... from federal supervisors is that it's damned near impossible to fire someone who deserves being fired. Full disclosure -- I was a federal supervisor for close to 20 years. Over that period of time, I managed to fire three employees. One was caught stealing from the warehouse and thought piling excess computers marked "US Navy Property" in the bed of his F-150 wouldn't draw any attention. Another person I fired hadn't completed his probationary period and had established a track record of showing up for work infrequently on time and sober. Those were the easy ones. The hard one was a career conditional GS-11 with over 15 years of government service. He was a guy I inherited from another division and came armed to the teeth with documented hours of training classes and letters of appreciation from a variety of people he dealt with over the years. Oddly enough, for all of that, I didn't notice he had received a single outstanding job performance rating his entire career. The reason became apparent almost from the first time I spoke with him welcoming him to the office. He let it be known that he wasn't much for team work and he readily admitted he had a problem getting work done on time. So, he sort of insisted that I should give him work he could work on independently and that I should be an "easy marker" when it came to the final product he produced. I told him that we sort of had a team concept going here, as most of the work really did require more than one person doing it and that I had certain standards of work I expected my people to achieve. He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his desk. It didn't take long for him to get on my bad side. The one way anyone who ever worked for me could get on my bad side is by not giving a shit enough to at least try to do an acceptable job. On his first assignment, which was supposed to be documenting an administrative process to allow someone (hopefully him) to analyze it for efficiencies and improvements, he essentially turned in a report which said "stuff goes in here and product comes out here." I told him that wouldn't do and he had to produce, at the least, a flow diagram of the process. He told me he didn't know how to do that. I checked his training record and he had been sent away numerous times to courses which are supposed to teach you how to do those very same things. When I mentioned that to him, he laughed and said, "what, did they really expect me to learn anything?" What I found out was that all those hours of training he had been sent away for were to get him out of the workplace so that the supervisor of record didn't have to discipline him. I also found out that the letters of appreciation he received, he had drafted himself and handed to whomever he was assigned to work with so he could fatten up his personnel jacket. Thus began a three year process in which I had to assiduously document what I was assigning to him (making sure to document what I assigned to others in the section at the same time) and document his monumental indifference to the job and his monumental inability to perform his job. I had to document my "counseling sessions", specifying what I said to him and how he could improve his situation and performance. I had to practice progressive discipline, which means you have verbal counseling combined with appropriate training and guidance before you get to move onto verbal reprimands and then on to suspensions. God forbid you get to the actual point where you're recommending that the employee be axed. And that's all a first or second level supervisor is allowed to do is recommend a removal and, because they have to be approved at the highest levels, it's a cold day in August before the government actually fires anyone. But, his day came finally, but in the interim he managed to cash a nice paycheck in return for doing not much of anything. And, in the process, poisoned the morale in the division for a few of his coworkers who believed that I was basically doing nothing about him. The entire process nearly drove me to distraction because I ended up having to spend so much of my time tending to the nonsense of one malcontent worker that I really felt I was stealing time away from what other workers in my division were about.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

...but this problem is, to some extent at least, quite real.  It's common wisdom that government workers get away with quite a bit more than private sector workers, and it's absolutely true.  I used to sell antiques on eBay, so I spent a lot of time at my local post office.  My local postmaster used to bring her dog to work every day, almost always came back late from her lunch break (it was a small post office, and she was the only person working the counter, so they closed when she went for lunch, making it quite obvious when she would come back late), etc, etc.  My wife now works for a state university library.  Her co-workers consistently leave work early (sometimes as much as an hour early) without taking any of their vacation or sick time.  Supervisors don't care because they don't want to take the time or effort to discipline anyone, and their evaluations / promotions aren't really tied to their department performance (in academic libraries, promotions are more based on how much you've published and how much grant money and/or donation money you can bring in).  It takes my wife day to do things that her supervisor will expect should take her a month, because she doesn't slack off an laze around like her coworkers.

Of course, the flip side to this is that government workers get paid considerably less then their private counterparts.  The benefits and work environment are relatively good and relaxed, but the pay is often fairly low, especially when compared against private sector workers with the same qualifications.  So the question is, is the bargain worth it for the taxpayers?