On the payroll thing, not really, it really depends on the specific job series / career field. Also you miss Federal pay isn't individualized hence you have to set a high floor if you want to attract talent, i.e. sure a GS-13 secretary makes vastly more than a receptionist at your local plumbing company but she makes vastly less than the…
On the payroll thing, not really, it really depends on the specific job series / career field. Also you miss Federal pay isn't individualized hence you have to set a high floor if you want to attract talent, i.e. sure a GS-13 secretary makes vastly more than a receptionist at your local plumbing company but she makes vastly less than the secretary for Elon Musk. Likewise both the secretary and the doctor are GS-13s hence if you drop the pay because the secretary is "making too much", you are going to harm, and get even worse, doctors. The head of the National Weather Service makes around $200K, want to guess what the head of weather.com, AccuWeather, or FedEx makes? What lots of people don't grasp is Feds have normalized pay in a way private industry doesn't and that's a good thing.
In the aggregate though Feds make well under market wage in the positions where we expect high levels of expertise and competency.
PS: When the USG fired me for being competent after twenty years I was making $55/hr. My private sector peers were entry level $60/hr with most up near $90/hr. I nearly doubled my pay the next day. That isn't uncommon.
You are absolutely correct that one of the biggest problems with the federal pay system is that it does not take into account local variations in pay by occupation. Even the Federal Salary Council recognizes this:
“’The current pay comparison methodology used in the locality pay program ignores the fact that non-federal pay in a local labor market varies substantially between different occupational groups,’ the pay agent said in its October 2023 report. ‘As currently applied, locality payments in a local labor market may leave some mission-critical occupations significantly underpaid while overpaying others.’”
However, typically the federal government uses special pay rates for occupations deemed underpaid. For example, cybersecurity is often cited as an underpaid occupation, so the concerned agencies offer special rates:
“New employees with a bachelor degree hired into eligible positions can be paid a minimum salary of $76,156 under the supplemental rates, while those with a master’s degree could be offered a minimum of $88,250. And it gives agencies flexibility to offer increased rates for high-demand work roles or “exceptional qualifications.”
The highest end of the new pay system for cyber and STEM roles at the NSA and other defense intelligence agencies tops out at $183,500, the same as the salary cap under the new Special Salary Rate for IT employees being adopted by the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
By way of contrast, the average salary for a cybersecurity analyst in the United States is around $92,621 per year, with an average additional cash compensation of $5,955, with Entry-level candidates being offered $68,202 per year.
So, there really should not be a shortage of candidates for federal job openings. And indeed, the biggest complaint I ever heard from hiring officials was that if they publicly advertised a federal job opening they would be inundated with applications. So instead they chose to rely upon the plethora of alternative appointment authorities available in order to pick the person they preferred without having to pick from a certificate of eligibles.
But that is just one problem with the system. Others include that benefits are not included in federal-private comparisons, federal hiring authorities favor candidates with degrees for positions that do not require a degree (thus rendering CBO’s pay comparisons by education level irrelevant) and that the redacted BLS survey data is not publicly available. For my money though the biggest problem is that the federal position classification system against which private sector jobs are leveled is completely unmoored from any reality and every GS-13 position description talks about responsibilities that surpass Elon Musk’s and requires the ability to blow unicorn farts. But when you look at what is actually done by the employee encumbering the position, it is nearly always routine and insignificant memo generating administrivia. There just aren’t that many real scientists and mathematicians working in government.
The bottom line is that as of March this year, the average federal employee earned $106,382 in salary alone per year compared to the USA median 2023 salary of $48,060 for the median American. Americans made a 2023 median of $104,200 for computer and mathematical occupations, $99,220 for legal occupations, $79,050 for Business and financial operations occupations
I find it very difficult to believe that every federal employee is the equivalent of a Wall Street investment banker and is massively underpaid as the FEPCA system claims. It would be one thing if their mission was not to immiserate every ordinary American, but that is not the case and the sooner the federal bureaucracy is chopped down to size the better.
Because while the bottom wages have a floor (minimum wage) that is generally maybe a third the average GS wage, the top wouldn't hence you would see things like political appointees get multimillion dollar salaries eating up an even larger part of their agency budget and given no revenue restrictions, nothing would restrain them.
The Feds attempted a large multi agency experiment for about decade using flexible pay bands, what they unarguably found was universally it was a failure as every supervisor simply gave all their people by year three max pay regardless of performance whereas historically it takes about twenty years to max out via time in service via tenure hence was a net loss for the taxpayer for no gains. That program officially ended around 2021 as a failure though have good data.
Also from a pure employee relations egalitarian perspective, all Feds are equal. Whether you are a secretary or a doctor, you are first and foremost a bureaucrat hence no less important than any other peer of yours in the same pay class hence it decreases marginalization and encourages communication as you know what the shim you are talking to, regardless of job series or title, comparable level of responsibility. Plus likewise it's all public record, you know exactly what each of your fellow employees is making, they can just Google you hence you don't have the private sector pay politics here, i.e. the constant chip on your shoulder someone somewhere less productive than you might make a penny more.
It's true that flexible pay band compensation scheme did not live up to the unjustified hype or do anything to improve average levels of employee accountability or performance where they were implemented, but this was predictable from the very start from the type of work being done in banded positions in those agencies. Specifically, in many government jobs, there are rapidly diminishing returns to the input of an employee's additional competence or effort to the quality or quantity of desired deliverables when there is no extra value placed on those deliverables above a standard of adequacy. In such circumstances it doesn't make sense to provide incentives for better performance which it isn't actually possible for an employee with untapped potential to have even the opportunity to demonstrate.
On the other hand, the de facto practice in the banded schemes, while contrary to the hopes and intent of those who championed such schemes, did not produce any worse consequences than those caused by the GS scheme.
And when it really mattered that flattened pay scales started to misalign severely with market rates for workers in a particular specialty, such that one started to experience enduring and severe shortages of workers performing an indispensable function with the requisite marketable talents for those jobs - cybersecurity is the best recent example - then Congress always jumps in with some special 'extraordinary' kludge to 'temporarily' pay those particular workers the additional amount it takes to recruit and retain the minimal acceptable number of full time employees, and extends such temporary periods over and over indefinitely, while pretending they are still really "GS-scale employees" and the pay will go back to the standard amounts any day now. There are so many of these special plus-up provisions that the updated list of them all and their amounts is practically a government publication. There is no way to produce a fair comparison of compensation schemes with so many exceptions, upon which their functioning absolutely relied, under the simplifying assumption that those exceptions don't exist.
At any rate, where the bands were ended, it wasn't because they 'failed', but because the Democrats and the big government union organizations (but I repeat myself) were opposed to them in principle and as a matter of political and financial interest, and vowed to get rid of them as soon as they had the power to do so, and simply followed through on that promise, regardless of the meta-performance of the performance-based schemes.
> Congress always jumps in with some special 'extraordinary' kludge to 'temporarily' pay those particular workers the additional amount it takes to recruit and retain the minimal acceptable number of full time employees, and extends such temporary periods over and over indefinitely, while pretending they are still really "GS-scale employees" and the pay will go back to the standard amounts any day now
This is reminiscent of how in Edo period Japan samurai stipends (samurai having become public servants rather than warriors in all but name and outward attributes) were based on their family rank (which was fixed, hereditary, and next to impossible to improve) rather than ability. Daimyo often needed to put able lower-ranking samurai into nominally higher-ranking positions to handle business, but after the end of XVII c. they became very reluctant to promote samurai in family rank, to avoid upsetting the existing hierarchy. Some ways they created incentives for new hires was extra pay on top of their stipends, temporary stipend increases based on current position rather than family rank, or temporary, non-inheritable rank upgrades, but by far the most popular one was to give them actual decision powers far in excess of their family rank. High-ranking samurai were increasingly limited to the role of resolving conflicts and final approval, which gave legal power to the decisions bubbling up from the lower ranks, but they almost never initiated policy changes themselves. / 三谷博、維新史再考 (2017) p. 51 / This disconnect extended all the way to the top of the shogunate government, where small and middle daimyo unrelated to Tokugawa exercised actual powers while big daimyo who nominally far outranked them (notably this included both direct Tokugawa relatives and the rulers of provinces, such as Satsuma and Choshu, who sided against Tokugawa Ieyasu at Sekigahara) were excluded from policy-making and the shogun himself reduced to a figurehead. This disconnect became the driver of Bakumatsu and Meiji restoration, as high-rank daimyo clamored for their policy input to be heard by the government, and lower-rank samurai for their formal social position to match their actual contributions.
That is an excellent historical parallel, with some resemblance to the consequences and tensions created by the DEI-regime-based equivalent of designating a quota of top leadership positions based on 'blood' instead of merit, which has also led to figureheading of the official leadership position while the deputy or other officially subordinate staff is the competent one who is really making the important decisions and calling the shots. But while everybody knows this truth and coordinates accordingly in their work patterns, the protocols of respect demand everyone play along with the pretense of the figurehead being the real leader, to avoid the offense involved in speaking the truth about the emperor's clothes.
In the case of Edo, figureheads were normally competent enough. Even if none of a family's sons were promising, it could always adopt from a poorer relative a rank down. This practice was quite widespread. The way 三谷博 explains it, in the three-way bargain between daimyo, upper-rank samurai and lower-rank samurai every group got something they wanted, which is why the whole structure was stable for 150 years. Lower-rank samurai were happy because they got to do important work and make policy for their country (meaning the daimyo's domain). Upper-rank samurai were happy to put part of their responsibility on lower-rank samurai and cover their asses. And the daimyo and his immediate family were happy to use lower-rankers to limit the power of upper-rankers (typical high-low vs middle) so they were less able to plot against him. / p. 57 /
It is interesting to think about what what make these kinds of scenarios more or less functional, and more or less stable.
The implicit "positive sum bargain" seems important, where everybody gets something they value to help compensate for what they can't get, opportunities they are denied, and structurally thwarted ambitions.
One extra factor of the modern USG system (for career employees, revolving-door or other temporary positions are different) is the prospect of employment after leaving the government, in jobs that are highly desirable, lucrative, and/or high-status, and often considerably greater in each of these characteristics than even the very top jobs within the government. That means that a de facto and unmerited glass ceiling for certain individuals doesn't irritate them as much since it is more like an awning that only covers their time in government. Furthermore, they are still incentivized to conspicuously perform at the highest levels so that they can leverage their reputation and network to get one of those better jobs elsewhere. And, of course, many of those later jobs are both made available to these individuals and high-paying for them precisely because of the insider knowledge and social network connections they acquired and cultivated while in the government's employ, and so these people are also incentivized to keep investing a lot of extra effort into those areas and even to intensify them near the end of their government careers, because the value of these assets in their human capital is at a maximum the moment they leave and has a short half-life.
Then there is also the calming and stabilizing influence of widespread belief in "The Narrative" of that structure, the mythos of the set of legitimating rationalizations for obvious and common deviations from simple meritocracy. Maybe 'belief' is too crude a way to put the way that aspects of social psychology shape the individual's emotional disposition and responses, I think the perception that "all the highest status people I like seem to consistently support it" is more than enough to get a person of typical agreeableness to suppress any urge to scrutinize the mythos and to feel much more content about the big picture justness of their "station in life" and how all involved made good and enlightened decisions, the outcome of which, even if personally limiting, is tolerably proper.
Of course, when you don't buy into the mythos, and you see a capable person who does getting screwed over but who has been tranquilized by the pretty lies, one cringes at the Orwellian result of successful socially-induced self-brainwashing.
One also sees plenty of the opposite side of that coin, people who really are at their just station, or who have even been fortunate enough to be promoted far above it and who should by all rights thank their lucky stars and do everything possible to avoid rocking the boat, but who, under the influence of the mythos, still feel they have been unjustly kept down, are perpetually and inconsolably upset about it, are hypersensitive to perceived lack of respect, nurse vicious grievances, interpret actions and incidents in the worst light, and, since someone must always be to blame, carry around in their heads a growing list of villains akin to the one in The Mikado.
Personally, I don't see these two opposite situations as having remotely similar moral weights. Things that influence people to be more content despite an injustice, to stop thinking about it, and move on to focus on everything else in their lives, can certainly be a good thing on net if both the injustice suffered and degree of delusion is not too severe and outrageous.
On the other hand, agitating discord, disunity, and intense acrimony in people who by any reasonable measure are enjoying rewards greater than their contributions, strikes my sense of moral judgment as being deeply evil.
Seems to me you're arguing that government social engineering trumps market efficiency.
If *I* were playing fantasy games and trying to eliminate low-paying menial jobs, I'd do it by eliminating low-paying menial jobs, not by turning them into high-paying menial jobs.
This isn't a conversation about efficiency, it's about public policy coupled with the USG's, as an employer, HR strategy.
Also you aren't looking at the aggregate, i.e. doctors at a third the price, C levels at 1% the price.
Lastly people confuse Federal employees with State and Municipal employees who generally are vastly overpaid. They aren't the same thing. Federal employees get a lot of hate but realistically almost no one ever meets one in practice.
The most overpaid Federal employees are military enlisted but somehow everyone wants to pay them even more and I highly doubt when you put out your vitriol towards Federal employees you mean we should cut Private Smith's pay by 75%. I mean if you want to talk pure USG employee pay efficiency, conscripts are dirt cheap, should bring them back.
It 100% isn't and anybody who has been around public or PRIVATE policy in a formulation role is aware of that. Efficiency is only factored in once "all things are equal" which means after you winnowed down to two highly equally inefficient choices and you have pick one.
Btw I am curious though in your advocacy of conscription given its high efficiency and likewise cutting Private Smith's pay 75% while sleeping in a tent in Iraq, when do you plan to enlist? I am actually giggling over here imagining every John, Jane, and Dick marching into the recruitment station and free market negotiating their pay with SGT Sanchez including vacation benefits, which particular rifle, just how high they individual have to jump when they are ordered to jump.as a group, etc. Does he get overtime if the enemy is still shooting him at 17:01 or can he just go home for the day? Those damn overpaid Federal employees with their Cadillac benefits packages lol.
And slaves are extremely efficient in many, though not all, industries, why do you think California just voted overwhelming to keep slavery this past election; the main argument abolishing it would cost too much.
The federal government shouldn't be hiring doctors, health care should be a private industry. People should choose their doctors rather than the government choosing doctors for them. Very few private individuals would choose Dr. Fauci but plenty of government morons like Donald Trump would choose him.
Curious how many private sector doctors are willing to sleep in a tent and get shot at working 18x7 no overtime living off MREs in Iraq for year at time and the inability to quit or go on vacation. Those damn Federal government doctors.
Not saying you couldn't set the pay high but it's going to be exponential what you pay them now. You seem to forget on average the USG pays contractors two times what they pay in house when it comes to personnel, facilities, and services. When I left the USG the average rate we paid our contactors was $225/hr, we paid the Feds they replaced $115/hr factoring in benefits, facilities, etc costs.
I'll grant you that doctors working for the military in a legitimate defensive war should be paid a high salary. However, they're only a tiny portion of the doctors working for the government. The others are robbing the public.
Not at all, the overwhelming number of Federal doctors, not counting the ones in DoD, are either USPHS, VA, or the Bureau of Prisons all providing direct medical services, sans the latter, to those nominally assigned to them, i.e. USPHS serve as the doctors on NOAA Corp ships for example; the VA doctors, whom treat vets, are a huge cost savings over "care in the community" which is where the VA outsources vet care to the private sector.
I feel you are just repeating sound talking points with an ex to grind and have zero clue about Federal medical doctors. They aren't serving the public, you are confusing them with state and municipal doctors.
Fauci was not a currently licensed medical practitioner with prescription authority, he was a agency manager who happened to have a medical degree. I went to school for economics thirty years ago, that doesn't make me an economist.
The USPHS should be abolished because we don't need doctor nannies to tell us how to run our lives and restraining trade, preventing 23andMe from selling products that people want. Before oppressing 23andMe, the USPHS prevented people from buying home pregnancy tests.
Margaret Crane, a product designer at Organon Pharmaceuticals argued in the late 1960s the company's pregnancy test could be simplified and sold directly to consumers. Crane's bosses resisted, not wanting to upset their physician clients, who then had a monopoly on testing women's urine for pregnancy hormones. After the company eventually adopted Crane's position, vendors of the test faced pushback from the United States Public Health Service and the Texas Medical Association.
It's been 50 years since Crane built her prototype, and home pregnancy tests have not caused a rash of suicides or psychotic breaks (as her bosses at Organon initially predicted); nor do women find them inscrutable or impossible to use. There are no contemporary arguments for revoking the right to test at home, and I can't imagine any obstetrician would argue that women are worse off for the invention.
And yet that isn't what USPHS DOCTORS do, they mostly work on ships for NOAA or deploy with FEMA. You once again are confusing administrators, directors, etc with DOCTORS.
You literally said we should fire all Federal doctors; then conceded well not military ones for no reason other than "well Feds that out in a camo uniform are exempt cuz they are pretty) (or something), they are still Feds though. Now you want to fire all the emergency FEMA doctors and those providing medical services on ships to scientists at NOAA lol. Once again, not trying to be a dick, but I think you have no idea about Federal doctors nor even their pay or duties.
Now sure we can just get rid of NOAA and FEMA, let soldiers bleed to death, and the ones that survive can just be homeless dying of preventable conditions because we fired all there doctors but I don't think Musk or Trump is advocating that.
I don't disagree but that's a different issue, they do exist and sans closing them down, they need doctors working for them, or more accurately, it's cheaper to have doctors on your payroll rather than contracting them. Your initial point wasn't shutting down an entire bureau or agency hence making all those jobs redundant and forcing most of them to just go on welfare where you will still pay them anyways as a result, but specially to impose a Federal bar on hiring medical doctors and all allow the contracting of their private sector services even at greater cost and a high level of inefficiency.
On the payroll thing, not really, it really depends on the specific job series / career field. Also you miss Federal pay isn't individualized hence you have to set a high floor if you want to attract talent, i.e. sure a GS-13 secretary makes vastly more than a receptionist at your local plumbing company but she makes vastly less than the secretary for Elon Musk. Likewise both the secretary and the doctor are GS-13s hence if you drop the pay because the secretary is "making too much", you are going to harm, and get even worse, doctors. The head of the National Weather Service makes around $200K, want to guess what the head of weather.com, AccuWeather, or FedEx makes? What lots of people don't grasp is Feds have normalized pay in a way private industry doesn't and that's a good thing.
In the aggregate though Feds make well under market wage in the positions where we expect high levels of expertise and competency.
PS: When the USG fired me for being competent after twenty years I was making $55/hr. My private sector peers were entry level $60/hr with most up near $90/hr. I nearly doubled my pay the next day. That isn't uncommon.
You are absolutely correct that one of the biggest problems with the federal pay system is that it does not take into account local variations in pay by occupation. Even the Federal Salary Council recognizes this:
“’The current pay comparison methodology used in the locality pay program ignores the fact that non-federal pay in a local labor market varies substantially between different occupational groups,’ the pay agent said in its October 2023 report. ‘As currently applied, locality payments in a local labor market may leave some mission-critical occupations significantly underpaid while overpaying others.’”
(https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2023/10/pay-agent-renews-calls-for-major-legislative-reforms-to-federal-pay/ )
However, typically the federal government uses special pay rates for occupations deemed underpaid. For example, cybersecurity is often cited as an underpaid occupation, so the concerned agencies offer special rates:
“New employees with a bachelor degree hired into eligible positions can be paid a minimum salary of $76,156 under the supplemental rates, while those with a master’s degree could be offered a minimum of $88,250. And it gives agencies flexibility to offer increased rates for high-demand work roles or “exceptional qualifications.”
The highest end of the new pay system for cyber and STEM roles at the NSA and other defense intelligence agencies tops out at $183,500, the same as the salary cap under the new Special Salary Rate for IT employees being adopted by the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
(https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2023/08/pentagon-approves-higher-cyber-pay-for-nsa-other-defense-intelligence-agencies/ )
By way of contrast, the average salary for a cybersecurity analyst in the United States is around $92,621 per year, with an average additional cash compensation of $5,955, with Entry-level candidates being offered $68,202 per year.
So, there really should not be a shortage of candidates for federal job openings. And indeed, the biggest complaint I ever heard from hiring officials was that if they publicly advertised a federal job opening they would be inundated with applications. So instead they chose to rely upon the plethora of alternative appointment authorities available in order to pick the person they preferred without having to pick from a certificate of eligibles.
But that is just one problem with the system. Others include that benefits are not included in federal-private comparisons, federal hiring authorities favor candidates with degrees for positions that do not require a degree (thus rendering CBO’s pay comparisons by education level irrelevant) and that the redacted BLS survey data is not publicly available. For my money though the biggest problem is that the federal position classification system against which private sector jobs are leveled is completely unmoored from any reality and every GS-13 position description talks about responsibilities that surpass Elon Musk’s and requires the ability to blow unicorn farts. But when you look at what is actually done by the employee encumbering the position, it is nearly always routine and insignificant memo generating administrivia. There just aren’t that many real scientists and mathematicians working in government.
The bottom line is that as of March this year, the average federal employee earned $106,382 in salary alone per year compared to the USA median 2023 salary of $48,060 for the median American. Americans made a 2023 median of $104,200 for computer and mathematical occupations, $99,220 for legal occupations, $79,050 for Business and financial operations occupations
and $80,820 Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations. And the federal benefits are much better and even the FERS employees get a defined benefit retirement. See: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-group.htm and compare at OPM’s FEDSCOPE app https://www.fedscope.opm.gov/
I find it very difficult to believe that every federal employee is the equivalent of a Wall Street investment banker and is massively underpaid as the FEPCA system claims. It would be one thing if their mission was not to immiserate every ordinary American, but that is not the case and the sooner the federal bureaucracy is chopped down to size the better.
Why on earth is it a good thing?
Because while the bottom wages have a floor (minimum wage) that is generally maybe a third the average GS wage, the top wouldn't hence you would see things like political appointees get multimillion dollar salaries eating up an even larger part of their agency budget and given no revenue restrictions, nothing would restrain them.
The Feds attempted a large multi agency experiment for about decade using flexible pay bands, what they unarguably found was universally it was a failure as every supervisor simply gave all their people by year three max pay regardless of performance whereas historically it takes about twenty years to max out via time in service via tenure hence was a net loss for the taxpayer for no gains. That program officially ended around 2021 as a failure though have good data.
Also from a pure employee relations egalitarian perspective, all Feds are equal. Whether you are a secretary or a doctor, you are first and foremost a bureaucrat hence no less important than any other peer of yours in the same pay class hence it decreases marginalization and encourages communication as you know what the shim you are talking to, regardless of job series or title, comparable level of responsibility. Plus likewise it's all public record, you know exactly what each of your fellow employees is making, they can just Google you hence you don't have the private sector pay politics here, i.e. the constant chip on your shoulder someone somewhere less productive than you might make a penny more.
It's true that flexible pay band compensation scheme did not live up to the unjustified hype or do anything to improve average levels of employee accountability or performance where they were implemented, but this was predictable from the very start from the type of work being done in banded positions in those agencies. Specifically, in many government jobs, there are rapidly diminishing returns to the input of an employee's additional competence or effort to the quality or quantity of desired deliverables when there is no extra value placed on those deliverables above a standard of adequacy. In such circumstances it doesn't make sense to provide incentives for better performance which it isn't actually possible for an employee with untapped potential to have even the opportunity to demonstrate.
On the other hand, the de facto practice in the banded schemes, while contrary to the hopes and intent of those who championed such schemes, did not produce any worse consequences than those caused by the GS scheme.
And when it really mattered that flattened pay scales started to misalign severely with market rates for workers in a particular specialty, such that one started to experience enduring and severe shortages of workers performing an indispensable function with the requisite marketable talents for those jobs - cybersecurity is the best recent example - then Congress always jumps in with some special 'extraordinary' kludge to 'temporarily' pay those particular workers the additional amount it takes to recruit and retain the minimal acceptable number of full time employees, and extends such temporary periods over and over indefinitely, while pretending they are still really "GS-scale employees" and the pay will go back to the standard amounts any day now. There are so many of these special plus-up provisions that the updated list of them all and their amounts is practically a government publication. There is no way to produce a fair comparison of compensation schemes with so many exceptions, upon which their functioning absolutely relied, under the simplifying assumption that those exceptions don't exist.
At any rate, where the bands were ended, it wasn't because they 'failed', but because the Democrats and the big government union organizations (but I repeat myself) were opposed to them in principle and as a matter of political and financial interest, and vowed to get rid of them as soon as they had the power to do so, and simply followed through on that promise, regardless of the meta-performance of the performance-based schemes.
> Congress always jumps in with some special 'extraordinary' kludge to 'temporarily' pay those particular workers the additional amount it takes to recruit and retain the minimal acceptable number of full time employees, and extends such temporary periods over and over indefinitely, while pretending they are still really "GS-scale employees" and the pay will go back to the standard amounts any day now
This is reminiscent of how in Edo period Japan samurai stipends (samurai having become public servants rather than warriors in all but name and outward attributes) were based on their family rank (which was fixed, hereditary, and next to impossible to improve) rather than ability. Daimyo often needed to put able lower-ranking samurai into nominally higher-ranking positions to handle business, but after the end of XVII c. they became very reluctant to promote samurai in family rank, to avoid upsetting the existing hierarchy. Some ways they created incentives for new hires was extra pay on top of their stipends, temporary stipend increases based on current position rather than family rank, or temporary, non-inheritable rank upgrades, but by far the most popular one was to give them actual decision powers far in excess of their family rank. High-ranking samurai were increasingly limited to the role of resolving conflicts and final approval, which gave legal power to the decisions bubbling up from the lower ranks, but they almost never initiated policy changes themselves. / 三谷博、維新史再考 (2017) p. 51 / This disconnect extended all the way to the top of the shogunate government, where small and middle daimyo unrelated to Tokugawa exercised actual powers while big daimyo who nominally far outranked them (notably this included both direct Tokugawa relatives and the rulers of provinces, such as Satsuma and Choshu, who sided against Tokugawa Ieyasu at Sekigahara) were excluded from policy-making and the shogun himself reduced to a figurehead. This disconnect became the driver of Bakumatsu and Meiji restoration, as high-rank daimyo clamored for their policy input to be heard by the government, and lower-rank samurai for their formal social position to match their actual contributions.
That is an excellent historical parallel, with some resemblance to the consequences and tensions created by the DEI-regime-based equivalent of designating a quota of top leadership positions based on 'blood' instead of merit, which has also led to figureheading of the official leadership position while the deputy or other officially subordinate staff is the competent one who is really making the important decisions and calling the shots. But while everybody knows this truth and coordinates accordingly in their work patterns, the protocols of respect demand everyone play along with the pretense of the figurehead being the real leader, to avoid the offense involved in speaking the truth about the emperor's clothes.
In the case of Edo, figureheads were normally competent enough. Even if none of a family's sons were promising, it could always adopt from a poorer relative a rank down. This practice was quite widespread. The way 三谷博 explains it, in the three-way bargain between daimyo, upper-rank samurai and lower-rank samurai every group got something they wanted, which is why the whole structure was stable for 150 years. Lower-rank samurai were happy because they got to do important work and make policy for their country (meaning the daimyo's domain). Upper-rank samurai were happy to put part of their responsibility on lower-rank samurai and cover their asses. And the daimyo and his immediate family were happy to use lower-rankers to limit the power of upper-rankers (typical high-low vs middle) so they were less able to plot against him. / p. 57 /
It is interesting to think about what what make these kinds of scenarios more or less functional, and more or less stable.
The implicit "positive sum bargain" seems important, where everybody gets something they value to help compensate for what they can't get, opportunities they are denied, and structurally thwarted ambitions.
One extra factor of the modern USG system (for career employees, revolving-door or other temporary positions are different) is the prospect of employment after leaving the government, in jobs that are highly desirable, lucrative, and/or high-status, and often considerably greater in each of these characteristics than even the very top jobs within the government. That means that a de facto and unmerited glass ceiling for certain individuals doesn't irritate them as much since it is more like an awning that only covers their time in government. Furthermore, they are still incentivized to conspicuously perform at the highest levels so that they can leverage their reputation and network to get one of those better jobs elsewhere. And, of course, many of those later jobs are both made available to these individuals and high-paying for them precisely because of the insider knowledge and social network connections they acquired and cultivated while in the government's employ, and so these people are also incentivized to keep investing a lot of extra effort into those areas and even to intensify them near the end of their government careers, because the value of these assets in their human capital is at a maximum the moment they leave and has a short half-life.
Then there is also the calming and stabilizing influence of widespread belief in "The Narrative" of that structure, the mythos of the set of legitimating rationalizations for obvious and common deviations from simple meritocracy. Maybe 'belief' is too crude a way to put the way that aspects of social psychology shape the individual's emotional disposition and responses, I think the perception that "all the highest status people I like seem to consistently support it" is more than enough to get a person of typical agreeableness to suppress any urge to scrutinize the mythos and to feel much more content about the big picture justness of their "station in life" and how all involved made good and enlightened decisions, the outcome of which, even if personally limiting, is tolerably proper.
Of course, when you don't buy into the mythos, and you see a capable person who does getting screwed over but who has been tranquilized by the pretty lies, one cringes at the Orwellian result of successful socially-induced self-brainwashing.
One also sees plenty of the opposite side of that coin, people who really are at their just station, or who have even been fortunate enough to be promoted far above it and who should by all rights thank their lucky stars and do everything possible to avoid rocking the boat, but who, under the influence of the mythos, still feel they have been unjustly kept down, are perpetually and inconsolably upset about it, are hypersensitive to perceived lack of respect, nurse vicious grievances, interpret actions and incidents in the worst light, and, since someone must always be to blame, carry around in their heads a growing list of villains akin to the one in The Mikado.
Personally, I don't see these two opposite situations as having remotely similar moral weights. Things that influence people to be more content despite an injustice, to stop thinking about it, and move on to focus on everything else in their lives, can certainly be a good thing on net if both the injustice suffered and degree of delusion is not too severe and outrageous.
On the other hand, agitating discord, disunity, and intense acrimony in people who by any reasonable measure are enjoying rewards greater than their contributions, strikes my sense of moral judgment as being deeply evil.
Seems to me you're arguing that government social engineering trumps market efficiency.
If *I* were playing fantasy games and trying to eliminate low-paying menial jobs, I'd do it by eliminating low-paying menial jobs, not by turning them into high-paying menial jobs.
This isn't a conversation about efficiency, it's about public policy coupled with the USG's, as an employer, HR strategy.
Also you aren't looking at the aggregate, i.e. doctors at a third the price, C levels at 1% the price.
Lastly people confuse Federal employees with State and Municipal employees who generally are vastly overpaid. They aren't the same thing. Federal employees get a lot of hate but realistically almost no one ever meets one in practice.
The most overpaid Federal employees are military enlisted but somehow everyone wants to pay them even more and I highly doubt when you put out your vitriol towards Federal employees you mean we should cut Private Smith's pay by 75%. I mean if you want to talk pure USG employee pay efficiency, conscripts are dirt cheap, should bring them back.
Pardon me for believing efficiency is an important part of policy.
It 100% isn't and anybody who has been around public or PRIVATE policy in a formulation role is aware of that. Efficiency is only factored in once "all things are equal" which means after you winnowed down to two highly equally inefficient choices and you have pick one.
Btw I am curious though in your advocacy of conscription given its high efficiency and likewise cutting Private Smith's pay 75% while sleeping in a tent in Iraq, when do you plan to enlist? I am actually giggling over here imagining every John, Jane, and Dick marching into the recruitment station and free market negotiating their pay with SGT Sanchez including vacation benefits, which particular rifle, just how high they individual have to jump when they are ordered to jump.as a group, etc. Does he get overtime if the enemy is still shooting him at 17:01 or can he just go home for the day? Those damn overpaid Federal employees with their Cadillac benefits packages lol.
You have a very narrow view of efficiency if you think slavery qualifies.
You once again avoided the question.
And slaves are extremely efficient in many, though not all, industries, why do you think California just voted overwhelming to keep slavery this past election; the main argument abolishing it would cost too much.
The federal government shouldn't be hiring doctors, health care should be a private industry. People should choose their doctors rather than the government choosing doctors for them. Very few private individuals would choose Dr. Fauci but plenty of government morons like Donald Trump would choose him.
Curious how many private sector doctors are willing to sleep in a tent and get shot at working 18x7 no overtime living off MREs in Iraq for year at time and the inability to quit or go on vacation. Those damn Federal government doctors.
Not saying you couldn't set the pay high but it's going to be exponential what you pay them now. You seem to forget on average the USG pays contractors two times what they pay in house when it comes to personnel, facilities, and services. When I left the USG the average rate we paid our contactors was $225/hr, we paid the Feds they replaced $115/hr factoring in benefits, facilities, etc costs.
I'll grant you that doctors working for the military in a legitimate defensive war should be paid a high salary. However, they're only a tiny portion of the doctors working for the government. The others are robbing the public.
Not at all, the overwhelming number of Federal doctors, not counting the ones in DoD, are either USPHS, VA, or the Bureau of Prisons all providing direct medical services, sans the latter, to those nominally assigned to them, i.e. USPHS serve as the doctors on NOAA Corp ships for example; the VA doctors, whom treat vets, are a huge cost savings over "care in the community" which is where the VA outsources vet care to the private sector.
I feel you are just repeating sound talking points with an ex to grind and have zero clue about Federal medical doctors. They aren't serving the public, you are confusing them with state and municipal doctors.
Fauci was not a currently licensed medical practitioner with prescription authority, he was a agency manager who happened to have a medical degree. I went to school for economics thirty years ago, that doesn't make me an economist.
The USPHS should be abolished because we don't need doctor nannies to tell us how to run our lives and restraining trade, preventing 23andMe from selling products that people want. Before oppressing 23andMe, the USPHS prevented people from buying home pregnancy tests.
Margaret Crane, a product designer at Organon Pharmaceuticals argued in the late 1960s the company's pregnancy test could be simplified and sold directly to consumers. Crane's bosses resisted, not wanting to upset their physician clients, who then had a monopoly on testing women's urine for pregnancy hormones. After the company eventually adopted Crane's position, vendors of the test faced pushback from the United States Public Health Service and the Texas Medical Association.
It's been 50 years since Crane built her prototype, and home pregnancy tests have not caused a rash of suicides or psychotic breaks (as her bosses at Organon initially predicted); nor do women find them inscrutable or impossible to use. There are no contemporary arguments for revoking the right to test at home, and I can't imagine any obstetrician would argue that women are worse off for the invention.
And yet that isn't what USPHS DOCTORS do, they mostly work on ships for NOAA or deploy with FEMA. You once again are confusing administrators, directors, etc with DOCTORS.
You literally said we should fire all Federal doctors; then conceded well not military ones for no reason other than "well Feds that out in a camo uniform are exempt cuz they are pretty) (or something), they are still Feds though. Now you want to fire all the emergency FEMA doctors and those providing medical services on ships to scientists at NOAA lol. Once again, not trying to be a dick, but I think you have no idea about Federal doctors nor even their pay or duties.
Now sure we can just get rid of NOAA and FEMA, let soldiers bleed to death, and the ones that survive can just be homeless dying of preventable conditions because we fired all there doctors but I don't think Musk or Trump is advocating that.
There shouldn't be any doctors or other employees working for NOAA or FEMA because those agencies shouldn't exist.
I don't disagree but that's a different issue, they do exist and sans closing them down, they need doctors working for them, or more accurately, it's cheaper to have doctors on your payroll rather than contracting them. Your initial point wasn't shutting down an entire bureau or agency hence making all those jobs redundant and forcing most of them to just go on welfare where you will still pay them anyways as a result, but specially to impose a Federal bar on hiring medical doctors and all allow the contracting of their private sector services even at greater cost and a high level of inefficiency.