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posted by martyb on Monday December 17 2018, @07:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the Meet-your-goals-by-moving-the-goalposts dept.

From NPR:

The audit found that as of Oct. 1 CBP had paid Accenture Federal Services approximately $13.6 million of a $297 million contract to recruit and hire 7,500 applicants, including Customs and Border Protection officers, Border Patrol agents, and Air and Marine Interdiction agents. But 10 months into the first year of a five-year contract Accenture had only processed "two accepted job offers," according to the report.

[...] When it became clear the company would miss a 90-day deadline to reach the "full operation phase" outlined in the agreement, the agency modified the contract granting Accenture another three months to ramp up operations to meet the terms of the contract.

CBP also allowed the company to use the government agency's applicant tracking system when Accenture failed to deploy its own, leading to another contract revision.


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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 17 2018, @09:02PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday December 17 2018, @09:02PM (#775552)

    the reason it's hard to remove deadwood in government exists for a reason, though: The main alternative to the systems of civil service protections that exist in many civilized countries is the "spoils system", where the new leader of the government executive determines who gets to keep their jobs based on whether those employees declare loyalty to that leader and/or their party (and are seen as loyal to the leader's faction within said party as well). This in turn leads to serious problems:

    - All government departments are in complete chaos right after an inauguration, and even after the dust settles the new people who just came in only kinda know how to do their jobs competently. (Of course, there was probably chaos and incompetence before this, but the spoils system absolutely guarantees it.)

    - All government employees are now strongly incentivized to keep the incumbent and their party in office, up to and including using their power as government bureaucrats to coerce people into voting for the incumbent. That motivation is so strong that this is now more of a priority than doing the job they're supposed to be doing, whatever that is. As a simple example, your postal carrier might quietly throw out all mailed campaign material from the opposition party, knowing that they'll lose their job if the opposition wins. (Again, something that can happen now if the government employee collaborated with the politician on some illegal act, which sometimes happens.)

    - You now have a large number of angry civil servants who just lost their job because of perceived disloyalty to The Party or The Leader. Do you think they're going to just take that lying down? For reference, this kind of disagreement led to the assassination of US President James Garfield in 1881.

    Even in a civil service system, there are ways of firing people (I know a guy who was fired from the US Mint, for instance, over a disagreement of methodology used in their metallurgy lab). However, deadwood can accumulate because a boss who has reached their level of incompetence finds it easier to allow the deadwood to just sit there than to go through the process of firing someone.

    --
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @09:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @09:06PM (#775557)

    All government departments are in complete chaos right after an inauguration, and even after the dust settles the new people who just came in only kinda know how to do their jobs competently. (Of course, there was probably chaos and incompetence before this, but the spoils system absolutely guarantees it.)

    This seems like a good thing to me. The system is being made robust against "chaos".