Interview transcript: 

Terry Gerton You have written a paper that asks a very provocative question. How many people can the federal government lose before it crashes? What’d you find?

Elaine Kamarck Well, we found that in the midst of all the DOGE chaos, people were figuring out that, wait a minute, they were making some mistakes. Some of these mistakes were absolutely clear from the get-go and were reversed in 36 to 48 hours. The one that I think everybody has heard about is when they fired a couple hundred nuclear safety engineers. And these are the people who watch over our nuclear stockpiles, and not only for readiness, but to make sure there’s no accidents. The stockpile are pretty old, as people in that area will tell you. And so the danger of something leaking, something going wrong is real, and you need people watching this all the time. And you can’t just immediately turn around and go to the help wanted ads and find a nuclear safety engineer. They aren’t a dime a dozen on the streets. So that created a huge outcry. And it was about 36 hours before they were rehired. And of course, the thing that happened there was that they had cut off all of their emails and contacts, so they had to really scramble to rehire these people. Now, that’s a very dramatic example. But there’s other ones where we are waiting to see what these cuts have done. And the fact that there’s — what we did when we put together this paper was we started watching carefully news sources like your own, like Government Executive, et cetera, that really cover the federal government and of course the traditional news sources, and looking for stories that talked about rehiring civil servants who were either fired or who were offered the deferred resignation. And in a lot of these cases, the agency took back the offer of the deferred resignation. So in other words, what was happening during really the whole of this year, was firings, dramatic firings sometimes, reductions in force, whatever, and then pullbacks as people began to realize, particularly the political appointees, I think, in the agencies, because they knew they were on the line. It’s no accident that the Transportation secretary, Secretary Duffy, was the first person to yell at Elon Musk in a cabinet meeting. Why? Because he knows that this, what they were doing to the FAA and to the air traffic controllers was going to result in trouble. It’s going to be an accident. And of course, who would be the face of that trouble? It would be the Secretary of Transportation, and of course ultimately the President. So, he stood up, he was the first one that really stood up to Musk in front of the President, and I think increasingly that’s been happening in less dramatic ways. People have been saying, wait a minute, you just cut too much.

Terry Gerton The latest numbers from OPM say that 317,000 people have left working for the federal government, but 68,000 have entered. It’s not clear if they left and then came back or if those 68,00 are new hires, but the administration’s contention has been that federal government is too big and too bureaucratic. At what point did these reductions stop being about efficiency and really start creating systemic risk?

Elaine Kamarck Oh, I think they’re already creating systemic risk. And that’s why you get the dramatic examples like the nuclear safety engineers. Then you have the longer term examples. So for instance, everything that’s going on at the CDC, at the Centers for Disease Control, is increasing the probability of pandemics and outbreaks. So you can imagine measles outbreaks in the coming months or years. You can even imagine polio coming back because of what they’ve been doing, the denigration of science, et cetera. And suppose you or your loved one is suffering from a really serious cancer. All right, well, there’s been laboratories defunded and they see what they’re doing. So they defund them and then they put the money back. And they’ve done this with some of Harvard’s laboratories recently. The problem is, you interrupt research and you lose months, if not years of research. The mice die. The tests, all that stuff that goes on in a laboratory, which is so complicated, when you close down a laboratory, you lose time. And if you’re somebody who has got a terrible cancer and is looking for a breakthrough cure, every minute counts.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Elaine Kamarck. She’s director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. Elaine, another one of the administration’s assertions is that AI can replace these folks, or automation will replace them, or we can contract it out. Can they? Are there some of these functions that just really require a human in a government chair to do the work?

Elaine Kamarck Most of them, frankly, require a human in a government chair. AI has huge potential. And back 30 years ago when we did Reinventing Government, the internet was just coming online for many people, because we were there, remember 1993 to 1996. So, when I went into the White House in 93, we didn’t even have the use of the internet. So as we went on, absolutely the internet was able to replace people. The technology did replace people. I have no doubt that that would be the case in AI. The problem is that AI is not ready for prime time and the DOGE people did not go about this with any sort of plan for which functions would do it. So, let me give you an example. I mean, 30 years ago, we really were convinced that eventually, technology would help us really get a handle on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. We’ve always known there’s a lot of fraud in there, but it’s a massive payment system and you have to have something that can sort of look through and find the patterns that are unusual. AI is going to be great for that. But did they announce that? I mean, the chaotic way makes us, everybody, suspicious that they just cut without a plan. And eventually, maybe in the next couple years, they’ll get a plan to use AI in this piece, but let’s face it, you can’t use AI in every place.

Terry Gerton Elaine, you have seen administrations come and go. You mentioned Reinventing Government back in the 90s. But if this administration sees the reduction in the federal workforce as a political win, at what point might they face the risk of having unintentionally weakened government capacity to deliver services? When did the people that government is supposed to serve figure this out and what happens when they do?

Elaine Kamarck Well, let me tell you something. They’ve already figured it out. So polling on DOGE is very unpopular with the public. Most of the public thinks, in the polls we have so far this year, they’re all the same, which was by about a 10 point margin, people think the government has gone too far. They think the cuts have gone too far. Now, when they will really feel it is when, and they are, if you’re a senior, you’re feeling it right now, or God forbid you’re turning 67 years old this year, and you’re trying to sign up for your Social Security benefits. You have three-hour wait times on the telephone, you have offices closing, even though Social Security keeps denying that they’re closing offices, and then GSA puts on their site that they are doing reductions in office space. I mean, so you’ve got two different agencies saying two different things. People are already feeling it on the service end. We had a little bit of a show of this in Texas with those terrible floods at the 4th of July, when you not only had NOAA asleep at the switch, but you had FEMA asleep at this switch. And that now, fortunately for the people involved, the state of Texas is a big state, a wealthy state with pretty good emergency response capacity. But what if they had been completely overwhelmed and needed outside help? So there’s a lot of ways that this is going to go wrong. And I think the public is already understanding that the cuts have gone too far.

Terry Gerton What will you be looking for come January when everybody’s sort of back after all of the holidays and before maybe another shutdown? What will you be looking for? What do you expect in terms of policy or action?

Elaine Kamarck It’s hard to say. I think I will be looking for more rehires, what we called in our paper rehires. More places where the cabinet secretary goes to OMB or an undersecretary and says, look, we’re in danger of this falling apart unless you have rehires. I think we’re going to have that. The bill that ended the shutdown, as you know, prohibits any more layoffs until the end January. So we’re obviously not going to have any more layoffs. But as I say in the paper I did on this for Brookings, the real effect of this was to cause people to leave. Either they took the deferred resignation or they retired when they were sort of just thinking about it or they took an early retirement offer or they took an old-fashioned buyout, and that, I think, is the most serious consequence, because think about it, who leaves their job? Well, either somebody who’s got a retirement set up and says, okay, I was going to do it next year, I’m going to it this year, because this place is crazy. Or somebody who knows they can get another job quickly, which means that some of our most talented people, probably younger people, left because they said, this is a crazy place to work. Not to mention the fact that you have an OMB director who constantly says things like he wants to make the federal worker terrified of going to work. I mean, that’s your legal definition of a hostile workplace. They have created a hostile work workplace for 2 million people. And so no wonder people are leaving. And that I think is the biggest consequence. And, so, the question is, can they get people back? Now, seeing what you’ve seen, suppose you’re a terrific cybersecurity person, and you’ve just gotten out of college a couple years ago. You’ve got a great resume. You know that field. We know that for decades now, the government’s been desperate to hire cybersecurity people. You have your choice of going to Chase Bank and doing cyber or going to Social Security or IRS or some other big government agency. What are you going to do? I mean, at these entry-level jobs, as we know, the pay is pretty even. So it’s not a matter of the pay diverging until you get into the upper levels, but the federal government is now run by people who constantly demean the federal workforce. Now, that can’t help hiring. So even if you’re trying to hire back, I think that it’s going to be difficult for the federal government to do that. And we’ll see what happens in January. And then, of course, the court cases. I haven’t even written about the court cases because I’ve been focusing on the operations of government. But there’s about 20 absolutely critical court cases that are going to have to wend their way through the system. And we’re going to see how much of this can be done. Because the nut of the argument is, if Congress has the authority to appropriate, and Congress appropriates money, and says, do this, do that with this money, and the executive says, oh, okay, we’ll do this, we’re going to do this with five people, and it is absolutely clear that you can’t do this with five people, is that a violation of the separation of powers? And that’s what we’re headed to. That’s really the issue that everybody is going to have to get their head around. And we’ll see if the courts offer any clarity on this in the coming months.

The post How lean can government get before essential services start to fail? first appeared on Federal News Network.