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.
