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GSA ordered to give job back to executive fired after Las Vegas conference scandal

http://m.washingtonpost.com/politics/gsa-executive-fired-after-las-vegas-scandal-ordered-to-get-his-job-back/2013/03/13/279ad318-8b5b-11e2-b63f-f53fb9f2fcb4_story.html

but the travel restrictions resulting from all this no doubt remain in place.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Before reading the article I had assumed that some legal technicality or union rule had been invoked to protect the person in question. After reading the article I came to the conclusion that the guy is probably incompetent and probably should have known what was happening but his position didn't require him to actually know, and it appears he was clueless. Invoking the "Sgt. Shultz defense - I know Nothing, I see Nothing" was good enough to get the job reinstated.
Anonymous said…
It's an interesting question though.

On one hand, it seems that Management should be "held accountable" for things that happen within their organization. The Manager failed by either knowing about it and not responding, or by allowing such poor communication to exist that he didn't know what was going on.

But by that logic, we'd fire them all, up through the President, who owns the organization at the top level. This probably isn't right either.

How to draw the line? I'd be interested to know how much annual budget this guy is responsible for. If the conference debacle was worth 0.1% of that, he should be responsible; seems like you ought to be able to manage at 1 part in 1000.

For less than that, I'd require an independent management review. That would make his life miserable for a while, and motivate him to pay more attention.
Anonymous said…
It's become almost impossible to attend conferences given the budget cut-backs and intense scrutiny of the weapon labs. Even normal operational travel at the labs is becoming difficult to get approved.

Science is slowly suffocating. Meanwhile, I see no cut-backs in the extensive travel that is allowed for the upper management team. The lab Directors still travel in first class and only stay at the best hotels.

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