It appears that Congress is in a big hurry to get this so called “Homeland Security” business through, and the only opposition has been from Democrats who are whining about labor protections.
But one issue that hasn’t been addressed is:
The Homeland Security Department will have 170,000 workers, presumably working 40 hours a week. That’s 680,000 man hours during an 8 hour work day.
For the life of me, I can’t imagine why we would need so many workers, and how what they could be doing could possibly prevent terrorism in any way shape or form.
WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE GOING TO BE DOING? What work could they be engaging in to keep our country “safe”? Monitoring the Telescreens that Ashcroft will install in all our houses?
The Department of Homeland Security will mainly consist of a bunch of already existing federal agencies, including the Coast Guard, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Customs Service. So, among other things they will be doing will be processing incoming travelers and goods at the border or other entry points to the U.S.; checking for illegal immigrants; and rescuing people who are lost at sea. Obviously, the new department will include lots of functions other than just hunting Al-Qaida.
Well, it’s certainly debateable whether or not creating a new federal department will accomplish anything. As far as I can tell, there won’t be much actual merging of organizations. Employees of the Coast Guard and the Customs Service will still have separate organizational structures and separate chains of command. I’m not sure how having them both be part of the Border & Transportation Security division of the Department of Homeland Security will magically make them work with each other better than when one of them is part of the Department of Transportation and the other is part of the Department of the Treasury.
But it’s not like the bill will create 170,000 paper-shuffling bureaucrats, either. Most of those people will do after the reorganization what they did before the reorganization, hurling themselves in front of bullets fired by would-be presidential assassins, providing aid to communities that have just been hit by tornadoes, saving the lives of pleasure boaters who’ve gotten in over their heads (so to speak), and so on.
Currently all federal employees (with some narrow exceptions) come under civil service protection. This means they are protected from arbitrary employment games. This is done to make sure the federal labor force does their collective jobs according to laws, regulations and published policies, and not the whims of politicians and power brokers.
(Yeah, yeah. I know. Just bear with me.)
Bush is claiming he needs the “flexibility” to respond to terrorism and other law enforcement functions at a moment’s notice and numerous federal protection laws are hampering his efforts.
The reality is, Bush comes from a right to work state. That means, generally speaking, an employer can hire and fire at will, for any reason and the employee has basically limited to no rights.
It’s not just an issue of “whining about labor protections.” Bush wants to remove civil service protections and politicize the federal work force - that is his ultimate goal. With Homeland Security, it is not inconceiveable he can create law enforcement organizations answering only to the President, with limited to no oversight by Congress, the People or the employees themselves.
As I walked into my federal government place of employment this morning, I was thinking to myself about costs such as letterhead, staff directories, phone systems. Not to mention, renting/building physical space.
Assuming the majority of these 170,000 are already on the job, it seems as tho a boatload of money will be spent simply shuffling them around.
With 16 years of federal employment under my belt, it is my opinion that they will need considerable economies somewhere else, to simply make up for the reconfiguration/duplication costs necessitated by forming the new entity.
What’s next for the Republicans, a Department of Government Reduction? I just hope that the Department of Homeland Security will protect at least as many Americans as the Department of Education has educated.
I work for the federal government and I’m glad that I don’t work in any of these agencies that will be morphed into the Homeland Security Department. The lack of civil service protections is what scares me. I believe the federal work force needs to be protected from politically motivated whims of whoever happens to be in office. If bad workers need to be gotten rid of, or personnel need to be deployed elsewhere, there are already processes to do this. If this keeps up, I can see a day when all government agencies will lose their protections under the guise of “security”.
“The Bush administration unveiled plans on Thursday to let the private sector compete for as many as 850,000 government jobs, from mowing the White House lawn to civilian positions in the military, sparking a backlash from unions and their Democratic allies in Congress.”
The current federal civilian workforce stands at about 2.7 million, down from more than 3.1 million in 1990.
If we assume the new Homeland Security Dept is not counted in the 850,000, already Bush has one-third of the entire federal civillian workforce on the chopping block.
Save money? Not on your life. It will cost the taxpayers more because the private sector will add their own overhead (they have to make a profit).