Within the next five years, the federal government will implode, losing up to half its workforce, and up to 70 percent of its most senior staff, to retirement, creating a significant “brain drain” all across the government.

This is easily the best news I’ve heard all week.

Over the next five years, over half of the federal government workforce is likely to retire, completely gutting vital agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, the Internal Revenue Service and Veterans Affairs. The higher up the management chain, the worse the problem; among top government officials, almost 70% are primed to retire. A culture of denial has set in, and the very people responsible to fix it are the ones who are going to ditch. Many agencies will enter an embarrassing phase of ineptitude, caused by a lack of staff or a newly hired and inexperienced staff.

Get ready to hate your government again. Unless a radical new stance is taken and some laws are changed, we will see the effects of this brain drain everywhere. . . .

You might think hiring people is easy, but there are both cultural and bureaucratic obstacles preventing them from succeeding. For instance, three agencies tried an “Extreme Hiring Makeover” to reduce the Kafka-esque process of getting a job. Hiring a new employee at one of those agencies now takes only 53 steps — rather than 114. But it’s still 53 steps! — Time

Wait, we don’t already hate the government for its embarrassing ineptitude? The government should be doing less, not more, anyway. I say let the attrition happen!

The brain drain has already started, in fact; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is casting an “unusually wide net” for senior staff. You can tell the net is unusually wide because they’re headhunting at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Timothy H. Edgar, a prominent critic of Bush Administration national security policies with the American Civil Liberties Union, has joined the ODNI staff.

“I have recently taken a job as deputy to Alex Joel, the Civil Liberties Protection Officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” he wrote in an email message to former colleagues last week.

“This was a position that Congress mandated in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and it reports directly to the DNI.”

“The new job is challenging and I am looking forward to continuing to defend civil liberties within the government,” Mr. Edgar wrote. — Secrecy News

Time suggested that the federal government needs to “wake up to the modern age, using recruiters and newspaper advertising” to find qualified candidates for nearly a million positions which will open up nationwide in the next few years. “They might even need to run an ad during the Super Bowl.”

I suggest that Congress should simply cut the size of government to match the attrition levels.

(Hat tip)