The swelling masses of federal employees are a powerful political interest group.They live well at the expense of the rest of us taxpayers (the counties in VA and MD surrounding DC are the wealthiest in the country, largely due to the generous pay received by the bureaucrats) and are determined to extract more. Minor budget cuts are a horror for them and deregulation that would actually eliminate agencies and the nice jobs they provide (e.g. the Civil Aeronautics Board, killed off in 1982) too terrible to contemplate.
Interest groups can mount impressive lobbying campaigns and as we read in this Cato@Liberty post by Chris Edwards, the union boss who represents these workers is threatening to “whoop ass” if anyone in Congress doesn’t go along with his demands. I guess we should expect a propaganda campaign meant to brainwash people into believing that these workers are hard-working, underpaid public servants who do extremely important tasks for the good of the country.
The truth is that most federal agencies get in the way of productive people and often harass Americans who aren’t in support of the “progressive” agenda. Close them down, save the money, and tell the employees to hunt for work that people are willing to pay them to do.
