My biggest complaint about bureaucrats is that many of them work at departments and agencies that should be eliminated.
But I also don’t like that they get overpaid compared to workers in the productive sector of the economy.
To make matters worse, bureaucrats have little incentive to be productive. Especially since politicians and union bosses conspire (illustrated by this cartoon) to make it just about impossible to fire bad employees.
But if you want to add insult to all this injury, consider how bureaucrats then often misbehave in ways that further line their pickets.
For instance, a local TV station in New Orleans did a fascinating expose about some bureaucrats at at the Sewerage and Water Board.
In the fall of 2019, the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board uncovered what officials said was a major payroll fraud scheme inside the Carrollton Water Treatment Plant filter gallery… Officials at the highest level of the agency were informed that employees appeared to be working in concert with their managers to improperly, and perhaps illegally, gift themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars by abusing overtime and “chemical pay,” a special pay rate for the handling of hazardous chemicals such as chlorine. …Following an extensive internal investigation in 2019, the Sewerage & Water Board’s chief of security recommended immediately firing three employees over the payroll fraud allegations, and potentially referring the evidence to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office for criminal prosecution. …Nearly four years later, no criminal charges have been filed, and only one of the three employees has faced serious discipline. Shortly after the investigation concluded, filter gallery employee Gregg Herbert was fired for payroll fraud, theft and falsification of records. But last month the Sewerage and Water Board agreed to reverse the termination, allow Herbert to retire with full benefits and give him $39,000 in back pay. …Of the two others, one retired earlier this year without facing discipline, New Orleans personnel records show. And the third, a manager named Steven Ware, is still working and has since been promoted twice.
So far, this is a typical story of pampered bureaucrats misbehaving with impunity.
But the story has another twist.
In 2021, a filter gallery employee filed a public whistleblower complaint that accused managers of using taxpayer dollars to build a “secret room” inside the Carrollton plant where a select number of employees would bring people to sleep with both on and off their shift. …two current employees and one former worker…confirmed the existence of what one employee described as a “secret sex room.” One employee provided a video of it, showing couches, a refrigerator, a microwave, a TV and a shelf full of framed photos of nude women.
Maybe I should reassess my view that bureaucrats are unproductive.
After all, some of the employees at the Sewerage and Water Board managed to screw taxpayers at the same time they were engaged in another type of…well, you get the idea.
They probably deserve membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.
P.S. Shifting to bureaucrat-themed humor, my all-time favorite is this video, though this top-10 list from David Letterman is a close second.
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Image credit: Dean Hochman | CC BY 2.0.
