Feds hold up my pension

 The bank told me my pension paycheck was 'held up by the feds.' - Cambridge | Somerville Independent

Government Downsizing

 Cambridge Day February 2025

When will they ever learn: Downsizing?

In the 1990’s there was a major wave of downsizing in North America. Students of organization studied this process in some detail and came up with a series of recommendations about whether to downsize and the best way of doing so.

Downsizing alone was rarely successful in terms of achieving an organization’s long-term goals of competitiveness and profitability, though short-term cost savings were sometimes achieved.

There were two bedrock principles that were found to be essential if downsizing were to be pursued effectively. First, downsizing must be guided by a clear strategic plan that refocuses the organization on its core activities. Secondly, there must be a sharing of the pain by the senior management of the organization.

The call by Elon Musk, supported by the so–called President, Donald Trump, is the worst possible way of implementing layoffs.

They called for millions of employees to resign their offices in exchange for a few months extra salary. Any one can take it: no analysis of which parts of government needed to contract or which need to be reinforced. There was little constraint on who might or might not take the buyout. And, in the background, there was the implicit threat that people might be fired in the future; hopefully after an analysis of where the needs were. 

In this form of reducing payroll, the people who are going to take up the offer are the best and the brightest. They are the people who have deep connections with the environment in which they work and with the clients that their departments work. They are the people that can immediately move into decent jobs.

Departments will be hollowed out. The tacit knowledge based on their experience in the agency will be lost. The remaining officials will be handicapped in performing the work that needs to be done.

I would have expected Mr Musk, an experienced business man, and his advisors would have known this. Mr. Trump not so much.

It is time to pause, to engage in sensible analysis, and not to ride rough-shod over the Congress, and the laws, and the Constitution of the United States.

Oh, and I do not see Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump sharing the pain.

De Leo's Plan

The only vision that Speaker DeLeo's plan will instantiate is a world enjoying a downward spiral of inferior jobs, and inferior pay, and inferior benefits (Editorial, Boston Globe, April 21, 2011).

State and local government employees are not overcompensated compared with private sector employees. The perceived differences are due to comparing public sector employees who are mainly in professional jobs with private sector employees who are in entry level jobs.

Compensation is not simply pay, it is also pensions and health-care benefits. In previous contract negotiations, public sector workers gave up larger pay increases in order to purchase health-care and pension benefits. Let us be clear. They (the employees, not the cities, towns, and states) are paying for those benefits with deferred or redirected compensation.

The reason that the citizens of the Commonwealth are balking at the increased costs is that, over the past 25 years, private sector compensation has stagnated (except for the top 1% of the earning population).

Corporations have starved most of us; the motto starve the beast was directed at government but impacted us all. Now they want the public sector to join in the race to the bottom and are using ordinary people, who are struggling to pay their bills, to achieve their goals.


Sent to Boston Globe

Science and Government

March 9th. 2006
Sent to but not published in the New Yorker

There are two things wrong with John Marburger's view of the relation between Science and Government (Political Science, New Yorker, March 13th, 2006).

First he argues that when presenting conference papers scientists are not just reporting data, they are also "putting forward a point of view that should reflect U.S. policy." He has got things backwards. In sensitive areas like AIDS policy, surely government policy should reflect the data rather than some ideological view that the administration holds.

He also says that "This administration is more management-oriented than others." That has to be joke. Perhaps the administration adheres to an outdated "command and control" view of how managers operate, but effective managers do not work like that any more. Real managers thrive on information to underpin their decisions. We only have to look at the range of information disasters that have beset this administration to conclude that it has no idea about how to ensure that current and accurate data (on Iraq, on hurricanes, and on port security) gets to the decision makers. There is no more managerially inept administration in living memory.

The implications of the administration's attitudes to science are and will undercut our ability to sustain the incredible scientific advances of the last century.

September 6th. 2005,
Sent to New York Times but not published

Government does not have a monopoly of incompetence.
It took 15 years or so for the levees of New Orleans to deteriorate. Here in Boston it took just a few months for the first significant breach to appear in the tunnel walls of the "Big Dig." A large number of major flaws have now been discovered in this project managed and undertaken by private enterprise.
It took three months of reports from health inspectors before Halliburton cleaned up a Mess Hall kitchen in Iraq. Their failure added to the perils faced by our troops.
Even today, two hundred years after Semelweiss discovered how germs were transmitted in hospitals, many doctors and nurses do not wash their hands between patients.
It is time for us all to start acting responsibly.