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| Mired in the Fog of Lucidity |
Quote from article:"Only 6.5 percent of EPA employees are "essential," according to the government's own calculations when it faced a shutdown in 2013." - Wow, that's even less than I thought....I would have gone with 7%. One really has to wonder how much fat can realistically be trimmed from government without causing any true harm or disruptions. I don't know the exact number, but I'm sure it's "yuge"! Full article: The Environmental Protection Agency has been riddled with employee misconduct, including workers who drink, smoke marijuana, and watch porn on the job. Inspector general reports over the past few years detailing employee misbehavior could serve as ammunition for EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who is seeking to eliminate 25 percent of the 15,000 employees at the agency. Only 6.5 percent of EPA employees are "essential," according to the government's own calculations when it faced a shutdown in 2013. At the time, just 1,069 employees were deemed necessary to continue working during the 16 days the government closed. The most notorious case of misconduct was the EPA official who earned $120,000 and performance bonuses after being caught watching pornography for up to six hours a day. The geologist in the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation downloaded over 7,000 pornographic files on an agency server and admitted to masturbating at work. He received paid leave for nearly two years after being caught. http://www.foxnews.com/politic...sult-in-layoffs.html Link to the original article: http://freebeacon.com/issues/h...duct-result-layoffs/ | ||
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Step by step walk the thousand mile road |
That is not the most notorious case of misconduct at EPA. The most notorious case of misconduct involves John C. Beale, who joined EPA full-time in 1988 and rose through the ranks to help run its Office of Air and Radiation. He was EPA’s highest-paid employee. In 2013 Beale was sentenced to 32 months in prison and $1.4 million in restitution (taken from his retirement annuity) after pleading guilty to felony theft of government property. He had faked his time cards, expense reports, and travel reimbursements, and if that wasn't enough, he falsely claimed to work on clandestine operations for CIA. He spent much his time in 2001-2013 at home and his vacation home in Massachusetts. Beale admitted taking off a total of two and a half years(six months in 2008 and two years from 2011-2013). IMO, he got off light, serving about 24 months in a Club Fed, followed by a halfway house where he was required to sleep and report in each day. Personally, I think he should have gotten a much longer sentence, say 320 months in medium security. There are other cases I know of that make jerking off at work seem tame. One case from the 1980s involved a person with a falsified resume. She claimed to have a PhD, when in fact, she never graduated from college. What makes this so egregious is the fact she testified in court on a couple of dozen occasions, all cases that resulted in massive fines against companies, and a few (four, IIRC) that were criminal prosecutions. The other element that made this case so egregious was no one, not once, ever asked her about her education until a USDOJ junior employee asked for transcripts from the unis she claimed to have attended. Then the whole rats' nest of lies came undone. She was never prosecuted, despite having defrauded the fed.gov of several million in pay and having committed perjury in multiple court cases. I learned of this case when I was working at the Department of the Interior. I managed to attend the EPA-employee only Basic Inspector training. This is the course needed to go inspect facilities' compliance and write up wrongdoings that lead to civil or criminal cases. Suffice to say the EPA Office of Counsel person who presented this as a case study of what not to do was more than a little perturbed she aired the agency;s dirty, cum-, piss-, and shit-stained laundry with a non-EPA person present. I've only met one other non-EPA employee (he was an Army civilian) who finagled a way into this EPA course. Read more about Beale at http://www.govexec.com/managem...alfway-house/127352/ Nice is overrated "It's every freedom-loving individual's duty to lie to the government." Airsoftguy, June 29, 2018 | |||
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| Mired in the Fog of Lucidity |
^^Good God!^^ I've never heard those stories. Unreal, yet so many people continue to have so much faith in government. | |||
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Coin Sniper |
Seems like a good place to install a swamp drain Pronoun: His Royal Highness and benevolent Majesty of all he surveys 343 - Never Forget Its better to be Pavlov's dog than Schrodinger's cat There are three types of mistakes; Those you learn from, those you suffer from, and those you don't survive. | |||
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Political Cynic |
start with the EPA lets see how well we survive without this abomination of a muckraking money-swindling extortion of a government agency [B] Against ALL enemies, foreign and DOMESTIC | |||
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Only the strong survive |
Over time, I have worked with just about every Government agency. There is a lot of politics and only a few people do any meaningful work. It is hard to get rid of the dead wood. Due to the benefits and job security, the dedicated workers put up with the politics rather then move on like if they were in private industry. Also a lot of work is farmed out to other companies and you may have two or more companies doing the same task. There is also a lot of "Green Stamps" man years given out by Congress each year to work on classified studies that are usually on going from year to year. The last place I worked, nonprofit company, there were a lot of unqualified people hired that were useless and a lot of managers that made no contribution to the job. They just took credit for other peoples work and if they messed up, they would just blame it on someone else. The turn over reached 40 percent in 1990 where they were hiring 50 people a week. They couldn't hire any more then 50 due to the orientation period of a week. Also some of the managers added a lot of hours to their time card that they never worked to make themselves look good. There were way too many managers that were not necessary. So I can see a lot of Government agencies reduced in size and even farming out work to specialist in the field of interest. 41 | |||
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| Member |
A friend of mine has worked at the EPA for about 20 years. She tells me the management in her area, water quality in the Pacific Northwest, is terrible. Managers often make BIG mistakes, or do misconduct, and they do not get fired. The managers constantly cover up for each other. If a field agent, such as my friend, did anything close to what the managers have done, they would be terminated. Other EPA field agents in the Seattle office, have all expressed the same opinion of EPA management. I just hope they get rid of the managers, rather than the field agents who actually do work. -c1steve | |||
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| I believe in the principle of Due Process  |
EPA employs 15,000 people. When it was suggested this was way too many, there was an efficiency study done, which concluded they needed another 750. Luckily, I have enough willpower to control the driving ambition that rages within me. When you had the votes, we did things your way. Now, we have the votes and you will be doing things our way. This lesson in political reality from Lyndon B. Johnson "Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible." - Justice Janice Rogers Brown | |||
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Member |
I worked in the same office and under the same bosses as John Beale, and retired about 6 months before he got caught. I also worked at USCG HQ in the civil engineering division where one of civilian civil engineers turned out not to be an engineer at all (he's was found out within about a year). | |||
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| Step by step walk the thousand mile road |
And don't get me going on the waste, fraud, and abuse I've seen in DoD. One example: a GS-14 who would regularly fall asleep in meetings he called. I've also seen him sound asleep at his desk on dozens of occasions. I asked a colleague of his if he was narcoleptic, and was assured that wasn't the case. But he was a protected race, so he would have needed to do something epic like fall asleep will flying a government airplane (he wasn't a pilot so don't freak out) to be taken off the job. I did however know an Air Force O-6 who was narcoleptic and medicated for it by his spouse who was a non-AF doctor. He finished with 24 years active duty, and was never discovered. Nice is overrated "It's every freedom-loving individual's duty to lie to the government." Airsoftguy, June 29, 2018 | |||
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| No double standards |
I have a few such examples with DoE, one was a sole-source contract, our firm was the only one qualified. A minority business threatened suit, the DoE gave them the award, first phase was ~$16M. They screwed up the research site in the first month, the cost to correct matters exceeded $16M, so DoE decided to cancel the project, use the money to promote minority contracting. I imagine members here could come up with dozens of examples of such incompetence and corruption. "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it....While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it" - Judge Learned Hand, May 1944 | |||
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| Step by step walk the thousand mile road |
Ditto for DOE, DOI, and DHS. The really sad thing is DoD, DOE, and DHS are probably the best managed agencies in the federal government. Not that that says much other than the other agencies are worse. One of the people I work with liked to claim that Thomas Jefferson once said "We should be glad we don't get all the government we pay for." Truer words were never spoken, even if they were never spoken by Thomas Jefferson. Nice is overrated "It's every freedom-loving individual's duty to lie to the government." Airsoftguy, June 29, 2018 | |||
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| No double standards |
Keep going down the list.  Quickie on Bureau of Mines. We had a meeting with their contracting officer and the senior scientist to review a proposed research contract. Their scientist chided us for not proposing leading edge technology per the international conference held earlier that year, suggested we get the proceedings of the conf and update ourselves. Seems the technical chairman of the conference, and editor of said proceedings, was our man sitting across the table from the USBM fellow. We didn't get the contract. "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it....While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it" - Judge Learned Hand, May 1944 | |||
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| It's pronounced just the way it's spelled |
I have dealt with the EPA, NRC and NASA. I've seen incompetence, waste and tin pot power junkies. They don't just waste their government budgets, but your money as well. My EPA story is I was working for a small company that was recycling industrial paint waste. We would take in 10 drums of hazardous waste, and end up with 9 drums of clean, pure paint solvents (toluene, xylene and acetone) and one drum of paint solids (the stuff that gives paint color). The EPA ruled we were GENERATING hazardous waste - the solidified paint solids. When we asked how they came to that conclusion, we were told anything that had ever come into contact with the paint solvent was hazardous waste. They did even bat an eye when I pointed out that by their definition, anything that had EVER been painted was now hazardous waste. Our company went out of business, as we could not afford to be classified as a haz waste generator, dispose of the solids as haz waste (we had to re-liquefy the solids) and pay for all the additional fees. They drove a business that was doing what their alleged mission was out of business. | |||
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| Member |
I believe that installation of a swamp drain would require a full environmental impact study. Could take decades. | |||
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Member |
About time the dead wood was pruned. | |||
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| Wait, what? |
Despite all of the above stories (and WAY more, I'm certain) libtards will shriek, moan, and gnash their teeth that the republicans are trying to destroy the earth by reducing the number of people trying to "save" it. The next battle cry will be that "Trump is removing jobs rather than creating them" for a huge number of fleas on the dog that should never have had them in the first place. Such is the mental disorder that is liberalism. “Remember to get vaccinated or a vaccinated person might get sick from a virus they got vaccinated against because you’re not vaccinated.” - author unknown | |||
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fugitive from reality |
When did this happen? I ask because in the early 1990's we used TCLP testing to segregate the waste streaming during lead paint abatement. We were able to significantly reduce the haz waste stream, and save the client big bucks. All of this was EPA/DEC/DEP compliant as we had to get approval prior to performing the work. _____________________________ 'I'm pretty fly for a white guy'. | |||
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| No double standards |
That pisses me off, but doesn't surprise me. "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it....While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it" - Judge Learned Hand, May 1944 | |||
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| Step by step walk the thousand mile road |
The residue from recycling paints would be a "P" listed waste under 40 CFR 261.33 and the associated comment. For those that do not understand, let me offer this observation which, when I taught such stuff, I started every class with:  Nice is overrated "It's every freedom-loving individual's duty to lie to the government." Airsoftguy, June 29, 2018 | |||
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