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MSN Money
Federal
employees: Can't hire the best, can't fire the worst
Fiscal Times
Rob Garver
A powerful new survey of thousands of management-level federal
employees found that the U.S. government is a massive bureaucracy that
is under terrific stress, in part because managers feel they can’t get
rid of underperforming employees, and often say their workers don’t
have the skills they need to do their jobs.
Conducted by Vanderbilt University’s Center for the Study of Democratic
Institutions, the survey polled 3,551 government officials, both career
civil servants and political appointees. While some agencies received
higher marks than others and most respondents said that believe they
are equipped to perform at least their core functions, nearly one in
five did not.
“The federal workforce is under stress and there are concerns emerging
among federal executives about whether the workforce has the capacity
and skills necessary to implement effectively the core tasks that
they’ve been given by the president,” said David E. Lewis, a professor
of political science at Vanderbilt and the lead researcher on the study.
“It’s time to do civil service reform,” he said. I worry that it will
be done in piecemeal fashion in response to a crisis rather than the
right way, which is to develop a modern-day human resources system for
a modern government.”
Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, was at the
downtown Washington venue where the report was released.
Stier, a longtime advocate of overhauling the federal personnel system
said, “We unfortunately have all-too-little information about what is
happening inside the federal government.” He described the data in the
study as “really very valuable.”
Among the key insights from the study is what it reveals about the
skills of the federal workforce. Asked if an “inadequately skilled
workforce is a significant obstacle to [my agency] fulfilling its core
mission, 39 percent of respondents agreed that it was. Only 45 percent
of respondents disagreed with that statement...
Read the rest of the article at MSN Money
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