Freeze Folly

Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service took down the GOP proposal to freeze federal hiring in an op-ed in the Washington Post this weekend.

It's not that Stier is a knee-jerk defender of bureaucrats: He's for a "rightsizing" effort in which employment at some agencies might come down while it went up elsewhere. Stier simply opposes an approach that takes flexibility in workforce management out of the equation:

Does the public want the Interior Department, for example, to be automatically barred from hiring additional inspectors to guard against more devastating oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico or applying leverage where other potential disasters may be brewing? When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in April, there were just 60 inspectors to cover nearly 4,000 facilities in the region.

Do we want to stop the Food and Drug Administration from hiring scientists and experts it may need to prevent food-borne illnesses like the recent outbreak of salmonella from eggs?

Of course, the GOP freeze only would affect non-security jobs. But those are basically the only area of the federal workforce that's grown in recent years. In the rest of government, the freeze would only serve to encourage agencies to put pressure on older (and more expensive workers) not to retire, so their slots wouldn't be lost. That doesn't sound like a money-saving proposition. And, as Stier notes, it would deny young people the opportunity to enter public service.