Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, known as "Dr. No" for opposing basically every non-military spending bill, has used the long Congressional recess to find a new foe — the 2.5 million federal employees. The Washington Post’s Christopher Lee reports that Coburn’s office has released a report on federal absenteeism that may say more about Coburn than civil servants.
Coburn report trots out a bunch of statistics that federal workers have missed millions of hours of work the last few years. Federal employees unions respond with counter-statistics showing their members are missing only a tiny fraction of their work time. Normally at this point in the blog post I would provide telling stats, but it’s hard to contextualize the figures from either side.
Coburn is an interesting character and his challenging "the ways of Washington" is not without merit (he actually collaborated with Barack Obama on a bunch of war contracting reform amendments before Obama ran for a president and Coburn became sort of a pariah). But he’s resurrecting tired Reaganesque tropes about the laziness of the federal bureaucrat. This makes it easier to continue starving the government — and deterring talented people from joining the civil service. -MB