Source: "Uncle Sam Must Learn to Slow the Brain Drain," Joe Davidson, The Washington Post, February 26, 2009.I wonder why USAID has such a young workforce. I probably can guess. It might be that eight years of the Bush administration have encouraged its staff to get out. Or that the work in danger spots of the world is best done by younger people. It might also be that the Agency grew very large in the Viet Nam days, and that the people who joined in those days were replaced by younger people in the last few years.
Too bad, in that there was once a lot of understanding of nation building in the Agency, embodied in people who gained that understanding through long years of experience, and that understanding seems more needed now than in many years.
2 comments:
You should check you source documentation. The Post got it wrong. According to the GAO report: :Across the federal government, about one-third of federal workers will be eligible to retire by 2012, although most federal employees do not retire immediately upon becoming eligible. The proportion of workers eligible to retire varies across agencies, but according to OPM’s data, 46 percent of the workforce at several agencies—HUD, the Department of Transportation (Transportation), the Small Business Administration (SBA), and USAID—are eligible to retire by 2012, well above the governmentwide average of 33 percent."
source: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09206.pdf
I apologize. I accepted the information published in the Washington Post without checking it further. Clearly one can no longer trust the WP to do its own fact checking, and I should have known that. I did of course provide a link to my source.
However, the percentage of those ready to retire given by the WP was suspiciously low, and I should have checked.
I tried to find up to date information on the OPM website and the USAID website with no luck. I did find some information that was several years old, but that strongly suggested that the USAID retirement-ready percentage is higher than that cited by the WP.
My thanks to the anonymous informant whose data at least has the appearance of accuracy.
Thinking about it, it is unfortunate when a citizen can't find data like that on the government's websites (and I am pretty good at finding things on the web). It is also too bad when an annnymous comment on a blog is more credible than an article in the Washington Post, but that seems to be the case here.
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