Senator Mark Warner seems to regard every reduction of personnel in our intelligence agencies as a threat to national security. I doubt that he would approve even a modest cut to the CIA’s janitoral staff.

I worked for one of those intelligence agencies for almost forty years. I knew many brilliant and dedicated employees at that agency, but I also knew others who contributed nothing to our mission. They were dead weight. It’s my honest opinion that we could have sustained more than a 30% reduction to our work force with no harm to our effectiveness. In fact, it’s likely that the quality of our product would have been improved.

Unfortunately, the inertia and ossification that exists in so many federal agencies allows many employees to virtually retire in place. Then there are the embedded partisans who consider it their patriotic duty to sabotage every new administration’s effort to change things.

Reducing and reforming the bureaucracy is a monumental task that will encounter resistance at every step along the way.