Hiring freezes are one of the most phony of attempts at budget savings. They are like crash diets. The only success might be to shrink fat cells but the freezes do not eliminate any bulk. Almost every Governor has tried hiring freezes when budgets get tight but the reality is that they do not save a lot of money and have never balanced a budget. They are useful symbols to make the press and public think the Governor is taking action.
I worked to implement a hiring freeze last year and all I can say is that it is a non-productive pain. Every department thinks their mission is critical and every department is under pressure from interested parties and legislators to do more. Add in the usual bureaucratic motives of turf building and every department hustles to gain an exemption to the freeze. I turned down many requests. I was told that it would violate the law to not hire more people. I was told that people would suffer if more state employees were not hired to protect consumers, process victim claims, print state publications, and on and on. I still said no. Governor Brown’s staff is going to be swamped in exemption requests. In fact his order already exempted 5 large categories of state departments from compliance in an effort to minimize the requests.
I do not know how much money I saved but it was not a lot. For no program ended. The programs just slowed down. So I purposely made government more inefficient by not allowing departments to spend more money on staff.
In fact as demand builds up for the program to get back on track, all a freeze accomplishes is set the stage for a rapid build up of new staff accompanied by all the issues and costs of training, and providing equipment. Crashing dieting followed by binge hiring is now in our future and it is not healthy for people or governments.
A dirty secret of state government is that the budget funds positions whether or not they are occupied. Then the budget orders the departments to save salaries by not filling positions or to go slower in testing for them. I am told that my old agency is already at 10% vacancy of funded positions. (Maybe I did accomplish a little bit) Everyone knows that departments are over-funded so that the Department of Finance can later recoup the money as budgeted savings. What is not known is exactly how few employees a department can have before it collapses and fails in its mission. Because of this system there has been a practical hiring freeze in place for years.
As predicted by Governor Schwarzenegger’s California Performance Review state employees are retiring in record numbers. Before hiring people in their place this is a wonderful opportunity to balance the budget by eliminating programs and thus avoid hiring people altogether.
California does not need a diet, California needs surgery.