Tens of Thousands of Federal Workers Collect Full Pay on Extended Leave

In biology, they would be known as parasites. In politics, they are called bureaucrats. They live well at our expense. Not all of them even pretend to do anything that would justify their lavish salaries and benefits. Those accused of misconduct often don’t even have to show up at the office:

Tens of thousands of federal workers are being kept on paid leave for at least a month — and often for longer stretches that can reach a year or more — while they wait to be punished for misbehavior or cleared and allowed to return to work, government records show.

During a three-year period that ended last fall, more than 57,000 employees were sent home for a month or longer. The tab for these workers exceeded $775 million in salary alone. …

While the employees stayed home, they not only collected paychecks but also built their pensions, vacation and sick days and moved up the federal pay scale.

There are rules to prevent this obvious waste. But rules don’t apply to the government these days.

The extensive use of administrative leave continues despite government personnel rules that limit paid leave for employees facing discipline to “rare circumstances” in which the employee is considered a threat. The long-standing rules were written in an effort to curb waste and deal quickly with workers accused of misconduct.

Note that these employees are not merely useless, like typical bureaucrats. Usually they have been banished from the office because their behavior makes them worse than useless. Most of them deserve to be fired. That would force them to work in the private sector, providing the constructive labor that generates the wealth Big Government squanders on generous salaries for barnacles.

Often federal bureaucrats on paid leave fill their empty days by heading for the local marina, causing further trouble by clinging to the hulls of boats:

barnacles-hull
Federal bureaucrats cling to a hull.

The time has come to scrape them off.

On tips from Ben S, Petterssonp, and Bodhisattva. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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