SACRAMENTO, CA - Not much grows during a freeze, except for government, even one that is more than $23 billion in the red. Consider the recent experience of the Golden State.

Last October 23, the governor announced a hiring freeze to deal with the growing budget shortfall. But from the time the freeze began through the end of March 2002, the state of California hired nearly 10,000 new employees, 9,311 to be exact, in some cases at a more rapid pace than before.

The California Department of Corrections, for example, which should be called the Bureau of Prisons because it doesn’t correct anybody, hired 2,005 new workers during the five-month span. By contrast, from October 31, 2000 to March 31, 2001, when no freeze was in effect, the department hired 1,579 new employees.

The California Employment Development Department, which should be called the Department of Unemployment since it doesn’t develop new jobs, hired 545 under the freeze but only 408 in the same period before the freeze. Likewise the state’s Compensation Insurance Fund took on 885 new employees during the freeze, compared to 516 before.

In other departments, such as the Department of Mental Health, the freeze brought little change. But hiring nearly 10,000 new state employees during a proclaimed freeze and under a $23.6 billion budget shortfall can hardly be called business as usual. But on one level, these developments are understandable.

The prison guards’ union is a staunch supporter of the governor, to the tune of $661,000 if one includes, besides direct contributions of $305,000, the $356,000 in “Governor’s Cup” golf fundraisers at Pebble Beach. In January, Governor Davis granted the guards a whopping raise of 33.76 percent by 2006, a hike of $1 billion overall. Davis also will shut down five of the state’s nine privately operated prisons, another item on the union’s wish list. This fits Davis’s antipathy toward privatization. Cleaning government buildings now costs twice as much as it used to when those services were contracted out, a practice Davis ended.

As Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee noted, while city-run prisons are a fiscal mess, the private prisons the governor has targeted are all but trouble-free. “With the cost of incarceration rising,” Weintraub wrote, “it makes sense for the state to keep using private operators to watch low-risk inmates.” But what makes sense seldom prevails in Sacramento. Davis is even opposed to private companies building prisons. Perhaps the inmates will lend a hand. Clearly, this administration is willing to sacrifice efficiency for politics, though it holds no monopoly on that practice.

The rush to kill privatization, coupled with nearly 10,000 new hires during a purported hiring freeze, is no way to resolve a budget shortfall greater than the GNP of many nations. Once hired, state employees tend to be permanent, whether or not they are good workers. Every state employee has a stake in the continued expansion of government. Likewise, government departments are easy to start but practically impossible to end, however useless or counterproductive they may be.

The larger lesson is that governments tend to grow, and that even during an economic downturn it is difficult to restrain that growth. Whether that unchecked growth is good for consumers and taxpayers does not require much explanation.

K. Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.