Still Riding the Retirement Wave

My skepticism on the allegedly impending federal retirement "tsunami" (see Oct. 31 item below) is apparently having little effect. The good folks over at the Partnership for Public Service were pushing the notion again last week, with an "issue brief" on the "Federal Brain Drain." The statistics are, as always, alarming:

According to U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) estimates, among all full-time permanent employees in the federal workforce as of October 2004, 58 percent of supervisory and 42 percent of non-supervisory workers will be eligible to retire by the end of FY 2010.

Again, though, unless OPM has changed its reporting methodology, these figures are arrived at by combining those eligible for regular retirement with those who could take early retirement. But relatively few people do that, which is one reason why the tsunami OPM has been predicting since the turn of the millennium hasn't started yet.

But the folks at OPM aren't giving up on the notion. According to Steve Barr's Thanksgiving Day Federal Diary column in the Washington Post, OPM now projects the big retirement wave will start in 2008, and run through 2010.

That could happen, and it almost certainly will occur at selected agencies and in certain kinds of positions across government. As the Partnership notes, there are pockets of government where the cause for concern seems very valid: For example, 87 percent of claims assistants and examiners in the Social Security Administration and 94 percent of the agency's administrative law judges will reach retirement eligibility by 2010.

Mostly, though, I still get the impression that this "retirement wave" stuff is mostly being used as a recruiting tool to lure young people into government (check out the headline on Barr's column: "A Cornucopia of Government Jobs May Be Just Around the Corner") and to prod agencies to streamline their hiring systems in order to attract better candidates for those positions that do come open.