What Is Happening to FDA Employees? An Analogy Can Help
I was out-of-town for part of the week and was asked several times: what is happening to Federal workers, especially those at FDA?
By way of an answer, I created this analogy:
There is a bakery with ten employees. Because fresh baked goods will be needed each day: some come in early to bake, some come in to serve the morning customers and deliver to nearby restaurants, some come in later to handle afternoon customers and do clean-up. Some of the jobs are more important to the business. Some of the employees do a better job than others.
DOGE tells the owner: you can only have six employees. DOGE knows nothing about the bakery business, the skills needed, time slots, or about your employees’ responsibilities and performance. Nonetheless, DOGE will be picking the four who will be let go.
All ten employees fear they will be laid off—without cause and at any moment that DOGE chooses to reappear. The cashier is thinking: I am not a baker, what if they let all the bakers go? The bakers are thinking: what is the point if there is no one to sell, serve, or deliver the baked goods?
Of course, if the bakers are PhD product reviewers, the cashier is a biostatistician, and the servers are consumer safety officers…..then there is a good chance that the remaining six employees cannot sustain the same volume or quality of baked goods, and maybe they won’t be able to keep the bakery open, at all.
If you want more facts and less analogy, this background should help.
The Federal Workforce is Large….FDA’s Is Small But Important
The federal Executive Branch employs about 2.3 million full-time civilians (excluding the Postal Service). Defense and security-related agencies accounted for 70% of the entire federal workforce[1]. Federal offices with the most personnel in 2023 were the Department of Defense Department (775,100 people), the Department of Veterans Affairs (433,700), and the Department of Homeland Security (212,000)[2].
In contrast, FDA had 18,500 employees in 2023[3]. About 1 in every 125 federal civilian employees work for FDA.
On its $6+ billion budget, the agency is responsible for regulating products that represent 21cents of every consumer dollar spent in the US. Globally, FDA oversees the safety of $3.9 trillion of food, tobacco, and medical products[4]. That averages about $200,000 per FDA employee.
Deficit Reduction Will Reduce the Federal Workforce….FDA Is Affected But Not Specifically Targeted
In an earlier column on budget reconciliation (here), I explained that (in FY 2024) the federal government spent $6.75 trillion and collected $4.92 trillion in revenue, resulting in a $1.83 trillion annual deficit. At that pace, we would be adding $18 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.
All discretionary spending amounts to $1.7 trillion, more than half of which is defense. Unless federal revenue is markedly increased…there is no choice but to make hard decisions on entitlements, mandatory programs, and taxes, as well as making cuts to discretionary spending. Decreasing the federal work force would need to be part of the process.
President Clinton Significantly Reduced the Federal Workforce…But This Is Different
President Clinton created a “Reinventing Government” initiative to find ways the government could work more efficiently. It dramatically cut federal employment, although actual costs savings were more modest than expected[5].
It took months, not days, to develop the reinvention plan, translate it into priorities, monitor attrition, offer incentives, etc. Notably, involuntary separations (i.e., lay-offs) were minimized and mostly came at the end of the process.
Congress supported the initiative. Federal employees were involved in the process. Statutory provisions for reduction in force were followed.
The reason Reinventing Government moved slowly, Kamarck said, was that it did not want to interfere with the myriad crucial roles of government while restructuring it.
“The stakes in federal government failure are really, really high in a way they’re not in the private sector,” Kamarck said. “We really worried about screwing things up…...”[6]
The key learning from the 1990’s is that most, if not all, federal employees would support downsizing if it is planned, paced, and predictable. The current effort is just the opposite in all three regards.