Only five employees were fired from the Department of Housing and Urban Development last year out of its 7,400 tenured employees, by far the lowest rate in the entire federal government.
The Education Department had a similar apathy, firing only one person annually during many recent years, Office of Personnel Management data shows.
In the Army, the odds of a civilian employee being given the boot for not being up to snuff at any point in the last six years combined were 1 out of 69 for civilian employees.
But at the Transportation Department, an employee was only half as likely to be fired, indicating either a more professional workforce or — more likely — lower standards.
New employees are subject to a probationary period during which it’s easier to let them go. If a federal employee can evade managers’ scrutiny for his first year, he may have it made — a lifetime of pay without regard to accomplishment, with a lucrative pension guaranteed after a couple decades.
At the Treasury, manager used this option to sack one in every 37 new hires.
But make it past that point, and it’s smooth sailing: Only one in every 430 employees at that department who had made it past probation was fired last year.
The variation in the level of firings in federal agencies has more to do with how tolerant managers are of poor performers than with misconduct being rampant at agencies with higher levels, said a former senior appointee in the Bush administration who spoke on a condition of anonymity because he is still involved with labor policy.
The process for firing employees is similar at each agency, but what differs is managers’ commitment to making sure that jobs are only for those willing and able to advance agencies’ missions.
“The managers who undertake this firing process are ones who need to be awarded. This is about having employees who are capable of recognizing poor performance and taking action,” he said.
That’s something that appeared to be missing at HUD under Secretary Shaun Donovan until recently, and Julian Castro, who succeeded him.
In October, former HUD loan specialist Brian Thompson pleaded guilty to stealing $843,000 in taxpayer money in a scheme that went unchecked by colleagues for more than a year.
Another HUD employee, J’Vaughn Hawkins, spent three hours a day on an unrelated business, including arranging strippers’ appointments, while yet another, Deona Madden, apparently ran a trucking business from her desk. HUD didn’t fire either, the Washington Times reported earlier this year.
Hawkins defended his virtue to investigators, saying that he also helped people with basketball.
Madden said she couldn’t work because the agency’s archaic computer system — indeed, its website appears out of the 1990s — left her unable to do work for hours each day.
She justified her behavior by telling investigators that those around her also spent large portions of the day doing “personal stuff.”
More than 4,200 HUD employees make six-figure salaries, according to Affordable Housing Finance.
“There is a pervasive tolerance of low, or no, standards. Many employees do little or no work and management does nothing about it,” a longtime HUD employee told the Washington Examiner. He could not be named because of a legal settlement with the agency.
He said the agency was obsessed with increasing the number of minorities who worked there, even if it meant hiring unqualified individuals or keeping them in their jobs even if they didn’t perform.
HUD did not respond to a request for comment.
HUD disburses huge chunks of money to contractors large and small who vie viciously for the funds and have an incentive to bribe them, and the agency counts as its customer base welfare recipients who may not be inclined to report illegal or unsatisfactory behavior.
A 2011 Washington Post investigation called it a “pattern” that many HUD projects turn into “million-dollar wastelands,” saying the agency readily shoveled money at developers and other government agencies but turned a blind eye to poor performance and outright theft.
The problem is not any one person, but rather something much more difficult to eradicate, the former labor official said — a culture of mediocrity in which it’s enough to disburse federal grants while doing minimal due diligence — that infects HUD’s 7,400 employees and is enabled by its legion of mid-level managers.
But a message of how hard-working is hard enough comes from the top, the official said.
“The tone is set by the head of every department. If he says, ‘We’re not going to be giving out bonuses loosely, we’re going to use performance reviews stringently,’ that trickles down. Otherwise, managers say the secretary doesn’t care much, I’ll just park him in the corner and he can draw cartoons or something.”
