Obama, Unions and 'Management Bloat'

Federal labor unions have so far been largely silent on Barack Obama's bold plan to fire managers, shift positions to the front lines, set up a "SWAT team" of experienced employees to root out waste, trim contract spending, boost performance bonuses and name a "chief performance officer."

But we've managed to get reaction out of some of them. The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, for example, isn't pulling any punches. Here's its statement:

IFPTE shares Senator Obama’s concerns about management bloat throughout the federal government and commends him on his SWAT team initiative. IFPTE has been arguing for years that a comprehensive review of the allocations of management versus rank and file at many government agencies is a key area for an Obama Administration to target with respect to government efficiency. We commend Senator Obama for this well thought out, and fair process for reviewing government efficiencies.

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, was a little more measured in her response. Here's part of it:

I am pleased that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has developed a plan to free up resources to hire more frontline workers in federal agencies as diverse as the Food and Drug Administration, the Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. This does not mean losing talented and skilled employees. Positions can be moved from managerial to frontline through attrition. This is what President Clinton did and was part of his administration’s reinventing government initiative.

Remember though, that Obama didn't mention attrition in his proposal. In fact, he specifically pledged to "fire government managers who aren't getting results." And there's a bit of revisionist history involved in saying that Clinton managed to achieve its goal of shifting middle management jobs to the front lines via attrition. First of all, Clinton relied heavily on buyouts of employees, not just attrition, to thin the ranks. Second, his National Performance Review didn't exactly achieve its intended goal of cutting the ratio of supervisors to employees in government:

Here's what Allan Holmes reported on Clinton's effort in Government Executive in 1995:

Still, buyouts did not make significant strides toward meeting the NPR goal of increasing the so-called "span of control" -- halving the supervisor-employee ratio from a government-wide average of 1:7 to 1:15 by the end of fiscal 1999. In written testimony given to the House Civil Service Subcommittee in March, GAO reported that the ratio at Agriculture, which was 1:8 in fiscal 1993, will only reach 1:10 by fiscal 1996. And the average Commerce Department supervisor will oversee 8.4 employees in fiscal 1996 -- not a big improvement from the 6.6

employees under each supervisor in fiscal 1993. GAO's Kingsbury says it is unlikely the government-wide supervisor-employee ratio will reach the 1:15 goal by fiscal 1999.