Oh baloney. You pay people what you think they have to be paid not to go to a competitor, and (pass/fail) whether their continued employment is important to the corporation. Full stop.


Yep.

My experience working for a federal government agency was somewhat different and sometimes frustrating. The employees at the lower echelons, the ones in the field who interacted with the public, were there because they believed in the mission of the agency and were, with few exceptions, dedicated to the work and appreciated by the public. But a trend I witnessed over nearly 30 years with this agency was a tendency for the organization to grow ever more top heavy. While the staff in the field stayed the same or, more often shrunk, the size of management grew until the service to the public was reduced and the organization chart became an inverted pyramid. The higher in the pecking order you were, the closer you were to the source of funds. Many managers who wanted to advance found that one way to get a promotion was to create more jobs underneath their position which would result in an increase in their 'span of command' and a consequent increase in their grade level. They had control of the funds and could divert them to this end at the expense of field operations.

There was one brief attempt to get a handle on the growth of wasteful middle-management and that came in Clinton's tenure with Al Gore's 'Reinventing Government' program. And it actually made a difference...for a while. Sadly, it didn't take long for the old organizational problems to creep back in.

Could government be more efficient? Yes. But the Trump administration's approach is to just indiscriminately demolish federal agencies. Taxpayers will not be well served by this.