A federal patent examiner recently made news for doing no work for 18 weeks while getting paid his full salary. In similar style, senior policy advisor John Beale of the Environmental Protection Agency told his bosses he worked for the CIA and did no work for two and a half years, receiving not only his full salary but some $500,000 in bonuses. Those cases may be hard to top, but California is giving it a shot.
The massive California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) maintains 3,500 full-time employees who do little beyond drawing their salaries. This revelation emerges from a 2014 report by the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst (LAO), which notes Caltrans’ surplus of engineers who prepare and supervise construction projects. The news disturbs some legislators.
“It is not okay to continue having these people sitting idly by while we desperately need that money for transportation projects today,” assemblywoman Kristin Olsen told reporters. “There is absolutely no good policy reason to use taxpayer funds to pay 3,500 people to just be sitting around at a desk.” But Caltrans does it anyway.
The Legislative Analyst recommends cutting the positions. That does not please California’s government employee union bosses such as Bruce Blanning, executive director of Professional Engineers in California Government.
“The LAO approaches these issues in an almost childlike manner” Blanning told Andrew Holzman of the Sacramento Bee. Blanning opposes the cuts and recommends keeping staff on hand for future projects, when state or federal money might be available. So his union likes the idea of drawing a full-time paycheck for doing nothing, courtesy of California taxpayers.
Some legislators decry the waste and want Caltrans to hire workers on a contract basis. Blanning contends that it is contracting out that “wastes taxpayer money,” not the thousands of full-time workers paid their full salaries and generous benefits to do nothing.
Legislators and taxpayers alike might turn their attention to what Caltrans does when its full-time employees are not just sitting around. The new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge came in ten years late and $5 billion over budget, and remains riddled with faulty welds, cracked rods, corrosion problems and such.
State senator Mark DeSaulnier, now a congressman, held hearings on the bridge’s safety problems and heard whistleblowers call for a criminal investigation. The case was strong, but no such investigation ever took place. “There’s never been anyone in the management of the bridge who has been held accountable,” laments DeSaulnier.
Caltrans maintains the 3,500 idle employees in its Capital Outlay Support Program. A bill by state senator John Moorlach would increase the number of contract employees in this program by 5 percent per year, aiming for a 50/50 ratio by 2023. That shift might be a good start, but the proposed reform faces tough odds.
Like all government employee unions, Professional Engineers in California Government lobbies the legislature and spends nearly $2 million a year on political contributions. The odds are stronger that cuts will be few, if any, and California government will continue to pay thousands of full-time employees to do nothing.
Meanwhile, the patent examiner and fake CIA man are not the only ones in Washington paid to do nothing. If he is serious about accountability, congressman DeSaulnier might run a count on people like that.
Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow and communications consultant with the Independent Institute.
