Ah, my mistake. I made an assumption, and I only skimmed the article. Thanks for the correction.
I’m still not sure this is a bad thing, surely it doesn’t apply to every job? Obviously you wouldn’t want this to apply to a job that requires a great deal of expertise, but that’s not every federal job.
It’s totally possible that it’ll be an amazing thing, but past practices don’t give me a lot of faith in that. The competitive process exists to weed out one or two people being able to hire who they want to without checks and balances. Removal of that for certain classes of people just makes it easier to skirt those checks as long as someone is in a special class.
The problem we run into is what the government considers jobs that require expertise — for example, the people who write rating decisions for disabled veterans have an immensely important job that requires substantial training and skills, but much of the aptitude for learning these is tested for in the panel and interviewing process. They aren’t specific degrees or certifications. Under this rule, those tests would never happen for these people. They’d just be hired, plonked into a training class they might have no ability to pass, and start creating financial obligations for the government in as little as six weeks.
It’s not a point preference. It says that they can be appointed non-competitively if the head of the Executive agency thinks they’re qualified.
We saw the same thing with direct-hire authority — people abandon the competitive hiring practices because direct-hire is faster.
Ah, my mistake. I made an assumption, and I only skimmed the article. Thanks for the correction.
I’m still not sure this is a bad thing, surely it doesn’t apply to every job? Obviously you wouldn’t want this to apply to a job that requires a great deal of expertise, but that’s not every federal job.
It’s totally possible that it’ll be an amazing thing, but past practices don’t give me a lot of faith in that. The competitive process exists to weed out one or two people being able to hire who they want to without checks and balances. Removal of that for certain classes of people just makes it easier to skirt those checks as long as someone is in a special class.
The problem we run into is what the government considers jobs that require expertise — for example, the people who write rating decisions for disabled veterans have an immensely important job that requires substantial training and skills, but much of the aptitude for learning these is tested for in the panel and interviewing process. They aren’t specific degrees or certifications. Under this rule, those tests would never happen for these people. They’d just be hired, plonked into a training class they might have no ability to pass, and start creating financial obligations for the government in as little as six weeks.