Decades ago, in high school, I could count the department secretaries reporting to the President by my fingers. I had no problem naming them in our current events test. Now, we have twenty, excluding the Executive Secretary, the vice president, and 30 government agencies.
Before EDSA's people power, a department secretary was assisted only by a bureau director and assistant director. With the concept of regionalization, we now have 16 regional directors and sixteen assistant regional directors, five to eleven Undersecretaries, and countless assistant secretaries, consultants, and confidential advisers.
Geographically, the number of provinces had grown by leaps and bounds to 81, a product of gerrymandering by our politicians. Davao was divided into Davao del Norte and Davao del Sur. It was further subdivided into Davao Oriental and Davao Occidental. Is that enough? Congress created another one, Davao de Oro. Davao is now gerrymandered into five provinces! I hope they will not convert Samal Island City into Davao de Yero. You know, of course, that Zamboanga is now divided into three provinces. Politicians’ attempt to subdivide Palawan into three provinces was nixed by the people in a plebiscite. God bless them! At the rate politicians create small islands into provinces, I’m afraid someday they will convert Pag-asa into a province.
Canada, with a total land area of 10 million square kilometers, has 10 provinces, whereas the Philippines, with a minuscule area of 343.45 square kilometers, has 81 provinces! One might say we are not comparing apples to apples, as Canada has a population of only 40 million versus the Philippines’ 115 million. But proportionately, our number of provinces still is simply outrageous. And don’t ask how efficient the Canadian government is compared with the Philippines because the answer is obvious.
Nobody can deny that there is a superabundance of personnel in government. There is an overlapping of functions and an unclear delineation of authority and accountability. A case in point is the recent brouhaha on Bohol Chocolate Hills. DILG, DOT, and DENR pointed at each other’s fingers and wondered how it happened. Productivity is a major issue in government. The output (performance) is not commensurate with the input (people).
That is only part of the reason why our government is bloated. Add the penchant of Congress to create a department to solve a problem. There is a problem in housing, voila! Department of Human Settlement was created. To protect our overseas workers, let’s make a Department of Migrant Workers. In the prolific Senate of PRRD, there were bills that proposed to create eight new departments! Indonesia, the biggest ASEAN country in population and size, used to have a Ministry of Labor and Migration. It’s now all subsumed under the Ministry of Manpower.
Every newly elected President brings his own coterie of friends and supporters to new positions as a form of payback. The government is seen as the biggest employment agency at taxpayers’ expense without improving its efficiency of service. All these suggest that the bloated bureaucracy is a product of political patronage.
Rightsizing or downsizing?
Almost every President that comes in thinks of rightsizing the bureaucracy. I recall President Cory Aquino appointing Luis Villafuerte, Sr., to handle this job. Sadly, nothing came of it. In President Duterte’s time, Congress was toying with the rightsizing idea by reducing 10,000 to 20,000 state workers, which to us was a pittance. Again, the result was zero, zilch.
PBBM, in his first cabinet meeting in 2022, instructed all members to look into their specific departments that could be streamlined. PBBM’s record of fast action gives us a refreshing hope that the heavily overstaffed government bureaucracy may finally be downsized. DBM Secretary Amenah Pangandaman theorized that if five percent of 2 million government personnel would be reduced, “that's P14 billion worth of savings for our personnel services. And the said savings can be allocated to other priority programs and government projects like healthcare, agriculture support, infrastructure, and others.” Given that this year’s budget alone of P5.7 trillion, 33 percent, is allotted for personnel services, we can easily understand Secretary Pangandaman’s estimated impact on government savings.
This number could be higher if you include the roughly half a million casual, temporary, contractual government employees who are hired under the euphemistic term of “job order.” This does not include the millions employed in the local government units as part of the political patronage whose term is coterminous with that of the mayor or governor.
Sadly, two factors may impede efforts to reduce the number of government employees. Firstly, the executive department itself is sending mixed signals. While Secretary Pangandaman talks about manpower reduction through mergers, abolition, or streamlining of some government agencies, she speaks in the same breadth of transferring, training, and “retooling” displaced workers to “upsized” agencies. It looks like the government is not serious about reducing the bloated bureaucracy. It’s rightsizing that she is talking about, not downsizing.
Secondly, the Executive Department needs a mandate from the legislature to review, reorganize, and streamline the government bureaucracy. . This is considering the track record of tepid support from our politicians in Congress. We in the private sector can only wish that the “elephant in the room” could be positively addressed.
(The author is vice-president of ECOP)