Cutting Bureaucratic Bloat

Despite the great temptation to write one such article as this one for every bureaucracy in the United States government, I have no desire to spend the remainder of my life treating on any one subject as this. As a result, I will pick the most recently announced employment cuts, those projected cuts that the State Department announced recently. As I write, the speculation is that the cuts will number roughly 1,100, or roughly 15% of the current workforce of 80,000 bureaucrats who are on the taxpayer dole. 

And while we are talking numbers, we should note that 80,000 people is enough to station 400 State  Department employees in every country on the face of the earth. Granted, a large chunk is employed in Washington, D. C., but still my point holds: that is an excessive number of employees, even taking into account the per capita deployments based on such factors as the sizes of foreign countries and our strategic interests in those countries. 

Average Salary and "Burden"

The average salary of a State Department employee is $102,000.00. The current payroll is approximately $8.5 billion. The total budget for the Department is upwards of $55 billion. Granted, there are tremendous amounts of dollars required for travel, housing, offices, soirees, office supplies, office, security, etc. But still, overhead or "burden" of $687,500 per employee per year, makes you wonder. 

Statistically, it would seem appropriate to also apply the Law of Diminishing Returns, that is, there is a point at which further additions to staff actually become detrimental to the mission. In this case, as is the case with virtually all the departments, bureaus and agencies, one of the dysfunctions caused by over-staffing is that manages spend far too much time supervising the work of people who actually have little, if any, productive work to do. 

Nay-Sayers and Boo Birds

Whether a product of Trump Derangement Syndrome or (more likely) a product of Federal Stockholm Syndrome (where you were raised and indoctrinated in the religion of Big Daddy Government for your entire life), a great percentage of the civilian population rails against any downsizing of any organization under any circumstances. …