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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 back in 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 on this issue. 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?

COMMENTS

• Taxpayer: Don't knock those of us with years of experience and call us resistant to change. We are the ones who keep agencies going, because we actually know our jobs and our mission, while political appointees come and go in droves (usually after a short time in office). Nobody objects to change when it is necessary. However, the idea that all change is good, or even needed, or the concept of change just for the sake of change, is wrong. In many cases, the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is actually very sound advice! Not all change is good, and in many cases, it just makes things worse. Just look at the abortion know as DHS and ICE, which is a prime example of a knee-jerk reaction to an event (9/11), and which did nothing to make our country safer, but just created an unnecessary and unmanageable new bureaucracy. Customs, FEMA, the Coast Guard, Secret Service, and other agencies were doing just fine before DHS was created, while immigration was a basket case which needed to be destroyed and rebuilt, but not in this manner! GovExec.com reader Posted January 5, 2006 1:04 PM
• We are being forced out by waves of RIFS as we become eligible and the bulk of us are going to be done away with when the BRAC budget hits our command. GovExec.com reader Posted December 1, 2005 10:02 AM
• Be careful civil servants. After joining the government because I thought I could help my country, I find that the expertise most of you refer to is simply an inability to change anything for any reason! Take the new accrual accounting system that the government is supposed to impose. The financial people at DoD do not even know the difference between accrual accounting and the cash system that they have many years of experience with. Get rid of those people and get new people from private industry who truly understand the difference between cash and accrual accounting and you might find a properly prepared financial statement for the government agency. The many years of expertise you mention seems to me to be one of the biggest barriers to any type of change, whether it is for the better or not. Taxpayer Posted November 18, 2005 7:16 AM