The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts

Presents findings from a survey that examines why some students do not complete their high school education, and what academic and personal supports would have helped them stay in school. Includes recommendations for improving graduation rates

Hiring more full-time federal bureaucrats will result in smaller and better government

The United States’ federal government has expanded greatly since the 1960s, with spending having increased by a factor of six in over that time. The number of federal employees, however, has not similarly increased, with present numbers close to those of the Reagan Administration and fewer than were present during Kennedy’s term. John J. DiIulio Jr writes that the federal government has become a Leviathan by Proxy, which gives billions of dollars and thousands of contracts to state and local governments, contractors, and non-profits. He argues that recent government problems such as the 2005 reaction to Hurricane Katrina and 2013′s Obamacare rollout show that the federal civil service is overloaded not bloated. In order to make government smaller and better, he calls for the hiring of one million more federal civil servants by 2035 and the introduction of better performance management practices

Achievement Trap: How America Is Failing Millions of High-Achieving Students From Lower-Income Families

Assesses the elementary school, high school, college, and graduate school experiences of students who score in the top 25 percent on national standardized tests and whose family incomes are below the national median

Save the Bureaucrats…from the Politicians

If Paul Verkuil was a stock, I would buy him. And if his wonderful keynote address at the Penn Program on Regulation’s 2015 Annual Regulation Dinner were a petition, I would sign it! Verkuil nails it in Save the Bureaucrats. We are living, as he says, in a “neo-spoils” era, but one created by what he has previously described and decried, in his fabulous 2007 book, as a process of “outsourcing sovereignty.” In his keynote address, Verkuil referenced the “killer chart” on the cover of my own my recent book, Bring Back the Bureaucrats, a chart showing that the federal government spends five times what it spent in 1960, adjusted for inflation, but that the federal workforce is smaller today than it was in 1960. I only wish more politicians thought about the killer truth behind that chart; instead, most either deny, ignore, or distort it. For instance, in a speech delivered earlier this summer, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush proclaimed “reducing the size of the bureaucracy by 10 percent within 4 years is a realistic goal, saving tens of billions of dollars, and without adding to unemployment.” Bush is no government bureaucracy-basher, but his proposal, like the more radical plans that many Republican members of Congress have concocted for rolling back big government by shrinking the federal workforce, ignores at least eight sets of facts relevant to understanding why we need to “save the bureaucrats” from the politicians. First, when George W. Bush became president, the executive branch employed about 1.8 million civilians (not counting postal workers), which was about the same number as when John F. Kennedy won the White House. And there were more federal bureaucrats (about 2.2 million) when Ronald Reagan won reelection in 1984 than when Barack Obama won reelection in 2012 (about 2 million). Second, eliminating the entire federal civilian workforce would save about $250 billion a year in wages and benefits, or less than the over$300 billion a year that Washington spends on defense contractors and under half of the more than $600 billion a year that it spends on Medicare beneficiaries. Third, the federal government spends more than$600 billion per year on more than 200 grant programs for state and local governments, a ten-fold increase, in constant dollars, since 1960. The post-1960 federal civilian workforce has remained steady, but the state and local government workforce has roughly tripled to more than 18 million. Many state workers function as de facto federal bureaucrats. The largest single item in most state budgets is the federal-state Medicaid program. More than 90 percent of federal environmental protection programs are administered by state and local agencies that together employ many times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s workforce of below 20,000. Fourth, the federal government also has millions of de facto employees in for-profit firms and nonprofit organizations. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense has roughly 800,000 civilian workers – plus the equivalent of some 710,000 full-time contract employees. Likewise, the U.S. Department of Energy spends about 90 percent of its annual budget on thousands of private contractors, who handle everything from radioactive waste disposal to energy production. The nonprofit sector has grown to encompass about 1.6 million organizations registered with the Internal Revenue Service, plus thousands more tax-exempt groups that are not required to register. The registered nonprofits have more than $2 trillion in annual revenues, with roughly a third of that money – and a large fraction of all jobs in the nonprofit sector – coming from government grants as well as fees for services and goods from government sources. Fifth, read the Congressional Record: state and local governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations lobby incessantly for federal policies, programs, and regulations that they are paid to administer. The proxies rarely lose, which is a big reason why government never stops growing. Federal employees and their unions are not politically toothless but, compared to Washington’s contract- and grant-funded federal proxies, they have had almost nothing to do with the post-1960 growth in federal spending. Sixth, Jeb Bush is right that many federal bureaucrats are “hired, promoted, and given pay increases often without regard to performance;” but it is also often the federal government’s paid proxies – incompetent, overpaid, or corrupt for-profit contractors and the nonprofit grantees – not federal civil servants, who are behind performance problems on chores as distinct as handling plutonium, approving pesticides, and containing forest fires. There is no empirical evidence that outsourcing saves money, and a small but growing body of evidence shows that it actually costs more than it would to have government workers supply the same services. Seventh, the most catastrophic government performance failures have typically occurred when federal agencies had too few, not too many, full-time workers. For instance, in 2005, we witnessed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) failed response to Hurricane Katrina, which hit when FEMA had only about 2,100 employees and had recently lost many senior managers. In 2013, we lamented the lame launch of Obamacare health exchanges, which involved scores of contractors and was overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, an agency with fewer than 5,000 employees. Over the last two years, we’ve been sickened by the scandals at Veterans Affairs hospitals, whose so-called Contracting Officer’s Representatives are too few to properly monitor what its medical centers’ small armies of contractors do. Eighth, many federal agencies are already in dire need of more workers. For instance, by 2025, Social Security beneficiaries will exceed 85 million people, and the Social Security Administration (SSA) will disburse nearly$1.8 trillion a year. But the SSA projects that it could lose a third of its workforce by 2020, when some 7,000 SSA headquarters and 24,000 SSA field employees become eligible for retirement. Unfortunately, in recent years, due to a congressionally mandated hiring freeze, the SSA has been unable to fill positions left open by employee retirements. In sum, as Verkuil suggested, today’s federal civil service is overloaded, not bloated. We have too few federal bureaucrats monitoring too many federal grants and contracts, and handling too many dollars spent hiring others to do the work of the federal government. And we do a terrible job recruiting, training, and rewarding those who do venture into our federal civil service. Terrible! Here is one little Verkuil-inspired challenge to Jeb Bush and other presidency-seekers who favor cutting the flat-for-decades federal workforce as a way to cut costs and shrink government: Do you also favor cutting the federal for-profit contractor workforce, and, if so, by exactly how much and in what specific programs? I expect few politicians would favor cutting the outsourced bureaucracy. Maybe Verkuil and I and others who see things as we do should save our breath. But we won’t. The country can’t afford any longer to neglect its bureaucrats! This essay is the second in a four-part Regulatory Review series, Good Government Requires Good People

Valuing Democratic Governance

Paul R. Verkuil’s Valuing Bureaucracy: The Case for Professional Government is a tour de force of historical interpretation and empirical analysis. It is also a civics sermon predicated on and punctuated by the author’s unshakeable faith in American democracy. I write to trumpet Verkuil’s history lessons, endorse his analyses—and question his faith. First, however, full disclosure: Valuing Bureaucracy contains frequent and favorable citations to public administration studies by Donald F. Kettl, Paul Light, and yours truly (two home runs and a foul ball, respectively), including one to an op-ed in The Washington Post that I co-authored with Verkuil in 2016. So, consider the source, but Verkuil’s historical renderings are vivid and visionary. Two chapters of the book, entitled “The Growth of Contracting Out in Government” and “The Consequences of Federal Contractor Government,” summarize just about every significant fact, development, and dispute of relevance to federal contracting. The former chapter expertly places the current government outsourcing frenzy in the context of the “growth in contractors in the economy as a whole over the last decade,” a trend that Verkuil suggests reflects a wider “transformation in the employer-employee relationship.” But, as Verkuil emphasizes, in the public sector “contractors now represent not only numbers, but brains—brains that have been outsourced.” To cite just my favorite from among Verkuil’s many compelling examples, just one unit—Booz Allen Hamilton—of one mega-corporation—the Carlyle Group—earns $5.48 billion a year from government agencies and employs nearly 23,000 people, “many of whom have prior government service, and one-half of whom have security clearances.” In agency after agency, Verkuil shows, there are “glaring inadequacies in oversight of the contractor regime” that “can only be overcome by infusing more talent in government itself.” Then these words, which might be the best single-sentence summary of the book’s bedrock thesis: “Rational government is not contractor government, it is professional government managing contractor services.” Verkuil supports his thesis with a variety of case studies. What do a coal ash spill in North Carolina, IBM litigation in Indiana, the administration of climate change regulations in New Jersey, and the privatization of government tasks in Texas all have in common? One part of the answer is monumental performance failure wrought by the use of paid non-public proxies to administer the people’s business, including with respect to tasks that even a radical libertarian might agree are inherently governmental. Another part of the answer lies in what happened after “each of these states shrank its public workforce in a risky gamble for government efficiency.” One subsection of Valuing Bureaucracy—entitled “Workarounds and Professionalism,” which includes Verkuil’s first-person testimonies about the conditions under which workarounds work (or do not work)—deserves to be nominated as the single most nuanced and novel part of the book. In computer science parlance, “workaround” refers to a technique for compensating for or curing a program feature or “bug” that causes a system to falter or fail. In bureaucratic parlance, “workaround” generally refers to ways and means of cutting red tape or overcoming other effectiveness-sapping, performance-killing organizational routines and structures. To achieve anything resembling administrative excellence, many, perhaps most, government organizations need workaround-ready leaders and managers who can circumnavigate “encrusted statutory and regulatory commands” and cope creatively with “what happens when rules are stacked upon one another across administrations over many years.” As Verkuil avers, “nowhere is professional expertise more needed than in cutting through the spider’s web of rules and formalities that delay and trap citizens.” But nowhere, as he illustrates, are contractors less suitable substitutes for seasoned public servants than in identifying, crafting, and executing workarounds that result in government either working better, or costing less, or both. As Verkuil demonstrates via facts, figures, and four superb case studies, that thesis applies not just to the federal contractor regime, but to the contractor regimes that now dominate most states. In his discussion of civil service reform, Verkuil refers to Achieving Regulatory Excellence, the outstanding 2017 volume edited by Cary Coglianese, but he could have cited it no less aptly in discussing the need for professional public servants, not paid contractors, when it comes to making workaround work. As Coglianese noted in that volume’s opening chapter, professional regulators practice “discretion with accountability” and must learn “what aspects of a problem to focus on or what rule violations to target or overlook.” But it is Verkuil’s faith in American democracy that motivates the book, and it is by no means a naïve faith. Verkuil has worked as a top college’s president and as dean of two great law schools. He served a half-decade under President Barack Obama as Chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States. He is a model pragmatic idealist, and his book Outsourcing Sovereignty remains a landmark treatise in spotlighting the many dangers associated with relying so heavily on contractors to translate public laws and policies into administrative action. In short, Verkuil is a noble civic soul whose final page is a hymn to hope: “I am always hopeful that arguments well-made can persuade, so long as people remain faithful to the cause of democratic governance.” I wish I were half as hopeful. As described in my little 2014 book, Bring Back the Bureaucrats, sadly, what I see is a constitutionally limited government that has morphed into a “Leviathan by Proxy”—a debt-financed, proxy-administered state in which most voters love their member of Congress but hate Congress; demand more government benefits without more taxes; unite in bipartisan disregard for “our Posterity;” divide into polarized partisan and ideological factions; and doubt or deny that public service professionals serve “the cause of democratic governance.” But maybe Verkuil is right to hope. Maybe Valuing Bureaucracy itself will win some hearts and minds. Even in the Trump Administration, Verkuil concludes, “doubters must come to recognize the bureaucracy is their government and disparaging it will neither make it go away nor perform better.” Maybe in the wake of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s relatively fine performance in responding to hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the story of how that particular agency was reformed and rebuilt post-Hurricane Katrina will be revisited, and the lessons duly generalized. And maybe rhetoric about “draining the swamp,” orders for freezing government payrolls, and the similar symbolic gestures will give way to a more fact-based focus on the need for real civil service reform. …Or maybe not

What Happens in Real Bureaucracies

I began as a political science graduate student at Harvard in 1980. James Q. Wilson had just finished editing The Politics of Regulation. With characteristic humility and humor, he said the volume was by his “wonderful former graduate students,” adding that I should read it “if only to learn about the kind of work done by people unlucky enough to be advised by me.” I was blessed to join that “unlucky” number. He supervised my dissertation (a multi-state study of prison management) and wrote about the book version of it in his masterful 1989 treatise, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. I served as his teaching assistant and course administrator for both his introduction to American government course and his famous “Bureaucracy” course at Harvard (Government or “Gov” 150). From 1992 to 2012, I co-authored his best-selling textbook, American Government: Institutions and Policies, including the chapter on bureaucracy and the passages in various chapters on regulatory politics. The Politics of Regulation contains superb case studies of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Maritime Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, state public utility commissions, and others. Wilson thought about The Politics of Regulation as akin to his 1968 work Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities. The latter book had illustrated and attempted to explain varieties of police behavior across different local police departments. The former volume illustrated and attempted to explain varieties of regulatory behavior within and across different federal and state regulatory agencies. But The Politics of Regulation went farther. Wilson interpreted the case studies as evidence against the notion that regulatory agencies were bound to be “captured” by special interests. As he wrote in the most recent edition of his textbook, “iron triangles are much less common today than once was the case,” in part because “the courts have made it much easier for all kinds of individuals and interests to intervene in agency affairs.” Nowadays, he added, “government agencies face a bewildering variety of competing groups and legislative subcommittees that constitute not a loyal collection of allies, but a fiercely competitive collection of critics.” In the volume’s concluding chapter, Wilson took direct aim at theorists who attempted to explain bureaucratic behavior in regulatory agencies as rational, self-interested, budget-maximizing behavior or the like. In Bureaucracy, he generalized the point as follows: “Government agencies are not billiard balls driven hither and yon by the impact of forces and interests. When bureaucrats are free to choose a course of action their choices will reflect the full array of incentives operating on them: some will reflect the need to manage workload; others will reflect the expectations of workplace peers and professional colleagues elsewhere; still others may reflect their own convictions.” This raised an apparent self-contradiction in Wilson’s wider academic corpus. In the Politics of Regulation, he rejected rational choice theory in relation to bureaucratic behavior. But, a half-decade earlier, in Thinking About Crime (1975), he embraced it in relation to criminal behavior. In 1991, on the occasion of his election as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA), I was invited to write an essay on him for an APSA journal. I entitled it “James Q. Wilson and Civic Virtue,” and it was a valentine to my teacher, friend, and mentor. But before writing it, I asked him about the apparent self-contradiction. The test of a good theory, he cheerfully replied, is not only its explanatory power, parsimony, and predictive value, but also whether it yields an understanding that is “general, meaningful, and true” while illuminating what is “most important” or “most essential” about the behavior or phenomena under study. In his view, rational choice theory explained why most career criminals routinely break laws, but not why most career public servants routinely strive to faithfully execute laws. For a scholar with big-time bona fides as a right-wing public intellectual, Wilson loved stories about great government leaders and public bureaucracies that worked. He was ever more temperamentally than ideologically conservative. His conservative temperament had him greet great government leaders and good public bureaucracies as lucky accidents, and to doubt that either regulatory agencies or other government agencies could be improved by plan or design. Thus, in The Investigators, Wilson’s brilliant 1978 study comparing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Drug Enforcement Agency, he lambasts the “top-down” view of bureaucracy and insists that what agencies do, and how (and how well) they do it, cannot be “chosen, defined, revised, or discarded as a result of efforts” by leaders or reformers out “to achieve organizational goals or respond to public demands.” By the same token, he opens Bureaucracy by warning that the book “is not very theoretical, neither is it very practical,” adding that readers “will not learn very much—if anything—about how to run a government agency.” He closes the book by offering a few “modest proposals for reform” (quite modest). Wilson also carved into the preface of Bureaucracy his belief that the scholarship on bureaucracy that is “most helpful to public discourse and to college students” is that which sticks “as close as possible to what actually happens in real bureaucracies.” But Wilson was never enamored with how traditional public administration scholars had stuck to the subject. In his 1994 acceptance speech for the John Gaus Award in Public Administration, he revealed publicly that he found public administration studies deadly boring. He also recounted that he had started teaching Gaus’s old Harvard public administration course only because teaching the course was a contractual condition of his Harvard appointment. To “console” himself and “irritate the faculty,” he renamed the course “Bureaucracy.” Thank goodness for that contractual condition

Let Light Shine on Government’s True Size

Paul C. Light is an intellectual giant on whose shoulders discerning American public administration scholars are proud to stand. Over the last four decades, Light has uncovered hidden truths about how American government actually works, discovered practical ways to improve government performance, and rallied influential public leaders to help reform the government bureaucracies that translate democratically enacted laws into actions. The lessons that Light offers in “Silver Linings Shutdown” synthesize the wisdom contained in his latest seminal book, The Government-Industrial Complex: The True Size of the Federal Government, 1984-2018. In a foreword to that book, Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Board Chairman who, in 1990, with Light’s help, launched the National Commission on Public Service (a.k.a., the Volcker Commission), writes: Amen. We ought to pay special attention to Light’s lessons about the “blended workforce,” and conclude with him that a plan is needed to end our “quiet crisis” and turn “a once-in-a-generation chance to remake the federal service” to good and lasting account. Light spotlights “the private and nonprofit sector employees who provide goods and services to the nation under federal contracts and grants.” He estimates that at the start of the last shutdown, “the federal government employed about 7.2 million federal, contract, and grant employees,” six million of whom worked for departments affected by the stoppage. He emphasizes how the shutdown brought “the federal government’s blended workforce” into the media spotlight and before the public mind. As usual, Light is absolutely right. At least for a brief and shining shutdown moment, journalists and citizens learned that full-time federal bureaucrats were not Washington’s sole and sufficient workforce. They wrote or read headlines about the economic and other hardships suffered not only by furloughed federal bureaucrats but by other flesh and blood fellow citizens who work on contract for the federal government. And they got a crash course in how much Americans rely on both bureaucrats and contractors, not only for tax refunds and the like, but also “for a host of benefits that keep them safe,” such as food and drug safety and aircraft inspections. To Light’s silver-linings list on the blended workforce, I would only add shutdown-related stories that stumbled across the fact that about 80 percent of our full-time, federal civilian employees actually live, work, worship, and shop outside the Washington, D.C. region—just like the vast majority of all U.S. Postal Service workers who deliver the mail. Indeed, just like most Americans, period. Since the last federal government shutdown, we have learned that federal contract spending grew 9 percent from 2017 to 2018. In 2018, it totaled $559 billion, which was the biggest total since 2010 when contract spending reached$562 billion. Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security led the increased contract spending parade. The biggest contract companies were once again Defense favorites such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Meanwhile, IRS-registered nonprofit organizations, most notably both secular and religious human services public charities, continued to rely on government grants and fees for services for about a third of the total revenues with which they paid workers and did good works. There are two overarching operational facts about present-day American government that cannot be ignored. One fact is well-known and much-discussed—namely, that ours is now a deficit-budgeted, debt-financed republic. The other fact, still little understood and often hardly noticed, is that federal laws and policies are executed not solely or even mainly by full-time federal bureaucrats, but by what Light terms the blended workforce. That workforce is flanked by a hard-to-specify but nontrivial number of state and local government employees whose positions are paid in whole or in part from the federal treasury, and whose jobs involve administering federally mandated programs. The blended workforce plus the de facto federal workers in state and local government agencies together staff America’s “shadow bureaucracy” or “Leviathan by proxy”—or whatever moniker one might wish to give it. Ironically, the only part of the blended-plus federal government workforce that has not grown over the last half-century is the part that most Americans think is bloated or worse: the roughly two million full-time federal civilian workers. These are the unduly maligned “Washington bureaucrats” who, as Light aptly summarizes, have been caricatured as overpaid and underworked when they are, in fact, and for the most part, “real people who clock in every day to make a difference for their communities and country.” The nearly $600 billion spent on federal contractors in 2018 was more than twice what the federal government spent that year on the wages and benefits of all two million or so full-time federal civilian workers. But almost nobody knows that or seems to care, except, maybe, when the federal government shuts down. The three “good government groups” that Light references in his penultimate paragraph (the Volcker Alliance, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the Partnership for Public Service) should join forces with universities, think tanks, and other good-government organizations (like, for example, the Brookings Center for Effective Public Management and Harvard’s Innovations in American Government Program, to cite just two). Here is plumping for a new, Light-directed national commission on—to steal his book title for the purpose—“The Government-Industrial Complex.” Led by Light, such a commission’s central, if not its sole, mission, would be to document the true size of the federal government, develop a big data-gathering system for describing and assessing the blended-plus workforce, and devise measures intended to revitalize and reform that workforce’s nucleus—the federal civil service system. Next year, 2020, marks the Volcker Commission’s 30th anniversary. In spring 2020, the University of Pennsylvania Press will be releasing an edited volume celebrating Chairman Volcker’s legacy and featuring a chapter by Light. Perfect timing for a conference in Philadelphia to launch that Light-directed commission! I, for one, would do all I could to advance it. A national, high-impact, Light-directed commission that shines searching lights on the true size of government, and creates a system for keeping them shining, would be more than a shutdown silver lining. It would be pure civic gold

Let Light Shine on Government’s True Size

Paul C. Light is an intellectual giant on whose shoulders discerning American public administration scholars are proud to stand. Over the last four decades, Light has uncovered hidden truths about how American government actually works, discovered practical ways to improve government performance, and rallied influential public leaders to help reform the government bureaucracies that translate democratically enacted laws into actions. The lessons that Light offers in “Silver Linings Shutdown” synthesize the wisdom contained in his latest seminal book, The Government-Industrial Complex: The True Size of the Federal Government, 1984-2018. In a foreword to that book, Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Board Chairman who, in 1990, with Light’s help, launched the National Commission on Public Service (a.k.a., the Volcker Commission), writes: Amen. We ought to pay special attention to Light’s lessons about the “blended workforce,” and conclude with him that a plan is needed to end our “quiet crisis” and turn “a once-in-a-generation chance to remake the federal service” to good and lasting account. Light spotlights “the private and nonprofit sector employees who provide goods and services to the nation under federal contracts and grants.” He estimates that at the start of the last shutdown, “the federal government employed about 7.2 million federal, contract, and grant employees,” six million of whom worked for departments affected by the stoppage. He emphasizes how the shutdown brought “the federal government’s blended workforce” into the media spotlight and before the public mind. As usual, Light is absolutely right. At least for a brief and shining shutdown moment, journalists and citizens learned that full-time federal bureaucrats were not Washington’s sole and sufficient workforce. They wrote or read headlines about the economic and other hardships suffered not only by furloughed federal bureaucrats but by other flesh and blood fellow citizens who work on contract for the federal government. And they got a crash course in how much Americans rely on both bureaucrats and contractors, not only for tax refunds and the like, but also “for a host of benefits that keep them safe,” such as food and drug safety and aircraft inspections. To Light’s silver-linings list on the blended workforce, I would only add shutdown-related stories that stumbled across the fact that about 80 percent of our full-time, federal civilian employees actually live, work, worship, and shop outside the Washington, D.C. region—just like the vast majority of all U.S. Postal Service workers who deliver the mail. Indeed, just like most Americans, period. Since the last federal government shutdown, we have learned that federal contract spending grew 9 percent from 2017 to 2018. In 2018, it totaled $559 billion, which was the biggest total since 2010 when contract spending reached$562 billion. Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security led the increased contract spending parade. The biggest contract companies were once again Defense favorites such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Meanwhile, IRS-registered nonprofit organizations, most notably both secular and religious human services public charities, continued to rely on government grants and fees for services for about a third of the total revenues with which they paid workers and did good works. There are two overarching operational facts about present-day American government that cannot be ignored. One fact is well-known and much-discussed—namely, that ours is now a deficit-budgeted, debt-financed republic. The other fact, still little understood and often hardly noticed, is that federal laws and policies are executed not solely or even mainly by full-time federal bureaucrats, but by what Light terms the blended workforce. That workforce is flanked by a hard-to-specify but nontrivial number of state and local government employees whose positions are paid in whole or in part from the federal treasury, and whose jobs involve administering federally mandated programs. The blended workforce plus the de facto federal workers in state and local government agencies together staff America’s “shadow bureaucracy” or “Leviathan by proxy”—or whatever moniker one might wish to give it. Ironically, the only part of the blended-plus federal government workforce that has not grown over the last half-century is the part that most Americans think is bloated or worse: the roughly two million full-time federal civilian workers. These are the unduly maligned “Washington bureaucrats” who, as Light aptly summarizes, have been caricatured as overpaid and underworked when they are, in fact, and for the most part, “real people who clock in every day to make a difference for their communities and country.” The nearly $600 billion spent on federal contractors in 2018 was more than twice what the federal government spent that year on the wages and benefits of all two million or so full-time federal civilian workers. But almost nobody knows that or seems to care, except, maybe, when the federal government shuts down. The three “good government groups” that Light references in his penultimate paragraph (the Volcker Alliance, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the Partnership for Public Service) should join forces with universities, think tanks, and other good-government organizations (like, for example, the Brookings Center for Effective Public Management and Harvard’s Innovations in American Government Program, to cite just two). Here is plumping for a new, Light-directed national commission on—to steal his book title for the purpose—“The Government-Industrial Complex.” Led by Light, such a commission’s central, if not its sole, mission, would be to document the true size of the federal government, develop a big data-gathering system for describing and assessing the blended-plus workforce, and devise measures intended to revitalize and reform that workforce’s nucleus—the federal civil service system. Next year, 2020, marks the Volcker Commission’s 30th anniversary. In spring 2020, the University of Pennsylvania Press will be releasing an edited volume celebrating Chairman Volcker’s legacy and featuring a chapter by Light. Perfect timing for a conference in Philadelphia to launch that Light-directed commission! I, for one, would do all I could to advance it. A national, high-impact, Light-directed commission that shines searching lights on the true size of government, and creates a system for keeping them shining, would be more than a shutdown silver lining. It would be pure civic gold