Government Employment is Inconsequential...

By which I mean that if you're a government employee, you can screw up massively, demonstrate your incompetence with crystal clarity, and you will not suffer any consequences for it. In fact, you'll quite likely be promoted the next time you cross some “time-in-grade” threshold, exactly as you would have been if you didn't screw up.

It certainly doesn't work this way in the real world of business, where incompetence is generally rewarded with unemployment – sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but pretty much inevitably.

If I was incompetent and knew it, or even suspected it, clearly the optimal career strategy would be to wangle a job with the government...

The latest demonstration of this phenomenon is at the SEC, who notoriously botched the investigation into Bernie Madoff's $55 billion Ponzi scheme. Not only did multiple SEC investigations turn up nothing (much to Madoff's surprise – he thought even the idiots at the SEC would figure it out), but multiple independent investigators repeatedly tried to tell the SEC that Madoff was up to no good. The best documented of these was Harry Markopolos, who repeatedly fed information to the SEC for 16 years – and the SEC managed to ignore all this through sheer bureaucratic ineptness. Ironically the current investigators are relying heavily on Markopolos' data, and he's testified to Congress.

So if you were amongst the many innocents who presumed that such manifest incompetence would have some consequence for both the SEC as a whole and for the individuals involved – why, then, you're in for a surprise. Because every single one of the SEC employees associated with the Madoff investigation is either still in the same position, or has been promoted. And utterly nothing has changed in the SEC's organization. If Bernie Madoff hadn't already been discovered, the SEC would still be missing the boat.

Which, of course, makes you wonder how many other undiscovered “Madoffs” yet remain...

The lack of consequence for incompetence in government is high on my list of reasons why we should never entrust our health care to them. And why we should stop entrusting them with other things important to us, such as retirement funding, education, letter delivery, etc. I fantasize sometimes about a new President and a new Congress somehow injecting some consequence into government employees, but those are just satisfying fantasies. In the real world, I suspect the only effective recourse will be to take away the toys we let these unpunished idiots play with.