A few years ago, Mencius Moldbug recommended Richard Crossman’s diaries, which were the inspiration for the BBC series Yes, Minister, as an unbeatable introduction to the reality of modern government — the reality being that the bureaucrats are in charge.
Foseti, who’s living the dream as a bureaucrat in Washington, explains the process for firing a government employee:
I’ve done a bit of asking around and found one person who works in government who is familiar with a federal employee actually being fired.
A bit of background. Apparently the fired person did nothing. The conservative estimate was that this guy did 10-20 hours of work in a year. (They swear up and down that he did no more than this). He did, however, consistently show up to work. For years, his supervisors basically ignored him. Then, he got a new supervisor who decided that enough was enough. So, the supervisor began the firing process.
First, the supervisor has to do document that the employee does not do or is incapable of performing his job functions. In this case, the supervisor documented requests to the employee and the employee’s response or lack thereof. This part of the process took several months.
Then the employee has to be flunked at a couple performance reviews. Another year down the drain. This flunking kicks off the official process.
Finally, the official process includes the employee enlisting the help of a union representative. It ends with full-on review by some sort of board.
My understanding is that this process took longer than one year. Further, during much of the union review, the process took up a huge amount of the supervisor’s time. So, firing multiple employees would take years and (with multiple employees) it would require 100% of the supervisor’s time during a significant portion of the union review process.
Before concluding, I should point out that the supervisor gets no reward for firing a bad employee. In fact, a supervisor’s budget may be cut, since the supervisor now has one less staff member. Good employees may choose to avoid that particular supervisor as well. There is no upside to firing an employee as far as I can tell. The amount of time and energy it costs a supervisor is downside enough to dissuade almost any sane supervisor from firing anyone.
I find this darkly amusing:
Also note that the fact that the process is so slow means that it’s basically impossible for the head of an agency to fire anyone. If an appointment at the head of an agency lasts for 4 years, the process would not be concluded by the time the head’s term had expired.
The root of the problem, Foseti continues, is that responsibility has been completely severed from authority:
Finally, it’s not always clear that “political heat” is bad for federal employees. Want to guess whether average salaries at healthcare agencies will go up or down after passage of healthcare reform? Care to make the same guess for the financial agencies after the financial crisis? Congress even protects employees of federal agencies that are being eliminated.
As Devin Finbarr adds, the feedback system might actively select for sadism and misrule:
If a bureaucracy screws an area up, more resources must be dedicated to fix the problem. This will result in more power for that bureaucracy, and because their is no firing or reorgs, more power for the people who screwed up in the first place.
Exactly matches my direct observations. This is in no way exaggerated or twisted.
And the conclusions are, if not complete, utterly accurate per se.
Even in the private sector, there is a disturbing trend for many people to prefer “staff” jobs (analysis and advisory jobs with no direct decision-making authority or accountability) to “line” jobs in which they actually make the calls and get judged on the results. For example, many b-school graduates would greatly prefer a job analyzing potential acquisition targets to one managing 30 salespeople as a regional manager.
I remember when you made that point about staff jobs vs. line jobs last year. Good insight.
The staff jobs vs. line jobs distinction is interesting.
However, I wonder if it’s really all that new or surprising that most people prefer to have stability over authority?