How Hard Is It To Get Fired From The Federal Government: Sex Offender Edition

There's only one government agency more forgiving...

epa logoThe stereotype of the bad federal worker is often overblown. Many are hardworking folks just trying to do their part. But what appears to have gone down at the Environmental Protection Agency over the last 10 years or so puts every insane presumption you’ve ever had about a government worker to shame.

In hearings before the House Oversight Committee, a mind-blowing EPA Office of the Inspector General report — summarized in written testimony — about just how many EPA employees abused the system for years before getting fired. Or in the case of one registered sex offender, fired and then rehired.

The highest profile anecdote from the committee hearings involved an EPA employee who was a registered sex offender dating back to 1997 and got suspended in 2006 for decking out his car with emergency lights and carrying a badge and handcuffs, I guess so people could “respect his authoritah.” He’d apparently done this same thing in the past and gotten a reprimand. Believing in rehabilitation is a noble sentiment, but sex offenders who front to the public that they carry the privileges and power of law enforcement probably deserve more than a reprimand or a suspension. In 2014, police investigated the guy for violating his probation and “may have viewed and possessed child pornography on his EPA-issued computer” (though a forensic investigation of the computer found no trace). At this point, the EPA fired him.

This would seem absurd enough, but then the report explains that the EPA was forced to rehire the guy when the Merit Systems Protection Board struck down his termination. After that the EPA paid him $55K to resign. What the f**k Merit Systems Protection Board? Help a fellow government agency out!

Other lawmakers focused on the case of an EPA contractor in Seattle who admitted to watching pornography on a government computer for one or two hours a day for 18 years, or another in which an employee in Atlanta pawned digital cameras the agency owned.

Committee Republicans said the EPA did not come down hard enough on these employees, instead allowing them to resign, putting them on probation or into counseling, or placing them on administrative leave.

“That is the M.O.,” Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., said at the hearing. “You steal, you sit around and watch porno, you get convictions outside. And you either voluntary resign or go to retirement, but nobody gets fired.”

Now there are a couple ways you can look at this. First, you could say that this is a problem likely enhanced because the agency is routinely strapped in terms of both finances and personnel and that contributes to a failure of effective management and an inability to root out and deal with problem employees. Add in a Merit Systems Protection Board — the entity that seems responsible for the most egregious example — that makes firing civil servants a chore, and you see an organization with its hands tied that needs more legislative assistance to get back on track performing its important work in the most effective way possible.

So that’s one way to look at it. The House Republicans chose the other way:

Sponsored

Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican who is piloting an effort to impeach EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, insisted [Acting Deputy Administrator A. Stanley] Meiburg step down, saying he is violating federal law by serving in a position for which he has been nominated but not approved.

Yes, bringing more effective management by firing the manager is only “acting” because you refuse to approve EPA officials. Ah, the George Steinbrenner School of Management. There’s a reason the Yankees sucked when Steinbrenner reduced the role of manager to a revolving door. Not to mention, Gosar’s plan is to further gut the management team who actually fired all these people — some of whom were bad eggs dating back to that prior administration. This makes a lot of sense and I’m glad this guy has his hand on the rudder of American government.

For his part, Meiburg took the excoriation like a champ and stressed that the agency dealt with all the cases in the report two years ago and that a few bad apples doesn’t suggest a systemic problem. But it turned out that GOP legislators were amazingly unsympathetic to this argument considering their former leader is an admitted child molester, another of their fellows landed in prison for tax fraud, and one of their potential new members literally sits around watching porno. Hell, the former head of the very committee holding these hearings has a pair of grand theft auto indictments and pleaded to carrying a concealed weapon in his past.

Not that the EPA employees in this report should have kept their jobs as long as they did. But the EPA manages over 15,000 people… the House GOP only has to deal with a couple hundred. When it comes to running a tight ship I’m leaning toward the EPA.

(The full written testimonial statement of Assistant Inspector General for Investigations Patrick Sullivan, complete with more tales of employee misconduct, is on the next page…)

Sponsored

House Holds EPA Official to the Flames on Mischief-Making Staff [Courthouse News Service]