests.

If you wanted to privatize OSHA regs, I don't know that there'd be a really strong voice at the table defending workers. I agree there are some things that could be privatized, but maybe not as much as you would think. If there's a real market failure then you can't privatize it. Pollution and worker safety involve externalities, so you're pretty much stuck relying on the government for that.

[DCZards]

That's exactly where you have it wrong. Companies DO think for the long term. Its government that has a short term outlook (the next election). A private testing lab operating in a competitive environment would understand that its credibility is really its only valuable asset and would therefore be more resistant to corruption than a short term oriented government with a monopoly on regulatory control.

Nate, I admire your idealism. However, I don't share your somewhat blind faith in the private sector or corporations. I've seen far too much corruption and greed to drink that kool-aid. I personally believe that government is more resistant to corruption than the private sector, because government agencies don't have the same need/desire for financial profits as corporations.

[Nivek]

Companies MIGHT think longer term, depending on what the executive incentives are. If execs are getting bonuses based on quarterly profit reports, then their thinking will be just as short term as government's.

[Zonkerbl]

Well, also depends on the kind of business you're in. If you're a standards making organization, and your main asset is your impartiality, you're going to protect that asset.

[old rem]

Alright, here's the fundamental problem. Your plan [edit: to regulate worker safety at the state level] puts the businesses that are located in states with stricter regulations at a competitive disadvantage, which is going to drive businesses to the states with the least costly regulations, which in turn is going to force all the states to compete with each other to have the most lax safety regulations.

It's an externality -- a state that lowers its safety regs would expect to get a boost from drawing jobs from other states. Because that state doesn't take the losses of the other states into account in its utility maximizing equation, there's a tendency in equilibrium for the resulting safety level to be lower than that which sets the marginal cost of safety equal to the marginal benefit of lives saved.

Only way to eliminate that externality is to regulate at the Federal level.

Wow, thanks for making me explain that! I have a paper where I try to explain this and I just couldn't quite figure out how to put it.

Sure, that some states and a lot of foreign lands can lure business and industry with a Third World disregard for any rights for workers, safety issues, environmental issues,has been a big part of our current and future job shortage and our shriveling up as an economy and a nation.

Matching the lowest common denominator? Well....I guess that's eventually gonna reduce illegal immigration. Just make the USA the same as Mexico or India or Columbia. That, of course sacrifices our spot on the global food chain,as we cease to be the big market.

Life has grown quite complicated over the past 150 years. There's a whole lot more of us. There's no homesteading,no frontier,no 100,000 thing yet to invent and make and sell.

Publicly funded private schools? In certain cases this IS done. A block away a Catholic elementary school who's demograpics shifted now is a majority of kids on vouchers because the public school scored low (Academic Emergency rule) and yet that ought to be a short term patch,since the Public school still is a big local investment and thus there's costly redundancy, not savings. State and federal belt tighting probably will soon eliminate that program, not expand it.
Schools are already getting a big squeeze. less education? Let some future folks sweat that.
Cull the herd early. The Winner-Loser view of America may conceded that all men are created equal, but the POINT then is to see they don't stay that way for long.

Welcome to the Jungle. Grab what you can.

I'm all for putting up a private sector toll gate on our street. We get a lot of traffic. I could make money on that.

Schools? I got no kids...close them. I can use them as cheap labor to shovel snow off my toll road next winter.

I guess without the "Big Govt" those wars in Iraq+ Afghanistan end. My neighborhood is of no value to Al Qaeda so, I don't care. I guess I need to get a gun again, fortunately, I'm a VERY good shot so when there's no Govt to tend to stuff like laws and chaos, I probably can be more trouble than I'm worth. I'd miss the traffic lights,even if they can be annoying.

Here, Gas, Electric, Phone, Cable,Water...are all regulated monopolies. Wonder if as unregulated they double or triple the rates? We could all be Amish without the farm or a horse.

Sorry about that Hurricane, Tornado,Flood, Drought, Earthquake...you lose. Get used to it.
Segregation returns to Mississippi? The air, water or food gets toxic? Get used to it.
Airplanes start running into each other or just get lost and land wherever they end up? Get used to it. Frauds? Scams? Cheats? Without courts and agencies policing such stuff, you still can round up a lynch mob. Lynch mobs and Witch Trials and Carjacking and frauds and slavery and....Oh my, the mind boggles at all the business opportunities. This Mad Max world of no big Gov, no watchdog, no tax, could give a ruthless bastard like me quite a lot of opportunity. If sh@t like social responsibility,ethics,are optional and the watchdog ain't guardin' the henhouse no more ......FREE CHICKEN DINNER ! I'm taking the good parts,you can have the gizzards.

This ain't 1830. It is 2011. Look before you leap. You can't downsize America to 100 yr ago and have no side effect.