OPINION:
I think Elon Musk is onto something (“Federal workers will get a new email demanding their accomplishments, with a key change,” Web, Feb. 28). Unfortunately, some federal workers do not have government email accounts. For those off-the-radar employees, Musk will need to dig deeper.
After retiring from the military, I worked for almost two decades at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I worked in the HHS OGC Ethics Division, where I was tasked with inspecting the ethics offices of its many components, including the CDC, FDA, IHS and NIH.
During a review I conducted of the Indian Health Service more than a decade ago, I found that there were more than 500 new employees who had not taken their federally required, within-90-days-of-hiring ethics training. When I asked where these people worked, no one could tell me, nor could anyone tell me the names of these people’s supervisors. All were low-ranking civil service employees who worked on Indian reservations across the U.S. They did not even have government email accounts, as they were supposed to be working outdoors and thus did not have desks or cubicles.
A year after my review, IHS still could not identify where more than 200 of these employees worked. No one at HHS took IHS to task over it, either. I told my department head that I knew how to find them: Just stop paying them and see how many called in to find out what was up. Of course, they didn’t take this advice.
To this day, I suspect some of these IHS people and probably hundreds of others and their supervisors were doing zero work and simply collecting paychecks from the federal government. If I am correct, it is probably still going on. Some might have died and are still getting paid.
Cmdr. WAYNE L. JOHNSON
Judge Advocate General’s Corps, U.S. Navy (retired)
Alexandria, Virginia
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