Progress in Washington

An ancient Washington gag is that an unsuccessful weapon is about to be renamed "the civil servant" because "it won't work and you can't fire it." That derisive opinion of federal employees may now have to be changed. For the past year a Government task force has been conducting the first survey ever made of output per man-hour by Uncle Sam's hirelings. Last week Labor Secretary James Hodgson announced that the results were "a pleasant surprise": the bureaucrats in Foggy Bottom and environs have been getting bigger productivity increases out of their workers than have bosses in private industry. Between 1967 and 1971, the report showed, productivity in the Federal Government rose an average of 2% a year, v. an average annual improvement of 1.5% in the non-farm sector of the private economy.

The federal self-report card has some huge gaps. For one thing, it did not measure how productive--or unproductive--Government employees were at the beginning of the four-year period. Many taxpayers may suspect that federal agencies can improve their productivity by considerably more than 2% a year and still remain something less than models of efficiency. Also, the task force made no attempt to assess what has caused the rise in output per man-hour. Government officials speculate only that the ever-present specter of budget cuts and hold-downs has forced federal managers to figure out their own ways to get more out of their workers.

"What is most important," says Hodgson, "is that we now have a new and useful yardstick to help us improve our performance." Altogether, some 600 standards were devised to gauge efficiency in such Government operations as the minting of coins, distribution of Social Security checks, processing of FHA mortgage applications and printing of federal documents. They cover slightly more than half of the 2.6 million employees in the federal work force. The rest, including NASA scientists, FBI agents and the Supreme Court Justices, perform jobs whose productivity is still unmeasurable.

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