Budget-driven vacancies get filled by unqualified staff, degrading the whole workforce.

Evidence

In the street-level bureaucracies with a high level of job specialization the vacancies will be filled by employees who lack the required skills or resources. Fifth-grade teachers will be assigned to kindergarten classes, and physical education instructors will become math teachers when there are excesses of the former and need for the latter. But even in street-level bureaucracies with low levels of specialization it will be difficult to fill the vacancies adequately. Police departments, for example, assign desk officers to active patrol in order to maintain the patrol force when additional officers cannot be hired. But those officers assigned to desk jobs may be more suitable for sedentary positions than the officers they replace. Moreover, except for retirees the people who leave public service work in the fiscal crisis will tend to be the more employable, so that the work force at the same time becomes mediocre through attrition. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1264

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the classic finding that constrained organizations substitute available categories of worker for the ones the task requires.
• SEED: Angle: ‘The competence ratchet’ — how fiscal squeeze quietly converts a trained workforce into whoever is cheapest to slot in.