The Impact of the Rationalization Program (Executive Order 366) in Selected National Government Agencies

Abstract

The Government of the Republic of the Philippines employs more than 1,445,498 employees in its various agencies, schools and law enforcement units. Since 1960, the current ratio of government employees to the total population is 1:52 compared to the 1970 ratio of 1:90. This condition of a bloated bureaucracy has led to a number of rationalization policies by the government to arrest the upsurge of civil servants. While it is important to deal with government fiscal realities, it is necessary to determine whether the lay-off of tens of thousands of government employees are justified in the sense that the savings of government from rationalization will indeed be delivered to basic social services such as education health, housing land reform, among others, can be used as added money flow to honor outstanding government debts. With the results of the survey and interviews exposing the socio-economic conditions of government personnel in selected government agencies, the rationalization program through Executive Order 366 must be scrapped or deferred at the least, as it does not answer the fundamental problems of our fiscal deficit and uses the bloatedness of government personnel as the convenient scapegoat for its failure to address the debt trap which is the central budget item that bleeds our coffers dry rather than appropriations to personnel services.