Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Bureaucratic Bungling

Mitt Romney, who so far has done the best of the presidential contenders, even though he ominously failed to win South Carolina, is the subject of 2012’s first Grading PolitiFact (PF) Liberal Style review.

Early in January, Romney told a crowd in New Hampshire that President Obama’s approach to improving unemployment was not to rely on the private sector, but to “hire lots of bureaucrats” and that “he’s added 135,000 to the government workforce.”

Sometimes I ask a very simple question when analyzing  such a fact-check as this: that would be “whose fault is that?”—whose fault is it that 135,000 employees were hired? Was it actually Obama’s doing? Besides the usual “why” which was covered in the ruling by PF New Hampshire’s Jon Greenberg by reviewing statistics from the Office of Personnel Management:

The Office of Personnel Management tallies are done every quarter, not every month, so the numbers don’t exactly match what you find on the BLS web site, but the trends line up. In round figures, from September 2009 to September 2011, the federal workforce grew about 100,000. Counting permanent civilian employees, the departments of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Defense grew by 53,000 -- more than half of the total. Veterans Affairs provides another 24,000, or about a quarter of the overall increase. Homeland Security contributes 12,000 -- call that another 10%. All told, national defense, assisting veterans, and protecting the national borders account for close to 90% of all federal civilian employee growth.

The numbers fall off quickly after that. The departments of Justice and Health and Human Services are tied at roughly 4,000 each.

There’s a nuance in Romney’s statement that bears some scrutiny. He talked about hiring lots of bureaucrats which raises the question, is everyone on the federal payroll a paper-pushing practitioner of the dark arts of red tape? Not in the opinion of Palguta.

"The sad fact is that the VA has had to increase staff at the hospitals to care for the wounded warriors coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan," Palguta says.

So, whose fault was it that staffs had to be increased to care for wounded warriors? If most of the hirings are VA-medically-related, who started the wars? If Obama had started troop withdrawals early in his presidency, it sounds like the VA would still have had to hire medical care for those returning. So, whose fault is it then? Or, let's say Republican John McCain had won the presidency in 2008--McCain, the renown former Viet Nam POW--would he have not just permitted, but embraced the hiring of additional VA medical care for returning soldiers?    If there were no wars we can assume there’d be far less than 135,000 “bureaucratic hirings.” One can also consider Obama’s continuing Bush’s “surge” but that’s only a little over ten percent of the peak number of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

PolitiFact made this more palatable for a Half True by portraying it as being two parts (one true, one false): the number 135,000, and whether or not they were bureaucrats. But there’s a third one: Romney said “You can hire lots of bureaucrats…That’s what the president’s done.” He’s saying it’s Obama that did this. Aside from the fact that it wasn’t literally Obama that hired 135,000, the VA needed to hire additional medical personnel to care for the returning troops who fought a war started (for nefarious reasons and at HUGE expense) by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The Department of Homeland Security was part of the fact-checked number, which was created under Bush. And it’s the GOP that’s generally more interested in protecting our borders than the Democrats.

Finally there’s the word “bureaucrat.” PF’s Greenberg gives the word “bureaucracy” (instead of individual bureaucrat) a definition of “a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation." But to Republicans and conservatives, a “bureaucrat” is someone (who must be from the government) who does nothing productive (even though I know from personal experience you can have bureaucrats in the private sector). And almost all of those 135,000 definitely had productive things to do.  It's hard to argue otherwise unless you're making a generalizing and  misleading statement like Romney did.

The only “element of truth” in Romney’s statement was the number. The rest of it ignored critical facts specifically in order to give a different impression. In other words, this should have been a deceptive, misleading Mostly False.