Shackling gov’t employees to their desks

Wilson doesn’t generate much actual businesses at conferences, he says. But as a consultant, he needs to be able to know where to find information for his clients, and that requires establishing personal contact with the people to whom he can direct questions. “If not,” he said, “I’m just another person in the world that they don’t know and they don’t give me their time.”

Nina Marino is an attorney based in Beverly Hills, California. “I am strong advocate of conference travel,” she told Remapping Debate via email. Marino is director of continuing legal education for the Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association, so she travels a lot. “Traveling to conferences gives me the opportunity to share the knowledge I have,” she said, “and the opportunity to learn from others who have different backgrounds and different ideas.” “Exposure to new environments stimulates creativity…You can only go so far in life sitting at your desk.”

Applicable to government?

Not surprisingly, a June 2013 report by Rockport Analytics, a consulting firm hired by the United States Travel Association, concludes that “government travel for meetings and attendance at conferences is vital to making government more efficient in carrying out its mission, more responsive to citizens and more effective in partnering with the private sector.” A bit more surprisingly, the report found that sending government employees to meetings and conferences actually cost 17 percent less, per day, than sending their private-sector counterparts, and that government-sponsored meetings cost 49 percent less, per attendee, than meetings sponsored by the private sector.  At least in this instance, any dollar-and-cents efficiency imperative would command business to be more like the government, rather than vice versa.

Brookings Institution senior fellow Thomas E. Mann is a political scientist who’s been observing Washington up close for more than four decades. The current war on government conference travel, he told Remapping Debate, is “kind of anti-intellectual, anti-research, anti-empiricism. It reflects a general disposition that we know everything we need to know.” And the knowledge deficit isn’t merely government’s; the private sector, Mann notes, “is heavily dependent on government research and information for going about its work. This is a good produced by government that has many beneficiaries in the business community.” Unfortunately, he said, “the bluntness of the cuts, both in the budget agreements and the sequester, means these activities of government are being squeezed.”

“One of the reasons why productivity levels in denser urban areas are higher than in rural and more dispersed areas,” Mann continued, “is because there’s less social interaction, [there are fewer] opportunities for people who wouldn’t ordinarily meet, to meet, to exchange information, to share ideas.” Conferences serve the same function.

“The more Congress does to sort of diminish the opportunities for doing useful work, for learning new things, for seeing opportunities to innovate in the delivery of government services,” Mann said, “the less likely government is to recruit the kind of people who can take full advantage of it. Dumbing down the public employee workforce is truly counterproductive.”

One high-level government agency employee with extensive private-sector business experience told Remapping Debate that his agency, like a business, has customers whom it’s expected to serve. “People do need to travel to talk to their customers,” he said, “because their customers don’t come to them.” This employee, who requested anonymity lest he provoke a flurry of subpoenas from Republican partisans in Congress, continued: “Suppose you want to talk to everyone in a particular industry. You have to go where their conventions are. Most people do not hold their conventions in Washington, D.C.”

Too much of a perk?

The cost findings in the Rockport Analytics report align with this government employee’s experience. When he was travelling in private industry, he said, he frequently travelled first class. In contrast, he said, when you travel for the government “you travel tourist.” In recent months, he said, he has twice been on a plane where he noticed a cabinet secretary — one of them, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew — also travelling coach.

“Travelling for the government is not for fun,” the government employee said. “It’s not a congressional junket.” For instance, in a couple of weeks, “I am travelling to Florida to give a speech.” The conference “is in a fancy resort hotel,” and many of the attendees will be counting the hours during morning meetings until they can hit the golf course. But “I’m arriving late at night” the evening before, “and leaving after my speech.”

Remapping Debate’s attempts to reach Sen. Coburn and Rep. Issa via multiple emails and phone messages went unanswered.

Rep. Farenthold, who did reply by phone, didn’t dispute that conference travel is valued highly in both the private and public sectors. “What we’re trying to do,” he said, “is bring travel within reason. We’re not trying to limit or end travel. We’re just trying to make sure it’s work-related and not a vacation.”

But didn’t last summer’s CR limit government conference travel (by requiring inspectors general to investigate all conferences that cost more than $100,000)?

 “I don’t know,” Rep. Farenthold said. (His press aide, Meaghan Cronin, later confirmed that it had.)

Rep. Farenthold and Cronin told Remapping Debate that taxpayers last year spent $340 million on 894 government-sponsored conferences. We asked Farenthold how much of that spending was wasteful.

Rep. Farenthold referred our question to Cronin, who said she couldn’t quantify how much of the $340 million was waste, but that, based on other examples of wasteful conference spending that have surfaced, “it’s clear that examples of waste were not isolated to one agency or a particular conference.”

The $340 million cited by Rep. Farenthold and Cronin — money spent on all government conferences, wasteful and un-wasteful alike — represented less than 0.03 percent of all discretionary spending last year (and less than 0.01 percent of all federal spending). Mann points out that if Congress were sincerely interested in cutting waste, it would do better to investigate government contracting. “There’s real money there,” Mann said. (Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that the federal government spent $516 billion on contracts during fiscal year 2012.)

When pressed on the question of whether muscle and bone were being cut along with the fat, Rep. Farenthold said, “Nothing we’ve done has passed…My bill has not been signed into law.”

But if his legislation were to pass? The bill’s imposition of elaborate new disclosure requirements would surely limit agencies’ willingness to participate in conferences. Rep. Farenthold did not explain how that could be consistent with running government more like a business.