DHS Dysfunctional, Say DHS Employees

by Dave Bennion · 2009-03-31 21:53:00 UTC
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Via Yglesias, the Office of Personnel Management has released a review of the federal workforce.

Every other year the Office of Personnel Management conducts a mammoth survey of the federal workforce. From the responses of more than 200,000 federal employees, the OPM calculates agency-by-agency scores on four dimensions: leadership (which indicates how favorably employees of an agency regard their leaders), performance (which indicates the extent to which employees believe their agency promotes improvements in processes, products, and services), talent (which indicates the degree to which employees think their agency has the talent needed to achieve its goals), and job satisfaction (which indicates how satisfied employees are with their jobs).

An enterprising journalist and an enterprising blogger have put this information into digestible, ranked format.

The metric is based on self-assessment by employees.  The effectiveness of an agency can be gauged somewhat by how happy the employees are, but that doesn't seem like the whole story.  I notice that DHS is very near the bottom of the list.  Few would dispute that it is a messed up agency.  But I very much doubt that the ICE rank and file are unhappy with their bosses for the same reasons that I am.  More likely, they've been dissatisfied with perceived constraints on their ability to enforce immigration laws.

USCIS just seems like a miserable place to work.  As an immigration adjudications officer (that's Ray Liotta, for the three of you who saw the movie), cases come by on a conveyor belt and you scramble to put them together while you're on the clock.  Also, you can't escape the persistent feeling that everyone is lying to you and wonder if the people who grovel in your office actually respect you as a person.  I'll say again that the NY Garden City USCIS office belongs in a Terry Gilliam movie or the pages of Kafka.  Hell on earth.

And then there's FEMA ... I'm not even going to touch that one.

Janet Napolitano certainly has her work cut out for her.

Dave Bennion
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