Following up on last night’s post on Rudy’s plain to slash the federal workforce down to about two-thirds of its current size, I find that Rudy apparently first rolled this plan out at the beginning of the summer. And it’s already generated a lively discussion among those who actually follow the federal workforce as an issue full time. Here’s one example here and another here.
One basic point — not a surprising one — is that if you approach this issue only as a matter of cutting federal workers rather than the less politically popular one of announcing which services you plan to cut, you quickly run into trouble. Either you farm the work out to crony contractors or you do what Rudy himself did as mayor when he had a similar job attrition plan. He quickly realized that cutting the number of city workers just wasn’t consistent with improving the quality and reliability of city services. So he quickly bagged the whole idea.
