Accountability is basically nonexistent in American government today. Performance doesn’t matter; many public managers tell me they’ve never seen a public employee dismissed for poor performance. The Minneapolis Police Department had received 2,600 complaints in the decade before the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Twelve led to discipline, of which the most severe was a 40-hour suspension.

Blatant misconduct rarely leads to speedy dismissal; instead it is just the starting point for negotiation. In 2019 a high-school principal in New York State was discovered to have created a fraudulent system of grading to exaggerate his school’s achievements. His penalty? He lost his position, but because of public-employee protections, he will get full salary and benefits of over $265,000 annually for the next seven years. An EPA employee, caught red-handed surfing porn sites in his cubicle, was paid for almost two years until he made a deal to retire. This lack of accountability isn’t a secret, of course. Nor is the reason. Police unions, teachers’ unions, and other public-sector unions have built a fortress against supervisory decisions.

Voters elect the president, governors, and mayors, but those officeholders no longer have the authority to manage public operations. For most of 2021 and 2022, for example, over 1,000 corrections officers at New York City’s Rikers Island jail were out sick or otherwise unavailable to oversee inmates. That’s because their collective-bargaining agreement allows unlimited sick days and also gives officers with seniority the right to have no contact with inmates. The result, according to political scientist Daniel DiSalvo, was that “no one was manning dozens of posts at the jail. Cell doors are broken. . . . Inmates in some housing units have been able to come and go as they please.”

Read the full article here.