Obese bureaucracy weighs us down
The Philippine Star
October 10, 2003

Bureaucratic streamlining is an exercise that is regularly employed by the country’s political leaders, having been utilized even as early as President Manuel L. Quezon’s government in 1905.

Almost every president has had his (or her) version of how to reform the bureaucracy. And yet, in the last 98 years, the government bureaucracy continues to be weighed down by a lot of deadwood resulting from confusing multi-tiered, overlapping, and uncoordinated agencies.

The quest for rightsizing in the civil service continues, albeit in vain. From a government of 430,000 employees in the early 70s, we have to date a workforce at an obese size of 1.5 million. This costs the government about a fourth of its annual P800-billion spending allocation.

For a government whose budget deficit is about P200 billion this year, paying the salaries of government workers – especially those who sit at their desks eight hours, five days a week doing virtually nothing – is a burden that becomes too heavy to carry.

Anyone of us who has gone to a government office knows how pathetic it is to see six or seven out of 10 people twiddling their thumbs all day long without having any substantial output. Although the salary of a government staff is lower than those working in the private sector, it is still money down the drain.

Easily, the number of qualified and competent persons who could do the job could be halved or even reduced by 65 percent. And even if those left were to get salaries at par with that of the private sector, there would still be substantial savings to government.

Playing The Numbers Game

Trimming down the bureaucracy is something that has perennially appealed to the management logic of most of the country’s past chief executives, from President Quezon to the current Arroyo government.

Different measures have been adopted to achieve the goal of controlling the upward trend in the number of civil servants. Some of these measures have modestly succeeded in keeping growth at a minimal level, including the five-year Attrition Law passed during the Ramos administration.

The law dramatically reduced the actual numbers of government employees during the first three years of implementation, from 1992 to 1994. Unfortunately, staff numbers increased again during the next two years, although in the end, the tally was still lower by about 20,000 employees compared to when the program started.

The Attrition Law’s acceptability lies in the fact that it did not provide for forcible termination of government employees. Rather, it simply prohibited replacements of vacant positions resulting from retirement, death, dismissal or retirement.

How Is The Current Administration Faring?

The current administration also introduced its own bureaucratic streamlining measures last year, with 77 agencies and task forces attached to the Office of the President abolished. This was estimated to have given the government an annual savings of P56 million in salaries and overhead costs.

There is a pending bill in Congress seeking to provide additional incentives to government workers who would go for early retirement should their positions be declared redundant, outdated or irrelevant.

If (and this is a big "if") the current administration pushes its enactment into law and Congress obliges, this legislation is expected to reduce the government staff level by 200,000 workers.

Under the proposed bill, affected government workers would be entitled to an additional half-a-month salary for every year of service on top of the monthly pension they would get from the Government Service Insurance System (assuming GSIS still has the funds) until death.

Proponents of the bill believe that the cost of retiring redundant or outdated workers, estimated at P15 billion, would be offset by P8 billion in yearly savings coming from the salaries and overhead that government no longer needs to pay.

Any bets that this seemingly sound approach to ease government overhead burden will be pushed by the current administration this year? Sorry, but it looks like there are other more urgent priorities.

Politics Abets Obese Bureaucracy

The political value of the gargantuan numbers of public workers is obviously a big reason why no administration is able to sustain the task of streamlining the bureaucracy. Obviously, laying off public workers is never good for politicians, especially those currently in power.

Even the Attrition Law of 1992 failed to sustain its initial success. During its last two years, the provision for exemptions was abused. As a result, towards the end of 1996, the penultimate year of the Attrition Law, almost 60 percent of the positions in the civil service were exempted from the hiring moratorium. It was politics again rearing its ugly head.

From a politician’s point of view, cold figures, i.e., budget savings and reduced costs, are no match to the political points earned by increasing the number of civil servants and keeping them happy. Any exercise, therefore, solely to reduce numbers in government will have minimum initial success, and will ultimately wane come election time.

Of course, the cynics among us will ask: Why target the low-level government bureaucrats when more substantial savings can be achieved by scrapping one of the houses of Congress, say the Senate?

Oh, no! I’ll miss my usual fare of comic relief.

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