Job security in America’s civil service is so remarkably strong that employees in more than a dozen federal agencies are statistically more likely to die in the course of their work than to lose their jobs for poor performance or misconduct.
These days, even advocating genocide doesn’t immediately qualify you for a pink slip. This might seem like a free-speech issue, but in 1942 the Supreme Court carved our four categorical exemptions to the constitutional protection of speech: “the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or ‘fighting’ words — those by which their very utterances inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” Call me old-fashioned, but urging the mass murder of all non-blacks should qualify. [...]
According to numbers from the Office of Personnel Management, which serves as the federal government’s human-resources agency, the government-employee dismissal rate for poor performers last year was less than one half of 1 percent. That’s one-sixth the annual rate measured in the private sector, where employers are empowered to fire at will.