Federal Workers Being Held Accountable For 1st Time, Not Handling It Well

Right now, there’s a lot of angst in certain corners about the Trump administration’s attempt to downsize the federal bureaucracy. I say “certain corners” because I don’t think this concern is widely held by American voters, but since I live in a Washington, D.C. suburb there’s a lot of anguished Facebook posts and fretful conversations between neighbors — to say nothing of a sudden increase in housing stock, following years of high mortgage rates suppressing the market.

On one hand, it’s hard to see anyone lose their job, let alone your neighbors. On the other hand, the D.C. area is one of the wealthiest areas in the country because at the bottom of a pyramid of absurdly well-compensated lawyers, lobbyists, and government contractors are about 400,000 federal employees. The average federal employee working in D.C. earns $120,305 in salary alone, not factoring in the federal government’s absurdly generous benefits.

Making things worse, a lot of the D.C. drama is federal workers realizing for perhaps the first time they are not impervious to being fired. Some years ago, a very fetching young woman had a full-time job reporting on the federal workforce. Among her findings: “Eight cabinet-level departments — employing about 486,000 people — did not fire a single employee for poor performance between 1998 and 2003.” Granted, Mrs. Hemingway wrote that story quite a while ago, so I checked to see if things are getting better. According to the Office of Personnel Management’s website, out of 2,313,216 federal employees, last year just 5,988 employees were terminated for discipline or performance reasons, roughly one quarter of one percent. Once you get a federal job, it’s more or less impossible to lose it.

Or at least it was, until Trump’s second term. Last week, the State Department laid off 1,300 employees. Naturally, the firing confirmed the worst suspicions of everyone that wants federal bureaucrats fired. It turns out the State Department was in fact filled with the worst sort of left-wing activist drama queens who issued vague threats against the democratically elected government that fired them on their way out the door.