Turkey Farm.

• Author: MARANTO, ROBERT

The government can't afford to keep ignoring the case for rearming civil service tenure

JIM WORKED IN A DEFENSE DEPARTMENT office with an employee whose lack of productivity was matched only by his hostile attitude. Eventually, a good manager with the patience of Job, a mastery of detail to match, and the help of higher management took the time to record, day by day, the offender's record of non-work. After developing improvement plans for the employee and thoroughly documenting his failure to meet them for many months, the incompetent worker was actually fired. Then, the employee appealed before the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Two years into the appeal, when it looked as if the government would finally win, MSPB threw out the case when one of the team, moving to dismiss the employee, made an offhand remark that "even the people in his neighborhood association think he's unstable." The employee was reinstated with back pay. The agency went through the process all over again. By this time Jim had become boss. With the benefits of hindsight and existing records, the final try took only one more year of work!

Jim's predicament is faced by thousands of hardworking federal employees who must suffer a small number of lazy, incompetent, and, occasionally, dangerous co-workers. For the past three years, I taught high level federal managers at the Federal Executive Institute (FEI). Despite the stereotypes about bureaucrats, the vast majority of federal managers are capable people who take pride in their work. In dedication and smarts, the government bureaucrats I've worked with are more than a match for the college professors I taught alongside during 15 years in the academy. Unfortunately, these good people are thoroughly frustrated by a personnel system which forces them to work alongside (and get the same raises as) a small number of turkeys.

A Broken Personnel System

One of my games in the civil service was to ask a lunch table full of federal managers whether it was possible to fire low-performing employees. Save for the ever optimistic personnel specialists, the usual consensus was that it was possible, but hardly ever worth the effort. My informal focus groups mirrored public employee surveys.

While career civil servants and political appointees do not always see eye to eye, mail surveys I conducted in the mid-1990s found that each side did agree that the federal personnel system is broken, at least when it comes to separating non-performers. Eighty-eight percent of Clinton political appointees and 83 percent of career managers agreed that "personnel rules make it too difficult to fire personnel"--more than half of each group strongly agreed. This dovetails with the findings of University of Georgia political scientist Hal Rainey. Reviewing years of survey data, Rainey reports that "[r]oughly 90 percent of the public managers agreed that their organization's personnel rules make it hard to fire poor managers and hard to reward good managers with higher pay, while 90 percent of the business managers disagreed"

Since courts have ruled that federal employees have property rights in their jobs, they can only be terminated after lengthy due process and multiple venues of appeal. As a result, managers who decide to use official means to deal with turkeys may face the prospect of spending all their time managing that one person, to the...