New York Times
By Michael Shear
December 25, 2014
This is how a bureaucracy grows.
Only
10 days after President Obama announced in a prime-time address that
millions of undocumented people would soon “be able to apply to stay in
this country temporarily without fear of deportation,”
an electronic bulletin reached inboxes across Washington. In a crucial
detail that Mr. Obama left out, the Citizenship and Immigration Services
agency said it was immediately seeking 1,000 new employees to work in
an office building to process “cases filed
as a result of the executive actions on immigration.”
The likely cost: nearly $8 million a year in lease payments and more than $40 million for annual salaries.
The
announcement of the new “operational center” among the chain
restaurants and high-rises of Crystal City, a Northern Virginia
neighborhood used for overflow from the federal agencies in
Washington, offers a glimpse into how swiftly a president’s words can
produce bigger government. It also demonstrates the bureaucracy’s
ability to swing into action, even during an extended power struggle
between the president and Congress.
“When
you have an executive order, when you have a president saying, ‘I want
you to do this,’ bureaucrats say, ‘O.K., let’s go do what the president
says,’” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow
at the Brookings Institution and a former White House official who
worked on Vice President Al Gore’s “reinventing government” initiative.
Although
conservatives in Congress are vowing to attack the president’s
executive action on immigration by blocking the funding for it, plans
for the small army of workers are moving forward.
The action is part of a larger trend: From 2001 to 2012 — mostly after
the Sept. 11 attacks — the government added about 180,000 federal
employees, for a total of more than 4.3 million, according to the Office
of Personnel Management.
At
the citizenship and immigration agency, officials said they had signed a
$7.8 million lease in a gleaming new building, which they will occupy
starting next month. During a recent speech
in Los Angeles, the agency’s director, León Rodríguez, said that 5,000
people had already applied for the Crystal City jobs.
In
the bulletin that the agency sent out, dated Dec. 1, the word “TODAY!”
is printed in red next to a dozen jobs with titles like special
assistant, management program analyst and immigration
services officer. By the time the new Republican Congress takes up the
debate about funding for the president’s immigration plan early next
year, many of those new jobs are likely to be filled.
Some
Republicans who have noticed the preparations for the new center have
issued statements of outrage, but so far they have done little else.
Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama,
called the new facility “a clear symbol of the president’s defiance of
the American people, their laws and their Constitution.” He said in a
statement that the new hiring would “foist on the nation laws Congress
has repeatedly refused to pass.”
Mr.
Rodríguez declined to be interviewed. But other administration
officials readily say they are eager to put in place the infrastructure
needed to allow undocumented people to apply for
work permits by the early spring. That will require a new website,
application forms and people to run background checks and process
application fees that will probably be several hundred dollars.
The
immigration agency officials said the fees would ultimately pay for
lease and salary costs. But because the fees are not yet being
collected, officials said the initial lease and salary
payments would be made from other fees, which would be replenished when
the new program was up and running.
The
new center is, of course, a minor outpost compared with agencies that
have grown rapidly in the past. When Congress and President George W.
Bush agreed in 2002 to create the Department
of Homeland Security, Mr. Bush said it would employ 170,000 people.
Decades
earlier, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 and 1966 led to
new functions of government and large increases in the bureaucracy.
In
2010, the passage of the Affordable Care Act led to a surge in hiring
at the Internal Revenue Service, which asked for about 1,000 new workers
to apply the tax credits and enforce other
provisions.
“It’s
very easy to focus on the benefits,” said Michael R. Strain, an
economist at the American Enterprise Institute. “Those are usually the
motivating impulse behind the action. But there
are costs to it as well.”
Mr.
Strain said the intense debate about Mr. Obama’s executive action on
immigration had focused almost exclusively on questions about the limits
of the president’s constitutional authority
to act without Congress. Little attention was paid to the impact on the
size of the bureaucracy.
“One
thousand new workers springing up in Arlington, Va. — it’s a nice
example of the degree to which when the government does something big,
it has a lot of consequences that people don’t
think of,” he said. “Our public debate and our political leaders need
to do a better job of identifying those effects.”
Once
it opens next year, the operations center will become a part of the
federal suburban sprawl that has helped define the Beltway bubble. But
first, the facility could end up at the center
of the tug of war between Mr. Obama and the Republican-controlled
Congress.
“It
really goes to what is the extent of executive authority to make policy
and then implement policy,” Ms. Kamarck, of the Brookings Institution,
said. “This is going to be the crux of the
fight.”
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