What Is Really Going on at Federal Agencies?

[Timber Rattler]

https://brownstone.org/articles/what-is-really-going-on-at-federal-agencies/

Years ago as an intern in D.C., and long before the agencies all locked their doors to visitors, I had the occasion to putter around the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

These were obviously not normal workplaces. To my amazement, they were mostly dark, empty, and quiet, and the employees did not seem in the slightest bit busy doing anything at all. It was all kind of spooky.

It then occurred to me that these many hundreds of agencies and millions of employees are not really covered well by the media much at all and certainly not in any detail. They mostly operate without any oversight but for the periodic reporting done for Congress and the sporadic accounting reports from the Government Accounting Office that are mostly ignored.

It’s rather strange, isn’t it? The business pages are packed with details on the hirings and operations of every publicly traded company. We know sales, products, locations, and management structures and changes. But as regards these agencies that are supposed to be responsible to the people, there is a strange lack of curiosity about what they really do and how they do it.

There is at least one organization that takes a deeper look. It is called OpentheBooks, and started with an idealistic idea of telling people what the operations of these agencies are really like. They aren’t trying to unearth classified information or otherwise do whistleblowing. They focus on the mundane accounting and goings-on at normal civilian agencies.

What they found would never be tolerated at any private company.

The average pay in 109 of 125 federal agencies was more than $100,000 per employee and after just three years federal employees received 44 days – 8.8 full work weeks of paid time off.
In a report to Congress, the Biden Administration redacted (hid) 350,000 names and 280,000 work locations from the payrolls. And these employees aren’t spies or intelligence officers – they are rank-and-file workers within the alphabet soup of traditional federal agencies like Education, Health and Health Services, EPA, or IRS. As a result, the organization couldn’t tell “who” was working, “where” they were located, and “what” they were doing!

At the Department of Commerce, the Inspector General found 23% of employees sampled were overpaid.
Employees took nearly a year in some instances to update their duty station, which dictates their locality pay. The Department couldn’t verify whether employees were showing up to the office as required.

The Commerce Department has 47,000 employees. The Inspector General sampled only 31 employees and seven of those were overpaid by a combined $43,000!

You are not surprised, right? And you probably assume that this is just the tip of the iceberg also. Indeed, one supposes so. I’m looking at the Federal Register. It lists 429 agencies in the government now, with only a tiny number mentioned in the US Constitution. The rest have been legislated into existence by Congress, going far beyond anything the Founders ever imagined.

EXCERPT

Being a former government contractor i can vouch that this article is 100% accurate.

[MajorClay]

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