GAO looked at 2013 ratings for almost 1.2 million staffers, not including Senior Executive Service (SES) members. The study found that only 0.3 percent were rated as minimally successful and 0.1 percent as unacceptable."Short on employee accountability" is a vast understatement. Permit me to elaborate.
Feds deserve much respect, but rating more than 99 percent as fully successful strains credibility. It diminishes the truly successful and could deny the less successful the assistance they need to improve. The report gives a boost to those who seek to overhaul the civil service system, which critics say is short on employee accountability.
Some decades ago, as a young B-School faculty member, I volunteered to be loaned to the Federal Government for two years. I served as an internal consultant to a major subdivision of a Cabinet-level Department, which subdivision employed roughly 10,000.
That division needed to create a management development program in a hurry, having discovered that fully half of its 100 managers would be eligible to retire within five years. As a young professor of Management with a fresh Ph.D. in the field and consulting experience, I was able to help them achieve their goal.
The office to which I was attached had as permanent staff a supervisor, four professionals, and two clericals. The supervisor was okay and one of the professionals was top-notch, luckily I worked with him. Another of the professionals was competent, but so phobic-acting and bizarre-looking as to be unemployable in the private sector.
I heard nothing bad or good about the third professional's work, perhaps because she was a minority. I assume she was also adequate. The clericals were lazy but their work got done. The fourth professional, no minority he, did very little and got away with it.
Thus, in my office one-seventh (14%) of the workforce was not "fully successful." My guess is that proportion was fairly typical at the time. Little has changed to improve the situation in the interim.
I asked the supervisor why he tolerated an idle professional and he replied simply, "What I'd have to do to fire him is so punishing to me that I refuse. It isn't worth doing and nobody expects me to do it." Multiply that by hundreds of thousands and you see why conservatives seek to keep tasks in the private sector where people still get fired.
