WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Prisons, its staff depleted by Trump-era hiring freezes, is advertising for thousands of jobs. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is bringing on dozens of lawyers after being gutted by four years of budget cuts. The Agriculture Department is moving to replace hundreds of scientists who fled or were forced out by the last administration.
At the Justice Department, officials are looking to hire civil rights attorneys — and the Energy Department is recruiting for senior energy efficiency and renewable energy roles that went unfilled when Donald Trump was president.
That’s a fraction of the growth in the federal bureaucracy that the Biden administration would like to see, according to a $1.5 trillion preliminary budget the White House released in April, which directs billions of dollars into hiring to help curb climate change, restore enforcement of environmental and workplace laws, and expand safety net programs in housing, education, public health, and veterans’ health.
President Biden vowed during his campaign to restore faith in a federal bureaucracy his predecessor villainized as an unaccountable “deep state” — and with debate stirring in Congress on $6 trillion in spending proposed by the White House, that shift now involves persuading Americans to embrace a bigger government.
Already, the vision is colliding with the reality that even in just a single term, Trump succeeded in his goal of cleaving and disrupting the federal government.
Some programs that are crucial to Biden’s agenda are so short-staffed that his administration can’t yet fully implement his policies, among them enforcement of fair-housing and workplace safety laws. A number of decisions by the Trump administration, including the relocation of key economic research and land management offices, are proving hard to reverse.
The annual list of troubled federal programs, released in March by the Government Accountability Office, is longer than ever, a shift workforce experts attribute to vast areas of the government the Trump administration ignored. Auditors spotlighted “high-risk” areas vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement, ranging from oversight of the federal prison system to the Department of Health and Human Services’ leadership and coordination of public health emergencies.
Then there are delays that have nothing to do with Trump. Across the government, departments are waiting for money from the yet-to-be-negotiated federal budget to fill vacancies. Biden’s spending plan for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 is scheduled to be released May 28.
The two agencies expected to drive the rebuilding effort, the Office of Personnel Management and White House budget office, are missing top leaders, with no Senate action yet on the personnel nominee, Kiran Ahuja, and no nominee for the Office of Management and Budget. Biden’s first choice to lead the budget office, Neera Tanden, withdrew from consideration in March.
The personnel agency, whose profile the president is expected to elevate after a revolving door of permanent and acting leaders under Trump, is confronting major vacancies after his administration installed a slew of political appointees, now departed, to fill roles normally reserved for career employees.
“The short-term tactical issues are huge,” said Donald Kettl, a public affairs professor at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the federal government. “But the [Biden] administration’s ability to wrestle with the really big questions has been slowed by the challenges of getting senior leadership in place.”
Despite Trump’s pledge to ”cut so much your head will spin,” the largest government departments — Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security — grew during his presidency, leaving the bureaucracy 3.4 percent larger overall than when he became president, according to an analysis of federal personnel data by the Washington Post. That compares with 3.6 percent growth in President Barack Obama’s first term and 1.3 percent in his second, the data shows.
But that masked a plunge in staffing in a majority of Cabinet agencies Biden inherited, prompted by Trump reshaping the permanent workforce in a contraction long sought by conservatives.
Homeland Security grew by 6.9 percent, VA by 13 percent, and the Commerce Department by 0.2 percent, for example, while Labor fell 11.8 percent, Education 5.9 percent, and State 5.5 percent.
As Trump rolled back regulations and aimed for a smaller, more targeted footprint, the government shed jobs in regulation, enforcement, civil rights, worker safety, and other areas. The number of mine inspectors dropped 22 percent by December 2020 from four years earlier; Internal Revenue Service officers who collect delinquent taxes fell by 19.6 percent; soil scientists tumbled 16.3 percent; and public health educators were cut by 28.6 percent.
In a $1.8 trillion Biden administration spending plan separate from its preliminary budget and covering domestic priorities, the IRS would get an extra $80 billion to revive enforcement against wealthy tax cheats, whom Biden has vowed to target. The enforcement staff would grow by 15 percent each year over a decade.
The tax agency, with a full-time staff of 73,554 in fiscal 2019, has lost 20,000 employees since 2010, a third of them in the enforcement division, as a result of Republican-led budget cuts, agency data shows.
Long-standing challenges largely ignored during the Trump era are further complicating the attempt to rebuild the federal government, according to veterans of the bureaucracy. The federal pay and benefits system hasn’t changed since the 1970s, making the private sector more competitive for hard-to-fill jobs. The system fails to adequately assess talent, those veterans say, with a computerized, multiple-choice self-assessment that doesn’t always advance the best candidates to the list of job finalists.