Incompetence and No Show Jobs Remember the scandal in Great Britain where top secret files were left at a bus stop? Wouldn’t you agree that certainly is a sign of incompetence? I think it is and I have been seeing too much of it lately in governments. It is hard to believe some of these people are trusted and even harder to believe no one is overseeing these documents to make sure they don’t leave their respective buildings. There is more news on the person that did this. Is he being fired or reprimanded, perhaps demoted? No. Before he lost the secret records, he was being considered to be the UK’s ambassador to NATO. I guess that won’t be, but wait, it is now being said he is not out of the running. That’s great, now maybe he can lose some top secret NATO documents. We usually don’t ever hear what the name of the person who is that incompetent is or what happened to them. Take the case of the Veteran’s Administration and the person who left the laptop with millions of names and information about vets on a subway. I can tell you this, after it was lost, the entire scenario was changed to reflect it was a stolen laptop. The story is now he took it home and it was stolen. What is an employee doing taking home a laptop computer and a hard drive, yes, he took a hard drive also, with over 26 million names of vets and active military, including family members, and the personal info to accompany them? This seems to me to be no excuse that it was stolen from the person’s home, a place it never should have been. How was this allowed out of the VA building? It has been said this guy was fired and had been an analyst. I guess he wasn’t high enough to cover for. Can there be any bigger sign of incompetence than a member of the US government having sex with a Chinese spy and being allowed to continue this relationship while on one of the most sensitive committees in Congress. It is hard to believe he hadn’t discovered she was a spy. You would think a person in that position would have someone looked into before dating them. Then there is the problem of allowing him to keep the status quo and continue with her and the committee. I ask you, how can those in government allow this to happen? In a 2015 article on Politico, it talked about an employee at the Environmental Protection Agency. The article alleged the employee, and I use that term loosely, was drawing a full salary and a performance award. The employee never had a building pass, no computer connected to the EPA network and there was no evidence he ever did any work there in the last five years. In five years, he earned $600,000 at the time. Many years ago, there was an employee in an agency in New York who came in one day asking for his paycheck. No one have ever seen him before, but a check of the payroll showed he was mailed pay checks for years and supposedly had a position with a state judge. It turns out things like this actually go on, especially in positions where one of the political parties have a hand in getting people appointed. These people must look at the rest of us as fools for going to work and doing our jobs. I have seen many incompetent people come into government agencies at the top or rise through the ranks by skipping over everyone else who were all better qualified. One person who came in at the time was put on at a salary higher than the person who ran the entire operation and knew absolutely nothing and had to rely on underlings to run things for him, but he did take the credit. It turned out his uncle was one of the biggest lobbyists in the state. Another employee was a typist, one of the lowest pay grades in this particular organization. She found out if you have sex with the boss, you can get ahead, and get ahead she did and proceeded to screw up everything and if anyone complained, she would take revenge on them. She became famous for saying other people said things they never did to start trouble. It was reported by CBS in 2018 590 employees in the federal government were fired because of incompetence or incapacity. Also 862 never made it through probation. I don’t have the incapacity numbers, but I can say this with confidence, when things go wrong at the top it rolls down to the least important person and a lot of times the one who gets the blame and maybe even fired had nothing to do with the problem. This can be seen time and time again when one of these problems is investigated. I am not saying all those who are fired for incompetence are innocent, what I am saying is not all of them may be guilty. Some agencies are affected more by incompetent employees than others. Take the military for example. An incompetent decision can cost lives. One of the most famous cases is thought to be the attack by Custer at the Little Big Horn. Not everyone thinks he was incompetent, but most do. Even before the battle it was said he did not get along with his subordinates. One of the flaws in getting into that battle was the fact all his repeating rifles were taken back by the army and he was issued single fire carbines. He failed to reconnoiter properly so he didn’t know the size of the force he was facing. As I said not all will agree with this assessment. There has been more times than there should have been, where incompetent commanders gave orders which cost the lives of soldiers. Stalin was the most incompetent leader in the war and the Soviets only succeeded through numbers and bravery with innovation in tanks and some planes, and a lot of help from the United States. Why did I say Stalin was incompetent? One of the reasons was he killed 20 million of his own people. He purged the ranks of officers in his military and most of the ones which were left did not want to become too famous because they knew Stalin would kill them. We should remember the Soviets were on the side of the Nazis until Germany invaded them. Usually, the powerful never get touched no matter how incompetent they might be.
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