Self-Serving Federal Bureaucrats

By Chris Edwards of Cato.

"In the federal government, employees are paid to faithfully execute the laws, but they often pursue self-serving goals counter to those of the general public. Unionized federal workers actively oppose legislators who support reforms. Agency leaders try to maximize their budgets by exaggerating problems in society. They leak biased information to the media to ward off budget cuts. They put forward the most sensitive spending cuts in response to proposed reductions, which is the “Washington Monument” strategy. 

Federal officials signal to the public that they are solving problems without actually solving them. Security agencies, for example, use “security theater” techniques that are visible to the public but do not make us safer.

Officials often trumpet the supposedly great jobs they are doing, but hide agency failures from the public. And officials stonewall congressional requests for information that may shed a bad light on them.

I describe these and other bureaucratic failures in this new essay at Downsizing Government.

The Washington Post reports on other ways that bureaucrats serve themselves and not the public. In one story the other day, the paper reported:

An assistant director of the Secret Service urged that unflattering information the agency had in its files about a congressman critical of the service should be made public, according to a government watchdog report released Wednesday.

That effort to smear Rep. Jason Chaffetz is disgraceful, but it is topped by another one in the Post the same day:

Senior executives at the Department of Veterans Affairs manipulated the hiring system to coerce two managers to accept job transfers against their will — then stepped into the vacant positions themselves, keeping their pay while reducing their responsibilities.

The executives also gamed VA’s moving-expense system for a total of $400,000 in what a new report by the agency’s watchdog described as questionable reimbursements, with taxpayers paying $300,000 for one of them to relocate 140 miles, from Washington to Philadelphia, Pa.

Rubens and Graves kept their salaries of $181,497 and $173,949, respectively, even though the new positions they took as directors of the Philadelphia and St. Paul, Minn. regional offices had way less responsibility, overseeing a fraction of the employees at lower pay levels. Rubens had been deputy undersecretary for field operations.

By and large, the federal government is not full of people that help us. They tax us, regulate us, defend their bureaucracies, and some of them try to actively fleece us. So in structuring the government, a basic assumption should be that it will not be populated by “public servants,” but by people who are in it for themselves. That is one reason why all of us should want to keep the government’s power strictly limited.

For more of the workings of the bureaucracy, see “Bureaucratic Failure in the Federal Government.”"