There are a lot better places to work than for the U.S. federal government. The hours may be easy, the benefits are good, and the pension plan is hard to beat. Still and all, there’s an enormous problem with job satisfaction inside some agencies where the political appointees who come and go interfere with overall mission and morale.
A report released Thursday by the non-profit Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Public Policy Studies finds the worst of them may still be the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, where the employee satisfaction surveys have taken a precipitous dip since Lina Khan became chairman.
In An Agency in Crisis: Employee Satisfaction at the FTC Continues to Decline, Phoenix Center Chief Economist Dr. George Ford again found satisfaction with FTC’s senior leadership again fell in 2022, while views of FTC supervisory leadership once again improved.
The latest data put the agency in last place on these attributes among its peers—an unprecedented decline. The continuing erosion of employee morale, the report found, was driven by “a diminished view of Chair Lina Khan’s honesty and integrity.”
Before Khan became chairman, in terms of employee satisfaction the FTC was the highest-rated federal agency according to workplace surveys conducted by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and Best Places to Work in the Federal Government.
Following her 2021 confirmation, the surveys began to show a sharp decline. Using the summary level satisfaction measures from these surveys, that analysis found that the FTC fell from the highest-ranking federal agency in 2020 to the bottom quartile of agencies in 2021—the largest decline of all agencies in 2021, and nearly the largest decline in satisfaction across agencies in the past twelve years.
According to the group, “The surveys revealed the reduction in employee satisfaction at the FTC is driven by a lack of respect for senior leadership due to a perceived lack of honesty and integrity among the agency’s senior leadership. That said, small increases in satisfaction were observed for direct supervisors, suggesting staff supervisors were trying to shield FTC line-staff from the mismanagement of senior leadership.”
“Some say, ‘it gets worse before it gets worse,’ and this cynical view appears to hold true at the FTC,” Ford said. “The surveys continue to offer strong evidence that under the leadership of Chair Khan, the FTC is the worst run agency in the Federal Government, at least among those for which data are available. The U.S. economy deserves better, though there appears to be little sign that the Biden Administration or Congressional Democrats have any interest in righting the sinking ship.”
The controversial Khan is not only a problem within her agency. Her efforts to expand the range of her agency’s authority without explicit congressional authority is making her an unpopular figure on Capitol Hill. Her desire to break up large corporations based on size alone and to block mergers and acquisitions on general principles has given proponents of the free market system considerable ammunition in their fight against the Biden Administration’s regulatory onslaught.
Peter Roff can be reached at RoffColumns AT GMAIL.com. Follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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