Do the Retirement Wave

Using fears of a 'human capital crisis' as a tool to achieve policy objectives is dangerous business.

Five years ago, talk of an emerging calamity began to dominate discussions of the future of the federal bureaucracy. The government, it was said, was facing a rapidly emerging "human capital crisis." Half the federal workforce, doomsayers noted, would be eligible to retire within the next decade, leaving unprepared agencies facing massive recruitment and retention problems.

Now we're halfway to the end of that decade. So where's the crisis?

It turns out the numbers were deceiving. As Brian Friel reported in these pages back in May 2003, the dramatic statistics about the vast numbers of employees allegedly on the verge of leaving were arrived at by combining the number of employees eligible for regular retirement with those eligible to retire early. But few in government actually do leave early, a fact that hasn't changed since the "crisis" emerged.

Obviously, there are a lot of baby boomers who have served for many years in the civil service and now are contemplating when to leave government. But they're not all the same age, in the same financial boat, or working at the same kind of agency in the same kind of job. That means there's not a single governmentwide human capital crisis in the form of a huge number of simultaneous retirements, but rather dozens and dozens of agencies, each with their own individual challenges.

This realization is gradually sinking in across government, but the prophets of doom remain undeterred. "Federal Workforce Faces Onslaught of Retirements," the Office of Personnel Management shouted in a press release this fall. "In the federal government we have a tsunami coming that I call the retirement wave," said the agency's director, Linda M. Springer, at an October job fair at George Mason University near Washington.

At this point, barring an even more dramatic increase in the retirement rate than predicted five years ago, that prospect seems unlikely. The Great Retirement Exodus has become the Y2K problem of the new millennium: It is a "crisis" far worse in the fevered imaginations of its proponents than in reality. So why does it cling to life? Because an emergency is a very useful tool in Washington.

In the case of Y2K, the concern that vast networks of computers could simultaneously shut down helped spur a much-needed effort to upgrade large systems. In the world of federal personnel management, fears of an impending crisis are useful in three key ways:

• As a club to get agencies to take more seriously the challenge of managing their people as assets of value to their organizations rather than mere cogs in giant bureaucratic machines.
• As a device to help proponents of efforts to overhaul the civil service system make the case that a more flexible, modern system is necessary to address future challenges.
• As a recruiting tool to make federal employment look more attractive to people at the beginning of their careers.

The motivation for making the future of the civil service look dire is understandable. The downsizing efforts of the 1990s left many agencies without the capacity to manage their workforces and to plan for future needs. They needed a spur to action. Likewise, members of Congress were unlikely to pay attention to prosaic personnel management issues in the absence of a clear and present danger. And there's nothing like screaming, "We're going to have all kinds of openings once those baby boomers clear out!" to get the attention of prospective new employees.

But government may end up paying a heavy price for crying wolf. Why should agencies pay more attention to recruiting, training and managing their valuable human assets if it turns out they're able to fill the pipeline of jobs the same way they always have? Why should Congress give them new tools to help in the effort? And if massive numbers of new openings are not in fact going to materialize at any given time, isn't government running the risk of further alienating young people who already take a pretty dim view of federal service as a career?