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The problem with federal employees is that it\u2019s almost impossible to fire them for incompetence or corruption. They basically have to criminally charged and convicted before they can be fired.<\/p>\n
The Veterans Administration is a major case in point. Thanks to incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, unions and the Civil service laws, sick and injured men and women who served in the military were treated like dirt. A number died from the lack of care and the incompetence of the managers in the system. President Trump started taking actions to clean p that mess and he wants to extend it to the rest of the federal work force. Here are the details from Pravda<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/a> USA Today<\/b><\/a>:<\/p>\n President Trump will seek to “hire the best and fire the worst” federal government employees under the most ambitious proposal to overhaul the civil service in 40 years, officials said. <\/b><\/p>\n The measures will be outlined in the budget plan that Trump will send to Congress Monday, said four Office of Management and Budget officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the budget hasn’t been released. <\/b><\/p>\n Oh yes, the infamous \u201cAnonymous Sources.\u201d I wonder, are these Obama holdovers or those who\u2019s actual jobs might be on the line?<\/p>\n Trump foreshadowed the proposal in a line in his State of the Union address last week<\/a>: “Tonight, I call on Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people,” he said. <\/b><\/p>\n Well, as the old saying goes, \u201cThem\u2019s fighting words!\u201d to the Unions. More on that later. Last year, working with Congress, President Trump started cleaning out the disaster that is the Veterans Administration. He is looking to expand that act to cover the entire federal civilian work force.<\/p>\n Trump is using the VA Accountability Act, which gave the Secretary of Veterans Affairs greater authority to fire and discipline workers, as a model. The White House says that law has resulted in the dismissal of 1,470 employees, the suspension of 443, demotions for 83 others last year. <\/b><\/p>\n I call that a good start. It\u2019s going to take years of work to clean up that mess, and honestly, I think a few prosecutions may be in order as well. Now, the Unions. They aren\u2019t at all happy with what President Trump is planning. No, they aren\u2019t happy at all.<\/p>\n “While to some people those are code words, they\u2019re very clear to us,” said American Federation of Government Employees President J. David Cox, who represents about 700,000 workers for the federal government and District of Columbia. “Basically it wipes out due process rights for employees.” <\/b><\/p>\n Due process is something you get when you are arrested for criminal acts. Is J. David Cox saying that his union is made up of criminals? In any case, most people have little sympathy for federal workers or their union. Most Americans are \u201cAt will\u201d employees. That means they can be walked out the door at any time for essentially any reason. But, as the commercials say, There\u2019s more!<\/p>\n Another pillar of the proposal would reduce automatic pay increases and instead use that money for a performance bonus pool. <\/b><\/p>\n Under the current system, federal employees get a review every one to three years. Employees whose performance is “fully successful” \u2014 as 99.7% are \u2014 get a within-grade “step” increase in addition to annual cost-of-living increases. <\/b><\/p>\n Are you saying that .3% of federal employees are not fully successful? Now that concerns me. How bad to they have to be in order to get that bad a grade? My guess, they\u2019ve just been convicted of something and have yet to be sentenced. My guess is the review form has a checkbox that says \u201cHas the individual been convicted of a felony in the last year?\u201d If that\u2019s checked off, then they aren\u2019t \u201cFully successful.\u201d (In other words, they were careless and got caught)<\/p>\n Trump’s plan would stretch out the amount of time it takes to go from step 1 to step 10 from 18 years to 27 years, saving $10 billion over the next decade, officials said. That money would then go to high-performing employees either as merit raises or one-time bonuses. <\/b><\/p>\n I suspect that many long term federal employees won\u2019t qualify. It will be the junior employees, probably with only a year or so on the job who get the bonuses and merit pay. Why? They won\u2019t be jaded yet.<\/p>\n Federal employee unions fear the pay-per-performance plan would be used to reward loyalists and discriminate against women and minorities. <\/b><\/p>\n “He seems to be interested in political revenge by firing people,” Cox said. “The government is not a family business that you get to be in total control of.”<\/b><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n