The Washington Examiner has an article with this title:
Jobs for life: Federal government very rarely fires workers
I'm not surprised it is still true, but it certainly is not new. Let me tell you a true story.
As a junior faculty member, I was loaned to the Federal Government as a temporary employee in the mid-1970s. I joined a large subdivision of the Department of Agriculture as an "internal consultant." My agency at that time had roughly 10,000 employees scattered across the country and even a few overseas.
I worked for them for two years and returned to my university post. While there I was colocated in a unit consisting of five professionals (one of whom the boss) and two clericals.
I shared an office with one of the professionals, a former Roman Catholic priest who had left the priesthood, married, got retrained as an Episcopal minister, and was pastor at a small church in a DC suburb. USDA was his "day job" that paid bills but the pastorate was where his heart was.
He spent much of his at-work time on the phone conducting parish business, scheduling weddings, baptisms, funerals, counseling the bereaved, etc. Candidly, the tax payers weren't getting their money's worth from my officemate.
After a couple of months when I felt comfortable doing so I asked the boss why he tolerated it. He opened my eyes to the realities of federal management. He said, as best I remember it, "Every federal supervisor eventually tries to fire some particularly egregious loser. None of us ever tries it a second time. It is just too punishing."
The process drags out over nearly three years, during which the target of the firing continues coming to work where he or she sits and glowers at the boss, does nothing useful, and foments discontent among the other employees while continuing to occupy a slot and draw pay.
Should the supervisor make any missteps in the complicated and intentionally difficult multi-step separation procedure, the firing will not succeed. However the supervisor will have wasted much of his or her time for three years in vain and his or her own performance appraisal will suffer, at least in part because the attempted firing also takes up a fair amount of the next level manager's time.
So you're a federal supervisor with a lame employee, what can you do? Why, help the loser find an even better, higher paying job elsewhere in government, of course. We had an ironic name for it, "turkey outplacement." Or you ignore them, as my boss did my officemate.
My agency was the recipient of one such turkey when we hired a unit manager from a smaller USDA agency and subsequently were asked by its employees how we were conned into hiring the loser. Our only possible rejoinder: "Now you tell us he was dreck?" Too embarrassing to admit we believed his glowing references, which were written to get rid of him.
The other professionals in the office ranged from excellent to useful-but-eccentric, none were active embarrassments. I partnered with the excellent one and together we generated an award-winning process by which lab scientists were selected for training as science managers.
