For federal employees, it's almost impossible to get fired

It is very difficult for federal employees to get fired.

(Image credit: iStock)

published 3 March 2016

The ultimate job security, it seems, comes from working for the U.S. government. As one Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found, "it can take six months to a year (and sometimes significantly longer) to dismiss an employee," with an average timeline of 243 days in 2013. And that's if a firing occurs at all: A federal worker's chance of being fired in a given year is just one in 500.

"It ends up being very, very difficult to fire a federal employee even when there is the best of cause," explains Joseph Morris, who served as general counsel for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in the 1980s. At one point, Morris recalls, he made a list of all the possible steps to fire a federal employee in his era and found it stretch some 30 feet. Today, he says, the list would likely be longer.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.