I would recommend replacing the system of automatic step increases with a system of automatic step decreases. That is, a government worker’s salary should go down as the worker spends more years at an agency.
Awhile back, I mentioned that I thought that the “revolving door” between government and the private sector ought to revolve faster. Instead of a lifetime sinecure, government employment should be a temporary period of service. I think that this might reduce the disconnect between bureaucrats thinking and the way that the private sector works. More important, I believe that this would change the mindset of government workers, so that they try to resolve problems rather than become invested in programs.
Please realize that 99.9% of government workers don’t have anything to do with policy or rules making, and cannot cash in on revolving door scenarios. Most of the government isn’t made up of bank regulators. I would argue that almost all of the problems you are focusing on stem from the decisions of Congress and perhaps a few thousand senior managers.
Thomas DeMeo, thanks for your interesting comment. I would put the figure lower, as a guesstimate. However, your point seems to have considerable validity. I would like to add: with politics clearly trumping free-market-type of behaviour, would Arnold’s proposition not rather lead to an even more intensified politicisation of the private sector.
We seem to be facing a very difficult problem.
The below statement has had a very strong effect on my way of thinking:
Writes Armen Alchian in The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian, Volume 2, in Economic Laws and Political Legislation, p.604:
“To change the move toward socialism, we must change the ability of various forms of competition to be successful.
I know of no way to reduce the prospective enhancement from greater political power-seeking, but I do know ways to reduce the rewards to market-oriented capitalist competition.
Political power is dominant in being able to set the rules of the game to reduce the rewards to capitalist-type successful competitors. It is rule maker, umpire, and player …
But I have been unable to discern equivalently powerful ways for economic power to reduce the rewards to competitors for political power!
Each capitalist may buy off a politician, but that only enhances the rewards to political power.”
The discussion of IETF is highly interesting. I seem to have experienced above-average efficiency levels and salutary incentive effect – as described in Arnold’s article – when working in voluntary groups in the financial sector.
As for the remuneration model described in the latter half of the article, I suppose, only real life testing will yield definite answers.
The authors suggestions are very valuable and ought to be discussed and tested.
In fact, we need much more public discussion of these issues.
Two more contributions to the debate out of a box labelled “public choice pessimism”: (a) I suspect, the public sector will very strongly resist the proposal. And I wonder, (b) will not civil servants (to use the British term) develop a keen ambition to please subsequent private sector employers – reinforcing regulatory capture? We have a nice term for what I mean in German: vorauseilender Gehorsam – something like anticipatory obedience, the idea is of a person acting obediently of her own accord in anticipation of the satisfaction she will cause her superior.
But then, my reasoning may lead to opposite conclusions. If the public sector reckons it will gain in influence thanks to the new remuneration model, might it not support it?
“. It is unhealthy for lifetime service to be standard in government. ”
I have a friend who just retired after a lifetime of being an administrative assistant for a county prosecutor’s office. What exactly about her career would you consider unhealthy?
In her later years, she store large amounts of institutional knowledge, so now people really miss her and give her calls asking how she handled particular issues. Why shouldn’t she have been paid more as the years progressed for that experience?
Like DeMeo says, you seem to be speaking about a subset of senior managers, and generalizing it to all government workers.
I waffle back and forth on this as a government worker. I just don’t think what you are proposing would work outside some select positions with high cross over to the private sector and one could argue those positions should be contracted out anyways given they aren’t inherent to the government. Yes contracting is a whole nother can of worms.
That being said there is definitely a lot of dead weight in the government but those folk aren’t going to be impacted by this in the slightest, they will happily remain a GS-6 Step 0 forever as they are unemployable and TBH, paying them at that level is probably better than simply giving them welfare. The government has a lot of intentional make work programs for disabled vets, minorities, mentally handicapped folk, etc. My GS-4 mail clerk, for example, has spent the last twenty years sorting mail for the whopping nine other people in the office (and we might get ten to fifteen pieces of mail a day). He takes the bus, lives in public housing, and has paranoid delusions; if he had an IQ higher than 80 I would be shocked). Also SES’s will be immune as will all the folk covered by unions. Basically you are simply going to screw over the already underpaid GS-13/14 manager non-supervisory subject matter experts.
A way you could really solve this is simply introduce something like they do with foreign assignments and have five year contiguous cap at any one agency (overseas in the foreign context; yes I know this is gamed and ways around it). You could also implement a requirement that prohibits grade level (not step) increases within the same agency. The problem isn’t so much lack of private sector experience but insular cultures where people spend their entire thirty year careers in the same office, not even moving to different agencies in the same area or to a different office in the same agency.