As a teenager, my dream was to make use of my foreign experience and language capability to work overseas. I felt I could make the biggest impact promoting American interests in the U.S. diplomatic corps. Newly married, I was finishing graduate school at a prestigious university in 1982 when unemployment was over 10%. Knowing that entry into the Foreign Service was highly competitive, I also took classes at the business school and the law school to broaden my employment possibilities. I did well in all those classes, but despite my peers landing jobs in the private sector paying three times as much, I took a position with the Foreign Service when it finally came available at $19,000 a year and lived my dream!
Like many others, I also sought a job with the federal government because I am risk adverse. I wanted my family’s financial security to be based as much as possible on my effort and performance, and less on swoons in the stock market, unanticipated industry disruptions or personality conflicts. I am glad that not everyone is like me. We need risk-takers to lead a dynamic economy. But I am also glad that there are some people like me to provide a steady hand when times are turbulent.
You should know where I am coming from when I talk about how people get fired.
Firing for efficiency
The new owners of the company my son worked for a few years ago decided that his division needed to be eliminated. The new boss had to choose the few who would be kept on to join another division. While my son thought he was performing well, she called one day to inform him of his dismissal and the reasons for it. The decision may have been hard for the new boss. It was definitely hard on our son. But sometimes hard decisions have to be made by the stewards of stockholder assets.
Out of respect for how loyal employees should be treated, the company gave my son a severance package, which fortunately enabled him to provide for his family of eight until he could land a new job. He says that his new job is the best he has ever had!
Firing with fairness
Public sector managers (I was one) spend an inordinate amount of time evaluating how well those who work under them perform toward the goals of the political leadership of the department or agency. Employees can be readily fired for unlawful behavior. They can also be fired for poor performance, but before that happens, the action must be reviewed by a committee to make sure that poor performance is the real reason for the firing. (Imagine, for example, if in my son’s situation, all the women in the division had been retained and all the men fired. Such would not happen under the fairness requirements of civil service employment.)
However, many in public service — I was among them — feel that the effort to assure fairness has been taken too far. There are so many appeals and documentation requirements and reviews that, as a practical matter, many managers give up trying to remove poor performers and can thus fail in their roles as stewards of taxpayer assets. This is not fair to the organization or to the taxpayers. But we do not need to blow up the entire concept of public service to fix this problem.
Firing from contempt
Here are some examples of firing by the unofficial DOGE that I am personally aware of:
- An employee who has been in his position for nearly two years and getting positive performance reviews received an email terminating him “for performance reasons” from someone who he has never met and who has never been in his office.
- A medical professional who was approved to work from home now has to report for work in either Phoenix or Washington, D.C., or be terminated. Until DOGE clarifies its initial ill-informed instructions, he has to be in both places, paying out of pocket for the twice-monthly flights required.
- Hundreds of staff at a world-renowned USG research agency are stranded outside because their building passes have been deactivated and their work projects (and their lives) upended. Aside from what they can surmise from the news, they have no idea why they have been fired.
- The sudden firing of support personnel and the freezing of accounts means that the promising work of teams of highly trained scientists is stymied as essential supplies can no longer be purchased. Trying to limp along, the interim leadership doesn’t even know who has been fired and who has not.
Those working in DOGE have the comfort of being able to make their determinations without public scrutiny, but they have the impossible task of making prudent decisions given unrealistic deadlines, a lack of knowledge and experience in the areas they scrutinize, and no legislative authorization from Congress. No surprise that some decisions are walked back because of poor coordination, many are challenged as illegal and others are pointlessly wasteful. One usually reticent senior scientist, who was not terminated, described what he saw around him during the Department of Health and Human Services firings last week as “disrespectful to the point of cruelty.”
It does not have to be done this way.
I can’t speak for all government agencies, but at the State Department, there are long-standing procedures to guide “reductions in force,” which use a point system to make sure the most valued officers are retained. Going through such procedures would take a little more time but would have a far better result.
What would motivate massive firings without regard to whether those being fired are the top performers or the worst performers and without regard to the damage done to government operations? I can think of no explanation but contempt. What difference does it make if the work of the government is done well or poorly if you have no regard for public service generally and public servants in particular?
As someone trained in public policy analysis, I hoped that the new administration would bring a much-needed fresh perspective to how taxpayers’ money is being spent. But positive and lasting government reform, including downsizing, requires putting in the hard work to do it right, not doing it rashly out of contempt.