By Rick Manning
You cannot drain the swamp, unless you can fire the swamp. That is why, Representatives Barry Loudermilk and Anna Paulina Luna’s MERIT Act is so important.
No, it isn’t a wholesale elimination of civil service protections against political firings, in fact it is a fairly tame change in the federal government employment law. At its core, all it does is allow an expedited process for firing incompetent, recalcitrant or lazy federal employees.
The current system rewards the worse employees in the federal government and punishes the best and even the average. But the MERIT Act would change that.
According to the bill’s summary, “The MERIT Act repeals the Chapter 43 special process for acting against poor performers and bad actors, which is unnecessarily time-consuming, and streamlines the Chapter 75 process for removal or suspension of employees and supervisors. The MERIT Act also permits agencies to remove a senior executive from the civil service for performance reasons, rather than merely demoting the individual to a non-Senior Executive Service (SES) position.”
Because it is currently next to impossible to fire a federal civil service employee managers have to choose when confronted by a bad employee on whether to endure an often multi-year long process of failed Performance Improvement Plans, endless Human Resources meetings and other remediations in order to fire someone.
The natural result is that managers often choose to just isolate the bad employees, not giving them anything to do and pay them anyway. It simply isn’t worth it to risk failing to meet your performance expectations because you are spending so much time and energy on an employee who has zero interest in doing their job.
The net result is other team members end up doing their own job and part of someone else’s. And the only people who benefit are the government employee union lawyers who keep their jobs, human resources staff that deals with these problems as their job and the person who is effectively stealing money from the U.S. taxpayer.
Creating an expedited system to fire the worse employees simply makes sense.
The MERIT Act fits perfectly in this new world where government systems are being evaluated to determine the best ways to create efficiencies and maximize taxpayer value.
Representatives Loudermilk and Luna are doing the right thing by being the point of this spear, and the American people look forward to the MERIT Act’s reintroduction and it will be up to the new Congress to make this common sense reform happen.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
