By Stephen Barr
Friday, May 26, 2006

An investigation of hiring practices by federal agencies during the first four years of the Bush administration has turned up 18 cases where political appointees apparently schemed to obtain career jobs in the civil service and stay on the public payroll for the long haul.

The practice is popularly known as "burrowing in" and happens in almost every administration. A similar investigation during the Clinton administration found 17 cases where political appointees benefited from cronyism or were given an inside track for a career job.

In a government of about 2 million employees, the job finagling is rather small. Still, allegations of favoritism trumping expertise are being taken more seriously these days on Capitol Hill because of renewed attention to the government's ability to respond to terrorist threats and to natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina.

One case turned up by the investigation found that a Bush administration political appointee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, working as a staff assistant, had been selected as a program specialist despite "limited qualifications and experience."

There were 39 applicants for the job, including a career FEMA employee with more than 10 years of experience as an emergency management specialist. The experienced employee and the appointee were deemed the "best qualified," although investigators said "it is unclear" why they were given the same rating.

The appointee had worked four years in the private sector for a former FEMA director before coming to the government. The career job paid $71,357, slightly more than the staff assistant position, the investigators said.

In addition to political appointees landing jobs over more qualified applicants, investigators said some agencies created jobs for appointees and some agencies allowed appointees to jump ahead of military veterans by ignoring laws that give a hiring preference to veterans.

The investigation was conducted by the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog agency, between May 2001 and April 2005 at the request of two House Democrats, Reps. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) and Danny K. Davis (Ill.).

They released the GAO's report on the probe yesterday. The report, which covered 41 agencies, does not name the appointees or the bosses who made the conversions possible, and it does not show whether the converted employees remain on the federal payroll.

The GAO recommended that the Office of Personnel Management undertake an executive branch review, which the OPM has agreed to do.

The GAO review found that 23 agencies converted 144 individuals from non-career to career positions during the time period studied. They ranged in salary from about $31,000 to $146,000 annually. (In the similar review of the Clinton administration, which ran from October 1998 through April 2001, the GAO found 100 appointees who had been converted to career status.)

For the Bush administration years, the GAO examined 130 conversions at the General Schedule 12 or higher pay levels, finding that 37 did not follow normal hiring practices. The GAO determined that 18 were improper, and could not find enough information about the rest to render any judgment.

In a letter to the OPM calling for corrective action, Waxman and Davis said improper conversions "are a threat to the civil service both because they implant less qualified personnel into the government and because they tarnish the integrity of the federal merit-based hiring system."

Civil service law calls for fair and open competition for federal jobs, based on what an applicant knows, not who they know. But the GAO probe found instances where agencies did not adhere to the highest hiring standards.

The Justice Department, for example, converted an appointee with less than six months of immigration law experience into an immigration judge, raising questions of fairness, the GAO said.

In one case, Waxman and Davis said, a longtime aide to a former secretary of Health and Human Services was given a career job that had been created to match the appointee's work experience. The employee received about the same in salary after the conversion, $57,550 annually.

Craig W. Floyd , chairman and executive director of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, will be the guest on "FEDtalk" at 11 a.m. today on federalnewsradio.com and WFED radio (1050 AM).

Richard L. Gregg , commissioner of the Financial Management Service at the Treasury Department, will be the guest on "The IBM Business of Government Hour" at 9 a.m. Saturday on WJFK radio (106.7 FM).

Stephen Barr's e-mail address isbarrs@washpost.com.