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Federal Work Force to Expand, but Rules Need Overhaul

WASHINGTON — For about 30 years, politicians have painted the federal bureaucracy as bloated, unresponsive and impossible to change.

Suddenly, though, the government and its bureaucrats are the good guys working to rescue the broken economy, and Washington is scrambling to find ways to lure and retain talent.

“We’re waking up to a moment when the public thinks government really matters,” said Linda Bilmes, a professor of public finance at Harvard University.

After all, it’s the government that’s trying to rescue failing banks, homeowners facing foreclosure, domestic auto companies and the entire American economy.

On Capitol Hill, Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Federal Workforce Subcommittee, is considering pushing legislation that “tries to cure all the ills in the current system” rather than taking the usual path of incremental change.

He and others are tempted not only by the new mood, but also by two stark realities:

-President Barack Obama’s plans are expected to expand the federal work force by hundreds of thousands in missions as diverse as tracking stimulus spending, helping to manage the baby-boomer deluge that’s confronting Social Security and increasing the foreign service.

-In addition, one-third of the current 1.9 million-member federal civilian work force is eligible to retire within five years.

As a result, the government will need to hire about 600,000 people during Obama’s current term, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group.

For a bureaucracy that’s known to take a year or more to hire a single employee, that’s a major challenge. Lawmakers are seeking ways to overcome three longtime hurdles: the anti-government mind-set, cumbersome federal hiring practices and personnel retention problems.

President Ronald Reagan helped make the bureaucracy a useful target.

“Government is like a baby,” he said in March 1981, “an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

Bill Clinton declared in 1996 that “the era of big government is over.”

In his inaugural address, however, Obama struck a different tone. “The question we ask today,” he said, “is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

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