Every time congressional dysfunction has caused a temporary government shutdown, I’ve heard people make fun of the instruction that “essential workers” must report to work anyway. Pundits always ask, if other government workers are not essential, why do we pay them? What business hires workers it doesn’t need?
Nearly all employees think they are essential, but clearly the Administration doesn’t agree. It has laid off or retired about 154,000 federal employees, according to the Office of Personnel Management. More layoffs are planned as various government activities are scaled back.
To put that in perspective, the total federal civilian workforce is about 3 million, so the layoffs total roughly five percent. Yet the reaction of government unions and numerous press reports have made it sound like vital public services will simply implode. My longtime friend Paul Driessen, a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, has written numerous books and articles on energy and the environment. His latest column is about the relative impact of these federal jobs, compared to layoffs in the private sector that sometimes result from their regulatory work.
Referring to about 1,350 State Department layoffs, two percent of that Department’s workforce, he cited a number of press accounts containing “Stories of tearful farewells, union outrage, and dramatic claims of ‘fascism’ that filled the airwaves.” We have unfortunately grown accustomed to such hyperbole in politics, with angry protesters flippantly throwing around terms like fascist, Nazi, and communist. But with respect to government reorganization and efficiency measures, some perspective is needed, as Paul Driessen suggests.
The first point to keep in mind is how recently many of these federal jobs were created. The State Department, for example, grew by over 40 percent in the last 20 years, from 57,000 to over 80,000 – so reducing employment to a mere 78,650 is not exactly draconian. Similarly, reorganization of the Interior Department may reduce its workforce from 70,000 to about 68,600. The Agriculture Department may reduce more, perhaps 15 percent of its 86,000 workers, and EPA is down about 700 so far this year.
Don’t get me wrong. We all understand the difficult situations facing laid-off employees. In fact, people in the West, especially those impacted by environmental regulations, know the hardships all too well. The main difference is a lack of outrage when thousands of jobs are sacrificed in the mining, energy, and forest products industries, for example. Or the boarded-up main streets of communities that depended on those industries.
Driessen cites a new report by Oxford Economics (commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers), which documents that EPA’s proposed air quality regulations for particulate matter (PM2.5) are projected “to put 852,100 to 973,900 current jobs at risk, both directly from manufacturing and indirectly from supply chain spending.” A Competitive Enterprise Institute analysis found that complying with EPA regulations costs the U.S. economy $353 billion a year, which is more than 30 times the total agency budget. And it costs thousands of jobs that money would have added.
Driessen also mentions how President Biden shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline killed roughly 11,000 blue-collar jobs. I am especially sensitive about the impact on coal miners, because there used to be over 2,000 of them in Colorado, and they helped develop the cleanest coal technology on Earth, only to see their workplaces shuttered while China mines and burns far dirtier coal.
Driessen’s column mentions 80,000 coal workers displaced during the Obama-era “war on coal,” but in truth it didn’t start or end with Obama. Worldwide, the shift from coal has cost an estimated 2 million jobs, and in the U.S. coal jobs declined by 50 percent since 2010, as American coal production cratered. The U.S. coal industry employed 200,000 miners in 1980, but today 80 percent – 160,000 – of those jobs are gone. Not to mention tens of thousands who once worked at the 300 coal-fired power plants shuttered by government policies.
Similarly, over the last 20 years over 600 U.S. sawmills closed, largely because of the shortage of timber available from national forests whose managers have allowed trees to burn instead. An estimated 1.2 to 1.4 million jobs have been lost in logging, paper mills, furniture manufacturing, and other wood products industries.
Because federal regulatory policies were such a major contributor to all those job losses, one might understand why those laid-off workers, and the communities they lived in, are not grieving over the loss of five percent of a federal workforce they do not generally view as allies.
