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Number of federal executives up 42% under Trudeau

Published

1 month ago

4 minute read

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

By Ryan Thorpe 

“The government has ballooned the bureaucracy across the board, but even more concerning is that this government is swelling the ranks of its most expensive bureaucrats”

Both the number and cost of federal executives has exploded under the watch of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, according to government data and access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

As of 2024, there are 9,155 federal bureaucrats classified as executives by the Trudeau government, an increase of 42 per cent since 2016, when the total sat at 6,414.

“The government has ballooned the bureaucracy across the board, but even more concerning is that this government is swelling the ranks of its most expensive bureaucrats,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Trudeau should go after the fat cats first and that means cutting back the size and cost of the federal c-suite.”

Growth has been seen among every class of executives within the federal government, with salaries  ranging from $134,827 to $255,607.

In 2022, the last year for which records are available, federal executives raked in $1.95 billion in total compensation. That represented a 41 per cent increase over 2015.

Inflation increased by 19.4 per cent between 2015 and 2022, according to Statistics Canada data.

About 90 per cent of federal executives get a bonus each year, according to records obtained by the CTF. The feds handed out $202 million in bonuses in 2022. The average bonus among executives was $18,252.

“Taxpayers are paying for more executives taking bigger salaries and bigger bonuses, but the government still can’t deliver good results,” Terrazzano said. “Can anyone in government explain why we’re paying so much for so little?”

The ballooning of the federal c-suite comes at a time when growth in the government’s bureaucracy has also been exploding.

The total size of the federal bureaucracy has grown by 42 per cent since Trudeau came to power, with more than 108,000 new bureaucrats added to the payroll.

Spending on federal bureaucrats hit a record high $67.4 billion last year, representing a 68 per cent increase in costs since 2016.

Meanwhile, spending on consultants has also reached a record high, with expenditures for 2023-24 sitting at $21.6 billion.

Despite the increased size of the bureaucracy and the federal c-suite, as well as record spending on outside consultants, departments continue to struggle to meet half of their performance targets.

In 2022-23, federal departments hit just 50 per cent of their performance targets, according to data  from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Each year from 2018 through 2021, federal departments hit less than half of their performance targets.

“Less than 50 per cent of [performance] targets are consistently met within the same year,” according to a 2023 report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the government’s independent budget watchdog.

“Taxpayers are paying through the nose because everywhere you look the size and cost of government is ballooning,” Terrazzano said. “If any politician is serious about fixing the budget and cutting taxes, they will have to shrink Ottawa’s bloated bureaucracy.”

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Chainsaws and Scalpels: How Governments Choose

Published on November 17, 2024

By

The Audit

 David Clinton

Javier Milei in Argentina, Musk and Ramaswamy in the US.. What does DOGE in Canada look like?

Under their new(ish) president Javier Milei, Argentina cut deeply and painfully into their program spending to address a catastrophic economic crisis. And they seem to have enjoyed some early success. With Elon Musk now primed to play a similar role in the coming Trump administration in the U.S., the obvious question is: how might such an approach play out in Canada?

Sure. We’re not suffering from headaches on anything like the scale of Argentina’s – the debt we’ve run up so far isn’t in the same league as the long-term spending going on in South America. But ignoring the problems we do face can’t be an option. Given that the annual interest payments on our existing national debt are $11.7 billion (which equals seven percent of total expenditures), simply balancing the budget won’t be enough.

The underlying assumption powering the question is that we live in a world of constraints. There just isn’t enough money to buy everything we might want, so we need to both prioritize and become more efficient. It’s about figuring out what can no longer be justified – even if it does provide some value – and what’s just plain wasteful.

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Some of this may seem obvious. After all, when there are First Nations reserves without clean water and millions of Canadians without access to primary care physicians, how can we justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding arts projects that virtually no one will ever discover, much less consume?

Apparently not everyone sees things that way. Large governments operate by reacting to political, social, and chaos-driven incentives. Sometimes those incentives lead to rational choices, and sometimes not. But mega-sized organizations tend to lack the self-awareness and capacity to easily change direction.

And some basic problems have no obvious solutions. As I’ve written, there’s a real possibility that all the money in the world won’t buy the doctors, nurses, and integrated systems we need. And “all the money in the world” is obviously not on the table. So the well-meaning bureaucrat might conclude that if you’re not going to completely solve the big problems, you might as well try to manage them while investing in other areas, too.

Still, I think it’s worth imagining how things might look if we could launch a comprehensive whole-of-government program review.

How Emergency Cuts Might Play Out

Imagine the federal government defaulted on its debt servicing payments and lost access to capital markets. That’s not such an unlikely scenario. There would suddenly be a lot less money available to spend, and some programs would have to be shut down. Protecting emergency and core services would require making fast – and smart – decisions.

We would need to take a long, hard look at this important enumeration of government expenditures. There probably wouldn’t be enough time to bridge the gap by looking for dozens of less-critical million-dollar programs. We would need to find some big-ticket items fast.

Our first step might be to pause or restructure larger ongoing payments, like projects funded through the Canada Infrastructure Bank (total annual budget: $3.45 billion). Private investors might pick up some of the slack, or some projects could simply go into hibernation. “Other interest costs” (total annual budget: $4.6 billion) could also be restructured.

Reducing equalization payments (total annual budget: $25.2 billion) and territorial financing (total budget: $5.2 billion) might also be necessary. This would, of course, spark parallel crises at lower levels of government. Similarly, grants to settle First Nations claims (total budget: $6 billion) managed by Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada would also be at least temporarily cut.

All that would be deeply painful and trigger long-term negative consequences.

But there’s a far better approach that could be just as effective and a whole lot less painful:

What an All-of-Government Review Might Discover

Planning ahead would allow you the luxury of targeting spending that – in some cases at least – wouldn’t even be missed. Think about programs that were announced five, ten, even thirty years ago, perhaps to satisfy some passing fad or political need. They might even have made sense decades ago when they were created…but that was decades ago when they were created.

Here’s how that’ll work. When you read through the program and transfer spending items on that government expenditures page (and there are around 1,200 of those items), the descriptions all point to goals that seem reasonable enough. But there are some important questions that should be asked about each of them:

  • When did these programs begin?
  • What specific activities do they involve?
  • What have they accomplished over the past 12 months?
  • Is their effectiveness trending up or down?
  • Are they employing efficiency best-practices used in the private sector?
  • Who’s tasked with monitoring changes?
  • Where are their reports published?

To show you what I mean, here are some specific transfer or program line items and their descriptions:

Department of Employment and Social Development

  • Workforce Development Agreements ($722 million)
  • Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care Transformation Initiative ($374 million)
  • Payments to provinces, territories, municipalities, other public bodies, organizations, groups, communities, employers and individuals for the provision of training and/or work experience, the mobilization of community resources, and human resource planning and adjustment measures necessary for the efficient functioning of the Canadian labour market ($856 million)

Department of Industry

  • Contributions under the Strategic Innovation Fund ($2.4 billion)

Department of Citizenship and Immigration

  • Settlement Program ($1.13 billion)

Department of Indigenous Services

  • Contributions to provide income support to on-reserve residents and Status Indians in the Yukon Territory ($1.05 billion). Note that, as of the 2021 Census, there were 9,150 individuals with North American Indigenous origins in Yukon. Assuming the line item is accurately described, that means the income support came to $114,987/person (not per household; per person).

Each one of those (and many, many others like them) could be case studies in operational efficiency and effectiveness. Or not. But there’s no way we could know that without serious research.

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Business

DOGE seeks ‘super high-IQ’ people willing to work 80 hours a week for free

Published on November 17, 2024

By

From The Center Square

By 

President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency is seeking “super high-IQ” people to work more than 80 hours a week for free.

DOGE co-leader Elon Musk, who is the CEO of Tesla and is one of the richest people in the world, is working with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to find top talent to cut wasteful spending, overburdensome regulations and re-structure federal agencies. Neither Musk or Ramaswamy will be paid for their work.

“We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE,” the new advisery group said in a social media post. “We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”

Candidates can send their resumes to the DOGE account on X.

“Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants,” according to the post.

In a separate post, Musk said the work will be challenging and won’t be paid.

“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lots of enemies & compensation is zero,” Musk wrote.

The department’s acronym, DOGE, is a nod to Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, dogecoin. Trump said the new group will pave the way for his administration to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulation, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies.”

Trump laid out lofty goals for DOGE in his announcement this week.

“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhatten Project,’ of our time,” Trump’s announcement said. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said the group welcomes DOGE to the challenge.

“Given our cumbersome bureaucracy and large fiscal imbalances, the effort is long overdue,” she said. “Regardless of political views, we should all want the federal government to spend scarce dollars wisely.”

MacGuineas said the outside group’s work could help restore trust in the government.

“An aggressive effort to reduce waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiencies could save billions or even trillions of dollars over a decade and could help improve the public’s faith in government,” she said.

MacGuineas urged DOGE to look at the full budget.

“Such an effort should look at all parts of the budget, especially in the areas of health care, national defense, and spending through the tax code, and it should look beyond just cutting fraud and reducing bureaucracy to also identify places where the taxpayer is not getting the best value for their dollar,” she said. “Federal health care spending, in particular, is rife with overpayments and inefficiencies that offer the opportunity to substantially lower costs without meaningfully reducing quality or access to care.”

Social Security and federal health care programs, specifically Medicare, deserve special attention, MacGuineas said.

Since fiscal year 2003, improper payment estimates by executive branch agencies have totaled about $2.7 trillion, including $236 billion for fiscal year 2023. Improper payments have declined in recent years, but remain a stubborn challenge for many federal agencies. Improper payments are payments that shouldn’t have been made or were made in the wrong amount.

Most of the improper payments come from five federal programs: Medicare, comprising three programs ($51 billion); Medicaid ($50 billion); the Department of Labor’s Unemployment Insurance – Federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance ($44 billion); the Department of the Treasury’s Earned Income Tax Credit ($22 billion); the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program Loan Forgiveness ($19 billion).

MacGuineas said DOGE should take a bipartisan outlook.

“Importantly, the process will need to be as bipartisan as possible in order to help with the deliverability and implementation of ideas,” she said. “The recommendations will need Congressional buy-in, further emphasizing the need for this to be an effort reaching across the aisle and leaving all options on the table to address our fiscal imbalances.”

Congress has run a deficit every year since 2001. In the past 50 years, the federal government has ended with a fiscal year-end budget surplus four times, most recently in 2001.

DOGE also plans to go after fraud at the federal level. The Government Accountability Office, which serves as the research arm of Congress, estimated fraud losses cost taxpayers between $233 billion and $521 billion annually, in a report in April. The fraud estimate’s range represents 3% to 7% of average federal obligations.

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