In the Federal Workforce Every Employee Is Above Average

A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that virtually every one of the 1.2 million employees in their study received a rating at or above “fully successful,” compared to only 0.1 percent who were deemed “unacceptable,” which might be surprising given the scandals that have rocked multiple agencies in recent years and the fact that these employees are people, prone to making mistakes or every day struggles like everyone else. Milton Friedman once asked “where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?” If these performance ratings are to be believed, they’re already in the federal workforce, which might surprise anyone who has followed the developments at the VA or TSA. The extremely skewed distribution of ratings highlighted in the report highlight the shortcomings of the current evaluation system, which makes it harder to actually address any real problems with the performance of federal employees. Distribution of Performance Ratings, 2013   Source: GAO Note: Ratings for permanent, non-senior executive service employees. The authors of the report used data from the Office of Personnel Management to analyze performance ratings for permanent, non-Senior Executive Service employees who received a rating for fiscal year 2014. While there are some exclusions, like the U.S. Postal Service and intelligence agencies, the 24 agencies included “are generally the largest federal agencies and account for more than...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs