Don’t Work, Get Money: Tens of Thousands of Federal Employees Paid to Sit at Home

Then God blessed paid leave for federal
employees under investigation and made it holy, reports

The Washington Post:

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.

A report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) … found
that 53,000 civilian employees were kept home for one to three
months during the three fiscal years that ended in September 2013.
About 4,000 were idled for three months to a year and several
hundred for one to three years.

Over the three year period, idle federal employees were paid
$775 million in salaries to sit tight and wait in
bureaucratic purgatory. And if full pay wasn’t enough to mollify
the unoccupied exiles, employees “also built their pensions,
vacation and sick days and moved up the federal pay scale.” The
report is most likely lowballing those statistics as
well: The GAO only looked at about three-fifths of the federal
government because many agencies don’t report the number of
employees on paid leave.

But getting paid to do nothing is no stint on the Isles of the
Blessed, according to some inactive feds. The Washington
Post tells the, uh, maudlin tale of Scott Balovich, an IT
systems worker for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration in Alaska:

Balovich, who makes $108,000 a year, was paid not to work while
investigators examined how pornographic images had gotten onto his
computer hard drive.

Perhaps he should talk to an
Environmental Protection Agency employee, who faced similar
queries. Balovich describes the hardship of getting paid to do
jack:

“Six months went by, and we didn’t hear anything…You’re so
anxious. You don’t know if you’ve got a job. You’re getting paid,
but it’s no vacation.”

No vacation, indeed. Another Washington Post
exposé from 2012 details the travails of Paul Brachfield, the
inspector general for the National Archives:

He planned to ring in the new year with his wife with a relaxed
visit to their vacation home near Bethany Beach, Del. In October,
the couple took a cruise to Puerto Rico. Brachfeld runs every
morning in Silver Spring, hikes with Spree, his Jack Russell
terrier, in the woods most afternoons and catches up with his adult
daughters in the evening. All while collecting his $186,000
government salary. These days, his life seems like one long
vacation.

Unsurprisingly, the government’s Office of Personnel Management
already has rules regulating paid leave, though apparently no one
follows them. Except for “rare circumstances,” such as when an
someone is a direct threat, an employee is to “remain in a duty
status” during disciplinary proceedings. As the
fictional Sgt.
Bilko said, “We have rules, rules, and regulations!” It would
seem those rules fly out the window when managers need an easy way
to shunt aside problem employees.