Treasury is mum on new hires to manage bailout

Three weeks have passed since President Bush signed legislation authorizing the Treasury Department to move forward with a massive bailout of the financial system, but it remains unclear whether the department will hire large numbers of new employees to help manage the distressed securities the government will purchase.

Paul Light, a professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, said in the Oct.11 issue of National Journal that it would take at least 1,000 federal employees to do the basic management work associated with the bailout, and more if employees take an active role in handling the assets the government plans to purchase. The 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (H.R. 1424) gives the Treasury secretary direct-hire authority, allowing Secretary Henry Paulson to fill such positions more quickly than the normal federal hiring process does.

But Treasury did not return multiple calls for comment on hiring related to the bailout. Michael Orenstein, a spokesman for the Office of Personnel Management, said OPM was not helping Treasury with any hiring efforts. Dina Long, a spokeswoman for the National Treasury Employees Union, said the union did not know whether new employees would be hired or existing employees would be transferred to staff the bailout.

Treasury does have an e-mail address for members of the public who want to submit résumés for potential job openings related to the bailout, but it has posted only three positions to USAJobs.gov: chief counsel, senior counsel for ethics and attorney advisor general.

Bob Tobias, former NTEU president and director of the public sector executive programs at American University's School of Public Affairs, said he was concerned that the political appointees running the bailout would depart when the administration changed, leaving the fledgling operation without even limited institutional memory or experienced leadership.

"The Treasury Department has incredibly broad authority to outsource much of this work," Tobias said. "The government doesn't have a great record of outsourcing the kind of effort that's envisioned by this plan. The failures have been around the inability or unwillingness to staff up inside, to define the expectations and monitor and measure the progress."

Brittany Ballenstedt contributed to this report.