The Bushie Obama Can't Fire

[ensho]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-25/the-bushie-obama-cant-fire/?cid=bsa:mostpopular3


Obama vowed to reverse Bush's hard-line drug policies, but Dubya still has a man raising havoc in the White House drug office. Problem is, Obama can't fire him.


-snip-

“He was brought in as a political hatchet man,” says Ross Deck, a former ONDCP analyst and a 16-year-veteran of the office who quit during the Walters years. Before joining in the ONDCP, Murray had no prior experience in addiction science, or law enforcement, or anything else particularly related to drug policy.

He is on the record questioning many of the drug policies espoused by Kerlikowske. Congress has spent three years trying to get him fired.

Why, then, does Murray somehow still have a job in the Obama administration? The reason can be found in the fine print of the federal bureaucracy. Midway through his tenure, Walters moved Murray—at the time his special assistant—from a politically appointed job to the chief scientist’s post, a theoretically apolitical position that makes him much harder to fire. By law, Kerlikowske can’t touch a hair on his head for the first 120 days of his own stint as drug czar. Which means that until the middle of September, Murray is living in a peculiar limbo: a lone human memento of the Bush administration’s botched prosecution of the drug war, surrounded by people who are trying to undo the work on which he has spent the past eight years.

-long snip detailing his craziness and ineptitude-

The committee has made it clear that ONDCP’s science shop won’t see another dime until Murray is gone, at least from his current job. What happens after that is an open question. (Repeated calls to the ONDCP’s press office for an interview with Murray or a comment on his future prospects went unreturned.) While most drug-policy watchers assume Kerlikowske will kick him out of the chief scientist post as soon as he can, actually firing him is trickier. There are ways to encourage burrowed-in ideologues to quit, however—ONDCP veterans recall that George Bush Sr.’s drug czar, Bob Martinez, used to do it by assigning them to an office with no windows, phones, or computers.

“He’ll be there until somebody runs him off,” Ross Deck, the former ONDCP analyst, says of Murray. “What can they do with him? They can give him a job counting paperclips.”
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they better find a way to get rid of him

or we will come do it

[Warpy]

1. If they really wanted to get rid of him

they'd promote him into a bigger office with a bigger desk and make sure that desk never has a single scrap of paper on it for the rest of his career.

That's how bad civil service bosses are neutralized. Either they collect a paycheck for doing nothing or they quit in frustration.

[haele]

7. Most likely he'd quit -

Public service payscale is still lower than what jerks at his level could get on the outside, either through corporations or think tanks.
Phase out his current position and require new criteria he isn't as qualified for as other candidates will be. Let him know he isn't going anywhere really soon as his program requirements are changing, ease away any responsibilities - any chance of showing a value-added benefit that would enable him to merit pay raises or bonuses, make it difficult for him to attempt a lateral transfer to another payscale, and he'll leave before a year is out for a "plumb" Conservative beltway or think tank job that "pays" twice what he makes in civil service for whatever time they'll keep him employed.

I work with govies, it happens all the time with those who have Peter-Principled themselves into a management position that they really shouldn't be in. Depending on the focus of the Department, if it's a political focus or if it's a functional focus, the flotsam that rises to the top usually leaves as soon as there's no where else to go.

Haele

[Warpy]

8. I, too, had a civil service job

which is why I described the plum department job with the resolutely empty desk.

I've seen it happen.

[bluestateguy]

2. I've never been a fan of civil service laws period

Unelected bureaucrats should reflect the will of the democratically elected politicians we elect.

[pscot]

5. Politicians thought so too

That's the system that kept the big city bosses in power for generations, and made the office of Postmaster General such a plum. Just imagine the result if Carl Rove and Tom Delay had had the ability to replace the entire federal beaurocracy wth a few million of their best friends.

[unblock]

6. civil service laws aren't perfect, but they're far better than the alternative

politicians are corrupt enough without giving them the ability to dole out oodles of jobs as payoffs, nevermind the effect of having partisans at every level.

how trustworthy would the numbers from the omb become, or the work of the epa or the fda?
how would you like partisan republicans in charge of delivering welfare checks?

[Turbineguy]

3. That was the doctrine all along

make government not work, then dismantle it.

[ensho]

4. true

nt

[bvar22]

9. The "War on Drugs" was FAILED Policy...

... long before Bush sat in the Oval Office.