At the most recent Republican presidential debate, Vivek Ramaswamy promised to “shut down redundant agencies that should not exist” as part of his plan to reduce the federal workforce.
His plan has received criticism from a diverse array of voices, including The Wall Street Journal, which stated that “[c]onvincing a majority of the House and Senate to close down agencies, many of which distribute billions of federal dollars to their states and districts, has proven nearly impossible for decades.”
The Journal has a point — Washington has never shut down a major cabinet-level agency. However, that does not mean that Congress and the president cannot succeed at privatizing the federal bureaucracy. They just need to pick their battles wisely.
Yes, they will not be able to shut down or privatize mammoth agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or Department of Education. That said, they can prosper by moving forward with an incremental approach, shrinking the size and scope of the public sector by putting unpopular, lesser-known agencies into private hands.
Take, for example, the Office of Personnel Management, the agency that manages most of the government workforce and recruits new federal employees. The agency couldn’t be less popular — and for good reason.
In January, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that OPM regularly awards health benefits to ineligible bureaucrats, costing taxpayers as much as $1 billion a year.
The agency’s security apparatus is even less secure than its checkbook is. It experienced one of the largest data breaches in government history, which led to Chinese intelligence officials receiving 22.1 million records of the American people’s super-personal information.
Even the OPM’s antiquated operating procedures have drawn the ire of federal employees, who have grown tired of the agency delaying their retirement claims.
A slew of private companies perform the exact management functions as OPM. Given how disappointed the American people have been with this agency, the executive and legislative branches should easily be able to convert these agency’s responsibilities into private-sector contracts.
In fact, House oversight committees have already begun the conversation about gutting the agency. On Nov. 17, the Committee on Homeland Security sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office endorsing Democratic New York Rep. Caroline Maloney’s call for the GAO to “review OPM’s use of the USAStaffing talent-acquisition-management information system within the federal hiring process,” which appears to be vulnerable to cybersecurity threats.
OPM does not “distribute billions of federal dollars” to federal representatives’ districts or ignite any other pragmatic political concerns the Journal raised about privatization. That is why even Democrats like Maloney support reforming it.
While this agency may represent the most logical starting point for a new Republican officeholder dead set on slashing the federal workforce, lawmakers must assess what other agencies, offices, and programs can come next. Whichever ones they pick must exhibit the same qualities. Their choices need to be important but boring and inefficient, yet also easily replaceable.
The left has gained so much policy ground over the last two decades by mastering the art of making incremental policy progress. That is how they passed Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank bank regulations, and too many environmental regulations to count. They always seem to start small and continue to build off their tiny victories. Why don’t Republicans begin doing the same thing with respect to privatization?
As Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker once said, “You can ask Americans to walk forward, slowly, knowing they can scramble back to the ledge if need be. You cannot ask them to jump.”
It is worth what it costs to try.
Joseph R. Pitts represented Pennsylvania’s 16th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1997 until 2017.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.