Journal article
Federal Hiring Dysfunction and the Self-Shrinking Skew
The American University law review, v 75(5), pp 1137-1218
2026
Abstract
A half-century of remodeling agency workforces against corporate blueprints has hollowed out the civil service, enervated oversight, and facilitated the rise of tech oligarchy. Progressive commenters have criticized the neoliberal turn and proposed reinvigorating reforms, but they’ve overlooked a foundational obstacle: federal hiring dysfunction. Hiring dysfunction entrenches low-resource, deferential regulatory tactics, makes sharper or more onerous approaches less feasible, and undermines recruitment of technical staff for policy and regulatory functions. Concerns about hiring dysfunction and capacity dampen regulatory ambitions. Finally, hiring dysfunction creates plausible-seeming capacity pretexts to oppose novel or more confrontational tactics. Cumulatively, hiring dysfunction cements regulatory dismantlement.
Prominent federal hiring critiques evangelize private sector hiring strategies and tie agencies’ precarious political legitimacy to their adoption. This Article is the first to filter those critiques through a law and political economy lens, which illustrates their contributions to what I call federal hiring’s “self-shrinking skew”—a fixation with containing agency discretion that drives brittle procedures and erratic hiring outcomes, even when hiring is highly prioritized.
Current hiring approaches cannot replenish razed workforces, and reliance on them will imperil valiant efforts to upend neoliberalism’s crabbed regulatory tactics. Progressive efforts to reoxygenate the regulatory state and facilitate sharper confrontations with tech oligarchy must therefore grapple with federal hiring dysfunction and reject the extractive ideologies that perpetuate it.
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Details
- Title
- Federal Hiring Dysfunction and the Self-Shrinking Skew
- Creators
- Lindsey Barrett (Author) - Drexel University, Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Publication Details
- The American University law review, v 75(5), pp 1137-1218
- Publisher
- American University
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Legal Research Center
- Other Identifier
- 991022184675704721