You see the occasional reference to comments attributed to Elon Musk saying that there are "phantom" civil servants and people with no particular work assignments in the federal civil service. He is probably correct in this allegation.
Congress in its less-than-infinite wisdom has made firing a civil servant who has been on-payroll for over a year, and thus not probationary, very difficult. In the normal run of things, relatively few such are fired.
As my supervisor told me decades ago when I worked in DC for a couple of years as a temp consultant, "Many of us will fire one loser in our managerial career. Almost nobody ever fires a second one, the process is designed to be too punishing to the firing boss."
It takes a boss many hours per week over perhaps 3 years to finally get rid of someone, presuming they haven't been caught red-handed committing a gross felony at work. During this multi-year period the loser continues to sit in the outer office fomenting ill-will and drawing pay. Plus not every attempt to fire someone succeeds, some win their cases constituting a total loss for the boss.
How do managers cope with a set of constraints like these? Sometimes by parking the offending person in a cubby and giving them no work, or only make-work assignments of no importance. I remember hearing of an office in the Ag Building where several guys sat around all day reading the newspapers. I presume they'd been moved out of the chain of command and left to serve out their time till retirement.
I betcha some such were sent home to do, effectively, nothing during Covid and in some cases have moved out of the DC area and basically just get their paycheck for doing nothing. The hope with the buyout offer that some 70,000 took was to get such individuals off the payroll without firing.
The presumption of the DOGE effort is that layoffs do not claim the individuals being fired are bad workers. Rather that the Government no longer needs the services they were hired to provide.
If you find the above reprehensible, you are of course correct. The blame lies with Congress which has over-protected non-probationary employees. They've done this because our elected officials do not like dealing with irate constituents who are also civil servants under threat of dismissal.
