There’s an old business truism: It costs a lot less to retain an employee than to hire a new one.
Let’s add a recently learned truism to the textbooks: It costs a lot less to retain an employee than to fire them and then rehire them when a US District Judge tells you the firing was an illegal “sham.”
Onboarding a new employee in the federal government—covering office space, technology, equipment, and security clearances—can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 (or more), depending on the position. For the 24,000 probationary federal employees who have been dismissed since February, it’s estimated that the federal government previously spent well over the lower end of that range, totaling at least $240 million to onboard those folks.
Now, U.S. District Judge William Alsup has told the Trump Administration those 24,000 employees should get their jobs back and those employees will need to be re-onboarded. While not every onboarding cost needs to be incurred twice, some of the costs will be repeated.
Estimated onboarding costs
Recruitment and hiring
- Estimated cost: $5,000-$15,000
- Includes advertising, assessments, interviews, and background checks
- Effort to re-onboard: While it won’t be necessary to spend time and money on recruiting and hiring, some will be spent communicating and coordinating with former employees to reinstate them.
Security clearance
- Estimated cost (varies by level):
- Public trust: $500-$700
- Secret: $3,000-$15,000
- Top secret: $15,000-$50,000
- Effort to re-onboard: Many of the reinstated-employees-to-be may have completed background checks and received clearances. For others, the process may need to start again.
Training and orientation
- Estimated cost: $5,000-$10,000
- Includes federal employee training, agency-specific programs, and compliance requirements
- Effort to re-onboard: Many reinstated-employees-to-be may have valid certifications, but trainings or certifications that were disrupted may need to be restarted.
Technology and equipment
- Estimated cost: $3,000-$5,000
- Includes computers, software, security credentials, workspace setup
- Effort to re-onboard: Technology and equipment needs to be re-provisioned, reconfigured, and reinstalled. For fired employees who returned their assets-where are those assets now? Stacked in IT offices and hallways across different agency buildings? Warehoused? Sold? Returned to suppliers?
Estimated total cost
All of this takes time and money. Tax dollars. Yours. Mine. Ours.
Let’s be conservative and say that the onboarding costs for the reinstated employees will be only a fraction of the cost of onboarding a new hire. Let’s estimate the costs between $5,000 and $20,000 per person.
24,000 x $5,000 to $20,000 = $120,000,000 to $480,000,000
Given that, the estimated costs to re-onboard the 24,000 employees will range from $120 million to $480 million.
To put it in Musk-scale--the total cost to onboard these illegally fired employees could easily cost upwards of a half a billion dollars.
If this isn’t waste, fraud and abuse, what is?