Giuliani's Plan to Cut Federal Employees

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani in a speech to the Heritage Foundation on May 7th, said he would use attrition to cut more than 20 percent of federal civilian employees and wants an outright cut in non-defense spending.

"The United States government right now needs an across-the-board spending decrease," the former New York mayor told the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, DC.

Mr. Giuliani has went even further than former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who has proposed limiting non-defense discretionary spending increases to 1 percent less than inflation. Giuliani also vowed to continue the Bush tax cuts and to veto spending bills that include pork-barrel projects without listing their sponsor or purpose. Mr. Giuliani said he wouldn’t “exclude anything” in his across-the-board cuts, except for defense spending, which he said must be increased because the nation is at war.

The former New York City mayor said part of the problem with spending in Washington is people use the wrong words to try to confuse the decisions. He said politicians should stop using phrases such as "nondiscretionary spending," to describe spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which are set by funding formulas and have proved difficult for Congress to trim.

"If I can convince you that 60 percent of the budget is nondiscretionary, then I don't have to do anything about it. The reality is that the entire budget is discretionary."

He coupled his economic message with his push for staying "on offense" in the war against terrorists and said "Democrats want to step back" on many of the key tools, including the USA Patriot Act, electronic surveillance and tough interrogation techniques.

“You step back on all of that, and you're back where we were in the 1990s -- in denial about the threat," he said.

As for military spending, he lamented the fact that it has fallen to 4.1 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, compared with 6.2 percent under President Reagan.

His pledge to trim the federal work force relies on attrition. He said 42 percent of the federal civilian work force is due to retire during the next two presidential terms, which would run from 2009 through 2017. Mr. Giuliani proposes filling only half of those jobs.
He claims his plan to reduce the federal workforce will cut costs by $70 billion a year.

"The challenge will be, of course, to convince the Democrats that there's such a thing as a nonessential government employee," he said.