Managers Under Fire

The Clinton administration is reviewing the size of the government's managerial ranks and the salaries of managers following reports of increased federal spending on pay and benefits in newspapers across the country.

According to a recent study by the Scripps Howard News Service, the federal workforce is more expensive now than ever before, despite downsizing and Vice President Al Gore's reinvention efforts. Scripps Howard puts the cost of the federal civilian workforce's salaries and benefits at $101.4 billion in 1996, up from $93.7 billion in 1992. (The Office of Personnel Management says salaries and benefits totaled $112.3 billion in 1996 and $107.3 billion in 1992). The news service attributed the higher compensation costs to burgeoning management ranks and salary increases for supervisors and managers.

In response, Gore has instructed the President's Management Council to review agencies' supervisor-to-employee ratios. Early in the Clinton administration, Gore's National Performance Review, now renamed the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, called for the ratio of supervisors to employees in government to change from 1:7 to 1:15 by fiscal 1999. But according to the Merit Systems Protection Board, the ratio was still 1:7 in March 1997.

Gore's new reinvention chief, Morley Winograd, has said the Vice President wants to make sure the federal bureaucracy is not top-heavy. Similarly, OPM director Janice Lachance has said the federal workforce needs to be reshaped now that downsizing is completed. Lachance is forming a "think tank" of OPM experts to study federal compensation and benefits.

The Scripps Howard report was reprinted in newspapers across the country, including The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., and the Raleigh, N.C. News and Observer. The report prompted newspapers, including The Boston Herald and The Houston Chronicle, to editorialize against the administration's reinvention efforts.

"Our scammer-in-chief has been scammed, by the bureaucrats," The Boston Herald wrote. "The new bureaucratic pooh-bahs will find something to do even if they have to invent it."

"Clinton and Vice President Al Gore still publicly praise the reinvention program for creating the smallest federal government since the Kennedy administration," The Houston Chronicle editorialized. "But what they may have on their hands is a top-heavy monster which, outside of some heavy military trimming, has not really been what they've been touting to taxpayers."

Federal agencies have been criticized in recent years for reducing their management numbers by simply reclassifying managers as "team leaders." (See "Taking the Fall," November 1997.) According to a 1996 General Accounting Office report, 19 of 24 agencies surveyed reduced supervisory positions by reclassifying their supervisors as non-supervisors.