The Rot Runs Deep: Thousands of Bureaucrats Need to Go

David French has a great article over on National Review, about the incompetency of government employees.

When dealing with the federal bureaucracy, we’re dealing with a collection of individuals who simply don’t live with the kind of job insecurity that hangs over the heads of most Americans. Most people live with the reality that not only are their job fortunes tied to the overall financial health of the corporation, but also that poor performance will lead (frequently) to rapid termination even if the corporation is doing well. The incentives — both to help the company thrive and to personally perform well — are obvious. But people are people (highly imperfect), and even in the face of these strong incentives, poor performance can abound even in the private sector.

The situation is much worse in the public sector, where the incentive structure is dramatically skewed, layers of bureaucracy protect poor performers, and politics is seeping down to the lowest levels — transforming many of our key public-sector institutions into vast, costly, and inefficient extensions of the Democratic party.

So the VA that Sloan Gibson fiercely defends is the same VA that not only makes headlines with its systematic corruption and deception — corruption that costs lives — but also can’t even handle small things like answering press inquires with their 54 full-time public-affairs employees or (to take one example from personal knowledge) firing an employee caught snorting cocaine in the parking lot.

No one is saying that all 350,000 employees are bad. But thousands are, and their continued employment and — even worse — continued protection from the top-down of a dysfunctional bureaucracy harms the government, harms the employees that work with them each day, and — most important – harms the American people they’re supposed to serve.

So, Secretary Gibson, spare us the crocodile tears until you can show us that your 350,000 people can do the jobs they’re hired to do.

We can’t think of a better argument against big government. The whole thing is worth a read here.