GAO: Appointees given employment may not be most qualified

The investigative branch of Congress found in a recently released report that about 60 percent of the 42 federal departments it questioned had politically appointed employees transfer to career employment jobs, which are typically awarded to candidates based on merit.

At the request of several high-ranking members of Congress, the study, which was publicly released this week, looked at the employee conversion rates to monitor how much favoritism exists in hiring employees who were politically appointed to temporary positions but who then tried to shift into career jobs based on their professional credentials.

“Sometimes ... circumstances surrounding [employee] conversions can raise questions as to whether the individuals received political favoritism or an unfair advantage in the merit system selection process, even the appearance of which could adversely compromise the integrity of the system,” the report reads.

The findings also suggest that the politically appointed employees may not have been qualified enough to beat out other employees for the merit-based positions.

The report, as issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), tracked employee movement within all of the White House agencies over a four-year period, which encompassed the shift in party in the White House when President Barack Obama took office.

It found that 143 employees who had been politically appointed by either President George W. Bush or Obama, or a member of a congressional panel or agency, had gone on to be hired for a job that required not political favoritism, but professional merit-based job superiority.

Most of the conversions from political appointments to career employment came from the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

The GAO report was requested by several members of Congress, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee; Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee; Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia; and Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.).

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