OPINION: Gov’t rewards lazy, incompetent work

We have a long list of government screw-ups. In recent years, we have the notorious virtual fence along our southern border. This system was supposed to detect and direct Border Patrol officers to groups illegally entering the U.S. from Mexico. After spending millions of dollars on the system, illegals still pour across the border bringing all kinds of drugs and other contraband. The virtual fence has been, for all practical purposes, abandoned.

Then, there is the ACORN fiasco. These people received millions of dollars supposedly for voter registration drives. Not only did they put millions of nonexistent or unqualified people on the voter rolls, they targeted their efforts for one political party over the other.

Government inaction, or poor policy, allowed the Gulf oil spill to be far worse than necessaryy. The result, this nation is buying even more oil from people who do not like us, causing our balance of payments to go even deeper in the red.

Most recently, news arrived that the U.S. Treasury has $1.1 billion misprinted $100 bills. These are a new design that was intended to protect our money from counterfeiters. Turns out that it is so complex that even the government can’t print them correctly. Now they are printing more of the old design while they sort out the damaged bills and figure out how to print them correctly.

The biggest screw-up, which was totally preventable, was allowing a disgruntled Army private access to millions of classified documents, then waiting until he had copied and released them to an America-hating European who then proceeded to release them on the Internet.

Now here is the real problem. Our federal government has a Civil Service system designed to protect government workers. Under this system, no government worker can be fired for incompetence, indifference or just plain laziness. Once someone is on the government payroll, it is virtually impossible to get them back off. And to make it worse, these government workers receive almost double the salaries and benefits of workers in the private economy.

So, who is responsible for this fiasco? One of the most important duties of Congress is oversight of government operations. Clearly they are failing in this responsibility. Congress needs to do its job and modify the Civil Service rules so that lazy, incompetent and indifferent federal workers are fired. They need to see to it that government pay is compatible with civil jobs. And they need to crack down on the unions who push for ever more government compensation for poor work.

Most of the blame for our current financial difficulty falls directly on the shoulders of Congress and its failure to properly regulate the government civil service system. We the people need to keep voting them out of office until they get the message and straighten out the mess.

Frank Gillispie is founder of The Madison County Journal. His e-mail address is frank@frankgillispie.com. His website can be accessed at http://www.frankgillispie.com/gillispieonline