I came across this while I was looking for something else. A study done a few years ago analyzed different federal agencies for partisanship and found, for example, that workers in the Department of Education tend to be Democrats while workers in Homeland Security tend to be Republicans.
Then, using the party affiliation for individual procurement officers in each of the agencies, they found that contract costs were controlled significantly better when a procurement officer belonged to the same party as the president:
The researchers were able to match the party affiliation for 7,200 officers who administered over 700,000 contracts across 132 departments and agencies during the period. Comparing among similar contracts, they found an 8% increase in cost overruns among contractors who were registered as Democrats under a Republican president, and vice versa. That was true even when they compared procurement officers within the same department in the same year.
“We didn’t see any change in how people were choosing contractors or the types of contracts, so the decline in performance occurred while they were overseeing the contract,” he said. “These overruns really do seem to be due to a decline in morale, which we corroborate through data from employee surveys.”
The researchers guess that the reason for this is morale. When a president of the opposite party is elected you get discouraged and don't put as much effort into your job. Less oversight means more cost overruns. The effect is the same for Democrats and Republicans and is higher for bigger contracts. It's also higher the longer an officer is misaligned with the president.
This is interesting, but offhand I can't think of anything to be done about it.
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It also could be just that procurement officers don’t know how to manage contracts for stuff that is dramatically different from anything they’ve had to manage before. And that situation is likeliest to happen when party control changes - because the incoming party has grossly different agendas and policy demands that they want to implement but possibly have never been tried before.
Like for example, I doubt many procurement officers had much experience in procuring Moar Wall Now! when Trump took office. Same with procuring More Health Insurance Websites under Obama or More Student Loan Forgiveness Websites under Biden. That stuff hadn’t been done in large quantities in the past, so procurement officers wouldn’t be as skilled at doing it.
Good point. You can also expect budget cuts and layoffs too to affect morale. Even threats to zero out a division, though budgets get restored by Congress, is very disheartening. In that case, people will be looking to have an exit, just in case.
Speaking for myself: I spent a year working for the Small Business Administration during the pandemic. (They had to hire a lot of people to administer the pandemic assistance programs.) I didn't do my job any better after Biden got elected, but then again, the program I was administering had bipartisan support and I personally saw it as a good thing.
I am inclined to believe that whether a government employee supports the specific policy they're implementing will make a larger difference than their partisan alignment with the president. Being misaligned with the president does increase the odds of finding yourself working on a policy you don't support, of course.