This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 29, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

With firing rates at one-sixth of the private sector should it be easier to fire federal workers.

Cato Institute Director of Tax Policy Studies, Chris Edwards, says upping the firing rate

for federal workers serves many ends, not the least of which would be to quit paying

useless but nonetheless employed federal employees.

It's extremely difficult to fire a federal employee and the federal firing rate for the 2 million or so federal civilian workers is extremely low.

This has been known for a long time.

The Bush administration tried to change this, but we still are at a situation where the most recent data shows that just

half a percent of federal workers are fired each year for any reason. That is only one-sixth of the firing rate in the private sector.

So the federal firing rate is half a percent.

It means that if you work at a company of 200 people only one person is fired every year.

Now the listeners can probably think about their own company and think about more people

than that that have been fired in a year.

All right, so what accounts for that difference?

The federal government workers have very strong civil service protections.

Many federal workers are unionized.

And so you get to a situation where it's extremely hard to fire workers.

They are fired.

Federal workers are fired from misconduct, you know, sexual harassment,

that sort of stuff. The area where they are virtually never fired at is poor performance.

So a worker who just performs poorly year after year, he comes in, he sits at his desk,

...