How Washington really works - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1993 by Charles Peters

The difficulty of removing a bureaucrat is illustrated by the case of Clarence Ferguson, an employee of the National Marine Fisherics Service in St. Petersburg, Florida. Ferguson, according to the St. Petersburg Times, drank a pint of gin a day. During the years 1980--83, he missed 389 days of work. Finally, he was fired. Now a federal judge has given him the right to get his job back and has awarded him $150,000 back pay. The judge reasoned that all federal agencies should make reasonable accommodation for their "handicapped" workers, including alcohol and drug addicts.

An alcoholic who misses 389 days of work deserves our sympathy and help in overcoming his addiction, but he does not deserve a government job. The only standard that should govern the retention of employees is performance.

One high-level bureaucrat claims that showing cause for firing, as the law requires, can take up to 50 percent of the bureaucrat's working time for a period that may run from six to eighteen months. The executive must keep a diary of the employee's indiscretions (tardiness, mistakes, goofing off, flubbed assignments) before filing a complaint. Protected by a maze of regulations and limitations and often defended by lawyers from government employees' unions, a civil servant threatened with firing can drag a heating out for months or even years.

The result is a bureaucracy that is overstaffed with unproductive employees, employees who know that the government's rate of discharge for inefficiency is only one seventh of 1 percent.

What would happen if there were dramatic reductions in the number of government employees--cutting it, say, in half? There is no conclusive evidence on this point, but scattered returns are suggestive. Have you noticed any difference in the service you get from Washington bureaucrats during the last two weeks of December? Probably not, but did you know that in recent years absenteeism among Washington federal employees during that time has run as high as 60 percent?

The greatest obstacle to bureaucratic reform is that most people think it is better to have a system based on merit hiring than on political patronage. But the fact is that getting a government job has only the most modest relation to merit. Veterans get five free points added to their civil service exam score; disabled veterans get an extra ten. For nonveterans the trick is to know someone inside the agency. People already in the system are the first to know about a job opening, and knowing both the applicant and the job, they can tailor the job description to fit the person they want to hire. Insiders call it "the buddy system."

Even at the height of Watergate, Gordon Freeman, formerly of the House Manpower and Civil Service Subcommittee, contended that the real saboteurs of the civil service concept are civil servants themselves. "Sure, some politicians get jobs for their friends," he said, "but you could put all the Nixon-referred people on the Sequoia [a small yacht used by Nixon] and it would still float. But if you put all the people involved in the buddy system on the carrier Enterprise, it would sink."