By Sam Stone
Governments cannot hire the people they need to protect and serve the public. Governments are on an unprecedented hiring spree. Irrationally, both are true. Last week, the AP highlighted one side of the issue, lamenting the lack of police and corrections officers, doctors, nurses, engineers, and positions requiring a commercial driver’s license. From my own experience at the City of Phoenix, I would add computer technicians and IT professionals, lifeguards, park workers, sanitation, street maintenance…it’s actually a long list. It’s also a list of people who do real things in the real world themselves. Governments are absolutely short of people in every one of those areas, and are struggling like crazy to compete.
Fundamentally, there are some serious mismatches between government pay caps and some of those positions. Engineers, computer specialists, attorneys, and other technically and educationally advanced workers can earn far more straight out of school working outside government. Those who do choose a government career do so because they are significantly more willing than the vast majority of their colleagues to trade income and growth for security. That ensures a very small hiring pool, and one self-selected for a lack of ambition. Simply put, the person who takes a $90,000 job in one of these fields where the private sector equivalent is double or more the pay isn’t very often going to be absolute best performer in their field. To get the very talented workers governments need in these areas, pay would need to be increased dramatically.
On the same side of the coin are frontline workers in physically demanding or technically advanced positions. These include cops, firefighters, and corrections officers, but also electricians, heavy machine operators, truck drivers and the like. Pay for these workers hasn’t kept pace with the private sector, either. Amazon warehouse workers can earn more in their first few years on the job than a police officer. The same is true in virtually all of these frontline positions: whatever someone might be paid working for the government, they can make more working elsewhere, and – crucially – do it with decidedly less in the way of red tape and bureaucratic hassling.
Which brings us back to the second point: that while governments everywhere are lamenting their inability to fill many technically demanding and frontline positions, they aren’t having any trouble at all expanding their bureaucracies. So far this year, US federal, state, and local governments have averaged nearly 400,000 new hires every single month. In fact, about 80% of the robust nationwide hiring that Joe Biden and his press team like to brag about has been made up of government hires, nearly all of them in bureaucratic, non-frontline positions. Bureaucratic positions, unlike their frontline counterparts, represent top-of-the-mark salaries in their fields. And, unlike the private sector, modern American bureaucracy rewards neither success or failure. All you have to do to reach the top of the mountain is stick around long enough, and not stick your neck out. Don’t innovate, don’t create, find excuses to hire more people around you to do the same work, and you’re gonna wind up running a department.
Most taxes scale with population and economic growth. More citizens making more money equals larger tax revenues. And yet even America’s fastest-growing cities have been raising taxes on residents annually for more than a decade. Why? Where is the money going? Does it seem like we have better roads? Improved public transit? Cleaner, safer streets? More services and treatment options for homeless people? Obviously, the answer to all those questions is “no.”
Bureaucrats run the show at every government agency, so it’s not surprising that they’re taking such good care of themselves at the expense of frontline workers and citizens alike, the surprise is that no politician is doing anything about it. They should be. The priority in government should be laser focused on delivering maximum services to citizens for every dollar. Functional, not managerial. And yet, for more than a decade now, our government – at every single level – has been growing the ranks of its middle and upper middle management without any commensurate increase in the number of people those bureaucrats are supposedly overseeing. Without that unnecessary and ongoing runup in ineffective, overpriced oversight, our governments would have plenty of money to increase salaries for frontline workers enough that we wouldn’t have any sort of shortage in those positions. As the AP article notes, when Georgia raised pay significantly for corrections officers, the result was a flood of new applications. We just need to fire a few million bureaucrats to afford it.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Sam Stone only and not his co-host Chuck Warren or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.