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Just when it seemed like we were going to have a high-minded debate this presidential campaign season about the size, functions and capacity of a federal bureaucracy that is arguably being asked to do more than at any time in the nation's history, up stepped GOP front-runner Rudolph W. Giuliani to take the discussion right back into the mud.

It came about because Giuliani ran into a political problem this spring. He emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, largely on the strength of his can-do reputation as New York's mayor. But with stands on certain issues -- particularly abortion -- that were out of the conservative mainstream, he needed to burnish his right-wing credentials.

So Giuliani made a pilgrimage to one of the bastions of the conservative movement, The Heritage Foundation in Washington. There, among other issues, he raised the topic of the anticipated wave of retirements in the federal civil service, which Bush administration officials have repeatedly characterized as a crisis of epic proportions.

But he made it clear he doesn't see things that way. In fact, he views the notion that thousands of career civil servants might leave at roughly the same time not as a problem, but as an opportunity. In his Heritage speech, he pondered the implications of a projection that 42 percent of civilian federal employees would retire during the next two presidential terms.

"Some politicians assume that we'll just replace all of them," he said. "I bet there are some politicians in the other party -- I don't know, maybe in ours -- that think we ought to increase them. . . . Here's what I would do: I would seek to replace only half of them." Such a move, Giuliani said, would save $70 billion a year. "The challenge will be, of course, to convince the Democrats that there's such a thing as a nonessential government employee," he said.

Nice.

In campaign materials, Giuliani boasts that in New York, he "restored fiscal discipline by controlling spending and cutting wasteful programs. He cut the size of city-funded government bureaucracy by nearly 20 percent." He clearly wants to do the same thing at the federal level.

But there are a couple of problems with that notion. The first is that Giuliani's math is likely to be off. The scary figures on looming retirements refer to employees eligible to retire, not those who actually do. The latter figure will likely be lower than Giuliani predicts, because not all employees leave as soon as they can.

But suppose he could actually succeed in slashing the federal workforce at a time when it is clear that the government doesn't have the capacity to do some of the basic things its citizen-customers demand. That would raise a series of questions for Giuliani: Does he want the Veterans Affairs Department to be able to provide top-quality care for military service members returning from Iraq with serious injuries? Does he want the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be able to quickly and effectively respond to emergencies (even really big ones)? How about, say, contract management at the Coast Guard? Does he want the agency to get into another situation like it did with its Deepwater program, where it was forced to outsource not only the construction of new equipment, but even the process of determining what the agency needed and how it should be purchased?

Dealing with these issues doesn't necessarily require an influx of personnel. But they certainly can't be addressed with a haphazard, unplanned loss of institutional memory that would be caused by simply not replacing half the people who retire in the eight years after the next presidential inauguration.

For the past 15 years, federal agencies to varying degrees have downsized, upsized, reinvented themselves, become more performance-based and results-focused, and put their jobs up for competition from the private sector. Almost nothing the government has done in that period has been undertaken as a purely bureaucratic endeavor performed by government employees.

As a result, most agencies have long since exhausted their options for doing more with fewer employees. Which raises another question for Giuliani: What, exactly, do you want government to stop doing? Or do you simply want all of government to be less effective and more wasteful? Because that's what another round of steep cuts in the civil service is likely to get you.

COMMENTS

• Commenter Gregory (June 4) wrote: "The loss of institutional memory is troubling but that's why we have books." Wow! I don't know where he works, but most people who retire from civil service at 55 or so are largely the disgruntled ones who believed in institutional memory. And not one of them I know would write down their job processes and notes on their experience in a book or otherwise (even if writing came naturally to them.) Doing is all, and you cannot learn most jobs from a book or even a manual. Governments become too reliant on the person rather than on the job, and do not prepare for their leaving. Employees should be expected to pass on their knowledge to others regularly in the normal course of business(usually subordinates) who will carry on after they leave. Most government work is not performd by folks who write books, but by front-line operations people who demand to be respected or will leave when it suits them, and not before(usually wait for buyouts or a much better consulting job.)Most people, once disenfranchised, while perhaps expendable to some such as Rudy(he was my Mayor after all),will NOT help their employers replace them. You must treasure the knowledge-holders even if you don't like them. It has happened in my NYC office that key operational staff left with at least 30 years of solid experience each. And the agency was unable to hold on to the subordinates these folks taught (energetic and imaginative subordinates). It took reinventing the wheel to get the job done by others (who worked in the office all the while but were not asked to learn these key functions until the crisis came). Twas ever thus and (likely)ever shall be. Teresa P Bland Posted June 12, 2007 12:16 PM
• Yes, e-government solutions both here and abroad are expanding at a phenomenal rate. but we venerable "old folks" are not too resistant to change, nor too blind to read books. The big problem is that some new IT solutions that have been developed and implemented still have some bugs in them that makes use of the solutions/processes cumbersome and/or incomplete to use, or they do not integrate to complement current systems that are still functional. I work in emergency management, and stopping to read a book on something is a fine idea, whose time will come when I retire, but not now. Institutional memory is worth its weight in gold - - good people are your true power base and will make you successful in administering programs and harnessing their processes. You can go buy another computer and some software, but it's hard to replace excellent employees with the backgrounds needed to accomplish agency goals. People sometimes resist change, but they are not always the biggest obstacle. Deborah Posted June 4, 2007 4:29 PM
• Tom, you better watch that tone. It sounded too closely to a belltone of reason. Keep up the good work! You’re helping me to cull the chafe. Tip off Posted June 4, 2007 1:36 PM