The US federal government directly employs about two million workers, not including military personnel or the postal service. I think government workers get a bad rap. The phrase “good enough for government work” hints at an attitude that the government employees do not do a very good job. We continuously make fun of municipal maintenance workers “One guy in the hole and four leaning on a shovel”, and other things. I’m from Chicago, and we constantly hear about “patronage” jobs and “ghost payrollers”. I’m not suggesting that there are not abuses in the system, just that we can’t infer anything about government employees from the few examples that make it into the press.

I think that one thing that many people begrudge government employees are their benefits. In an age when few if any workers in the private sector have defined benefit pensions (no employee contributions), our federal government workers, for the most part, have this benefit, and are allowed to “double-dip” meaning that they can collect multiple pensions from different government services. In the private sector, no one would complain about this, because we the tax payers are not paying for it. The healthcare benefits afforded to government employees are much better than most of us have.

In my experience, most government workers are diligent, competent, dedicated, hard-working individuals who see their job as making a difference. My question is not about the value or quality of individual workers, but is the government employment policy.

I think if you took a survey of people who are not government workers that would question:

• Job Security – is it possible or practical for the government to fire workers for non-performance?
• Benefits – does the government provide benefits beyond what is typical in the private sector?
• Political Hiring – how many employees are hired because of political connections in addition to or in spite of job qualifications?
• Workplace efficiency – since there is no profit motive, what mission or objective does the government use to measure its efficiency?
• Accountability – since this is all paid for by tax dollars, and the only accountability we have is through elected officials, how can we the people, assess whether the elected officials have instantiated the correct leadership and operating processes?

We all have these questions. I expect that there is a tremendous amount of diversity in the answers to these questions across the various government agencies and operational units.

The US government is so big, and has so many parts, and is engaged in so many activities, that we, for the most part, are not able or willing to spend the time and mental energy to figure it out. How in hell, can our government employ so darned many people – what can they possibly be doing and why?

I frame the question as follows:

Of the activities that could be done in the private sector, does government involvement add any value? Does it add cost? Why are we paying the cost?

Without getting into the economics of monetary theory and defecit spending. The two questions that I continuously ask are does the government have a clear mission for each of the activities that it is engaged in, and where is the accountability for that mission?

My miniscule example is as follows: A few years back, I moved into an unincorporated area. Since I didn’t have a local municipality to arrange waste removal service, I had to contract with a service individually. I was concerned that I would have to pay much more than I did when my former municipality contracted for the same service, and billed me directly. In fact, the price was within a couple dollars either way. Perhaps competition was at work – there are at least three waste removers that service my area, and their price and level of service varies by about 20%. Obviously, the former municipality had to perform a billing service, and had to pay the service provider, so some staff was necessary to arrange this. What the government did was negotiate for me, but give the service provider a monopoly. Before I moved, I had never really thought about why the local municipality contracted for waste removal service. There is no bespoke infrastructure – water or sewer pipes. Why waste and not phones or cable or gas or electric utilities? What is the difference?

There is nothing that indicates that only government can provide waste removal service, so why do they? Interestingly enough, they do not provide the same service for commercial enterprise – they must contract independently.