-Caveat Lector-
Here is a part of the problem--too much law enforcement. Poorly
trained and with questionable objectives?? We are paying for this
lack of service and for our own abuse by LEO out of control.
~Amelia~
The shifting federal workforce
More law enforcement,
fewer safety
related jobs,
data show
U.S. Department of Transportation workers Jimmy Phillips and Billy
NeSmith -- responsible for safety at 1,000 bridges -- check one
near Moultrie, Ga. . Positions like theirs are growing ever scarcer
in the federal government.
By Ellen Nakashima
THE WASHINGTON POST
Sept. 2 - The government has dramatically increased law
enforcement staffing - Border Patrol agents, prison guards and
criminal investigators - over the past 25 years, while trimming
jobs such as food safety inspector and air traffic controller,
according to data released yesterday by a nonprofit research group.
'We're doing more regulating than serving the American public.'
- JAMES ALAN FOX
Northeastern University criminal justice professor THE
TRENDS took place within an overall decline in the federal civilian
workforce. It decreased from 2 million to 1.76 million employees,
even as the population surged from 214 million to 280 million,
according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC),
which over the past year analyzed government personnel information
and yesterday released new federal workforce figures.
A good portion of the downsizing was a result of the end of
the Cold War, but analysts say the TRAC figures fail to capture the
breadth of the work being done by the federal government because
they do not include contract and grant employees. Brookings
Institution government expert Paul Light has estimated that the
"hidden" workforce numbers 8 million.
The TRAC data also suggest that the civilian government is
engaged across the board in more "reviewing" and less "doing,"
Light said. The number of management and program analysts more than
quadrupled, and the number of government lawyers more than doubled,
from 13,600 to 27,300.
'DOING LESS TO SERVE PEOPLE'
"We're doing less to serve people," said James Alan Fox, a
criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
"We may be serving them with subpoenas as opposed to serving them
with housing and food. So we're doing more regulating than serving
the American public."
The declines in civilian staffing owe partly to new
technology, partly to procurement reforms undertaken in the Clinton
years, which have enabled agencies to shed supply clerk and
warehousing jobs. Many other jobs have been sent to the private
sector - food service and custodial work, for example.
But decreases in areas such as air traffic control and food
safety inspection, as more people fly and consume more food, could
carry dire consequences, watchdog groups say.
DANGEROUS LACK OF INSPECTORS
"Right now, people eat meat at their own risk," said Arthur
Hughes, an Agriculture Department inspector and member of the
National Joint Council for Food Inspection Locals, who estimates
that the department would need 9,000 inspectors to do its job
properly.
"It is scandalous," said Carol Foreman Tucker, food safety
analyst at the Consumer Federation of America, of the lack of
inspectors for fresh fruits and vegetables. "It's a public tragedy
waiting to happen that the Food and Drug Administration has so few
inspectors and so few resources."
The agency's lack of inspectors does not track with its own
strategic plan goal of reducing food-borne illnesses by 25 percent
by 2000, Light noted. That appeared to be the case in other
departments as well, he added.
Air traffic safety is another area that has been hard hit.
Between 1995 and 1999, 92 million more passengers were flying. Yet
over the past quarter century, the number of air traffic
controllers has fallen from 27,000 to 24,000. (Aviation safety
personnel, however, have increased from 2,000 to 3,600.)
"We have failed to keep pace with the growth in the
industry," said Ruth Marlin, executive vice president of the
National Air Traffic Control Association. "We've felt that in the
increase in delays and the problems that have plagued the system."
An inadequate air traffic control corps hurts not just
passenger safety, but also the economy, everything from airplane
manufacture to e-commerce, which depends on prompt overnight
package delivery, she said.
INCREASES IN LAW AND ORDER
The big increases in law and order reflect the priorities of
a series of administrations as well as a huge expansion in the war
against drugs in the 1980s, Fox said. So since 1975, the Border
Patrol has muscled up from 1,750 agents to 9,100, prison guards
from 3,600 to 13,900 and criminal investigators from 19,800 to
36,000.
The trends are not surprising, government-watchers say.
There are more laws, more regulations, more pages in the Federal
Register, more inspectors policing the work of government. In 1975
there was one inspector general's office. Today there are dozens.
In 1975 there were 28,000 employees letting and monitoring
contracts. Today there are 53,100. Paralegals have zoomed from 15
to 6,425.
"Basically the federal government should put as much of the
resources as possible into the front line actually delivering
services as possible," Light said. "We've gone too far in terms of
people reviewing the work of others - the ratio of reviewers to
doers has doubled."
NO DECREASE IN WORKLOAD SEEN
On one item, federal workers and groups advocating smaller
government agree: It is hard to see how, given the mission of
government, the workload has decreased. But they take somewhat
different lessons from their impressions.
"Reduced number of civilian employees? Anybody who's here
probably finds that hard to believe. If you see spending going up,
how can you do it with fewer people?" said Tom Schatz, president of
Citizens Against Government Waste.
Schatz said what is really lacking is a way to measure the
results of government spending, whether it is on people, programs,
grants or contracts. "The problem is, in Washington people say,
'Gee, that program isn't doing what it's supposed to do. Let's
create a new program.' Rather than fix it. The culture of spending
creates inefficiency."
Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees
Union, which represents 150,000 workers, said: "If you're serving a
2001-size population with a 1950-size government, somebody's doing
the work. Only so much of that can be credited to technology."
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
� 2001 The Washington Post Company
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