A mild January hits a freeze (get it?)

Many years ago I knew a reporter who had covered the Massachusetts state house. He said that in one small, tucked away office, a man sat and did nothing all day but drool on his desk. Clearly an extreme example of a patronage sinecure.

I doubt that many federal employees do so little work. If anyone sits there and drools all day, it’s unlikely he or she would have been introduced to a Trump transition team.

So who then are all of these “duplicative” employees White House press secretary Sean Spicer cited when detailing the hiring freeze President Trump has imposed?

A second question might be, where is the “dramatic expansion” of the federal workforce in recent years he cited? According to what is likely the Office of Personnel Management’s most-often-looked-at charts, you can see federal employment has been  steady or drifting down in recent years.

Relative to the Kennedy-Johnson era, the civilian federal employee population is nearly a half million smaller. Yet the number of programs has steadily expanded. What’s the difference? Contractors and grantees to whom the government outsources hundreds of billions of dollars worth of work every year.

Hiring is not the only freeze the Trump administration has imposed. The order for the freeze includes a ban on hiring contractors for work new employees would have presumably done.

At the EPA, according to a ProPublica report, the new crew has imposed a freeze on all new contracts, task orders and grants.

If you say no new hires and no new contracting out, you’ve got the bureaucracy pretty well boxed in. So, the administration urges agency managers “seek efficient use of existing personnel and funds to improve public services and the delivery of those services.”

Translation (and raise your hand if you’ve heard this before): Do more with less.

Hiring and pay freezes create drama. They signal the new sheriff. But if your goal is to shrink the government or make it more efficient, they do little more good than ordering a Diet Coke to go with your twin Big Macs, large fries and apple pie. They stave off the hard work, like deciding which programs to end, how to simplify the tax code or how to reform entitlements.

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