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Bureaucrats Behaving Badly – A Follow-up


Tuesday March 3rd, 2015   •   Posted by Craig Eyermann at 1:53pm PST   •  

4 We’re returning to the troubles of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy today, because she’s made the news again due to her oversight at the out-of-control government agency. CBS News reports:

In the private sector, if you’re caught viewing porn on company time or intimidating a co-worker, you’d probably be fired immediately; not so if you’re a federal employee.

A CBS News investigation looks at how hard it is for the U.S. government to discipline or fire employees who behave badly. With examples ranging from extravagant to explicit, civil service rules meant to protect public workers from political pressure may be backfiring, and costing you big, reports CBS News correspondent Don Dahler.

At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), red tape is preventing the removal of a top level employee accused of viewing porn two to six hours a day while at work, since 2010. Even though investigators found 7,000 pornographic files on his computer and even caught him watching porn, he remains on the payroll.

At a Congressional hearing, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy was asked why she hadn’t fired the employee and said, “I actually have to work through the administrative process, as you know.”

The administrative process meant to prevent against politically motivated firings is the civil servant protection system. The rules give employees the right to appeal a termination, a process that can take up two years.

Now, we’re going to emphasize how bad the federal government’s and Gina McCarthy’s management failures are with the following YouTube video. In it, you’ll see McCarthy’s congressional testimony, with Representative Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) challenging the EPA Administrator on the bonuses that were paid to the EPA’s prolific porn-watching employee after it was well established that the employee was engaged in gross misconduct. We’ll explain why it demonstrates such a tremendous failure of management in the federal government below the video.

That video was posted on YouTube on June 25, 2014, well over eight months ago. Now, guess who’s still collecting a federal government paycheck?

At this point, the real outrage is that the EPA’s porn-watching-on-the-job employee and EPA Adminstrator Gina McCarthy are both still collecting federal government paychecks. If the federal government had competent leadership, both heads would have rolled long ago.

Unless, of course, the kind of creepy on-the-job behavior of the federal government’s employees is supported by its top officials, who are turning a blind eye toward both sexual harassment and the establishment of an extremely hostile work environment.

And without action to fire such employees engaged in clear misconduct and the officials who tolerate the ongoing misconduct as their managers, what other conclusion can we logically draw from this continuing situation? After all, wouldn’t a competent leader with a pen and a phone find ways to cut through red tape to get rid of misbehaving employees? Especially if doing so could save U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year?

Or do they perhaps have other priorities?




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