[ekam]

I'm fine with government employees being paid handsomely as long as they're qualified and effective. Currently, public employees are typically underpaid; however, a lingering problem in California is that public employees, once hired, have a "right to employment" that makes them considerably more difficult to fire than employees in the private sector. The guarantee of employment often removes any incentive for continued improvements in performance. If it were easy to shape the public employee workforce by selecting for the best, it would be easier to justify having salaries of public employees that are competitive with the private sector, which is how it should be if we want effective government run by competent and ambitious professionals.

[Helmut10001]

"right to employment" is a concept that applies to many jobs in Germany, often beyond public employees. It is one of the biggest internal debates I had: Give people guaranteed employment (which sounds fair, benevolent), but how to continue to motivate improvement? Often I come to the conclusion that the US "fire & hire" system is better than the "hold & secure" approach of Germany. Primarily because it also makes switching jobs in Germany much harder.

[lnxg33k1]

I think you guys are both worried about how to motivate people to become more efficient and productive by keeping up to date "In their own time", while in Germany companies usually pay for courses, so yeah if a company is scared of improvement, they just need to pay for their people to improve

[systemvoltage]

It'd be amazing if we had honest, loyal, productive workforce in the Government. Many people do amazing job, but many don't. And they cannot be held accountable. I want extreme sense of accountability for government employees, tracking their performance and ability to fire them if they do not meet standards. Media should be doing that but media is in bed with the Gov.

If people missed, please check more departments, the default view in the article is just Police. There is similar crisis in gazillion other departments in the drop down menu.

We've create an incentive structure to make permanent administrative bloat of the magnitude mankind has never seen. What deeply bothers me is that most people are OK with that, they are OK with lazy government employees. They are OK with a state employed dystopia. They are OK with increasing bureaucracy and love participating in newer ways to expand the government.

Has anyone read the Chips Act? There are so many non-tech spending line items in there. It's just adding more and more administrative and managerial class of people.

[borroka]

I don't agree at all that "people" are okay with this. If I, like many others, had a choice, we certainly would not want people, for example, to work so many overtime hours that no sane person could reasonably justify.

But what to do? You will say, vote! Or, protest! But have you ever seen a government visibly reduce administrative bloat, unreasonable government spending, coddling public servants? Because I have not seen it, either here in the United States or in the country where I come from. This is not a "things will never change" statement, but the impact that "people" can have on the way government works is very limited, if not negligible. The older I get, the more I realize that "elites" live in and govern a world in which I participate as a mere spectator.