By Mark Hemingway
With unemployment hovering around double digits and no foreseeable turnaround in the economy, it’s quite maddening to see the government keep growing. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management says the federal work force grew from 1.86 million in 2005 to just over 2 million in 2009.
Federal work force data suggests that a big reason why government keeps growing is that hardly anybody is ever fired. The number of career civil servants “separated” for discipline or performance issue last year was 11,275 — one half of 1 percent of the 2 million total. What’s more, this is a significant increase in the number of workers fired.
The OPM Web site only has data back to 2005, but Federal Times, citing the agency’s data, reported that “eight cabinet-level departments — employing about 486,000 people — did not fire a single employee for poor performance between 1998 and 2003. (I should add that the Federal Times reporter who wrote that story later became my wife.)
By contrast, the Department of Education — one of the eight departments that fired nobody for five years — separated exactly six people last year. Progress!
Even more odd, the number of firings remains suspiciously consistent year after year. In 2005, 10,655 poor performers were fired; in 2006, it was 10,381; in 2007, it was 10,383, in 2008, it jumped up to 11,165; and it held steady last year at 11,275.
When I asked Edmund Byrnes, an OPM spokesman, why there was shockingly little fluctuation in these figures year after year, he brushed me off: “The information comes in from the agencies. We just gather the information. That goes into our Central Personnel Data File, so we don’t analyze why people have been separated.”
OPM doesn’t analyze data about the federal work force? “That’s insane,” said Robert Moffit, a former senior official at OPM during the Reagan administration and a federal work force expert at the Heritage Foundation.
“If you know anything about OPM, they’re responsible for following this sort of thing as a policy matter. … They are the central management agency, so what you’re telling me is that the central management agency can’t answer a simple question,” Moffit said.
Patrick Korten, another Reagan-era OPM official, interpreted the data thus: “My experience, and what I suspect is still the experience, is that firing federal workers continues to be done only in extremis,” he said. “It is very, very difficult to get a federal bureaucrat to make that final step of firing someone. It’s a lot of work.”
Korten’s assessment of the problem is supported by federal employee surveys — including OPM’s biennial Federal Human Capital Survey — which almost always lists poor performers as a top problem in the federal work force. And anecdotal evidence abounds of federal employees who remain employed despite being guilty of egregious behavior and costing taxpayers thousands of dollars to be removed.
William Wiley, a consultant who makes his living helping federal agencies fire poor performers, told me it’s not hard to fire a federal worker — provided you know what you’re doing. Maybe he’s right, but the fact that Wiley’s been in his line of work for over three decades suggests that federal agencies aren’t getting any better at firing people.
Federal jobs aren’t just good work if you can get it; it’s good work and you can’t seem to lose it — no matter how bad at your job you are.
And we haven’t even talked yet about the pay and benefits.
Mark Hemingway is an editorial page staff writer for The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
