Why should adaher care about those slackers? (The Vets, not the Evil Federal Employees.) Were Trump’s comments really taken “out of context”?
Yeah, yeah. adaher keep saying he disapproves of Trump; he’ll probably vote for some 3rd party loser. But Trump is the choice of his party…
Fair enough, but that does not mean I endorse all of my party’s views, even when I do like their candidate. As a matter of fact, one of the criticisms I’ve had of the Republicans in recent years is that they love to criticize the performance of the government but don’t care about making it work better, unless by “work better” they mean handing government functions and revenue over to private actors who don’t end up making things any better.
One way that Republicans can increase support for their worldview is to make the government more efficient and as a side bonus mock the Democrats when they rush to the aid of public employee unions at the expense of taxpayers and those needing to use government services.
I’d think the important metric would be the success rate of talking folks out of suicide. I’ve no idea how that could be measured, though.
I don’t think it’s really all that hard. There are only two things they really need to measure:
Are they answering all of the calls? If not, is that due to lack of staffing, or because existing staff is lacking?
Since they do actually seem to have a backup call center according to the article, albeit one staffed without experts, does the call center with experts do better with callers than the call center without? If the call center without is doing just as well, then there’s no point in hiring so-called experts! Empiricism!
I stand ready to serve and to cash checks.
Well we could always fob it off on the private sector.
“Please have your credit card ready while I access your account. In the meantime we would like to share with you some great deals from some of our partner vendors that we think you might like, Ace hardware for all your rope buying needs, CVS pharmacy has a 2 for one sale on 100 count bottles of sleeping pills …”
Well, you’ve now moved the goalposts on your claim about firing federal employees for poor performance from “federal workers don’t just get fired for failing to do their jobs” (in your post of 9/30 10:05 PM) to “it’s a nice theory […] but impossible in practice” (9/30 11:46 PM) to “the process is too difficult for most managers to bother” (10/3 11:57 PM) to “not the norm”.
You appear to be asymptotically approaching an actually accurate position along the lines of “it is indeed possible to fire federal workers for poor performance, and in fact that happens to thousands of federal workers annually, but the process is much more infrequent and convoluted than in the private sector, and ought to be made more efficient”.