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August
19 , 2002 10:30 a.m. EDITOR’S NOTE: President Bush heated up the debate over the work rules at the Department of Homeland Security last week at Mount Rushmore. Here's what I wrote about the controversy a few weeks ago in my syndicated column. — Rich Lowry |
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did President Bush know that his historic restructuring of the federal
government would create the "Department of Federal Job Security."
It turns out that congressional Democrats have an appetite for a new department to protect the homeland only if its workers can leave by 5 P.M. every day and not have to worry about supervisors with the power to do untoward things like, say, fire them if they don't do their jobs.
In other words, only if the Homeland Security workers are as pampered and unaccountable as all other federal employees. Feel safe yet?
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has declared that Senate Democrats unanimously oppose the Bush-administration preference for an employment system that is "flexible," "contemporary," and "grounded in the principles of merit and fitness."
And why not? All of those principles run exactly counter to the system created over the years by those Democratic powerhouses, the public-employee unions.
Federal job actions are resolved about as quickly as the endless case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House.
If a supervisor finds a federal employee's work unsatisfactory, he must put the worker on a 90-day notice, followed by another several-months-long period before the employee can actually be fired.
During this time, the employee has a chance to hit back by filing a grievance against his supervisor with — take your pick — the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Then, a year or two later, after the case is decided by one of these bodies, the offending employee might have to leave. Or not.
Many supervisors avoid the hassle in the first place. "There is a significant fraction of the management corps in the federal government who just duck for cover," says civil-service expert George Nesterczuk.
During their first probationary year, when federal employees can be fired summarily, their attrition rate is about 20 percent, according to Nesterczuk. The second year, as civil-service protections begin to kick in, that rate falls to roughly ten percent.
After that, they don't budge (often literally — it's very hard to reassign long-time employees). Federal workers essentially hold on to their jobs as lifetime entitlements.
One recent study found that of roughly 100,000 "poor performing" federal employees, only three percent lost their jobs. An extraordinary 88 percent were given pay raises, which proceed on a rigid schedule unrelated to merit.
If you thought preventing the murder of Americans was more important than reproducing this ludicrous system in the Office of Homeland Security, you would be wrong.
The biggest public-employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees, represents about 600,000 federal employees and — along with several similar outfits, including the powerful postal-workers unions — is an important source of Democratic muscle and dollars.
Daschle et al. are now in effect saying, "My union, right or wrong."
Last October, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, Democrats were amenable to looser, common-sense work rules when it came to the new Transportation Security Administration, charged with protecting airports.
It was hard for Democrats to argue then that private airport security workers rarely fired for incompetence should be replaced with federal airport security workers nearly impossible to fire for incompetence.
So the TSA was given some leeway to develop its own work rules. But, as the shock of Sept. 11 fades, the old rules — in this case, the old and absurd rules — are making a comeback.
It doesn't matter that the Department of Homeland Security might have to hire large numbers of workers quickly, something that is difficult under the current regulations that can make it a six-month ordeal even to hire a new federal employee.
Nor does it matter that the brand-new, untested department will have to be flexible in exploring the best ways to achieve its mission, making an ossified, unmovable work force a potential disaster.
No, Democrats are happy to settle for homeland security that is good enough for government work.