A Victory Over Big Government

Today I’m going to share some good news. A needless government bureaucracy was officially abolished last year.

• Sadly, it was not the Department of Education
• Sadly, it was not the Department of Transportation
• Sadly, it was not the Department of Agriculture
• Sadly, it was not the Department of Energy
• Sadly, it was not the Department of Housing and Urban Development

No, Washington politicians did not get rid of a significant bureaucracy.

But a journey of a million miles begins with the twitch of a first step. So I’m happy to annouce that our Lords and Masters were finally convinced to get rid of…(drum roll, please)…the Federal Tea Board.

Eric Boehm wrote about this (underwhelming) victory in Reason. But if you don’t have a subscription, here’s an excerpt from the official notice from the Federal Register last September.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA or the Agency) is announcing the termination of the Board of Tea Experts by the Federal Tea Tasters Repeal Act of 1996. This document removes the Board of Tea Experts from the Agency’s list of standing advisory committees. FDA is also updating the statutory citation to the Federal Advisory Committee Act to reflect recodification. This technical change aligns with the desire of Congress to incorporate various provisions that were enacted separately over a period of years.

I’ll add one final detail to this story, something that will illustrate the breakneck speed of bureaucratic action.

Here are some excerpts from a 2017 article published by Smithsonian, and pay close attention to the final sentence.

For 99 years, the United States government employed a group of people to check the quality of incoming tea by tasting it. …The Board of Tea Experts, as they were called, was created as part of the Tea Importation Act of 1897. …thus the Board of Tea Experts, a group of men with finely-tuned tongues on the lookout for bad teas. “Tea tasters, working in FDA offices around the country, examined every lot of imported tea, using standard teas selected by the Board for comparison,” the FDA writes. …At the time the office was closed, it employed a head tea taster, chemist Robert H. Dick, an assistant tea taster, Faith Lim, both based in Brooklyn, and two further tasters at the ports in Boston and San Francisco. Its total annual cost: $253,500, or about $400,000 in today’s money. …It wasn’t until 1996 that the government passed the Federal Tea Tasters Repeal Act.

Amazing. A low is enacted in 1996 and we have to wait until 2023 for the Federal Register to put the final nail in the coffin.

Almost makes Amtrak and the Postal Service seem fast by comparison.

P.S. Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s bad monetary policy, $253,500 in 1996 is akin to about $500,000 today.

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Everything You Need to Know about Bureaucracy, in a Single Tweet

My “everything you need to know” columns have a common theme of highlighting stark examples to make broader points.

• China’s economic policies are misguided
• The USA is out-performing Europe
• People respond to tax incentives
• California has remarkably bad governance
• Teacher unions deserve scorn and abuse

Today, we have a tweet that tells us everything we need to know about government bureaucracy.

Alex Stapp of the Institute for Progress tweeted about the staggering expansion of middle management in Washington.

The tweet shows five sentences from a story in the Atlantic last month, authored by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini.

And Mr. Stapp highlights two jaw-dropping excerpts, one about the 50 percent increase in middle managers and one about the five-fold expansion of the federal flowchart.

In other words, we now have a top-heavy bureaucracy.

Yet is there even the slightest bit of evidence that we have better government or more efficient government?

Of course not. The evidence strongly shows just the opposite. Sort of like this image.

Indeed, the article in the Atlantic was written to point out that Operation Warp Speed (the development of COVID vaccines) was successful precisely because government bureaucracy was kept to a minimum.

Needless to say, no lessons were learned from that experience. We now have even more government, even more bureaucracy, and even more top-heavy middle management.

Why? Because government almost always operates for the benefit of insiders, not to serve people.

P.S. Reminds me of the everything-you-need-to-know column I wrote about how more NHS bureaucrats in the United Kingdom is correlated with longer waiting lists for patients.

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Another Italian Bureaucrat Joins the Hall of Fame

In 2014, I wrote about the Italian bureaucrat who worked only 15 days over a nine-year period.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the more industrious (relatively speaking, of course) Italian bureaucrat who worked four years over a 24-year period.

Both of these stellar public servants are now in my Bureaucrat Hall of Fame, which is an honor reserved for government employees who “have gone above and beyond the call of duty” to live “fat and happy at our expense.”

Today, we’re going to add another Italian to the Hall of Fame, meaning that Italy will be the first foreign nation with three representatives.

Congratulations to that nation’s lucky taxpayers!

Our recipient is Alberto Muraglia, who first became famous years ago for punching a time clock in his underwear and then heading home.

That’s remarkable, but not enough to become a member of the Hall of Fame. What makes Alberto special is that he then won two legal cases that confirmed his right to be a slacker.

I’m not joking. Here are some excerpts from a report in the U.K.-based Times.

Alberto Muraglia, 61, a police officer in Sanremo in northern Italy, became a symbol of Italy’s stereotypical skiving public servants in 2015 when he was caught in a corruption inquiry. After installing hidden cameras, investigators filmed him descending the steps from his service flat above his office in his Y-fronts and a T-shirt, clocking in, then returning home. …the police officer became an emblem of Italy’s battle against what it calls fannulloni, or good-for-nothing workers in council offices and government departments who are rarely at their desks. …But when Muraglia was sacked, a court acquitted him in 2020 of the charge of defrauding the state of public funds, ruling that getting dressed in the morning is part and parcel of an employee’s official duties. …However, the town of Sanremo refused to give him his job back, prompting Muraglia to go back to court, where he won again this week. A judge ruled he should not only be re-employed but should receive back pay of €250,000, dating back to his sacking.

Way to go, Alberto!

Stories like this, as well as the many examples form the U.S. and other countries, should remind us that governments waste money wantonly and do not deserve even a single penny of additional tax revenue.

Especially since more revenue would simply encourage politicians to further increase the spending burden, meaning even more debt.

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Bureaucrat Humor

I shared one column of bureaucrat humor in 2021 and another in 2022, so let’s make sure we do at least one this year.

We’ll start with this Remy satire about the Rich Men North of Richmond.

By the way, you can enjoy more Remy videos by clicking here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Our next bit of satire features some very sensible career advice.

Our third item is the visual depiction of anyone who has ever called a government office and tried to get a straightforward answer to a question.

I don’t know if this was a real line from the show, but it’s nonetheless amusing for the obvious reason.

As usual, I’ve saved the best for last.

There is a special training regimen for bureaucrats, but this Instagram video shows that some people are exempt.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dushont Jefferson (@bigduke1313)

P.S. My all-time favorite example of anti-bureaucrat satire is this video, though this top-10 list from David Letterman is a close second.

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Another Italian Member for the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame

I created the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame to give recognition to government employees who confirm our worst suspicions about being lazy and overpaid. Or worse.

Getting selected is not easy. For instance, the bureaucrats from the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board (the focus of yesterday’s column) did not make it into the Hall of Fame.

This is an “honor” reserved for those who go way above and beyond the call of duty.

Such as Cinzia Paolina De Lio.

Who is this person? What makes her worthy of being inducted into the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame?

She’s an Italian teacher. But she’s a teacher who almost never taught. She missed 20 years of work over her 24-year career.

How long do you think you could skive off work for before you start to get into trouble? A week? Two? How about twenty years? It might sound ridiculous, but apparently it can be done. Just ask Cinzia Paolina De Lio. …De Lio had been hired to teach at the secondary school near Venice, where she was supposed to fill her students’ minds with everything they needed to know about literature and philosophy. …The teacher is said to have used sick leave, holiday time and permits to attend conferences to avoid giving lessons at the school, and on the rare occasions she did turn up, she didn’t do a very good job of educating the students. …De Lio was sacked by the school for her behaviour, but she took the case to court and managed to get her job back. …De Lio’s casual approach to her career came back to bite her when the court realised she’d only been present in the class for four years out of 24. …Journalists attempted to contacted De Lio in the wake of her firing, The Times reports, but she was unable to comment on the situation because she was busy – at the beach.

By the way, Ms. De Lio is not the first foreigner in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame. She’s not even the first Italian.

But she nonetheless can be proud of being the 7th non-American to earn this special recognition. Here are the other foreign awardees.

• An Italian government doctor who worked only 15 days in a nine-year period.
• A bureaucrat in India’s Public Works Department stopped showing up for work in 1990 and didn’t get fired until 2014.
• In France (gee, what a surprise), a bureaucrat was provided a car and driver by taxpayers, yet still managed to run up nearly $150-per-day of taxi cab expenses.
• The English bureaucrat who worked in law enforcement by day and promoted anti-Western Jihad by night.
• A bureaucrat in Spain got a service award even though he hadn’t shown up for work in six years.
• The bureaucrat in the United Kingdom who advocated strict stay-at-home rules while exempting his f**k buddy.

I’ll close by making a very serious point about public policy. Ms. De Lio almost certainly was able to retain her job for so long because of so-called employment protection laws, which basically make it very difficult to fire bad workers.

In the private sector, such laws discourage employers from hiring people in the first place. In the government sector, they enable and allow scammers like Ms. De Lio to bilk taxpayers.

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Bureaucrats Gone Wild

My biggest complaint about bureaucrats is that many of them work at departments and agencies that should be eliminated.

But I also don’t like that they get overpaid compared to workers in the productive sector of the economy.

To make matters worse, bureaucrats have little incentive to be productive. Especially since politicians and union bosses conspire (illustrated by this cartoon) to make it just about impossible to fire bad employees.

But if you want to add insult to all this injury, consider how bureaucrats then often misbehave in ways that further line their pickets.

For instance, a local TV station in New Orleans did a fascinating expose about some bureaucrats at at the Sewerage and Water Board.

In the fall of 2019, the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board uncovered what officials said was a major payroll fraud scheme inside the Carrollton Water Treatment Plant filter gallery… Officials at the highest level of the agency were informed that employees appeared to be  working in concert with their managers to improperly, and perhaps illegally, gift themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars by abusing overtime and “chemical pay,” a special pay rate for the handling of hazardous chemicals such as chlorine. …Following an extensive internal investigation in 2019, the Sewerage & Water Board’s chief of security recommended immediately firing three employees over the payroll fraud allegations, and potentially referring the evidence to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office for criminal prosecution. …Nearly four years later, no criminal charges have been filed, and only one of the three employees has faced serious discipline. Shortly after the investigation concluded, filter gallery employee Gregg Herbert was fired for payroll fraud, theft and falsification of records. But last month the Sewerage and Water Board agreed to reverse the termination, allow Herbert to retire with full benefits and give him $39,000 in back pay. …Of the two others, one retired earlier this year without facing discipline, New Orleans personnel records show. And the third, a manager named Steven Ware, is still working and has since been promoted twice.

So far, this is a typical story of pampered bureaucrats misbehaving with impunity.

But the story has another twist.

In 2021, a filter gallery employee filed a public whistleblower complaint that accused managers of using taxpayer dollars to build a “secret room” inside the Carrollton plant where a select number of employees would bring people to sleep with both on and off their shift. …two current employees and one former worker…confirmed the existence of what one employee described as a “secret sex room.” One employee provided a video of it, showing couches, a refrigerator, a microwave, a TV and a shelf full of framed photos of nude women.

Maybe I should reassess my view that bureaucrats are unproductive.

After all, some of the employees at the Sewerage and Water Board managed to screw taxpayers at the same time they were engaged in another type of…well, you get the idea.

They probably deserve membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

P.S. Shifting to bureaucrat-themed humor, my all-time favorite is this video, though this top-10 list from David Letterman is a close second.

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A New Member for the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame

My primary problem with bureaucrats is that they often work for agencies and departments that should not exist.

My secondary problem is that they generally get overcompensated compared to workers in the economy’s productive sector.

And my tertiary problem with government employees is that they have job protections that encourage bad behavior – everything from sloth to crime.

When selecting new members for the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame, I usually pick from that final group.

And that’s the purpose of today’s column. We have a bureaucrat from Washington, DC, who deserves to be honored.

But he’s not a federal bureaucrat. He’s a cop with the DC metropolitan police. Here are some details of his misdeeds, as reported by Amanda Michelle Gomez.

The former vice chair of D.C. Police Union, Medgar Webster Sr., was arrested on Saturday for allegedly defrauding the D.C. government by working a second job at Whole Foods Market while reporting as on duty for the Metropolitan Police Department. …MPD paid Webster $33,845, including overtime and holiday pay, for hours he was simultaneously on the clock at Whole Foods, according to an arrest affidavit. Webster allegedly worked at two locations for the grocery chain between January 2021 and April 2022, and earned $45,946 at one of those stores along H Street Southeast. …Webster earned an hourly rate of $53.11 as an officer, which was adjusted to $79.67 for overtime work, per the affidavit.

If nothing else, I guess we can say he’s not lazy. I imagine other cops don’t bother doing any work, but they’re probably home napping instead of working a second job.

So congratulations…sort of.

But here’s the part of the story that definitely makes Mr. Webster a Hall of Famer.

He was caught double-dipping only because he got in trouble for sexual harassment at his second job.

The police spokesperson says agents discovered Webster was allegedly working a second job while on the clock at MPD during an “unrelated [Internal Affairs Division] investigation.” Webster was being investigated for engaging in an “unwanted sexual contact” with an individual at the Whole Foods.

Apparently he was trying to double-dip in more than one way.

Seems like he has something in common with Mr. Geary.

P.S. My all-time favorite example of anti-bureaucrat satire is this video, though this top-10 list from David Letterman is a close second.

P.P.S. Since we’re making fun of bureaucrats, here’s a good jab at the Post Office from Jimmy Kimmel and a clever one-liner from Craig Ferguson. And to see how government operates, we have the Fable of the Ant. But this Pearls before Swine cartoon strip is very clever. Also, here’s a new element discovered inside the bureaucracy, and a letter to the bureaucracy from someone renewing a passport.

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In Five Sentences, Everything You Need to Know about Bureaucracy

One thing that became very apparent during the pandemic is that government schools are mostly run for the benefit of bureaucrats rather than students.

Not that any of us should have been surprised.

The same is true for other government bureaucracies, as well as parts of the private sector where there is a lot of government intervention that subsidizes featherbedding.

What’s especially galling is when budget increases are used to hire more bureaucrats, yet taxpayers get nothing of value in exchanges.

That’s certainly the case in the United States, where education bureaucracies (and education spending) have dramatically increased, yet there has been no concomitant increase in educational outcomes.

Another examples come from the United Kingdom where the government-run National Health Service gets more money and more bureaucrats every year, as explained in CapX by Fiona Bulmer, yet there’s never an improvement in health outcomes.

Indeed, these five sentences are a perfect example of government bureaucracies in action.

…the NHS in England employs the full time equivalent of 1.2 million people, nearly 200,000 more than they did in 2012.

…in 2021, the NHS was around 16% less productive than before the pandemic.

…one of the managers lamented to me that he could schedule a maximum of four knee operations a day but in the private sector they manage eight a day. 

…7m people on NHS waiting lists.

The NHS, like all organisations where users have no choice defaults to accommodating the providers not the consumers.

I’m left with two conclusions after reading those depressing numbers.

• First, the Conservative Party is unwilling to do anything to restrain spending on the NHS (or any other part of the UK budget), which is why their main role nowadays is to be the tax collectors for the welfare state.
• Second, the so-called national conservatives in the United States, given their dirigiste policy agenda of more intervention and more government spending, seem to want a very similar fate for the United States.

The obvious takeaway, as I’ve previously noted, is that if you don’t want massive future tax increases, there’s no alternative to what critics call “free-market fundamentalism.”

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Tweeting the Obvious: The Department of Education Has a Failing Grade

I’ve already shared a “Tweet of the Year” for 2022, as well the “Most Enjoyable Tweet” of the year.

I’m going to call this the “Most Obvious Revelation Tweet” since it reaches a should-have-been-immediately-clear conclusion that the Department of Education is a net negative for the United States.

I’ve already provided my two cents on why the Department of Education should be eliminated.

So let’s look at what others have said.

In a column for National Review, Charles Cooke says it’s time for the bureaucracy to be retired.

In our constitutional order, education is the preserve of the states, and it ought to be the preserve of the states — not only because educational institutions work best when they are close to their benefactors and beneficiaries, but because education is power and because the centralization of power presents enticements that are beyond any human being’s ability to resist. …We have now seen the failure of nationalized education policy under presidents of both parties: George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” was a signature of his campaign in 2000 and his pre-9/11 presidency and has been largely abandoned, as has Common Core, which started life as a “conservative” idea but was quickly sucked into the maw under President Obama. The problem, as so often, is the system itself.

And here’s some of what Neil McCluskey wrote back in 2020.

Department of Education…was basically a payoff to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, for their 1976 support of Jimmy Carter’s presidential candidacy. …What we have gotten… One thing we do know is that total, inflation‐​adjusted federal education spending, including K‑12 programs and college student aid, has risen greatly since 1980, from $115 billion to $296 billion. Meanwhile, national test scores for 17‐​year‐​olds have been basically flat… Federal education meddling, especially since the advent of the Department of Education, has been of questionable value at best, and a high‐​dollar, bureaucratic failure at worst.

Needless to say, I agree with both of them. The current system is bad for America’s kids.

If you’re wondering why I have that view, just click here, here, here, here, and here.

By the way, it’s not just that the Department of Education has been a failure for K-12 kids. It’s also been bad news for college students.

Here are some excerpts from a 2015 column that Richard Vedder wrote for the Foundation for Economic Education.

He observes that higher education was a success story before the Department of Education was created.

The 30 years between 1950 and 1980 were the Golden Age of American higher education. The proportion of adult Americans with college degrees nearly tripled, going from 6 to 17 percent. Enrollments quintupled, going from 2.3 to 12.1 million. …This was the era in which higher education went from serving the elite and mostly well-to-do to serving many individuals from modest economic circumstance. …During this period, however, the federal role was quite modest. …College costs remained remarkably stable. Tuition fees typically rose only about one percent a year, adjusting for inflation. At the same time, high economic growth (real GDP was rising nearly four percent annually) led to incomes rising even faster, so in most years the tuition to income ratio fell. In other words, college was becoming a smaller financial burden for families.

But things took a wrong turn after a new federal bureaucracy was created. Here are some of the reasons Prof. Vedder has identified.

First, of course, education costs have soared. Tuition fees rose more than three percent a year in inflation-adjusted terms, far faster than people’s incomes. …rising federal student financial aid programs are the primary factor in this phenomenon. …Second, if anything, college has become more elitist and less accessible to low income students. The proportion of recent graduates who are from the bottom quartile of the income distribution has declined since 1970 or 1980. …Third, there has been a shocking decline in academic standards. Grade inflation is rampant. …Fourth, accreditation of colleges, overseen by the Department of Education, is expensive and ineffective. …Fifth, the federal aid programs and “college for all” propaganda promoted by the Department have led to a large proportion (probably over 40 percent) of recent graduates being underemployed… Sixth, the Department is guilty of regulatory excesses and bureaucratic blunders. …the form required of applicants for federal student aid (FAFSA) is byzantine in its complexity.

For what it’s worth, I think Rich’s first item deserves some sort of special emphasis. Maybe a couple of exclamation points to drive home the point that higher education is absurdly over-priced today precisely because of government intervention to supposedly make it more affordable.

Now politicians are reacting to this mess by urging even more subsidies. Which will simply make the problem worse. Lather, rinse, repeat.

P.S. Here’s a bit of humor to compensate for the depressing news in today’s column.

My other examples of education-themed humor can be found here, here, here, and here.

P.P.S. Biden wants to reward failure with a 21 percent increase in the Department of Education’s budget.

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First-Hand Exposure to TSA Inefficiency and Incompetence

I’ve posted several videos about the Keystone Cops of airport security (see here, here, here, here, and here) and here’s another one to enjoy.

Why am I motivated to mock the Transportation Security Administration today?

For the simple reason that I went to the Atlanta Airport yesterday after watching my #1 Georgia Bulldogs win another game.

Yet when I exited the highway to the airport, traffic ground to a halt. It took me about 30 minutes to get to parking (a trip that normally takes about three minutes).

And then, when I got in the airport, the “Clear” line for accelerated screening was shut down, which required me to instead get in the slower “Pre-check” line (but still faster than the regular line).

But that line was much longer than normal, and moved much slower than normal, because the bureaucrats required us to take off shoes and remove laptops (things that normally are not required for flyers that have received Pre-check clearance).

So why did I have to endure and extra hour-plus of wasted time, risking my ability to make my flight?

Because some idiot earlier in the day accidentally packed a gun in his carry-on bag and then apparently panicked and grabbed the gun when it was (surprisingly enough) detected by screeners, causing an accidental discharge.

I don’t blame the TSA for engaging in a brief period of heightened security following this incident.

But it was utterly pointless to have a huge police presence on the airport roads hours later (thus slowing traffic to a crawl), along with shutting down the Clear line and eliminating the (comparative) efficiency of the Pre-check line (making it a slow slog).

This is empty “security theater,” particularly since there have already been nearly 5,000 cases this year of passengers forgetting about guns in carry-on bags. So it’s not as if finding a gun is unusual.

What is unusual, of course, is the accidental discharge – and the subsequent TSA over-reaction.

Which gives me an excuse to write about the TSA and the need for reform for only the third time since 2015 (I had one column about the TSA in 2019 and another one in 2016).

We’ll start with a just-published column by J.D. Tuccille for Reason.

…the TSA has proven itself skilled at harassing travelers and freaking out over pocketknives and water bottles while steadfastly failing at its assigned task of making air transportation any safer. The TSA, in short, is an awful example of government in action. …It’s not clear why anybody saw a need for the TSA, since it’s unlikely that a federal agency would have been any more successful than private contractors at predicting terrorists’ unprecedented use of aircraft as kamikaze weapons. It’s especially unlikely that the federal agency we actually got would have successfully diverted itself from confiscating play-doh to thwarting homicidal fanatics. …What the TSA is good at is high-visibility groping, scanning, and confiscating. Making people drop their pants, take off their shoes, and surrender their shampoo annoys people in a way that says “we’re doing something” without actually accomplishing anything.

Wow, I would suspect he also traveled through Atlanta yesterday, but his article was published Friday.

Next, we have an overall indictment of the TSA. Here are some excerpts from a column by Kevin Williamson for National Review.

The catalogue of the TSA’s sins reads like the diary of the Marquis de Sade, from the sexual abuse of children to the production of child pornography, beside which such workaday offenses as looting travelers’ property and smuggling drugs seem quaint. This is not a few bad apples — this is a crime syndicate pretending to be a federal agency. …The TSA’s record for providing actual security is practically nonexistent; security testers sneaking mock explosives and weapons past TSA screeners achieved an astonishing success rate of 95 percent. …Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport processes more passengers than does New York’s JFK, and its security process, including something like an El Al pre-board interview in which a well-trained security officer gives passengers the hairy Dutch eyeball, generally takes only a few minutes, whereas traversing JFK can take hours. …We need choice, competition, and accountability. And we also need to fire a few tens of thousands of people, starting with TSA administrator.

So what’s the solution?

David Inserra of the Heritage Foundation explains for FEE that the private sector is a better option.

A private model would allow for strengthened accountability, a decrease in operation costs, enhanced management of labor, and better focus on security threats and problems. …The TSA model is quite uncommon worldwide. The more common models utilize the government as a security regulator while a contractor or the airport itself provides security. This automatically pushes accountability and competition higher than the current U.S. model. …By looking to examples in Canada and Europe, we can observe how governments spend drastically less yet still manage to meet international aviation standards. These countries show that privately-hired scanning teams can manage personnel far more efficiently than the government and still make a profit. They also cost significantly less—Canada spent about 40 percent less per capita on aviation security than the U.S. in 2014, for example.

Amen.

Here’s the graphic accompanying the article. As you can see, other nations wisely utilize private contractors.

If Americans got better security, perhaps higher costs and longer lines would make it worthwhile.

But that’s not the case, as I’ve previously pointed out (see here, here, and here).

And if that’s not enough, here’s what NBC reported about bomb-sniffing dogs.

Bomb-sniffing K-9 teams at 10 major U.S. airports have failed tests that check how accurately they can detect explosives… New records obtained by KXAS through a Freedom of Information Act request call into question whether those dog teams are training enough to stay sharp and keep bombs out of airports and off planes… K-9 teams funded by the Transportation Security Administration have failed annual certification tests at 10 large airports 52 times between Jan. 1, 2013, and June 15, 2015, the most recent detailed numbers TSA provided. Some teams failed to find explosives, while others had too many false alarms that could cause unnecessary airport evacuations.

Humans are probably even worse, as Judd Gregg explained in a piece for the Hill.

The TSA failed to detect ninety percent of the bombs and weapons that were passed through its passenger screening system in its last test. Were the test also applied to baggage placed on planes, it is likely that their failure rate in detecting bombs specifically would be even higher. Thus, an agency that costs the taxpayer $7.5 billion a year, has 40,000-plus screeners and 15,000-plus administrators does not seem to be doing a very good job of protecting passengers on airplanes.

I have other pieces I can cite, but I’ll save them for another day.

Let’s close with an outrageous example of TSA foolishness, as captured by this tweet from Amy Alkon.

P.S. Here are other examples of bone-headed TSA actions.

• Confiscating a plastic hammer from a mentally retarded man.
• Detaining a woman for carrying breast milk.
• Hassling a woman for the unexplained red flag of having sequentially numbered checks.
• Demanding that a handicapped 4-year old boy walk through a metal detector without his leg braces.
• Putting an 8-year old cub scout on the no-fly list.
• Stopping a teenager from flying because her purse had an image of a gun.
• Seizing raygun belt buckles and Kitty Cat keychains.
• Taking a “fart gun” from a child.

P.P.S. I am willing to defend the TSA when the bureaucrats make sensible choices based on cost-benefit analysis.

P.P.P.S. And I am always willing to share some jokes at TSA’s expense (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

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Bureaucrat Humor

My all-time favorite example of bureaucracy humor is this Spanish-language video (with English subtitles!).

But this clip from Yes Minister also captures how bureaucracies operate.

And if you want another reason why bureaucrats don’t like initiative, this cartoon provides the answer.

Our third item shows that you need the correct angle to understand the life of bureaucrats (sort of like these six images).

Our next item shows featherbedding in action.

Never hire one person when you can make it a three-person job (or a lot more if you’re in California).

My final (and favorite) item is this cartoon strip. I don’t know if it’s a parody (like this one) or real, but it does show how bureaucratic pay scales operate.

Quite funny, though not for taxpayers.

P.S. If you want more, we have a joke about an Indian training for a government job, a slide show on how bureaucracies operate, a cartoon strip on bureaucratic incentives, a story on what would happen if Noah tried to build an Ark today, a top-10 list of ways to tell if you work for the government, a new element discovered inside the bureaucracy, and a letter to the bureaucracy from someone renewing a passport.

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2020’s Tweet of the Year

Every so often, I highlight tweets that deserve attention because they say something important, usually in a clever and succinct fashion.

• Best-ever tweet about inequality.
• Best tweet about capitalism vs socialism.
• The most depressing tweet.
• Trump’s worst-ever tweet.
• The best-ever counter-tweet.

Today, I’m highlighting what I consider to be the year’s best tweet.

The tweet is from Matthew Lesh of the Adam Smith Institute in London and it shows the big difference between private sector results and government incompetence.

Some readers may wonder if he is being unfair? Is the tweet merely libertarian-style grousing?

Well, consider this recent story from the Washington Post, which details how government incompetence at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) greatly delayed testing capacity.

On Jan. 13, the World Health Organization had made public a recipe for how to configure such a test, and several countries wasted no time getting started: Within hours, scientists in Thailand used the instructions to deploy a new test. The CDC would not roll out one that worked for 46 more days. …The agency squandered weeks as it pursued a test design far more complicated than the WHO version and as its scientists wrestled with failures… The CDC’s response to what became the nation’s deadliest pandemic in a century marked a low point in its 74-year history. …Without tests to identify the early cases, health authorities nationwide were unable to isolate the infected and trace the rapid spread among their close contacts. …120 public health labs were without a government-approved test of their own and, with few exceptions, depended wholly on getting the CDC’s kits. …companies had no incentive to navigate regulatory hurdles and mass-produce kits.

The above story describes how the CDC screwed up at the start of the pandemic.

In her December 27 column for the Washington Post, Megan McArdle highlights a new example of CDC incompetence.

…the now-infamous November meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices…unanimously agreed that essential workers should get vaccinated ahead of the elderly, even though they’d been told this would mean up to 6 percent more deaths. This decision was supported in part by noting that America’s essential workers are more racially diverse than its senior citizens. …the discussion of whether to prioritize essential workers was anything but robust. …not one of those 14 intelligent and dedicated health professionals suggested adopting the plan that kills the fewest people. …for the past nine months, public health experts have insisted that minimizing deaths should override other concerns, even quite important ones. So how, in this case, did equity conquer death?

Let’s close with some excerpts from Aaron Sibarium’s article on the same issue for the Washington Free Beacon.

The committee openly acknowledged that its initial plan would result in more deaths than “vaccinating older adults first.” But, the panel said, the plan would reduce racial disparities—something they deemed more important than saving lives… The result was an explicitly race-conscious plan that would have prioritized shrinking the case gap between races over saving the most lives. …All of this—the exclusions, the contradictions, the moral redundancies—helped disguise the agenda that it justified, giving unscientific value judgments an air of scientific assuredness.

The really amazing aspect of this story is that there almost surely would be more minority deaths if this this approach was implemented.

But the “woke” bureaucrats though that would have been okay since there would have been an even-greater increase in white deaths.

This is healthcare version of their warped view that it’s okay to support policies that reduce income for poor people so long as the rich incur even greater losses.

Anyhow, I guess we should “congratulate” the CDC for showing it can compete with the WHO in the contest to see which bureaucracy had the worst response to the coronavirus (we already had plenty of evidence that the FDA is incompetent).

We can add this column to my series (here, here, here, and here) on how government blundering magnified the coronavirus pandemic.

P.S. If I had the flair for self-promotion that you often find in D.C., I would have been tempted to claim that my tweet from earlier today deserves some sort of recognition.

But I don’t need attention and affirmation. I simply want people to understand that it’s reprehensible that we have cossetted international bureaucrats (who get lavish, tax-free salaries!) pushing sloppy and ideological nonsense that will make the world less prosperous.

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Bureaucrat(s) of the Year

The most-common complaint about bureaucrats is that they’re lazy.

Though it’s probably more accurate to say that bureaucracies have very little incentive to care about citizens.

After all, the rest of us are captive customers, whether we’re dealing with the federal government’s postal service, a state motor vehicles department, or a local government’s education bureaucracy.

So it would be naive to expect the kind of attentiveness and hustle you find when dealing with many private merchants.

But one thing we can say is that bureaucrats aren’t sluggish when they have an opportunity to defraud taxpayers.

For instance, a report in the New York Times by Benjamin Weiser exposes a jaw-dropping overtime scam by transit bureaucrats in New York.

Thomas Caputo, a senior track worker for the Long Island Rail Road, put in for 15 hours of overtime for work he said he had done at the West Side Yard in Manhattan. His shift began at 4 p.m. and ended at 7 o’clock the next morning. But, the authorities say, Mr. Caputo was somewhere else that evening: at a bowling alley in Patchogue, N.Y., more than 55 miles away, where he bowled three games, averaging a score of 196. He took home an overtime payment of $1,217. …Mr. Caputo, 56, who retired in 2019 after three decades with the railroad, was listed in 2018 as the highest paid M.T.A. employee with total pay of more than $461,000, including about $344,000 in overtime. …In 2018, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday, Mr. Caputo claimed to have worked 3,864 overtime hours, on top of 1,682 regular hours. If he had worked every single day that year (which he did not), the complaint said, his claims would average about 10 hours of overtime each day for the entire year, beyond his regular 40-hour workweek.

But Mr. Caputo was just the tip of the iceberg.

Caputo was one of five current and former employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority charged on Thursday with participating in an overtime fraud scheme that allowed them to become among the highest-paid employees at the agency… All five defendants each earned more than the salary of the M.T.A. chairman or Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who oversees the agency.

Another bureaucrat was very creative in milking the system.

Michael Gundersen, 42, a maintenance-of-way supervisor at New York City Transit, was accused of reporting he had worked long shifts in March 2018, for which he was paid $2,481. But evidence showed that at the same time, he had hotel reservations in Atlantic City and tickets for concerts there on successive nights, a second complaint charged. During other periods that Mr. Gundersen was paid thousands of dollars for claimed overtime, he was on vacation in Williamsburg, Virginia, participating in a 5K footrace in New Jersey, and on a family vacation at a resort in the Hudson Valley.

By the way, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the M.T.A. has serious financial problems (one of the few entities to get bailout money as part of pandemic relief).

The charges come at a time when the authority is confronting its worst financial crisis because of the pandemic and a stalemate over federal aid. Without a financial bailout, the agency has said that it will have to slash subway and bus service and that more than 9,000 workers could lose their jobs. …The huge overtime payments made to Mr. Caputo and other M.T.A. employees were revealed a month earlier by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Albany. Its research showed that 33 M.T.A. employees earned more than $300,000 in 2018, with almost all receiving large amounts of overtime pay. …The charges come more than a decade after the Long Island Rail Road was caught up in a scandal over disability payments. A New York Times investigation had found that nearly every career employee who retired received a disability pension.

In other words, not only are bureaucrats overpaid in general, but they also are very adept at cheating the system to pad their paychecks.

We’ll close with by explaining that this type of scam is common with government employment.

Why? For the simple reason – as illustrated by the cartoon – that politicians are bureaucrats tend to be on the same side with negotiating new contracts.

Nobody represents the interests of taxpayers.

In any event, I’m sure we can all agree that Mr. Caputo, Mr. Gunderson, and the rest of the crooks deserve membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

P.S. Here’s a new element discovered inside the bureaucracy, and a letter to the bureaucracy from someone renewing a passport.

P.P.S. And this satirical video actually does a very good job of capturing how bureaucracy actually operates.

P.P.P.S.  Here’s a great top-10 list from Letterman about bureaucrats.

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Cross-Country Comparisons on the Relative Attractiveness of Government vs Private Employment

For those still fixated on last week’s election, my analysis can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

I’m now returning to my normal pattern of pontificating on public policy.

Today we’re going to look at which nations that make it more lucrative to be a bureaucrat rather than take a job in the productive sector of the economy.

I sort of wrote about this topic back in 2013 when I looked at cross-country data on the overall cost of bureaucrat salaries, as well as the number of bureaucrats as a share of the labor force.

But that’s hardly a perfect measure since it doesn’t tell us how much bureaucrats are compensated compared to workers in the private sector.

So I was very interested to see a fascinating report that investigates this issue from the European Data Journalism Network.

The first couple of charts in the report basically replicate the data I shared back in 2013, but then we get some data showing how much bureaucrats get paid compared to per-capita GDP in each country.

Here are some of the highlights (keep in mind that “liberal” in Europe actually refers to pro-market “classical liberals“).

…liberals are always complaining that there are too many employees in the public sector. So, from country to country, what is the scale of public employment in Europe? …by deploying a number of indicators it becomes possible to paint a fairly complete portrait of the situation. …To…better quantify public sector salaries, there are many indicators at our disposal. The first is provided by the ratio of public sector salaries to GDP per capita. This brings into relief the countries where public employees come out rather poorly compared to the rest of the population (notably in the Nordic countries and the UK) and the countries where public employees on the whole are better off (first and foremost the countries of southern Europe).

Here’s the relevant chart, which shows that it’s very lucrative to be a bureaucrat in Greece, Italy, and Spain, but it’s more lucrative to be in the private sector in Nordic nations.

I view this as more proof for my argument that the Nordic countries are much more market oriented than most people think.

But what about America?

The U.S.A. wasn’t mentioned in the EDJN report, but if you go to the French-language study that was the main source for the EDJN report, you’ll find that there is data for America.

As you can see from this graph, the United States (États-Unis) isn’t as bad as the Mediterranean nations of Southern Europe, but American bureaucrats definitely are overpaid compared to their counterparts in many other countries.

By the way, I have a video that specifically examines the American data and it has lots of supporting data on how government bureaucrats are overpaid.

It’s 10 years old, but more-recent data further confirms that bureaucrat compensation is excessive.

P.S. Even research from the International Monetary Fund finds negative results from too much bureaucracy.

P.P.S. Why are there negative results if bureaucrats are overpaid? For the simple reason that an economy’s output is a function of the quality and quantity of labor and capital. So it stands to reason that economic performance will suffer if excessive compensation lures people out of the productive sector and into the government workforce.

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The Indonesian Version of Everything You Need to Know about Bureaucracy and Government

I have a “Bureaucrat Hall of Fame” to acknowledge individuals who go above and beyond the call of duty. As measured by sloth and waste, of course.

But maybe I also need a “Bureaucracy Hall of Fame” for examples that capture the self-serving nature of departments, bureaus and agencies. I already have several examples.

• In 2014, I wrote we learned “everything you need to know about government bureaucracy” when discussing how senior bureaucrats at the Veterans Administration got big bonuses while they were putting veterans on secret waiting lists.
• The following year, I wrote that we learned “everything you ever wanted to know about bureaucracy and government” when discussing how governments have dramatically increased the number of firefighters even though there are now far fewer fires.
• In 2016, I wrote about “the Italian version of everything you need to know about bureaucracy and government” when discussing rampant absenteeism, featherbedding, and fraud by local bureaucrats in a town in southern Italy.

Let’s augment this collection by taking a virtual trip to the Pacific Ocean.

The Economist has a sobering report about how many people in Indonesia aspire to become overpaid bureaucrats.

When the government rang to tell Budi (not his real name) that he had been hired as a tax collector, it was like a dream come true. When he graduated from university in 2013, the only work he could find was as a stevedore at the local port. Jobs in his hometown of Ende, a small city on the island of Flores, were scarce. Local government promised a steady income and a pension. …Budi was one of the lucky ones. Last year some 4.2m people applied for around 150,000 spots in the civil service. …Government salaries are often higher than those at private companies, and jobs are for life. …senior bureaucrats, particularly in the farther reaches of the archipelago, regard the districts in which they serve as their own personal fiefs.

Sadly (but predictably), they don’t repay the coerced generosity of taxpayers by providing quality governance.

…they often fail to serve the people. Public services are patchy, particularly at the level of local government, which is responsible for health care and education, among other things. Real spending per person by local governments soared between 1994 and 2017, by 258% on average, according to the World Bank. But services remain ropy. More than half of children leave school unable to read properly, for instance. Inefficiency is rife. At the local level, exam results, jobs, promotions and transfers are regularly sold to the highest bidders, according to a study published in 2012… Local politicians often reward supporters with temporary posts in the civil service. …A report published in 2017 by the State Civil Service Agency found that more than 40% of the 696 directors (the highest-ranking bureaucrats) that it assessed were not fit to do their jobs.

Want more evidence?

This column from 2017 is painful evidence that more money for bureaucracy in Indonesia doesn’t translate into better results.

Unsurprisingly, it’s almost impossible to fire bureaucrats in Indonesia, notwithstanding their penchant for graft and corruption.

…it is almost impossible to fire civil servants. In 2017 only 347 out of 4.3m were dismissed. …Workers often slink away from their desks hours before they are supposed to. …Many civil servants also seek to bump up their incomes through schemes… Employees of the tourism ministry, for instance, are paid a generous daily fee when they travel for work. It is standard practice to extend trips by a day or two beyond what is necessary, to claim extra cash, says Hadiono. Some officials are not content to stop there. Every year, millions of dollars are siphoned off the health system which, with its relatively large budget, is a particularly popular target for embezzlers.

The most amusing (or most tragic) part of the story is that Indonesia actually set up a bureaucracy that’s in charge or reforming bureaucracy.

…there have been many attempts to reform the bureaucracy; an entire ministry is devoted to the cause.

Needless to say, that won’t produce good results.

Since I realize there may not be many readers who have a keen interest in policy developments in Indonesia, allow me to close with two observations that have very wide application (in addition to the above point about bureaucracies behaving in a self-interested fashion).

1. First, poor countries won’t become rich countries if they don’t follow the recipe for growth and prosperity. At the risk of understatement, excessive bureaucracy is not one of the ingredients. Bureaucratic bloat is a problem throughout the developing world, not just Indonesia.
2. Second, it’s a very bad sign for any nation’s outlook if ambitious people think becoming a bureaucrat is the ticket for economic success. That’s either evidence of excessive pay for people in government or evidence of a private sector stifled by too much government. Or both.

Remember, this satirical video actually does a very good job of capturing how bureaucracy actually operates.

P.S. If you want to enjoy additional bureaucrat humor, my collection includes a joke about an Indian training for a government job, a slide show on how bureaucracies operate, a cartoon strip on bureaucratic incentives, a story on what would happen if Noah tried to build an Ark today, a top-10 list of ways to tell if you work for the government, a new element discovered inside the bureaucracy, and a letter to the bureaucracy from someone renewing a passport.

P.P.S. If you want unintentional humor, the OECD actually asserted that the problem in Indonesia is that government is too small.

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New York vs. Florida, Round #4

Politicians from New York want states to get a big bailout from Uncle Sam. I explained earlier this month that this would be a bad idea.

Simply stated, the Empire State is in big trouble because it has a bloated government, not because of the coronavirus.

Probably the strongest piece of evidence is that New York is ranked #50 for fiscal policy according to Freedom in the 50 States.

If you want to understand how New York’s politicians have created a fiscal disaster, let’s compare the Empire State to Florida, which is ranked #1.

I’ve already done that three times (Round #1, Round #2, and Round #3), so this will be Round #4.

The Wall Street Journal compared the two states in an editorial two days ago.

…let’s do the math to consider which state has managed its economy and finances better over the last decade. …Democrats in Albany are claiming to be victims of events that are out of their control. But they have increased spending by $43 billion since 2010—about $570,000 for each additional person. Florida’s budget has increased by $28 billion while its population has grown 2.7 million—a $10,400 increase per new resident. New York has a top state-and-local tax rate of 12.7%, while Florida has no income tax. Yet New York has a growing budget deficit, while Mr. Scott inherited a large deficit but built a surplus and paid down state debt. The difference is spending. …Blame New York’s cocktail of generous benefits, loose eligibility standards and waste. New York spends about twice as much per Medicaid beneficiary and six times more on nursing homes as Florida though its elderly population is 20% smaller. …The rate of private job growth in Florida has been about 60% higher than in New York from January 2010 to January 2020. Finance jobs expanded by 25% in Florida compared to 9.7% in New York. …The policy question is why taxpayers in Florida and other well-managed states should pay higher taxes to rescue an Albany political class that refuses to restrain its tax-and-spend governance. Public unions soak up an ever-larger share of tax dollars, but Albany refuses to change.

If you want further details on the difference between the two states, Chris Edwards takes a close look at the burden of government spending.

New York and Florida have similar populations of 20 million and 21 million, respectively. But governments in New York spent twice as much as governments in Florida, $348 billion compared to $177 billion. On some activities, spending in the two states is broadly similar… But in other budget areas, New York’s excess spending is striking. New York spent $69 billion on K-12 schools in 2017 compared to Florida’s $28 billion. Yet the states have about the same number of kids enrolled—2.7 million in New York and 2.8 million in Florida. New York spent $71 billion on public welfare compared to Florida’s $28 billion. Liberals say that governments provide needed resources to people truly in need. Conservatives say that generous handouts induce high demand whether people need it or not. Given that New York’s welfare costs are 2.5 times higher than Florida’s, the latter effect probably dominates. …New York governments employed 1,196,632 workers in 2017 compared to Florida’s 889,950 (measured in FTEs). …Most New York residents do not benefit from bloat in government payrolls, inefficient transit, excessive welfare, and deficit spending. To them, the high taxes are disproportionate to the government services received. That is why they are moving to better‐​managed states with lower taxes.

Here’s the accompanying chart.

And he also compares the level of bureaucracy in both states.

New York’s excess includes spending more on handouts such as welfare. Another cause of New York’s high spending is employment of more government workers and paying them more than in Florida. …New York governments employ 34 percent more workers than Florida governments. …The two states have similar K-12 school enrollments of 2.7 million in New York and 2.8 million in Florida. But New York employs 31 percent more teachers and administrators than Florida. Do the 111,000 extra staff in New York generate better school outcomes? Apparently not…study puts Florida near the top and New York in the middle on school quality. Does New York really need two times more highway workers than Florida and three times more welfare workers? …Government workers in New York make 42 percent more in wages than government workers in Florida, on average.

Here’s the accompanying chart.

The bottom line is that New York is a great place to be an over-paid bureaucrat in an over-staffed bureaucracy.

But if you’re a taxpayer, Florida is the easy winner – which may explain why so many productive people are leaving the Empire State and permanently migrating to the Sunshine State.

P.S. The same pattern exists all across the United States. Taxpayers are escaping the poorly managed states and fleeing to low-tax states. Especially ones with no income taxes.

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Coronavirus and the Failure of Big Government: A Closer Look at the CDC

I’ve written four columns (here, here, here, and here) on the general failure of government health bureaucracies to effectively respond to the coronavirus.

The pattern was so pronounced that it even led me to unveil a Seventh Theorem of Government.

I’m not surprised at this outcome, of course, given the poor overall track record of the public sector.

But I was negatively surprised to learn how red tape from these bureaucracies prevented the private sector from quickly reacting to the crisis.

Today, let’s take a closer look at one of those bureaucracies, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Eric Boehm, writing for Reason, has a nice summary of the CDC’s failures.

Over the past three decades, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has seen its taxpayer-funded budget doubled. Then doubled again. Then doubled again. And then nearly doubled once more. But spending nearly 14 times as much as we did in 1987 on the agency whose mission statement says it “saves lives and protects people from health threats” did not, apparently, help the CDC combat the emergence of the biggest disease threat America has faced in a century. In fact, …inflating the CDC’s budget may have weakened the agency’s ability to handle its core responsibility by giving rise to mission creep and bureaucratic malaise. …the CDC’s budget has ballooned from $590 million in 1987 to more than $8 billion last year. If the agency had grown with inflation since 1987, it would have a budget of about $1.3 billion today. …Has all that extra funding made America safer? …hindsight now suggests that the CDC should have spent more time and money researching emergent influenza-like infectious diseases, a project that received just $185 million in funding… Instead, the CDC was doing things like spending $1.75 million on the creation of a “Hollywood liaison”.

A big problem with bureaucracies is that they engage in mission creep. They concoct new roles and responsibilities in hopes of justifying bigger budgets and more staff.

The CDC certainly is no exception. In its early years, the bureaucracy had a targeted mission, focusing on diseases posing a major threat to public health, such as malaria, plague, and tuberculosis.

Over the years, though, it has lost focus and become involved with social issues.

Daniel Greenfield opines on the CDC’s foolish diversions on issues such as obesity.

The Centers for Disease Control has…one job which it messes up every time. The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans… There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States. …Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. …During the Ebola crisis, the CDC had been spending…$2.6 million on gun violence studies. But the CDC has a history of wasting money on everything from a $106 million visitor’s center with Japanese gardens, a $200K gym, a transgender beauty pageant, not to mention promoting bike paths. …the CDC’s general incompetence…, like that of other government agencies, just ticks along wasting money. In 1999, the CDC announced a plan to end syphilis in 5 years…an unserious social welfare proposal that wanted to battle racism and was such a success that by 2018, syphilis rates had hit a new record high. … The CDC’s fight against the “obesity epidemic” is even sillier. That includes…giving LSU over a million bucks to work with farmers’ markets. Obesity obviously can kill people, but it’s not something that the CDC can or should be trying to fix. …Unfortunately, the CDC, like every federal agency, has drifted from its core mission into social welfare. …No one thinks about the CDC until we need it and discover it doesn’t work. And then the same story repeats itself a few years later while the CDC goes back to battling obesity and racism. …We don’t need a CDC that changes people’s minds about eating chocolate or engaging in unprotected sex. There are already multiple redundant parts of the government that are trying and failing there.

In a column for Forbes, Larry Bell reviewed the history of the CDC’s politicized campaigning against gun ownership.

In 1996, the Congress axed $2.6 million allocated for gun research from the CDC out of its $2.2 billion budget, charging that its studies were being driven by anti-gun prejudice. …There was a very good reason for the gun violence research funding ban. Virtually all of the scores of CDC-funded firearms studies conducted since 1985 had reached conclusions favoring stricter gun control.  This should have come as no surprise, given that ever since 1979, the official goal of the CDC’s parent agency, the U.S. Public Health Service, had been “…to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership”… Sociologist David Bordura and epidemiologist David Cowan characterized the public health literature on guns at that time as “advocacy based upon political beliefs rather than scientific fact”. …Dr. Katherine Christoffel, head of the “Handgun Epidemic Lowering Plan”, a CDC-funded organization…said: “guns are a virus that must be eradicated…”

Michelle Minton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote for Inside Sources about the CDC’s senseless efforts to restrict vaping.

Our health agencies had the information and the resources, so they should have been planning for this, but they weren’t. The problem isn’t because they’re underfunded, it’s that they are bloated and mismanaged. …a close look at how CDC spends its budget reveals it has strayed from this mission of protecting Americans from communicable diseases, turning more toward influencing people’s lifestyle choices. …Indeed, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC and other agencies were busy sounding the alarm about the nonexistent “epidemic” of youth vaping. Collectively, they spent billions on anti-vaping advertisements, biased research and lobbying, wasted countless hours of congressional hearing time, and squandering public trust. Had they remained focused on infectious disease, might have been prepared to fight real epidemics, like the COVID-19. …there’s nothing new about exploiting a crisis to expand budgets and score political points. Similar claims of inadequate funding were made during the 2014 outbreak of Ebola, for which various health agencies got an additional $5.4 billion. And what do we have to show for it now?

Let’s wrap up by noting that squandering money should be viewed as the CDC’s indirect failure.

The direct failure was how the bureaucracy bungled its one legitimate function of fighting infectious disease.

Jacob Sullum, writing for the New York Post, explains what happened.

The grand failure of federal health bureaucrats foreclosed the possibility of a more proactive and targeted approach… At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ­monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective. The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests… The CDC still insists that “not everyone needs to be tested for COVID-19.” But without testing everyone — or at least representative samples — for both the virus itself and the antibodies to it, we can do little better than guess its prevalence, its lethality and the extent of immunity among the general public. …Our ignorance about COVID-19 will have profound consequences, potentially leading to an overreaction that wrecks the economy while saving relatively few lives… You can thank the same agencies on which we are relying to guide us through this crisis.

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center summarizes the issue, noting that the CDC is a monumental failure.

The lack of preparedness at every level of government (federal, state, and local) has nothing to do with a lack of funding or inadequate staffing. Instead, it has everything to do with governments’ bloat, mismanagement, cronyism, and poor focus. That’s particularly true of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). …it is no secret how much the CDC is to blame for the country’s lack of preparedness to take on the coronavirus (followed very closely in ineptitude by the Food and Drug Administration). …By now, every major newspaper has reported on the incredible failure of the CDC during this crisis. …Messing up is not a new thing for the CDC. However, unlike what its employees and political allies like to claim, the agency’s poor record and its lack of preparedness has nothing to do with a lack of funding. …For instance, funding for its National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases—which aims to prevent diseases like Ebola—received only $514 million in 2018, a tiny sliver (less than 5%) of total CDC funding. And less than half of that $514 million went to emerging diseases like COVID-19. The rest of that budget is spent on stuff like chronic fatigue. Meanwhile, funding…to prevent smoking, alcohol consumption, and poor diets…received nearly $1 billion over that same time, almost double the funding for infectious-disease prevention.

Here’s a look (courtesy of Chris Edwards) at what’s happened to the CDC budget over time.

As you can see, the bureaucrats got more and more funding. Yet when America needed competence, they didn’t deliver.

P.S. The bureaucrats are not the only ones to blame. A big reason for the CDC’s lack of focus is that headline-seeking and vote-buying politicians created new roles and responsibilities. The CDC was happy to get more power, staff, and money, of course (just as it will be happy to get more power, staff, and money as a reward for its failure to deal with the coronavirus).

P.P.S. It’s almost as if there’s a lesson to be learned.

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Coronavirus and the Failure of Big Government, Part IV

Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared headlines and tweets to illustrate how bureaucratic inefficiency and incompetence have hindered an effective response to the coronavirus.

Time to beat that dead horse one more time.

But not just for the sake of mocking the clowns in Washington. I want to help people understand that we would get better outcomes with a slimmed-down public sector that focused on genuine governmental responsibilities.

Before providing a comprehensive collection of headlines and tweets, please read these excerpts from a searing indictment of the federal government’s incompetence, written by Stephen Pimentel for Palladium.

The FDA’s poor performance has little to do with insufficient budgets… The countries with the most effective responses… Taiwan, for example, has relied on a decentralized set of quickly developed digital tools, coordinated by its DIGI+ digital ministry but developed on the fly by private citizens. ….None of these countries allowed their equivalents of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to block virus-testing and the production of masks. In the U.S., the FDA possesses exclusive authority to approve tests once the Department of Health and Human Services declares a Public Health Emergency, which it did on January 31, 2020. The FDA proceeded to grant such approval only to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In February, the CDC developed a test on its own and distributed it to state labs. But the test kits had a bad reagent and did not work. During the entire month of February, as the virus continued to spread, the FDA granted no private lab approval to test. The first approval for a private lab was only issued on March 2, 2020. …Why have common surgical masks (and not only the higher-grade N95 masks) run short during the pandemic? Surely they are easy to produce. The answer is that, while they are physically easy to produce, the FDA treats them as regulated medical devices and requires extensive risk analysis and testing before they can be legally sold, making them difficult and time-consuming for a company to legally bring to market. …The American institutions charged with protecting public health are embedded in a bureaucratic culture that values turf-centered gatekeeping and control over effectiveness and outcome.

Now for our collection of headlines and tweets.

And we’ll start with the one that carries the main message of today’s column.

And why are people needlessly suffering? And even dying?

Well, feel free to click on any of these stories and tweets to access the underlying information.

FDA finally allows use of KN95 masks. They should have done this a month ago.https://t.co/Y0bmfiQSWB

— Paul Graham (@paulg) April 3, 2020

The federal government 1) blocks distillers from bulk production of non-retail sanitizer, so "approved" products aren't there for the public, and 2) blocks import of perfectly good masks because bureaucratic boxes haven't been checked. Please fix this, @realDonaldTrump.

— Kurt Couchman (@KurtCouchman) April 3, 2020

COVID-19 preparedness

With Trump's trade war tariffs of 25%, the American health care system was forced to reduce by 16% its purchases of critical medical supplies and stockpiles from China in 2019.
https://t.co/ZpGwEuAGQA

— Chad P. Bown (@ChadBown) March 30, 2020

While the FDA and CDC deserve plenty of scorn and criticism, Let’s not forget that states augment the damage of big government thanks to misguided “certificate of need” laws that restrict the capacity of the health sector, as well as laws against so-called price gouging.

Certificate of Need laws have restricted the proliferation of hospitals and surgicenters in many states. This Coronavirus crisis has showed us that central planning can be deadly. End CON laws. @SurgeryCenterOK @AAPSonline @HConomics @StephenMoore @marklevinshow @JediPD

— Alieta Eck, MD (@AlietaEck) March 30, 2020

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/1245723586238742534

The same problem exists to varying degrees in other nations, and also with international bureaucracies.

This is the strongest statistical association I've seen w/ respect to the virus. Wear a mask, mandate others to wear masks, & remember that @WHO is criminally incompetent. To repeat:@WHO is criminally incompetent.

PS-Don't get into elevators, buses, etc. unless your mask in N95 https://t.co/ZCkl3hql9K

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) March 31, 2020

Why does the WHO keep misinforming the public?

– The WHO said the coronavirus couldn't be transmitted from person to person.
– The WHO says masks don't protect anyone or prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
– The WHO advised against shutting borders and canceling flights.

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 31, 2020

NEW REPORT: 'Testing Times: The urgent need to decentralise COVID-19 diagnostic testing in the United Kingdom' by our @matthewlesh makes the case for allowing private, university and charity labs to test for COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/lvXPDepzIu

— Adam Smith Institute (@ASI) April 1, 2020

So what’s today’s message? Here’s a blunt headline that applies to national red tape, local red tape, and global red tape.

That lesson is captured by this image from the Atlas Society.

Once again, we have an answer to the question first asked back in 2009.

P.S. The bad news shared above doesn’t even count the deadly impact of the FDA’s lengthy and expensive process for approving new drugs.

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The Inevitability of Bureaucratic Bloat

I’m not a big fan of bureaucracy, mostly because government employees are overpaid and they often work for departments and agencies that shouldn’t exist.

Today, motivated by “public choice” insights about self-interested behavior, I want to make an important point about how bureaucracies operate.

We’ll review two articles about completely disconnected issues. But they both make the same point about ever-expanding bureaucracy.

First, the Economist has an article about central banks, specifically looking at how they employ thousands of bureaucrats. What makes the numbers so remarkable, at least in most of Europe, is that they no longer have currencies to manage.

Central bankers around the world have long pondered why productivity growth is slowing. …But might central banks themselves, with their armies of employees, be part of the problem? …many central banks in Europe look flabby. Although the euro area’s 19 national central banks have ceded many of their monetary-policymaking responsibilities to the European Central Bank (ECB)—they no longer set monetary policy by themselves, for instance—they still retain thousands of employees… the Banque de France and the Bundesbank each employ more than 10,000 people… The Bank of Italy employs 6,700. All told, the ECB and the euro zone’s national central banks boast a headcount of nearly 50,000. …The Board of Governors in Washington, DC, where most policy decisions are made, had about 3,000 staff at last count. When the Fed’s 12 regional reserve banks are included, the number rises to more than 20,000.

I actually wrote about this issue back in 2009 and mentioned the still-relevant caveat that some central banks have roles beyond monetary policy, such as bank supervision.

That being said, this chart suggests that there’s plenty of fat to cut.

What I would like to see is a comparison of staffing levels for countries that use the euro, both before and after they outsourced monetary policy the European Central Bank.

I would be shocked if there was a decline in the number of bureaucrats, even though monetary policy presumably is the primary reason central banks exist.

By the way, there’s a sentence in the article that cries out for correction.

Although central banks have become more important since the global financial crisis, it is not clear why they need quite so many regional staff.

It would be far more accurate if the sentence was modified to read: “…have become more of a threat to macroeconomic stability since the global financial crisis that they helped to create.”

But I’m digressing.

Let’s now look at the next article about bureaucracy.

John Lehman, a former Secretary of the Navy, recently opined in the Wall Street Journal about bureaucratic bloat at the National Security Council.

The problems that plague the NSC trace to before its founding in 1947. The White House has long sought to centralize decision-making to overcome the political jockeying that often takes place within the national-security establishment. …The NSC was established in the 1947 National Security Act, which named the members of the council: president, vice president and secretaries of state and defense. …under President Nixon…, Mr. Kissinger grew the council to include one deputy, 32 policy professionals and 60 administrators. …the NSC has only continued to expand. By the end of the Obama administration, 34 policy professionals supported by 60 administrators had exploded to three deputies, more than 400 policy professionals and 1,300 administrators. The council lost the ability to make fast decisions informed by the best intelligence. The NSC became one more layer in the wedding cake of government agencies.

Wow.

A bureaucracy that didn’t exist until 1947 and didn’t even have a boss until 1953 then grows to almost 100 people about 20 years later.

And then 1700 bureaucrats by the Obama Administration.

Needless to say, I’m sure that the growth of the NSC bureaucracy wasn’t accompanied by staffing reductions at the Department of State, Department of Defense, or any other related box on the ever-expanding federal flowchart.

Whenever I read stories like the two cited above, I can’t help but remember what Mark Steyn wrote almost ten years ago.

London administered the vast sprawling fractious tribal dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight, was the least-worst two-thirds of a century in that country’s existence. These days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as at home, the United States urgently needs to start learning how to do more with less.

As always, Steyn is very clever. But there’s a very serious underlying point. Is there any evidence that additional bureaucracy has produced better decision making?

Either in the field of central banking, national security, or in any other area where more and more bureaucrats exercise more and more control over our lives?

Maybe there is such evidence, but I haven’t seen it. Instead, I see research showing how bureaucracy stifles growth, creates waste, promotes inefficiency, crowds out private jobs, delivers bad outcomes, acts in a self-serving fashion, and bankrupts governments.

P.S. The best example of bureaucrat humor is this video.

P.P.S. If you want more, we have a joke about an Indian training for a government job, a slide show on how bureaucracies operate, a cartoon strip on bureaucratic incentives, a story on what would happen if Noah tried to build an Ark today, a top-10 list of ways to tell if you work for the government, a new element discovered inside the bureaucracy, and a letter to the bureaucracy from someone renewing a passport.

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IMF Research on the Adverse Impact of Government Bureaucracy on Private Employment

When I did this video about public-sector compensation almost 10 years ago, I focused on why it is unfair that bureaucrats get much higher levels of compensation than people working the private sector.

Today, let’s consider the economic consequences of excessive bureaucracy.

And what will make this column particularly interesting is that I’ll be citing some research from economists at the International Monetary Fund (a bureaucracy which is definitely not an outpost of libertarian thinking).

The two authors, Alberto Behar and Junghwan Mok, investigated whether nations lowered unemployment rates by employing more bureaucrats.

The contribution of this paper is to investigate the effects of public hiring of workers on labor market outcomes, specifically unemployment and private employment. In particular, does public hiring increase (“crowd in”) private employment or decrease (“crowd out”) private employment? …It is arguably the case that a private-sector job is more desirable than a public-sector job from a public policy point of view…there is evidence that a large government share in economic activity can be negative for long-term growth because of the distortionary effects of taxation, inefficient government spending due in part to rent-seeking or lower worker productivity, and the crowding out of private investment. …Crowding out could occur through a number of channels. Derived labor demand can be affected through crowding out of the product market, possibly via higher taxes, higher interest rates, and competition from state-owned enterprises. It can occur through the labor market, where higher wages, more job security, or a higher probability of finding a public-sector job can make an individual more likely to seek or wait for public-sector employment rather than search for or accept a job in the private sector… Finally, it can occur in the education market, where individuals seek qualifications appropriate for entering the public sector rather than skills needed for productive employment

As you can see, the authors sensibly consider both the direct and indirect effects of public employment.

Yes, hiring someone to be a bureaucrat obviously means that person is employed, but it also means that resources are being diverted to government.

And that imposes costs on the economy’s productive sector.

So the real question is the net impact.

In their study for the IMF, the authors cite other academic research suggesting that government employment crowds out (i.e., reduces) private employment.

…there is prior evidence that crowding-out effects are sufficiently large to increase unemployment in a number of advanced countries. However, there has hitherto not been a thorough investigation of how public employment affects labor market outcomes in developing countries. We fill this gap in the literature by investigating the effects of public employment on both private employment and on unemployment. An important part of our contribution lies in the assembly of the dataset to expand the number of non-OECD countries… The most related and relevant work to this paper is by Algan et al. (2002), who explore the consequences of public-sector employment for labor market performance. Using pooled cross-section and annual time-series data for 17 OECD countries from 1960 to 2000, they run regressions of the unemployment rate and/or the private-sector employment rate on the public-sector employment rate. Empirical evidence from the employment equation suggests that the creation of 100 public jobs crowds out 150 private-sector jobs.

In the study, the authors look at two main measures of public sector employment.

And, as you can see in Figure 4, they look at data for nations in different regions.

They wisely utilize the broader measure of public employment, which includes the people employed by state-owned enterprises.

We have collected data for up to 194 countries over the period 1988–2011. …Our contribution to the literature includes the assembly of data on public and private employment and other indicators for a wide range of developing and advanced countries. …Definitions of “public sector” are different across countries and organizations, so we choose two definitions and generate corresponding public employment datasets, namely a “narrow” measure also referred to as “public administration” and a “broad” measure. …This dataset includes not only governmental agencies but also state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We call this the ‘broad’ measure of public employment, preserving the term ‘public sector’.

In Figure 7, they use a scatter diagram to show some of the data.

The diagram on the left is most relevant since it shows that private employment (vertical axis) declines as government jobs (horizontal axis) increase.

And when they do the statistical analysis, we get confirmation that government jobs displace employment in the economy’s productive sector.

…all coefficients indicate a very strong negative relationship between public- and private-sector employment rates. For example, 100 new public jobs crowd out 98 private job… Taken together with the unemployment results, public employment just about fully crowds out private-sector employment regardless of the definition, such that a rise in government hiring would be offset by decreases in private employment… Regressions of unemployment on public employment and of private employment on public employment, each of which is based on two definitions of public employment, find robust evidence that public employment crowds out private employment. …Public-sector hiring: (i) does not reduce unemployment, (ii) increases the fiscal burden, and (iii) inhibits long-term growth through reductions in private-sector employment. Together, this would imply that public hiring is detrimental to long term fiscal sustainability.

The final part of the above excerpt is critical.

In addition to not increasing overall employment, government jobs also increase the fiscal burden of government and undermine long-run growth.

So the long-term damage is even greater than the short-run damage.

P.S. The IMF isn’t the only international bureaucracy to conclude that government employment is bad for overall prosperity. A few years ago, I shared research from the European Central Bank which also showed negative macroeconomic consequences from costly bureaucracy.

P.P.S. While I’m usually critical of the IMF because it has a statist policy agenda, it’s not uncommon for the professional economists who work there to produce good research. In the past, I’ve highlight some very good IMF studies on topics such as spending caps, the size of government, taxes and business vitality, fiscal decentralization, the Laffer Curve, and class-warfare taxation.

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Should Government Bureaucracies Be Relocated Outside the Beltway?

An utterly depressing statistic is that the Washington, D.C.-area is now the richest region of the country.

At the risk of understatement, that wealth is largely unearned. It’s mostly a reflection of overpaid bureaucrats, greedy politicians, fat-cat lobbyists, beltway-bandit contractors, and other insiders who have their snouts buried in the federal trough.

I’m not a fan of class warfare, but there’s one exception: It’s galling that lower-income and middle-class taxpayers across the nation are subsidizing a gilded class in Washington.

That’s the type of redistribution that should be ended first.

So what can be done to address this inequity? Is there an approach that will curtail D.C.’s entitled, self-aggrandizing elite?

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Terry Wanzek, a state legislator from North Dakota, makes the case for new legislation that would shift government bureaucracies from Washington to the hinterland.

The Hawley-Blackburn bill calls for moving Agriculture and its more than 100,000 employees to Missouri. Other departments would go elsewhere: Commerce to Pennsylvania, Education to Tennessee, Energy to Kentucky, Health and Human Services to Indiana, Housing and Urban Development to Ohio, Interior to New Mexico, Labor to West Virginia, Transportation to Michigan, and Veterans Affairs to South Carolina. …The bill’s sponsors pitch their legislation as an employment program…but the main benefit would come from putting regulators into proximity with the people whose lives and businesses they regulate. …This would be a government “of the people”—something that is lacking as the administrative state inexorably grows in Washington, D.C.

This is an interesting proposal. But does that mean it’s a good idea?

Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is not overly impressed.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, he opines that it would backfire.

The bill’s sponsors, Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, would send the Agriculture and Education departments to their respective states. Eight other federal departments and most nondepartment agencies would also be dispersed throughout the land, often to places intended to suit their functions—for example, the Transportation Department would be sent to Michigan to be near the auto industry. …The only understandable part of this plan is conservatives’ visceral desire for revenge. People across the county can see the massive houses Washington bureaucrats and consultants occupy, walled off in single-party strongholds like Fairfax, Va. …But since when did Republicans accept the idea that the federal government ought to be a premier job creator? The GOP insisted for decades that many New Deal agencies and subsequent government bodies should never have been created in the first place, and that their red tape and interference is a dominant cause of economic inefficiency. …It will be impossible to uproot or at least prune the bureaucracy once its seeds are spread to every state. …Would legislators from the “lucky” chosen states ever have the gumption to slash funding from agencies that employ thousands of their constituents and pay them generously? The HIRE Act would tie Middle America inextricably to big progressive government, remaking America in Washington’s image.

So who is right?

I wrote about this topic back in 2016.

Part of me liked the idea, though mostly for punitive reasons.

…it wouldn’t be a bad idea. …locate some bureaucracies in the dodgy parts of cities such as Detroit. Especially departments such as HUD and HHS since they helped cause the economic misery in inner cities. And the Department of Education could be placed somewhere like Newark where government-run schools are such awful failures.

But I concluded it would be a bad idea.

Shouldn’t we focus on shutting down counterproductive bureaucracies rather than moving them? …If we move bureaucracies (whether they are necessary ones or useless ones), does that create the risk of giving other parts of the nation a “public-choice” incentive to lobby for big government since they’ll be recipients of federal largesse? Will we simply get duplication, meaning a new bureaucracy somewhere in America without ever really getting rid of the original bureaucracy in Washington, DC?

So I’m siding with Mr. Crews over Mr. Wanzek.

P.S. I’ve already identified bureaucracies that should be terminated.

• Get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• Shut down the Department of Agriculture.
• Eliminate the Department of Transportation.
• Abolish the Department of Education.
• Pull the plug on the Department of Energy.
• Phase out the Department of Veterans Affairs.
• Privatize the Postal Service.
• Dump the Small Business Administration.

Looking at this list, it reminds me that I need to make the case for the abolition of some other bureaucracies.

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An Oakland Cop Joins the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame

The Bureaucrat Hall of Fame recognizes government employees who go above and beyond the call of duty in terms of getting over-paid or being under-worked.

Or both.

Adding insult to injury, many recipients of this award are employed by bureaucracies that shouldn’t even exist.

Today we’re going to look at the Oakland police department, which is a part of the government that presumably should exist (though Camden, NJ, shows that maybe we shouldn’t make that assumption).

The Oakland PD is notorious for being over-compensated, but one cop stands out.

Eric Boehm of Reason has the sordid details.

When Oakland, California, police officers are needed at Golden State Warriors basketball games and other special events, Malcolm Miller is the officer in charge of making those assignments. Often, he assigns himself. As a result, Miller has become one of the highest paid officers in the department. He’s earned nearly $2.5 million over the past five years—most of it overtime pay—according to data collected by Transparent California, a watchdog group.

What a scam.

It’s highly likely that Mr. Miller is a basketball fan, so he’s figured out a great racket.

He basically gets a big pile of money for going to the games.

He and his colleagues are making out like bandits.

…he’s hardly the only officer to take advantage of poor oversight and a general lack of accountability. According to the audit, 217 officers worked roughly 520 hours of overtime last year, helping to cost the department more than $30 million in overtime pay—about twice as much as had been budgeted. Over the past four years, overtime expenditures have ranged from $28 million to $31 million. Proper documentation of overtime work was lacking in 83 percent of cases, the auditors found.

Though Officer Miller might not be the worst of the group.

One officer was paid for more than 2,600 hours of overtime—equal to 108 days of round-the-clock work—in just a single year.

So how do cops get away with this scam?

Simple, they make sure to negotiate contracts that have sweetheart provisions that they can exploit.

And why does Oakland agree to such contracts?

Well, as Michael Ramirez illustrated, bureaucrat unions give lots of money to state and local politicians, and those politicians then conspire with the unions to give them contracts with the sweetheart provisions.

Let’s close by looking at an example of this kind of scam.

Perhaps the most stunning part of the audit is the explanation of a department-wide policy that allows Oakland cops to accrue 1.5 hours of “comp time” for every hour of overtime worked. When an officer cashes in that comp time and isn’t working, other officers have to work overtime to fill the gap. That creates a cascade of additional overtime pay—10 hours of overtime creates 15 hours of comp time, which some other cop has to work, earning 22.5 hours of comp time (if they’re also working overtime), and so on.

Here’s the accompanying illustration.

How ridiculous. Extra money for overtime, combined with being able to work fewer hours in the future. Which then gives other cops an opening to rack up more overtime pay.

Everyone wins…except for taxpayers.

P.S. Some bureaucrats earn admission to the Bureaucrats Hall of Fame by misbehaving. Often in very strange ways.

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Bureaucrat of the Year?

When I gave readers an opportunity to select their favorite political cartoonist back in 2013, they picked Michael Ramirez.

And I can understand, given the excellent options that I shared (here, here, here, and here).

But I now think I overlooked his true masterpiece, at least if salience is an issue. The cartoon he produced on politicians and bureaucrat unions perfectly identifies the problem that has produced gaping fiscal shortfalls in so many states and communities.

Simply stated, politicians and bureaucrats have figured out how to gang up against taxpayers.

The Chicago Tribune recently opined on this horrific example.

…a controversial state law…allowed a lobbyist for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, David Piccioli, to become certified as a substitute teacher in December 2006 by working one day at a Springfield elementary school — and to buy pension credit for his 10 previous years working as a lobbyist. That sweet deal qualified him for a pension windfall from a teachers retirement fund that as of late 2018 carried an unfunded liability of more than $75 billion-with-a-B. Because he also draws a pension from a previous job as a House Democratic aide, Piccioli’s total pension income now rises to nearly $100,000.

Sadly, Illinois courts routinely acquiesce to this kind of scam.

…the court upheld a dubious loophole that allowed government employees who left those jobs to work for their union in the private sector to still qualify for a public pension — with payouts based on their much higher salaries in their union roles. One example: Former Chicago labor boss Dennis Gannon, who started out working for the city, was able to retire at age 50 with a city pension based on his union salary of at least $240,000. The Supreme Court upheld that arrangement too.

Perhaps those actually were correct legal decisions.

But, if so, that underscores my original point about politicians and bureaucrat union working together to fleece taxpayers.

This story underscores the unfairness of a system that provides much higher levels of compensation for government bureaucrats compared to those toiling in the economy’s productive sector.

But it also can be seen as a Exhibit A for why Illinois is a fiscal black hole. Which is, of course, why the state’s politicians are so anxious and determined to get rid of the state’s flat tax.

And this explains why productive people are leaving.

Needless to say, this won’t end well.

P.S. I’m not going to put Mr. Piccioli in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame. That high honor is reserved for people who actually had government jobs for longer than one day (such as the Philadelphia bureaucrat who “earned” a $50,000 annual pension after being employed for just 2-1/2 years. As a consolation prize, I will instead offer him up as a potential candidate for Bureaucrat of the Year.

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The World’s Most Depressing Tweet

I periodically will make use of “most depressing” in the title of a column when sharing bad news.

And new data from the Census Bureau definitely qualifies as bad news. It confirms what I’ve written about how the Washington region has become the richest part of America.

But the D.C. area didn’t become wealthy by producing value. Instead, it’s rolling in money because of overpaid bureaucrats, fat-cat lobbyists, sleazy politicians, beltway-bandit contractors, and other grifters who have figured out how to hitch a ride on the federal gravy train.

Anyhow, here’s a tweet with the bad news (at least if you’re a serf elsewhere in America who is paying taxes to keep Washington fat and happy).

Highest counties by median household income (2013-2017):
-Loudoun County, Va.
-Fairfax County, Va.
-Howard County, Md.
-Falls Church City, Va.
-Arlington County, Va. https://t.co/1AA3U00xBA #ACSdata

— U.S. Census Bureau (@uscensusbureau) December 6, 2018

Most of my friends who work for the federal government privately will admit that they are very fortunate.

But when I run into someone who denies that bureaucrats get above-market compensation, I simply share this data from the Labor Department. That usually shuts them up.

By the way, there’s strong evidence from the European Central Bank that overpaid bureaucrats have a negative impact on macroeconomic performance.

And the World Bank has produced a study showing how bureaucrats manipulate the political process.

…public sector workers are not just simply implementers of policies designed by the politicians in charge of supervising them — so called agents and principals, respectively. Public sector workers can have the power to influence whether politicians are elected, thereby influencing whether policies to improve service delivery are adopted and how they are implemented, if at all. This has implications for the quality of public services: if the main purpose of the relationship between politicians and public servants is not to deliver quality public services, but rather to share rents accruing from public office, then service delivery outcomes are likely to be poor.

Here’s my video explaining how bureaucrats are overpaid. It was filmed in 2010, so many of the numbers are now out-dated, but the arguments are just as strong today as they were back then.

But keep in mind that the bureaucracy is only one piece of the puzzle.

The D.C. metropolitan region is unjustly rich because of everyone else who has figured out how to divert taxpayer money into their pockets. That includes disgusting examples of Democrat sleaze and Republican sleaze.

Simply stated, Washington is riddled with rampant corruption as insiders get rich at our expense. No wonder many of them object to my license plate!

P.S. Here’s some data comparing the size and cost of bureaucracy in various nations.

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Voluntary Quit Rates Confirm that Federal Bureaucrats Are Overpaid

President Trump has proposed a one-year pay freeze for federal bureaucrats, which has reinvigorated the debate over whether compensation levels for the civil service are too lavish.

The Washington Post opines this is nothing but “government bashing,” but this chart from my former colleague Chris Edwards should be more than enough evidence to show that federal bureaucrats have a big advantage over workers in the economy’s productive sector.

And there is plenty of additional evidence that federal employment is very attractive. For instance, it’s just about impossible to get fired from a bureaucracy.

Though defenders of the civil service sometimes make the preposterous claim that nobody gets fired because bureaucrats are such good employees.

The low rate at which federal employees are fired for poor performance doesn’t prove the government accepts it but instead “could actually be a positive sign,”… A report from the Merit Systems Protection Board in effect responds to members of Congress and others who contend that federal managers don’t care, or don’t dare, to take disciplinary action because of civil service protections. “…If the agency is successful in preventing poor performance…, a small number of performance-based removals could actually be a positive sign,” MSPB said. …Of the 2.1 million federal employees in a government database…, about 10,000 are fired for either poor performance or misconduct each year. …That low rate of firing has been cited in proposals to force agencies to take action… Individual employees, too, commonly express dissatisfaction with how agencies handle poor performers among their co-workers.

I have to confess that my jaw dropped when I read this article. Maybe we should ask veterans whether they think all federal bureaucrats do a good job?

Or we can ask non-profit groups whether they think IRS bureaucrats are top-quality workers? Or ask anyone who has ever tried to navigate the federal government?

We also know that the counties where most federal bureaucrats reside are now the richest region of the entire nation.

The three richest counties in the United States with populations of 65,000 or more, when measured by their 2016 median household incomes, were all suburbs of Washington, D.C., according to data released today by the Census Bureau. Eight of the 20 wealthiest counties with populations of 65,000 or more were also suburbs of Washington, D.C.–as were 10 of the top 25. …With Falls Church City included in the 2015 data, the nation’s four wealthiest counties were D.C. suburbs.

To be fair, this data is also driven by all the high-paid lobbyists. contracts, consultants, and others who have their snouts buried in the federal trough. So the incredible wealth of the DC region is really an argument for shrinking the size and scope of the federal government.

But the bureaucracy is part of the problem.

Interestingly, even the Congressional Budget Office concluded that bureaucrats are overpaid. And CBO almost certainly understated the gap, as noted in congressional testimony.

The CBO report’s headline figure is that, on average, federal salaries and benefits are 17 percent above private-sector levels. … I would consider the CBO’s reported federal compensation premium to be on the low end… when I analyze federal employee wages using the methodology that the progressive-leaning Economic Policy Institute has used in numerous studies of state and local government salaries, I find an average federal salary premium of not 2 percent but of about 14 percent. … The CBO chose to value federal employees’ pension benefits using a 5 percent discount rate. Using that discount rate, the federal employee retirement package was found to be substantially more generous than is received by comparable private-sector employees. But…corporate pensions are not nearly as safe as federal pensions, as witnessed by pending benefit reductions for “multiemployer” defined benefit plans. Valuing federal pension benefits using a lower discount rate to better reflect their safety would find a higher overall federal compensation premium.

Notwithstanding all this evidence, the unions representing bureaucrats nonetheless try to crank out numbers showing federal employees are underpaid.

To be sure, overall compensation levels don’t tell us everything. It is important to adjust for education, skills, and other factors.

Which is why the most useful, powerful, and revealing data in this debate is produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures voluntary quit rates by industry. If there is a lot of turnover in a sector of the economy, that suggests workers are underpaid. But if there are very few voluntary departures, that suggests workers in that part of the economy are overpaid.

And the numbers from BLS clearly show that federal bureaucrats are far less likely to leave their positions when compared to employees in the private sector.

This five-fold gap is staggering. I have lots of friends who work for the federal government. Most privately confess that they know that are making out like bandits. I think I’ll send this chart to the few holdouts.

By the way, I shared the numbers about quit rates for state and local bureaucrats back in 2011. Same story, though the compensation gap isn’t quite as large and may be driven mostly by unfunded fringe benefits.

P.S. I’m much more interested in shrinking government rather than shrinking pay levels. The correct pay for bureaucrats at the Departments of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Energy, and Agriculture is zero. Why? Because they bureaucracies shouldn’t exist.

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Bureaucrat Hall of Fame Contest

When I first created the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame, I confess that my standards were a bit slack. I awarded membership to government workers that are grossly overpaid (see here and here, for instance), but otherwise didn’t really do anything special to merit awards.

In recent years, I’ve been more judicious. I only give the “honor” to bureaucrats who go above and beyond the call of duty.

• A new Jersey bureaucrat got almost $250,000 per year for simultaneously holding six different government jobs.
• Figuratively screwing taxpayers wasn’t good enough for a welfare bureaucrat in Pennsylvania.
• The civil servant at the Veterans Administration who overlooked deadly waiting lists but had…um…time on his hands for other things.

There’s even a foreign wing in the BHoF

• An Italian government doctor who worked only 15 days in a nine-year period.
• A bureaucrat in India’s Public Works Department stopped showing up for work in 1990 and didn’t get fired until 2014.
• In France (gee, what a surprise), a bureaucrat was provided a car and driver by taxpayers, yet still managed to run up nearly $150-per-day of taxi cab expenses.

We’re going to expand our list today, but by using a different approach. We’re going to have a poll so you can decide which bureaucrat is most worthy.

Is Darryl De Sousa the most deserving?

Federal prosecutors have charged Baltimore Police Commissioner Darryl De Sousa with three misdemeanor counts of failing to file federal taxes… De Sousa, 53, willfully failed to file federal tax returns for 2013, 2014 and 2015 despite having been a salaried employee of the Police Department in those years, prosecutors said Thursday. …“There is no excuse for my failure to fulfill my obligations as a citizen and public official,” he said in a statement. “My only explanation is that I failed to sufficiently prioritize my personal affairs.” …Mayor Catherine Pugh expressed “full confidence” in De Sousa. …De Sousa earned $93,104 in 2013, when he is first accused of failing to file taxes. He earned $101,985 in 2014 and $127,089 in 2015. …The Police Department routinely suspends with pay officers accused of a misdemeanors pending the outcome of the case. De Sousa remained on the job Thursday. He currently earns a salary of $210,000 a year.

Does Thomas Tramaglini merit this award?

The Kenilworth school superintendent charged Monday with defecating in public was caught in the act at the Holmdel High School football field and track after surveillance was set up due to human feces being found “on a daily basis,” police said. Thomas Tramaglini, 42, …was running at the track on the athletic fields at 5:50 a.m. before he was arrested. Track coaches and staff at Holmdel High School told the district’s resource officer that they found human feces on or near the football field and track daily… Tramaglini is also charged with lewdness and littering.

Should Donn Thompson win the prize?

Los Angeles firefighter Donn Thompson had a busy year in 2017. If his pay stubs are to be believed, he literally never stopped working. Data obtained by Transparent California…show that Thompson pulled down $300,000 in overtime pay during 2017, on top of his $92,000 salary. Over the past four years, Thompson has earned more than $1 million in overtime… To earn that much in overtime pay, Thompson would have had to work more hours than actually exist in a single year. Either the highly paid firefighter found a way to stretch the space-time continuum or something fishy is going on. …earning $302,000 at a rate of $47.40 per hour would require working more than 6,370 hours. Add that to the 2,912 hours he worked as a salaried employee, and you get more than 9,280 hours worked, despite the fact that there are only 8,760 hours in a year. …Thompson…might very well be the highest paid firefighter in American history. …During 2017, the Los Angeles Fire Department had 512 employees who cashed in with at least $100,000 in overtime pay… Thompson was one of 26 employees to get at least $200,000 in overtime pay.

This is a tough contest.

In Baltimore, I suspect ordinary people don’t get a mulligan when they commit a crime, so Mr. De Sousa’s kid-glove treatment stands out. I’m also impressed (in a bad way) that his salary soared from $93K to $210K in just five years. Nice work if you can get it.

On the other hand, Mr. Tramaglini has…um…layed down a special type of marker. Was he inspired by fellow bureaucrats from the Postal Service and Environmental Protection Agency?

But let’s not forget Mr. Thompson. Claiming to have worked more hours than actually exist is rather extraordinary. Though ripping off taxpayers apparently is a tradition for firefighters, particularly in California.

As they say in Chicago, vote early and vote often.

If you like making your opinion heard, my most recent poll was about which state will be the first to suffer political collapse. And my favorite poll was to pick the best political cartoonist.

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More Pay for Unionized Teachers Is the Wrong Solution to the Wrong Problem

Education spending and teacher pay has become a big issue in certain states.

Unfortunately, not for the right reason. In an ideal world, taxpayers would be demanding systemic reform because government schools are getting record amounts of money (higher than any other nation on a per-student basis) while producing sub-par results.

Instead, we live in a surreal parallel universe where teacher unions are pushing a narrative that taxpayers should cough up more money because teachers supposedly are underpaid.

Let’s look at the data.

An article in City Journal debunks the claim that teachers are underpaid.

…protests across the country have reinforced the perception that public school teachers are dramatically underpaid. They’re not: the average teacher already enjoys market-level wages plus retirement benefits vastly exceeding those of private-sector workers. Across-the-board salary increases, such as those enacted in Arizona, West Virginia, and Kentucky, are the wrong solution to a non-problem. …At the lowest skill levels—a GS-6 on the federal scale—teachers earn salaries about 26 percent higher than similar white-collar workers. …The average public school teaching position rated an 8.8 on the federal GS scale. After adjustment to reflect the time that teachers work outside the formal school day, the BLS data show that public school teachers on average receive salaries about 8 percent above similar private-sector jobs. …Data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation show that teachers who change to non-teaching jobs take an average salary cut of about 3 percent. Studies using administrative records in Florida, Missouri, Georgia, and Montana showed similar results. …public-employee retirement and health benefits are bleeding dry state and local budgets. Neither the public nor teachers fully appreciates the costs of these programs. We forget the value of benefits when considering how teacher pay compares with private-sector work.

And keep in mind those lavish pensions are woefully underfunded, so taxpayers are paying too much now and they’ll have to pay even more in the future.

But I think the key factoid from the above article is that teachers take a pay cut, on average, when they leave the profession. Along with the “JOLTS” data, that’s real-world evidence that teachers are getting paid more than counterparts in the economy’s productive sector.

Allysia Finley of the Wall Street Journal also punctures the false claims of the union bosses.

Teachers unions… They’re using misleading statistics… They conflate school funding and state education spending. In Oklahoma, unions proclaimed that per pupil school spending fell by 28.2% over the past decade. That refers to the inflation-adjusted state’s general funding formula. But total per pupil outlays increased by 16% in nominal terms between 2006 and 2016… They use elevated spending baselines. Teachers unions nearly always compare school spending and teacher salaries today with peak levels before the great recession, which were inflated like housing prices. Between 2000 and 2009, average per pupil spending across the country increased 52%…per pupil spending ticked up by 7.5% between 2012 and 2015. School spending growth…increased faster than the consumer price index. …They don’t account for other forms of compensation. Since 2000, per pupil spending on employee benefits has doubled. …pensions and health benefits are the fastest-growing expenses for many school districts, and most of the money goes to retired teachers. …the unions are lying with statistics.

In a column for the Denver Post, a parent showed that his state’s teachers are getting above-average compensation.

Teachers are…mostly paid via a union “salary schedule,” meaning they get pay raises based on only two factors: the number of college degrees and certificates they earn, and how many years they’ve been on the job. That makes a pretty lousy incentive structure… We keep hearing Colorado is 49th in the country for educational spending. That lie is repeated so often it becomes legend. Funding for Colorado schools are split between the local school district and the state. So, if you compare only the state funding part to states that have no local match, yep, ours looks low. But when you look at total funding, which can be counted in different ways, the picture doesn’t look so dire. …According to the Colorado Department of Education, the average salary for teachers here is $52,728. But that’s only one piece of the compensation. The school year is about 180 days, or 36 weeks. So, the pay is $1,465 for every week a teacher is teaching. Vacation time? Well, 52 weeks in a year, minus 36 weeks in the classroom, that’s 16 weeks off, roughly 4 months! Compare that to someone who only gets 2 weeks off but still gets paid $1,465 a week when working, that’s the equivalent of $73,233. And let’s count the present-cost value of their retirement benefits. …Not bad for a system where you can retire at 58.

Let’s close with some excerpts from Jason Riley’s column in the Wall Street Journal.

The nation’s K-12 schools are…turning into hotbeds of political activism. …teachers are demanding higher pay, better benefits and more education funding overall. …The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have thousands of state and local affiliates. They are among the richest and best-organized pressure groups in the country. And they are on a roll. That’s good news for their members but not necessarily for children, parents and taxpayers. …Teachers unions support work rules that prevent the most capable teachers from being sent to low-performing schools, that shield teachers from meaningful evaluations, and that require instructors to be laid off based on seniority instead of performance. …those rules do nothing to address the needs of students. …politicians love to highlight education outlays. It helps them win votes and ward off union agitators. But the connection between school spending and educational outcomes is tenuous. …total spending per pupil at the state level rose, on average, by an inflation-adjusted 18%. During this period, it fell in Arizona… Yet on 2015 federal standardized exams, Arizona made more progress than any other state. New York, by contrast, boasts the highest spending per pupil and teacher pay in the country, but you wouldn’t know it from the test results.

For what it’s worth, the final few sentences in the above excerpt should be main issue being discussed in state capitals. Lawmakers should be asking why more and more money never produces better outcomes.

But that’s really not the problem. It’s the symptom of the problem.

Our primary challenge in education is that we rely on government monopolies that are captured by special interests. We need school choice so that competitive forces can be unleashed to generate better results. There’s strong evidence that choice produces good outcomes in the limited instances where it is allowed in the United States.

And in that kind of system, we may actually wind up with better teachers that are paid just as much. Or maybe even more.

P.S. There’s also strong evidence for school choice from nations such as Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.

P.P.S. Needless to say, eliminating the Department of Education is part of the solution.

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Administrative Law Is the Real “Deep State”

I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories. When people ask me whether there is some sinister, behind-the-scenes cabal running Washington, I tell them that petty corruption, self interest, and “public choice” are much better explanations for the nonsensical policies being imposed on the country.

So you won’t be surprised that rhetoric about the “deep state” rubs me the wrong way. If the term simply was used to describe D.C.’s bloated, self-interested, and left-leaning bureaucracies, that would be okay. But is seems that the phase also implies some sort of secret master plan on the part of shadowy insiders.

To be blunt, the people in Washington don’t have the competence to design, implement, and enforce any type of master plan. Yes, we have a Leviathan state, but it’s much more accurate to think of Uncle Sam as a covetous, obese, and blundering oaf (as illustrated by my collection of cartoons).

That being said, that oaf is not a friend of liberty, as explained in an article published by the Federalist.

…to make a government job more like the ones the rest of us have will require the president and Congress to undo more than a century of misguided, anti-democratic, and unconstitutional laws governing the civil service. …the bulk of the civil service—2.8 million bureaucrats—has become a permanent class of powerbrokers, totally unaccountable to the winds of democratic change. …incompetence and corruption are the least of the problems with the modern civil service. With 95-99 percent of political donations from government employees going to Hillary Clinton in the last election, it looks less like a system of apolitical administrators and more like an arm of the Democratic Party. …Civil service protections…have created a system that grows government and advances left-wing causes regardless of who the people elect.

Moreover, there is a structural feature of the Washington bureaucracy that gives it dangerous powers.

John Tierney’s column in the Wall Street Journal explains the problem of the “administrative state.”

What’s the greatest threat to liberty in America? …the enormous rogue beast known as the administrative state. Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government… Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution… Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar…says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School… “The government can choose to…use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law…” In volume and complexity, the edicts from federal agencies exceed the laws passed by Congress by orders of magnitude. “The administrative state has become the government’s predominant mode of contact with citizens,” Mr. Hamburger says. …“The framers of the Constitution were very clear about this,” Mr. Hamburger says…”Congress cannot delegate the legislative powers to an agency, just as judges cannot delegate their power to an agency.”

George Will elaborates, noting that “administrative law” is an affront to the Constitution’s principle of “rival branches.”

…the administrative state distorts the United States’ constitutional architecture…Clarence Thomas…is urging the judicial branch to limit the legislative branch’s practice of delegating its power to the executive branch. …This subject is central to today’s argument between constitutionalists and progressives. …Today, if Congress provides “a minimal degree of specificity” in the instructions it gives to the executive, the court, Thomas says, abandons “all pretense of enforcing a qualitative distinction between legislative and executive power.” …the principles Thomas has articulated “attack the very existence of the modern administrative state.” This state, so inimical to conservatism’s aspiration for government limited by a constitutional structure of rival branches… Woodrow Wilson…became the first president to criticize America’s founding, regretted the separation of powers because he thought modern government required a clerisy of unfettered administrators. …Today we are governed by Wilson’s clerisy, but it does not deliver what is supposed to justify the overthrow of James Madison’s constitutional system — efficient, admirable government.

Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute adds some cogent analysis.

Although the Constitution places the federal legislative power in Congress, it is now increasingly — and alarmingly — flowing to administrative agencies that, unlike Congress, are not directly accountable to the public affected by their decisions. Unless we can find a solution to this problem—a way to curb and cabin the discretionary power of administrative agencies —decentralization and individual self-determination will eventually be brought to an end. …The framers believed that the tripartite structure of the federal government would be enough to prevent any one of the three branches from consolidating the power of government and becoming a danger to liberty. But with the growth of the administrative state, we may now be seeing exactly the consolidation of powers that Madison feared. …the judicial branch is supposed to be the final interpreter of the Constitution and thus the objective protector of the framework the Constitution ordains. But unfortunately, modern courts have generally failed to perform this role… America is an exceptional country in part because its constitutional framework has, until relatively recently, limited the government’s ability to centralize its control and restrain the nation’s diversity. If we are to avoid a dramatic over-centralization of power, the growth of the administrative state must be restrained.

In an article for National Review, Stanley Kurtz delves into the topic.

the gist of the growing conservative critique of the administrative state…focuses on a runaway bureaucracy’s threat to constitutional government. Congress has improperly delegated much of its law-making power to bureaucrats, who in turn have abusively expanded this authority. The courts, for their part, have turned a blind eye to the administrative power-grab. Meanwhile, agencies staffed by unelected bureaucrats now operate de facto courts. In effect, these agencies negate the separation of powers by simultaneously exercising legislative, executive, and judicial functions, the very definition of authoritarian rule. …governors and state legislators can be unaware of policy end-runs imposed by federal agreements with a state’s own bureaucrats. At both the state and federal levels, then, bureaucracy has broken loose and effectively turned into a national fourth branch of government. …The Founders designed our federalist system to secure liberty by dividing and disbursing power, and by ensuring that local and state governments would remain more accountable to citizens than a distant federal government ever could. In fundamental ways, however, the modern practice of conditioning federal grants on state acceptance of federal dictates undermines the Founders’ intent. …

Robert Gebelhoff of the Washington Post points out that this fight has major implications.

One of the legal issues that’s less often discussed is the role that the next Supreme Court justice will play in conservatives’ long-running legal fight to limit the size of the federal government. For decades, conservatives on the bench have been losing that war, giving way to a system of administrative law that is written, for the most part, by bureaucratic agencies. …it’s a really big deal. Over the past half century, agencies have exploded in size and power, so this debate really is about how much power the federal government should have. …Conservatives, fearful that bureaucracies are becoming an unchecked “fourth branch of government,” have decried agency deference. Just last month, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the doctrine “has metastasized,” as if it were a cancer. And back in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts warned of the “danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state…” Both Roberts and Thomas frame the issue as a threat to the separation of powers: We’re letting agencies in the executive branch dip into the powers reserved for the judicial and legislative branches. …And by allowing bureaucrats the ability to define the scope of their own jurisdiction, we let them answer questions meant to be left up to the courts. This, they argue, is at odds with the Constitution. …Conservatives fearing a powerful bureaucratic state have few legal weapons to fight it. The future of a small-government Supreme Court is bleak, and the march toward greater agency control of the law will probably continue forward.

I’ll close with some recent polling data about the “deep state” from Monmouth University.

Here’s a question asking whether there’s a conspiratorial version of the “deep state.”

I’m not sure what to think of the answers.

I like people to be suspicious of the federal government. But I’d much prefer them to be concerned because they’re reading my daily columns, not because they think there’s a sinister plot.

I prefer the answers to this next question. Most people presumably have never heard of “administrative law” or the “administrative state,” but they do have a healthy skepticism of bureaucratic rule.

Most of the authors cited today correctly want federal judges to fix the problem by limiting the power of bureaucrats to make and enforce law.

That would be desirable, but I’d go much further. We should eliminate almost all of the agencies, programs, and departments that clutter Washington. Then the problem of the administrative state automatically disappears.

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Bureaucrats Behaving Badly

Time for a confession.

I routinely mock bureaucrats, but I don’t really think they are any worse than other people. Indeed, I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who work for various levels of government and they are fundamentally decent people.

The real problem is that bureaucracies create bad incentives. So even people who are generally good will be tempted to exploit rules that reward bad behavior.

And some of these folks, operating in systems with bad incentives, will morph into bad people. Heck, some of them are so awful that I elect them to the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

But it’s also important to recognize other bureaucrats – as well as the perverse rules that encourage their bad actions.

Let’s start with a cop in New Jersey who went above and beyond the call of duty, at least if the call of duty involves ripping off taxpayers.

…former Police Chief Philip Zacche…could spend the first decade of his retirement in federal prison after he admitted to stealing $31,713 from an agency that serves the city’s neediest families. Federal prosecutors said Friday that Zacche filled out phony time sheets to get paid for security work that he never performed for the Jersey City Housing Authority. …As a member of the department’s brass, Zacche pulled a six-figure salary before overtime. He earned even more by working an off-duty part-time gig as a security officer for the Authority’s Marion Gardens housing development. When he retired in June, city taxpayers had to cut Zacche a check for $512,620 to compensate him for 450 unused comp and vacation days. The 61-year-old Manalapan resident is now set to collect a pension of at least $11,946 every month for the rest of his life.

That’s a pension of more than $140,000 per year. And he gets it well before age 65. No wonder New Jersey is a fiscal mess.

Let’s also highlight a senior federal bureaucrat who specialized in exploiting immigrants to steal money.

A chief counsel at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has admitted stealing immigrants’ identities to defraud banks. Raphael Sanchez, 44, forged identity documents on his government computer to open bank accounts and credit cards in the names of seven immigrants. He racked up more than $190,000 (£135,000) in personal loans, transferred funds and card-spending during the four-year scam. …He claimed three were dependent relatives on his tax returns for 2014 to 2016. …He resigned from his role at the ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor after his crimes came to light.

I’m almost impressed by this guy’s depravity. Not only did he steal identities, but he even listed some of the victims as dependents on his tax return. That’s real chutzpah!

And notice that theft and fraud apparently are not enough to get a bureaucrat fired. Instead, he resigned.

And since we’re on the topic of bureaucrats doing bad things and not getting fired, we may as well note that the guy who sent the false alert in Hawaii is still getting checks from the taxpayers he terrified.

The worker who sent a false missile alert to Hawaiian residents on Saturday has reportedly been reassigned. The civil defence employee has been moved to another role, but not fired, according to multiplemedia reports. In a press conference on Saturday, the head of Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency, Vern Miyagi, said the worker “feels terrible.” …The Post also confirmed that there are no plans to fire the employee.

Here’s a fourth example, dealing with a former Obama appointee who was unmasked for screwing taxpayers.

Vikrum Aiyer liked to commute to his government job by taxi. On at least 130 occasions over two years — the majority during a four-month stretch in 2016 — the then-chief of staff for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office called a taxi to pick him up near his home in the District. He was chauffeured across the Potomac River 10 miles or so to the agency’s headquarters in downtown Alexandria. And then…Aiyer billed the government for each ride. To escape notice, Aiyer impersonated current and former high-level agency officials, writing their names on cab receipts and vouchers he submitted to the taxi company, which then billed the government, investigators found. …Aiyer…released a statement saying he had a “misunderstanding of agency taxi rules.”

Hmmm…, I think I’ll go to the grocery store later today and slip a couple of steaks into my jacket. If I get caught leaving the store, I’ll say I had a “misunderstanding of store rules.”

The good news, at least if we’re grading on a curve, is that it only took about two years for the government to realize what was happening.

Aiyer’s unauthorized rides apparently went unnoticed for at least two years by budget officials who reviewed the invoices from Alexandria Yellow Cab, which has a contract to provide authorized taxi services for agency officials. The patent office paid the taxi company more than $4,000 for Aiyer’s rides, the report says. …For most of the cab rides, Aiyer was picked up on a street corner a tenth of a mile from his home, according to the report. But he wrote on the invoice that he was leaving from Commerce Department headquarters in downtown Washington. …investigators found…that he “used the Agency’s Cab Company account to facilitate his weekend social activity… Aiyer also racked up $15,000 in expenses on his government-issued credit card, charging for food and drink at local bars, clubs, coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores, dry cleaners and at least one liquor store, the report said. …The report says he also misstated his educational credentials on résumés he submitted to the Obama administration, claiming to have a postgraduate degree that he did not receive.

By the way, the article mentioned that Aiyer was a technology adviser for the White House. Did he advise on how to lie on your resume and how to get taxpayers to finance one’s social life?

A common problem in most of these stories is that politicians and bureaucrats conspire together to create rules that enable bad behavior.

Government employee unions, for instance, give lots of money to politicians and then sit down with those lawmakers to “negotiate” pay and benefit packages.

Needless to say, the interests of taxpayers don’t get represented. And that’s why many state and local governments are careening toward bankruptcy.

What’s especially discouraging is how these deals often include loopholes that are designed to be exploited.

For instance, the Los Angeles Times has a very depressing exposé showing how senior bureaucrats in the police and fire departments benefited from a scam allowing them to double dip. But not just double dip. They get extra compensation and oftentimes then don’t do any work.

When Capt. Tia Morris turned 50, after about three decades in the Los Angeles Police Department, she became eligible to retire with nearly 90% of her salary. But like many cops and firefighters in her position, the decision to keep working was a financial no-brainer, thanks to a program that allowed her to nearly double her pay by keeping her salary while also collecting her pension. A month after Morris entered the program, her husband, a detective, joined too. Their combined income for four years in the Deferred Retirement Option Plan was just shy of $2 million, city payroll records show. But the city didn’t benefit much from the Morrises’ experience: They both filed claims for carpal tunnel syndrome and other cumulative ailments about halfway through the program. She spent nearly two years on disability and sick leave; he missed more than two years… The couple spent at least some of their paid time off recovering at their condo in Cabo San Lucas.

Yes, I’m sure they were “recovering” at their luxurious place on the beach.

Just like the other bureaucrats who exploited the system.

The Morrises are far from alone. In fact, they’re among hundreds of Los Angeles police and firefighters who have turned the DROP program — which has doled out more than $1.6 billion in extra pension payments since its inception in 2002 — into an extended leave at nearly twice the pay… Former Police Capt. Daryl Russell, who collected $1.5 million over five years in the program, missed nearly three of those years because of pain from a bad knee, carpal tunnel and multiple injuries he claimed he suffered after falling out of an office chair. …Former firefighter Thomas Futterer, an avid runner who lives in Long Beach, hurt a knee “misstepping off the fire truck,” three weeks after entering DROP, according to city records. The injury kept him off the job for almost a full year.Less than two months after the knee injury, a Tom Futterer from Long Beach crossed the finish line of a half-marathon in Portland, Ore.

Yes, you read correctly. His knee supposedly was so damaged that he couldn’t work, but he nonetheless runs long-distance races.

I’m beginning to think that firefighters in big cities are the most cossetted of all bureaucrats. I now understand the hostility in this video.

Here’s some background on the DROP scam.

The idea of allowing retirement-age public employees to collect their pensions while working and receiving paychecks originated more than three decades ago in tiny East Baton Rouge, La. …the goal was the opposite: to discourage older employees from staying so long that they limited upward mobility for younger workers. And it had a two-year time limit. Since then, versions of the program have been adopted by dozens of states, counties and cities across the country. The details vary — some have short terms to encourage early retirement, others have long terms to retain experience — but the central appeal for employees is constant: two large checks instead of one. …former Mayor Richard Riordan…said: “Oh, yeah, that was a mistake…it’s total fraud.” …in recent years, a growing number of jurisdictions have abandoned or drastically scaled back DROP programs because the math doesn’t work. …Instead of saving money, or remaining “cost-neutral,” the programs lead to ballooning pension costs and accusations that employees are simply double-dipping.

Needless to say, the taxpayers who finance all this aren’t treated nearly as well as government insiders.

When most Los Angeles taxpayers reach the standard retirement age, 65, they face a stark choice: keep working and collecting their paychecks or quit and start collecting Social Security, which replaces only a small fraction of annual wages for most people.When city firefighters or police officers reach their retirement age, 50, the choices are far better. They can keep working for a paycheck, they can retire with up to 90% of their salary in pension and city-subsidized health insurance for life, or they can enter DROP. For many, the choice is easy. …they keep working and collecting their paychecks for up to five years while their pension checks are deposited into a special account. …the city guarantees 5% interest on the money in the account. The city also adds annual cost-of-living raises to the pension checks to make sure they keep pace with inflation.

Disgusting.

Let’s close by speculating whether Trump will do anything to fix this mess, at least the part that occurs on the federal level.

Some pro-Trump readers sent me this story from the Washington Post and suggested it shows that the President is making progress.

…a year into his takeover of Washington, President Trump has made a significant down payment on his campaign pledge to shrink the federal bureaucracy… By the end of September, all Cabinet departments except Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Interior had fewer permanent staff than when Trump took office in January — with most shedding many hundreds of employees, according to an analysis of federal personnel data… The falloff has been driven by an exodus of civil servants, a diminished corps of political appointees and an effective hiring freeze. …Federal workers fret that their jobs could be zeroed out amid buyouts and early retirement offers that already have prompted hundreds of their colleagues to leave, according to interviews with three dozen employees across the government. Many chafed as supervisors laid down new rules they said are aimed at holding poor performers and problem workers to account. …“Morale has never been lower,” said Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal workers at more than 30 agencies. “Government is making itself a lot less attractive as an employer.”……Agencies have told employees that they should no longer count on getting glowing reviews in their performance appraisals, according to staff in multiple offices, as has been the case for years. Housing and Urban Development managers, for example, are being evaluated for the first time on how effectively they address poor performers.

If I was planning to die in the next month, I would probably agree with readers that Trump made progress in this area.

But as I wrote last year, the only way to successfully shrink bureaucracy in the long run is to shrink government.

Yet Trump just capitulated to a budget deal that increases spending.

I’m willing to praise this President when he does good things, but his weak record on spending almost surely is going to translate into a bigger bureaucracy over time. Though I hope I’m wrong.

Here are two final additional passages from the story that deserve some attention. Starting with an honest bureaucrat.

…some civil servants said they welcome the focus on rooting out waste and holding federal workers to high standards. “Oftentimes we run on autopilot and continue to fund programs that don’t produce the results that were intended,” said Stephanie Valentine, a program analyst at the Education Department. “You can’t keep blindly spending because that’s what we’ve always done.”

And since I’ve previously contrasted Bill Clinton’s good record and Obama’s bad record, this passage is added confirmation of my findings.

Trump already has begun to reverse the growth of the Obama era, when the government added a total of 188,000 permanent employees, according to Office of Personnel Management data. …The last time federal employment dropped during a president’s first year, President Bill Clinton was in the White House.

It’s also worth noting that the bureaucracy didn’t contract during the big-government Bush years.

I’ll conclude by circling back to my original point. Most bureaucrats are no better or no worse than the rest of us. Given the perverse “public choice” incentives inherent in government, however, the good bureaucrats often are lured into bad behavior and the bad bureaucrats frequently become scam artists and crooks.

P.S. If my conclusion was too grim and pessimistic, you can cheer yourself up with another example of bureaucrat humor.

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Government Run Amok at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) must be anxious to get on my list of government bureaucracies that shouldn’t exist.

The bureaucrats have engaged in some really silly and petty behavior (such as confiscating Airsoft toy guns because they might be machine guns), and they’ve engaged in some behavior that is criminally stupid and dangerous (running guns to Mexican drug gangs as part of the “Fast and Furious” fiasco).

Now we have another example. Though it’s so bizarre that I’m not sure how to classify it. Basically, the bureaucrats created an illegal slush fund, and then used the money illegally.

The New York Times has been on top of this story. Here are excerpts from the latest report.

For seven years, agents at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives followed an unwritten policy: If you needed to buy something for one of your cases, do not bother asking Washington. Talk to agents in Bristol, Va., who controlled a multimillion-dollar account unrestricted by Congress or the bureaucracy. …thousands of pages of newly unsealed records reveal a widespread scheme — a highly unorthodox merger of an undercover law enforcement operation and a legitimate business. What began as a way to catch black-market cigarette dealers quickly transformed into a nearly untraceable A.T.F. slush fund that agents from around the country could tap. …One agent steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate, electronics and money to his church and his children’s sports teams, records show. …At least tens of millions of dollars moved through the account before it was shut down in 2013, but no one can say for sure how much. The government never tracked it.

Oh, by the way, the BATF was breaking the law.

Federal law prohibits mixing government and private money. The A.T.F. now acknowledges it can point to no legal justification for the scheme.

But you won’t be surprised to learn that there have been no consequences.

…no one was ever prosecuted, Congress was only recently notified, and the Justice Department tried for years to keep the records secret.

And it’s also worth noting that this is also a tax issue. As I’ve noted before, high tax rates encourage illegality.

Though cigarettes are available at any corner store, they are extraordinarily profitable to smuggle. That’s because taxes are high and every state sets its own rates. Virginia charges $3 per carton. New York charges $43.50. The simplest scheme — buying cigarettes in Virginia and selling them tax-free in New York — can generate tens of thousands of dollars in illicit cash. By some estimates, more than half of New York’s cigarettes come from the black market.

By the way, I can help but wonder why the federal government is engaging in all sorts of dodgy behavior to help enforce bad state tax laws. Yes, I realize the cigarettes are crossing state lines, but so what? The illegal (but not immoral) behavior occurs when an untaxed cigarette is sold inside the borders of, say, New York. Why should Washington get involved?

In other words, I like the fact that borders limit the power of government. It’s why I don’t like global schemes to undermine tax competition (why should Swiss banks be required to enforce bad U.S. tax law?), and it’s why I don’t like the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act (why should merchants in one state be required to enforce the sales taxes of other states?).

But I’m digressing.

Let’s get back to the Bureau’s misbehavior. Here’s some additional reporting from the U.K.-based Times.

A US government crime-fighting agency ran a secret bank account that its employees used to buy luxury cars, property and trips to casinos. Officers for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), charged with investigating smuggling and gun crimes, built up a slush fund worth tens of millions of dollars through illicit cigarette sales, ostensibly as part of an operation to catch traffickers. The scandal is the latest controversy to hit the agency, which has been criticised in recent years for lack of accountability and allowing the flow of guns and drugs to go unchecked. …Cash from the slush fund generated at an ATF field office in Bristol, Virginia, …funded activities such as a trip to Las Vegas, donations to agents’ children and the booking of a $21,000 suite at a Nascar race.

And what about the overall BATF bureaucracy? Well, it’s getting some unfavorable attention. Keep in mind that this scandal is on top of the “Fast and Furious” scandal of the Obama years.

The ATF has said that it has “implemented substantial enhancements to its policies, and has markedly improved leadership, training, communication, accountability and operational oversight”. Under the previous administration, it was widely derided for a botched weapons operation known as “Fast and Furious”. The agency allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel kingpins. But out of the 2,000 firearms sold, only a fraction have been traced. The secret account scandal has renewed calls from across the political spectrum for the department of about 2,000 agents to be reformed or shut down.

Last but not least, I think we have a new member of the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

Thomas Lesnak, a senior ATF investigator, began the scheme. …Mr Lesnak retired with his pension and was not reprimanded.

Just like Lois Lerner and the IRS, engaging in corrupt and crooked behavior and then escaping any punishment.

Maybe the two of them should hook up? They’d make a great couple. I’m sure they could even figure out a way to make taxpayers finance their wedding and honeymoon.

P.S. The “Fast and Furious” scheme was just one of scandals that occurred during the Obama years, but it may have been the most foolish. Didn’t anybody at the BATF realize that it wasn’t a good idea to funnel weapons to Mexican drug gangs?!?

P.P.S. The silver lining to that dark cloud is that we got a couple of good one-liners about the Obama Administration’s gun-running scandal from Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon.

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