The federal government's contribution to ending the recession will be more than just stimulus money, bank bailouts and cash for clunkers. The federal government needs to begin hiring massive numbers of new workers over the next three years.
According to a recent survey by the Partnership for Public Service, a think tank that studies the federal work force, 35 federal agencies will need to hire 273,000 new employees for "mission critical" jobs, those positions deemed essential for an agency to fulfill its mission. In total, over four years, the study estimates the government will have to hire nearly 600,000 people for all types of jobs.
The sudden demand, which PPS says would be a 41 percent increase in hiring over the level of the last three years, is due to a confluence of factors. The bulge of baby-boomer bureaucrats is beginning to retire. Some specialties will see a third to a half of their workers retire in the next three years. There's pent-up demand because the federal work force has been kept artificially low. The bloom is off privatizing with the recognition that, free-market dogma to the contrary, there are some things that government does better. And the government faces large, new responsibilities.
PPS says that because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Veterans Affairs will need more than 48,000 hires, including 8,500 doctors and 19,000 nurses. The Department of Homeland Security needs to fill 65,730 positions by 2012. The intelligence agencies expect to hire 5,500 people a year over the next three years. And the fiscal 2010 budget contains money for 4,000 new positions at the Justice Department.
This may sound not only like Big Government, but Even Bigger Government. But Max Stier, the head of the Partnership, says that in absolute terms the government is about the size it was in the late 1960s, and that in relative terms it is quite a bit smaller.
The demand for new federal workers will come, one hopes, as the economy is picking up steam and unemployment is falling. That means the government could find itself in competition with the private sector for the best workers. It's a problem we can live with.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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