Take a look at the memo that Mick Mulvaney sent out to all federal agencies on the subject of "Comprehensive Plan for Reforming the Federal Government and Reducing the Federal Civilian Workforce." The amount of naivete and arrogance contained in this one memo is just stunning. It's what you get when someone takes all the nonsense spewed out by Fox News seriously. Of course, the federal government is just crammed full of waste, fraud and abuse. Of course, all it takes to end this and bring about dramatic reductions in government expenditures is for a tough-minded businessman to come in and demand that agencies become efficient.
Like Donald Trump, Mick Mulvaney will have to learn on the job and to do that he's going to have to abandon many of his cherished beliefs. One way or another, he's going to be defeated by his job because the federal government is vastly more complicated than he believes and he really has no idea in the world of how to "reform" it. He doesn't know it but there have been endless attempts to "reform" the federal government. Mick Mulvaney doesn't know it but he isn't smarter than his predecessors.
40 comments:
They are agenda driven elitists. Anything not for the very wealthy will be a target. Good faith and truth are so blasé. The peasants haven't lost just yet, however.
The rhetoric just destroys morale... its a relentless fervor from your boss, you're part of the problem, you're a drain on the country, you don't deserve what your getting, what you are doing is not noble and your not righteous and how can I best get rid of you. Now how hard do you want to work for me?
Support the troops! (30% of the fed workforce is vets) We love teachers, cops, border patrol agents, firefighters, prosecutors, food inspectors, and DOD! (all on GS scale)
Really, after reading the memo (really long memo) I didn't see anything that outrageous. Cut cost and be more efficient. Every POTUS in my lifetime has said that. Eliminate or reform overlapping programs. OK, whats wrong with that? I thought it a bit funny they had to explain Federalism in the charts, but I am in favor of reducing the federal role for more control in the states where the people on the ground know what is going on.
President Obama called on Federal agencies in 2011 to initiate an unprecedented government-wide review of rules on the books, agencies have achieved significant results by streamlining, revising, and eliminating many existing regulations. The regulatory lookback effort to date has achieved an estimated $28 billion in net 5-year savings. Moreover, these efforts significantly benefit States, local and tribal governments, businesses, and the American people by making all levels of government more efficient and effective.
What is so horrible or out of the ordinary in this.
8:07 and 9:24 are SPOT-ON!
BRAVO!
Not that many years ago, SSA paid employees overtime every weekend and the offices had kids running up and down the halls on the weekend. 25% of the staff in our ODAR office does little to no work. With the staff working at home now, nothing is getting done. There needs to be big changes, quickly.
such broad generalizations. I'm in the top 10 percent of writers nationwide and I work at home. It's up to the person. lol the poor performers don't care if their supervisor is watching them not do work. The performance metrics are objective its easy to see who is not working. You're either turning in work or not. It doesn't matter WHERE you are or are not working.
I'm not really talking about the content of the memo. Its not going to outright say F you. It's the tone that is being set. The tone is we are all part of the problem, we're all slackers who don't work. I'm all good with making it easier to fire bad people but cut the BS about how were all overpaid slackers. If your pissed about how things are going broadly hit the SESers they make the decisions. I'd love to see the freeloaders fired but I'm just along for the ride.
Fire the bottom 10% every year, hire new. Perform or get out. Write it in at the beginning of hiring. Why should we taxpayers pay the bottom 10% to perform so poorly. Want to keep the job, at least be in the upper 90%. Don't like, get an equally high paying job, with the low cost benefits, and extensive time off in the civilian work place. No more free rides for GS.
Don't lie you don't pay federal income tax. Neither do 90% of the red state brietbarters. Tell me you're not getting a refund. I dare you
Paid $3000 to the feds this year due to ACA, we had income and insurance changes during the year. So suck it up snowflake you are dead wrong!!!
The funny thing here is, all the government employees chime in and say they are working hard but also state there are slackers that are too hard to fire. By defending themselves they point out the problem, that poor performers exist but cannot be fired. Why? Why cant they be fired for performing poorly? Perform like that in a small business or even midsized company and you are out the door. But perform poorly on the taxpayers dime and you get to keep performing poorly for life.
If you do not see this is wrong, then you are in denial.
obamacare insurance premiums don't go to the government
Yea I'm the poster from above, I am openly acknowledging there is a problem that needs to be fixed.
The poor performers can be fired but its a pain in the ass to do it for managers because we have appeal rights, this isn't a system like that at-will employment system in the south. It's not your fired no questions asked. Why? Courts have consistently held that federal employees have a property interest in their jobs. So the government has to give you constitutional substantive and procedural due process before they can take that property away from you.
said differently, the managers have to prove you are being fired for a legitimate purpose and be prepared to present evidence and defend their assertions in court. They have to give you notice of it and you have to have an opportunity to appeal it before an impartial adjudicator. Additionally, the entire workforce is unionized and the government has signed away certain mgmt. rights in collective bargaining agreements. The union contracts generally contain elaborate procedures for performance management. Again it can be done but its often a drawn out process which deters the effort to begin with. I owned a small business prior to law school and worked at a private firm prior to coming here. I am not a union member and would prefer an at-will employment environment.
When I see senior case technicians with a high school diploma making over $50,000.00 a year and doing next to nothing, I get upset. When I see paralegals with a high school diploma that can't even use proper grammar in a decision making over $80,000.00 a year, I get upset. There needs to be a deep housecleaning.
12:56 it is very nice of you to exercise your ignorance to keep it healthy. If you are receiving a premium assistance when using ACA, and there is a change, in this instance a change in income and insurance coverage, the premium assistance is paid pack in your income tax filing.
Thanks for showing the depth of your misunderstanding sparky.
yea a lot of government positions are overpaid some aren't. ODAR paralegals make more money than new FBI and border patrol agents. ALJs are absurdly overpaid.
More broadly though powerful wall street, globalization and automation forces have brought about the highest income inequality in generations driving down private sector wages, but federal employees are always the easy scapegoat. FWIW, I took a pay cut but I also was working a lot more than 40 hours per week.
What is performance, though? Is it how many widgets, i.e., decisions, Hearings, dispositions, one has each month, regardless of the shoddy quality of the work? The problem is ODAR has almost always measured performance by numbers/quotas, as opposed to quality of work. The exception was the recent period in which the pendulum swung so far to quality that it became ridiculous and created the perfect storm for the unprecedented backlog. Now, the pendulum has been swung once again in the quantity category. Obviously, the perfect hybrid to strive performance wise is the sweet spot in the middle between quantity and quality. Unfortunately, I have observed for far too many years, employees performance measured primarily, if not exclusively, based on numbers/quantity with no concern for the quality of their work product. Further, those employees who achieve that sweet spot between quality and quantity and maintain this level of performance for several years, are far too often not recognized when being considered for other positions to move forward in their career, i.e., from GS into SES, etc. I would like to see SSA/ODAR management establish a method of performance measurement which accurately takes into account both quality and quantity, and see to it that subordinate managers consistently and appropriately adhere to this standard when measuring an employees performance. I am sick and tired of watching certain select employees, irrespective of performance, regardless of how it is measured, moving up through the ranks into higher paying, or SES positions, without having achieved or been able to maintain that sweet spot in their work performance between quality and quantity. This is what "Merit" selection is supposed to be, but is far too often ignored in higher paying job selections made by SSA/ODAR management.
There is an established objective quality/quantity metric your agree rate vs your DWPI. Keep your agree rate at or above expectation and your DWPI as high as possible for good marks. The AC is denying more and more, speed should be increasing.
Charles a huge percentage of the country takes Fox news very seriously. We are surrounded by fools. Especially in North Carolina!
I have never understood how a those in state government are suppose to be better informed than those in federal government, and because they are supposedly 'on the ground' they can run things better. State officials can be just as ignorant as federal officials. State capitals can be just as isolated from the ground as the federal capital. In my lifetime, my state has discriminated, didn't let minorities vote, and spied on citizens who did oppose discrimination and tried to register to vote (and were a minority).
@2:15 hasn't your federal government done the exact same things you list? State representatives are more accessible, you have a better chance of getting their ear than the you do a Senator. My local state representative even walks around neighborhoods and knocks on doors. Talked to her when I was doing some yard work. My Fed Senator wouldn't listen to a word I had to say without a donation of 6 figures or more. Locally, they know where my town is, in my state, every thinks the state ends once you leave Chicago, but 350 miles south of Chicago is still in the state and culturally totally different.
@1:41
Could you more specifically explain how this works for those of us who are not familiar with it?
And as an add on, the state guys are cheaper to buy.
Its Friday, its a joke, get over it. ;)
its easier to move from your state if you don't like something than it is to leave the country.
When people get denied by ODAR they can appeal to the Appeal Council this body decides if the decision is good enough for the agency to defend in court in terms of whether there were any errors of law articulated in the decision if its not they typically send it back to the ALJ. If the appeals council agrees with your decision its considered legally sufficient, that is your agree rate. The percentage of time the appeals council agrees with your decision. ALJs and decision writers have agree rates. Agree rates are how ODAR measures quality. A quality decision is one that is legally sufficient.
DWPI stands for decision writer productivity index. There are 12 categories of decisions. The agency has conducted research to determine how much time it should take to write each of the 12 different types of cases. 4 hours for some 8 for others 10 for others. There are benchmarks for agree rate and DWPI percentage or speed. This is your objective measurement for quality and quantity. Its not perfect but its objective and treats everyone as near as equal as they have figured out how to do.
There are also factors that weigh into how fast you should be able to go on a local level like how big your files are but DWPI should objectively measure productivity within a specific office at a minimum.
@2:42
Thank you for explaining this.
The problem with ODAR is too much management at all levels. You don't need so much management with so many folks working at home. What exactly are managers managing when virtually no one is in the office. The ALJ jobs at ODAR should be eliminated. TOo many don't do their jobs well and no one seems to care.
I agree that ODAR needs to be cleaned up. It's a disgrace and taxpayers deserve better. Who will dare to fix it? I hope someone does. IT is a disgrace.
Agree rate is a worthless measure for both employees it's used to evaluate: ALJs and writers/senior attorneys. Bad writers often have good agree rates because judges that give a damn about the quality of their decisions edit the hell out of the bad ones. Similarly, bad judges are often saved by good writers. The metric is, as far as it is defined and used well generally, a good measure of overall decision quality, but since two sets of essentially independently acting employees work on most every decision, it's worthless to evaluate either ALJ or writer quality separately.
Agree rate, for the person who asked, is just the ratio of decisions that are appealed to the AC and federal courts that get remanded or reversed. The fewer remands and reversals of cases so appealed, the higher the agree rate, and hence the better the decision quality. However, AC analysts and AJs suffer from varying quality and harshness, so the number itself isn't that good from the start.
DWPI is the new metric for writers. Just like with the DWSI, we still do not apply this metric to senior attorneys. Cheese and rice, how hard is it to cut out the time they spend on their other duties and evaluate those separately and apply the DWPI to the time they are actually writing? The idiocy of ODAR and SSA upper management has no bounds. But I digress...
Gerald Ray and his math whiz kid acolytes up at the AC came up with 12 types of decisions based on rationale and issues involved and used their wizardly math powers to figure out how long it took all writers on average to write each type using a few recent years worth of data. Let me stress this - these averages came from analysis of actual performance, not some desired number or imagined proper time.
That average time became the amount of time each category of case is worth, essentially, so that we calculate the time worth of all the decisions they wrote and divide it by how much time they were on duty writing to get a ratio. 100% would result if what one wrote was worth exactly the time they were on duty writing.
We only ask writers to achieve 80% of this average to avoid risk of being fired. Think about that - at first glance, someone not very good at math might think that means we allow folks to be at the 20th percentile and stay aboard. That's not too unreasonable, heck, the person above only wanted to jettison the lowest 10%. So while the mean DWPI should be 100% if Gerald and the wizards did their math right AND management assigned cases properly, it likely isn't. But more indicative of a huge problem with this metric is the fact that the standard deviation for DWPI sure as hell ain't 15.
Knowing that, it's clear that being 20 points off the average indicates that the 80% line in the sand actually describes a really, really low percentile/high standard deviation value. In short, assuming the math was done even remotely well, 80% of the average should correspond to a low single digit percentile. But wait, it gets better. Somehow, despite all these things that should be true, something like 25% of all NTEU writers are below 80%, or at least they were a little while back during the bargaining over adopting the metric.
All this to say: DWPI is all sorts of f'd up. From it's inception to its application. The numbers I ran through above just don't mesh at all. It's flawed, majorly.
Perhaps Ray and his math whiz kids aren't as smart as everyone seems to think they are.
None of the DWPI or DWSI apply to AFGE employees,and if you are a low paying ALJ you will not be appealed as much - so agree rate is useless. Wonder what the Huntington judge's agree rate was before he got caught?
Meh in theory writers will write for every judge in the office so it equals out. It not perfect but there will always be people that bitch without offering other solutions, want no accountability and will oppose anything mgmt does.
As a practicioner in this area one might expect I would have many criticisms of SSA and it's workers. I think there is a certain glee on the part of some who are constantly talking big about firing a certain percentage every year and all of that. I can only comment with certainty about the office I deal with regularly. The main ODAR I practice at is well run and efficient. Workers and ALJ's are pretty dedicated to their jobs and pretty much everyone is courteous and decent to work with. Considering the resource and attitude problems they have had to deal with from on high, I think they have done an exceptional job the past five years. I would say the same for the most part about the field office in my area. The big play the past few years has been billionaire corporate raiders swooping in and taking over companies and in the name of efficiency cutting the hell out of everything and eventually driving them into the ground while pocketing enormous profits. I grew up in a society of relative stability where people lived in the same neighborhoods and parents worked at the same companies for years. Houses weren't mere commodities to be flipped and foreclosed on and schools weren't under constant attack from crazy politicians. I guess what I am saying is when you cut everything and fire everybody you are creating chaos which wipes out the tax base, decreases spending power below the top and can harm families with children in them. One gets the feeling sometimes that all of this gloom doom and cutting the hell out of everything and everybody is more about destruction and looting and profit taking by elites than it is about improving anything. I honestly see very few faking claimants but lots of broken ones and very few bad SSA employees from my end. Maybe my area is the exception but I have doubts.
Amen, amen and Amen!
Sounds eerily similar to OCREO-HR/Civil Rights components!? Total lack of leadership on top of employees many if not all of whom are lacking passion as well as compassion. They all have forgotten the reason they were hired for the job..replace them all for the sake of the agency and its well-deserving public!!
Drain the swamp is an understatement!!
Drain the swamp so far has meant more billionaires and Goldman Sachs people than ever coming into government. Who are we draining the swamp for? The Koch brothers? Why don't we try funding government and treating civil servants with some of the respect they got fifty years ago.
Embrace the swamp, it worked for Shrek!
4:02 Thanks so much for your perspective. I think ODARs and field offices have lots to go through with different stuff being dumped on them. I can usually find someone in a field office or the ODAR office with whom I can work.
You are right. When we are all yelling, hollering, and blaming local offices for our problems, we miss sight of the real problem. I am really worried about those who make a big profit to screw things up and take the money and run.
ODAR, the law schooled and non-law schooled employees are mostly lazy, heartless, narcissistic, ignorant and tax-wasting bunch of sorry bureaucrats that to shit down ODAR is just a consolation prize for our nation's taxpayers!!!
Does anyone have a good explanation as to why senior attorneys are not held to a productivity index? OR why paralegals are not held to a productivity index (under AFGE)?
"None of the DWPI or DWSI apply to AFGE employees"? Are you sure about this? Where can one find the evidence to support this statement? Hyperlink or a pdf, please? Thanks!
Post a Comment