Paid Leave or Paid Vacation?

The old saying is, there’s strength in numbers. The federal government workforce is so large that thousands of employees are allowed to stay home and get paid to do nothing, sometimes for months or even years at a time.

These employees are able to hide in plain sight due to a practice called paid administrative leave.

Agencies put employees on paid leave when someone is accused of wrongdoing, like Secret Service agents who engage prostitutes when they’re supposed to be preparing for a presidential visit to a foreign country, or when veterans hospital staff is accused of fudging appointment wait times. Sometimes paid leave comes in when an employee is outspoken over agency practices and a manager wants to sideline him to make life easier.

A short period of leave might be reasonable, and those wrongly accused should have the chance to defend themselves. But the agencies are abusing the practice.

At my request, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office looked at paid administrative leave for what appears to be the first time.

The auditors found that over three years, data covering about 60 percent of all civilian federal employees found that more than 57,000 employees were on paid administrative leave for more than a month.

That cost the taxpayers $700 million in salary alone, excluding benefits.

About 4,000 of the employees were off the job for three months to a year and 263 employees for one to three years. That’s just a snapshot. The numbers are probably much bigger.

In these long-term cases, paid leave appears to have become an excuse for managers not to manage and put off a decision on what to do with employees accused of misconduct or who blow the whistle or dispute a personnel action.

The mentality seems to be out of sight, out of mind, and that’s not the way to run the government or look out for taxpayers.

I’m looking at ways to limit paid leave, including bipartisan legislation that would force managers to make a decision on an employee’s immediate status: Should the employee be removed from the workplace for safety or security reasons or can he be assigned work that would achieve value for the taxpayers while his case is under investigation?

I’ve also asked the agencies to explain how and why they use paid leave for long periods of time. It’s not authorized by any law and bureaucrats are abusing it.

It’s hard to imagine many scenarios where employees should be paid to stay home for months on end. The taxpayers can’t and shouldn’t have to sustain that kind of waste.