The March 10 editorial “The administration’s radical idea: Retaining workers based on merit,” about a proposal from the Office of Personnel Management to prioritize performance over seniority when making layoff decisions, got it only half right, or maybe even less than that.
Based on my experience working in the federal government, your chances of staying employed and being promoted depend on whomever your supervisor favors in the office.
In the three years I worked under one supervisor, he never gave me an “outstanding” rating. It was always “highly successful,” which basically means I was present and could be relied on to do the required work. Sure, I could have been rated even lower, “fully successful,” which would have meant, not to sound sarcastic, I was conscious.
My next supervisor in that same office gave me “outstanding” ratings for doing the same work as before.
In my agency, those with lower General Schedule rankings were stereotyped as less important than, say, a GS-13 or 14 and often weren’t viewed as deserving an “outstanding” rating. One hardworking and exceptionally competent GS-9 in my office got the same “fully successful” performance rating each year and as such never got promoted, even if she deserved at least a GS-11. The supervisor didn’t consider her work worthy of a higher rating — or maybe he just didn’t like the cut of her jib. It all makes me wonder whether the Office of Personnel Management, which sets rules about hiring, firing and pay levels, should be renamed the Office of Personal Favoritism.
Eric Green, Arlington
Spillover effects
The March 13 Metro article “Beyond Potomac, sewage spills threaten older cities with less funding” shows how we have neglected our water infrastructure for far too long. It wasn’t always this way. In addition to their famous aqueducts, the ancient Romans worshiped Venus Cloacina, the Roman goddess who protected the Cloaca Maxima, the oldest of the sewers in the Eternal City. See, as an illustration of reverence for water infrastructure, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg’s 1814 painting “View of the Cloaca Maxima, Rome,” on display at the National Gallery of Art.
Michael Nardolilli, Arlington
The writer is the executive director of the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin.
Aliens visiting Earth would see a society that purposely fouls its most valuable natural resource for the sole purpose of moving our waste from Point A to Point B. And it costs billions of dollars to build and maintain a network of underground pipes to do so.
But that’s not all. Once it arrives at sewage treatment plant Point B (if it arrives; witness the Potomac spill in January), the society spends billions more dollars to (ostensibly) purify the waste-mixed water (hundreds of millions of gallons every day in Washington alone) to a level deemed safe enough to discharge it to local rivers (Potomac), estuaries (Chesapeake), lakes (Great) and oceans.
When I ran the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, we built a number of education centers and even two office buildings that discharged zero waste. We installed modern composting toilets that produced a few wheelbarrows of dry, fluffy, nontoxic, sweet-smelling compost a year. Of all the green “components” we employed (HVAC, lights, materials, etc.), the most positive comments from visitors (wedding guests, conference attendees, government officials and more) were about the composting toilets.
Will Baker, Baltimore
Here lies Congress
When Congress’s obituary is written, the cause of death will be recorded as assisted suicide. The March 11 front-page article “Congress shrinks as it cedes power to Trump” accurately detailed several ways in which President Donald Trump has asserted the powers of the executive branch of government at the expense of the legislative, but Congress has been a willing actor in its demise.
In the article, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who along with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) spearheaded a resolution to halt Trump’s military action in Iran, cited James Madison, the Father of the Constitution and the fourth president. Paul drew from the essay known as Federalist No. 51, published in 1788, in which Madison explained the relationship of the three branches as one in which “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The article should also have noted something else Madison wrote there: “In republican government the legislative authority, necessarily, predominates.” In making policy, Congress, which is closest to the people, must play the leading role.
It’s no secret that Trump exalts efficiency over constitutional process. However, long before nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles were invented, the framers knew that only the people’s representatives should determine when the nation goes to war. When a threat is imminent, every president must have the power to act, but little evidence has been presented to invoke emergency powers for going to war with Iran’s brutal theocratic government. War might have been necessary, but it required approval by Congress.
The patriots of the founding era did not fight their own war to create a system of government that so easily could be returned to monarchy.
Steven S. Berizzi, Norwalk, Connecticut
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