Insecurity and Social Services

With just about everyone looking for ways to cut the budget, entitlements are on the firing line, it’s no wonder that the lowest morale among federal agencies is at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Federal employees in that organization, slammed with furloughs and constantly defending their existence before Congress, responded to the federal government’s annual employee survey (Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys) with a positive job satisfaction score of only 56 out of 100. That’s a lot of demoralized folks. With almost the entire department furloughed (96%) during the shutdown, it’s pretty clear that they are hardly considered “essential.”  

There are an estimated 11 thousand workers there, and “HUD’s mission is to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. HUD is working to strengthen the housing market to bolster the economy and protect consumers; meet the need for quality affordable rental homes: utilize housing as a platform for improving quality of life; build inclusive and sustainable communities free from discrimination…” Wikipedia. Who cares… at least that the message these civil servants seem to be getting.

But perhaps even more important is the abysmal morale at a blended organization of former antagonistic turf-war battlers, a failed FEMA structure, the border patrol folks who are at the heart of immigration reform controversies, and the lovely cadre of close to 60 thousand TSA agents, one of whom was recently shot to death at Los Angeles International Airport. There are over 240,000 employees at the Department of Homeland Security, a hodge-podge of hastily restructured and incredibly embellished civil servants shoved together after the 9/11/01 attacks in an effort to create a more centralized and coordinated internal security and disaster relief structure.

DHS does appear to be little more than the bureaucracy from hell, one more federal agency that probably was not needed, could have mostly been covered by what already existed, but hey… got a new problem (9/11)… add more federal government to deal with it. It came with the massive budget boondoggles that included fighting two completely frustrating, unnecessary, deficit exploding wars and pretty much failing to achieve the stability promised. Oddly, this drunken and wasteful spending spree came from the same party that today is complaining about overblown bureaucracies and unsustainable deficits.

That this agency is waddling and seemingly lacking any semblance of balance and control that might just make it work, basking in the glow of a Congress that is willing to incur even more deficit burdens by not cutting anything dealing with security and border control, doesn’t mean that the folks that work there feel their important oats. At 57 out of 100 on the above government employee survey, their morale is one lousy point above that of the hapless HUD folks. It seems that this internal measurement of job satisfaction is a pretty good indicator of “Houston, we’ve got a problem” that our lovely elected representatives seem to ignore.

But dig further into the numbers, and DHS just gets worse, even when compared to the Housing folks: “[HUD’s] 2013 decline in job satisfaction is no surprise considering that the government-wide score fell by two points this year, but Homeland Security fared worse with its four-point drop… In terms of leadership, the department earned a score of 50, ranking second from last behind the Broadcasting Board of Governors. In 2011, DHS earned a 55, so the problem has grown worse.” Washington Post, November 12^th.

Looking at another survey, the DHS numbers sink even lower. “The annual Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings, which are based off the survey results, showed especially low index scores for the [DHS’] Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Intelligence and Analysis division, all of which scored far below the government-wide average of 60.8 points — none of them scored above 54 points… Customs and Border Protection, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and Citizenship and Immigration Services all earned much higher ratings than Homeland Security’ overall score of 52.9.” The Post. I wonder what the surveys will say next year about the Department of Health and Human Services after the debacle in attempting to implement the Affordable Care Act?!

The entire cadre of civil servants is under attack by rolling sessions of Congressional committee and subcommittee hearings. Deficit reduction means that once stable government jobs with pension benefits that make the private sector drool are on the block. It’s not the fault of those who took and are doing the jobs; it’s the idiots in Congress, many seeking pork for their districts, who authorized these expenditures in the first place… and now are disavowing the legacy of their own party’s mandates just a few short years ago. To see the self-righteous grimace on the faces of those who are members of the same party that caused the problem is the essence of what is wrong with a gridlocked, do-nothing Congress: they refuse to take responsibility for their own damned actions! Many didn’t even want to lift the debt ceiling to pay for the expenses that they themselves mandated!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am coming to believe that the real function of our federal government is simply to foment sustainable hypocrisy!