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TOPICS
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.
COMMENTS
- Indeed, the best way to staff this new organization is by hiring WaMU, Lehman Bros, etc alumni. There is no reason why only the poor should have a safety net. M Onger Posted November 3, 2008 8:25 AM
- This is almost to the point of rediculous and histerical. I wonder how many people know that the Department of the Treasury has employees trying to help the Russians with their financial system to prevent waste, fraud and abuse? And now good ole Bushy Boy and the Department of the Treasury want to hire more people to handle our mess. My God, here we are a "generation lost in space with no time left to start again" and our fellow 1970s liberal, anti Viet Nam War people who are now high priced federal department of the treasury civil servants are turning conservative and trying to claim they will take control of this $700,000,000,000.00 bail out? It will never happen. For one thing hiring more Department of the Treasury personnel will take a good chunk out of that figure to pay for their salaries and benefits. I thought the idea was to reduce the size of Government not find ways to increase it. Oh well " And the beat goes on, and the beat goes on, Congress, FTC and Bush keep pounding BS to my brain, la di da di di, la di da di da". When will it Stop Posted October 30, 2008 8:10 AM
- Look there isn't expertise in the CS system for this kind of work. All the work will be contracted out dan m ketter Posted October 28, 2008 5:21 PM
