The Federal ‘Swamp Thing’ Cut Down to Size

No, this is not about the 1982 horror movie starring Adrienne Barbeau, but those who mean to “drain the swamp” should take heed — danger lurks in an unlikely place, and, left unchecked, the beast could well destroy even the best intended efforts of DOGE and its allies in Congress.

I keep reading about the need to shrink the federal government and the corollary need to regain the “people’s agenda,” taking the government out of the hands of unelected bureaucrats and returning it to our elected representatives. I agree wholeheartedly that the federal government has become a monster and that slaying the beast is essential, not only as an exercise in fiscal responsibility, but also as a matter of restoring a functioning democracy, one responsive to the will of the people.

Can this be done? I’m sure that it can. Will it be easy? Far from it, and not at all if we ignore the ways in which the administrative state actually operates. There are many good ideas floating about. The first is to simply do away with agencies that either serve no worthwhile purpose, or which actually do harm.

The Department of Education should be at the top of the list. Created in a fit of Carter administration madness in 1979, it long ago outlived any pretense of useful purpose. Prior to 1979, education was understood to be primarily the province of local governments, and secondarily that of the individual states.

Anyone familiar with how education actually worked prior to 1979 understands that, in most parts of the country, it worked quite well without the involvement of the Feds. Some school districts had more resources, some had less, but by and large, they were responsive to the people who paid the bills — that is, local taxpayers, the parents, or grandparents, or aunts and uncles of the schoolchildren being educated. My small town school district lacked many of the resources of the bigger schools in nearby Atlanta, but we did just as well on almost every measure of performance.

We don’t need a federal department whose chief purpose is to promulgate woke regulations and to promote a progressive agenda by taking taxpayer dollars and then doling them out to favored groups. The great argument of the 1960s, that we needed to ensure that all children benefited equally in the educational sweepstakes, turned out over the years as a recipe for rewarding big city teachers unions, without noticeable improvement in pupil performance.

As a general proposition, the most efficient use of tax dollars consists of raising taxes locally and spending them locally, where all involved have a clear idea of the relationship between tax and expenditure.

There may be other agencies that could similarly be axed, and I think everything should be on the table. Similarly, one should look carefully at functions within agencies. When I first started working at my agency’s DC headquarters, the office in charge of “equal employment,” was on a corridor right around the corner from mine, and its staff was accommodated behind a handful of doors.

By the time I retired a decade later, this same office, already fully invested in promoting DEI, occupied both sides of a corridor the length of a football field, and that was before the Biden era DEI explosion. There are many reasons to take on DEI bureaucracies, but not least among them that they have spread — expensively — throughout government like an aggressive tumor.

Still, eliminating agencies will require legislation, and even with majorities in both houses, this takes a level of heavy lifting that Congress has seemed loathe to do. Eliminating offices and functions within agencies will also encounter congressional roadblocks. Most such activities came into existence with either the acquiescence of legislators or their outright insistence. However worthless a function, it will have its allies on Capitol Hill. Similarly, firing individual federal employees, almost inevitably, will invite a raft of lawsuits, which in many cases will be successful, so long as the existing statutory protections remain in place — yet another challenge for Congress.

There is, however, a much easier target for those who would  shrink the federal government, something that’s only rarely mentioned in most “drain the swamp” discussions. While figures vary, the general consensus is that something like 40 percent of the federal workforce, perhaps 3.7 million workers, are not federal employees at all, but rather agency contractors. Cancel contracts or, when cancellation is problematic, simply let them expire — soon you’ve eliminated vast swaths of the federal workforce.

This promises enormous savings. When company profits and employee pay and benefit packages are fully considered, contractor staff are frequently as expensive — and often more expensive — than a Fed performing similar work. And make no mistake. In today’s government, in spite of regulations requiring that only Feds perform “essentially governmental functions,” contractors are frequently engaged in the work that ordinary people would think of as “governing.”

I spent two years of my government career wrangling this issue as it pertained to the protection of nuclear materials. The lines are far more blurry than even most federal contracting officers can adequately comprehend, or than the typical federal manager is willing to address.

Ironically, one objection to cutting contractors is that this simply shifts the workload back to federal staff, who are much harder to fire for poor performance. It’s also argued that the typical contractor works harder and more productively, because they aren’t afforded the usual gamut of civil service protections.

To be sure, contractors often do work hard and are often measurably more productive. But that’s beside the point. If the issue is one of shrinking government by eliminating unnecessary functions, then it makes no difference if a contractor performs these more efficiently than a Fed. Instead, simply recognize that cutting contractors is the easier path for a new administration bent on shaking up an agency.

Ironically, part of the growth of contracting came about in response to previous efforts to “cut the size of government” or, in our current parlance, to “drain the swamp.” Cutting federal jobs has been done before, although typically through attrition, leaving positions unfilled when employees leave. Rather than downsizing expectations, the agency response, abetted by congressional friends, has been to outsource jobs to contractors. It would be bitterly ironic if, for example, federal DEI positions were eliminated only to have their functions contracted out.

I worked in government for the better part of forty years, serving both as a contractor and as a Fed. That’s a long time spent in the belly of the beast, a long time coming to understand what works and what doesn’t. I’ve seen Feds doing good work, and I’ve seen some contractor companies that provide great services. There’s a place for both in doing the people’s work.

But I’ve also seen a lot of laziness and incompetence. Worse, I’ve watched the energy and industry with which entirely wrongheaded tasks are performed. Again, think of the ghastly impact of those hardworking employees at the Department of Education or, during Covid, at Health and Human Services.

We need to return the federal government to that handful of missions that are indubitably national in character, things such as national security and foreign policy. For the rest, we should return to true federalism, where government is centered at the state and local level. We can and should make a start on January 20th, and we should pursue the task relentlessly. This isn’t simply an exercise in budget cutting, but instead vital to the business, ahem, of “Making America Great Again.”

But let’s not make the mistake of waiting for the perfect solution to “draining the swamp,” and let’s not get bogged down while the legislative stars are aligned — that was the mistake made with respect to replacing Obamacare during the first Trump administration. Go after the 40 percent-sized “swamp thing” in the federal workforce, even as we pursue the more challenging downsizing tasks.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

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The Lie Behind the ‘Hearts and Minds’ Plea

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.

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