Managers in the federal government say they can’t fire underperforming employees because of too-restrictive civil service rules, but when they do have ample opportunity and authority to do so — during the one-year probationary period for new hires — they use it less than two percent of the time, according to the Merit Systems Protection Board.
The board also reported that most federal hiring managers don’t rely on references from previous employers when evaluating applicants.
And President Obama’s removal of an essay portion of the job application process has led to people applying for jobs indiscriminately, leaving civil service bosses with little ability to judge whether a person is a good fit for a job and whether they really want that particular job at all.
The MSPB findings were based on a survey earlier this year of managers and supervisors in the federal government’s 2.1 million civil service workforce. The MSPB enforces civil service regulations meant to protect the independence of career employees.
“Federal managers do not typically use the probationary period as an additional assessment. Less than two percent of competitive service employees are removed in their first year of service. If this is to be an effective assessment tool, supervisors need to be willing to separate employees during their probationary periods if they are not successfully performing the duties of their jobs,” MSPB wrote in a report presenting the findings of its survey.
The MSPB’s findings may also suggest the near-total lack of competitive hiring and firing among federal managers is explained by factors that go far beyond being hamstrung by human resources red tape. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, managers said the regulations were the chief reason they hadn’t fired anyone over the secret wait-list scandal that made headlines throughout the national media earlier this year.
But since July when Congress and Obama explicitly gave VA managers the authority to expedite firing of incompetent and dishonest high-ranking employees, they have hardly used it.
In November, a Washington Examiner analysis of government employment data found that the number of federal employees fired for cause has declined each year since Obama took office in January 2009.
At Housing and Urban Development, for example, only five employees out of 7,400 were fired last year — and one employee who admitted to spending hours of every workday doing unrelated tasks, including arranging strippers’ appointments while on duty, for example, was only disciplined, not fired.
In that article, a former government official familiar with personnel issues said that “the most important thing that could be done is doubling the probationary period,” because it is essentially the one chance managers have to get rid of poor performers without interference from federal employee unions and lengthy administrative proceedings and litigation.
But the revelation by MSPB that less than two percent of new hires are fired during the probationary period raises questions about when, if ever, federal managers will systematically enforce competitive hiring and firing standards.
The finding that managers don’t rely on job references when hiring — a primary tool for many private-sector managers — helps explain how disgraced employees who are being pushed out of agencies after serious wrongdoing are often hired at other agencies in equivalent or even higher-level jobs.
For example, Office of Personnel Management investigators found that Kay Ely “failed to fulfill her responsibilities as the Associate Director” after being involved with contract fraud. “As a result of actions by … Ms. Ely and the mismanagement within [her department] … approximately $450,000 “was improperly paid to a contractor,” an OPM report said.
But instead of being fired by OPM, Ely now works in a high-level job at the General Services Administration overseeing millions of dollars in contracts. The agency’s website says Ely currently “oversees IT Schedule 70, the government’s largest acquisition vehicle dedicated to technology and telecommunications solutions.”
Similarly, Iris Cooper, a procurement official at Veterans Affairs, steered a contract to a friend and lied about it, VA investigators found.
Months later, she became the “senior procurement executive” at the Treasury Department. Treasury said it didn’t know about the problem at VA and would not say whether it called her manager there for a reference.
“Less than half of our survey respondents (46 percent) said reference checks were used to a great extent as an assessment with 24 percent reporting they used them little if at all,” MSPB wrote. “As we have stated in previous reports, reference checking is a key part of the assessment process and can improve the quality of new hires. It is important for hiring managers to verify what is in the applicant’s resume.”
The survey also said that Obama eliminated a writing requirement from the job application process, making it far easier to apply to jobs, something that did nothing to help managers find qualified applicants quickly.
“In 2010, President Obama issued a presidential memorandum eliminating essay style responses, or KSAs, from the initial step in the application process… 43 percent of HR staff believed eliminating KSAs increased the number of unqualified applicants, only 21 percent believed it helped their agency make better hires,” MSPB wrote.
Managers said the change has led people to apply to multiple government jobs simply because they can do so with a few clicks of a mouse, and not because they particularly want it or feel qualified. In addition to taking up more time for managers who have to dredge through a mountain of applications, it makes it far harder to supervisors to know who’s qualified for the job, thus potentially leading to more poorly-performing workers being hired by the federal government.
