Government Efficiency

Part of the reassignment from my home office in Davis to the FSRDC in Berkeley was a change in my locality. Part of my argument for being reassigned remote was that I would cost my employer less money. The Sacramento locality zone has a lower cost of living than the Washington, DC locality zone. A map of locality zones is here, if you are interested: https://www.federalpay.org/gs/locality. So, by moving from DC to Davis, I saved the government $5,754. The move from Davis to Berkeley costs the government $16,591 annually, or around $1,382 a month.

Sending me, and the rest of the employees of the federal government, to report in person, is not about saving money, nor is it about productivity. Why send me to a computer lab in another city where it makes it harder, not easier, to collaborate with colleagues and communicate with my supervisors? Why try to push all of my colleagues in DC into a building that wasn’t designed to accommodate full-time in-office? To try to get us to quit. That’s the goal. There is some part of me that wants to make this work, just to show them that they can’t make me go away. But I also know that if another option comes my way, I’ll jump, just like so many other people have. Before this year, there would have been very few jobs that I would prefer to Census, but the commute, the uncertainty, and seeing my leadership crippled in face of adversity means there are many jobs that seem like a better fit now than they did even 6 months ago.

I am worried about the Census. I am worried about the data and reports and other public goods we produce. Between the “fork” and the early retirements, the Census Bureau is gutted. Hansi Lo Wang wrote about it last week, but I don’t think he fully portrayed the chaos that we are facing, because I don’t think we, including the people he was talking to, have fully absorbed how much human capital is walking out the door in the next couple of weeks. I told someone who is waiting on an FSRDC proposal that the entire team that handles internal project approvals and logistics just retired. The main person who does FSRDC proposals is still around, but now she has many more things to try to handle. And there are other teams throughout the Bureau that are in a similar place. All of the leadership is gone, and the remaining, often more junior, staff are left to pick up the pieces.

This is before any reduction in force/forced layoffs. No one is targeting the Census specifically and trying to dismantle it. But it feels like a Jenga tower with many holes, and pulling out one more piece could send it crashing to the ground.