Has anyone noticed….?

We have all watched the incredibly inept launch of the ObamaCare website, and the desperate Democratic reassurances that “everything will be fine…real soon now”.  But has anyone noticed that, as far as I can tell, not a single person has been fired for this incompetence?  Not Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Not Health and Human Services Chief Information Officer Frank Baitman or Deputy Chief Information Officer Henry Chao.

We all heard about the murder of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and four of his staff in Bengazi in 2012.  And we all heard after the fact about the repeated requests his staff made for better protection – requests which were refused and ignored by State Department officials in Washington.  But as near as I can tell no one was ever fired for that oversight and poor judgment.

We all have heard of Edward Snowden, now in Russia, and the damaging leaks he has provided to domestic and foreign newspapers.  And after the fact we have all heard how sloppy communication between security agencies meant that documented concerns about his behavior were never passed on to his new employers. But as near as I can tell, no one ever lost their job over that sloppiness.  Certainly no high-level executive seems to have been disciplined.

I am no fan of President Bush’s administration, but after the incredibly inept FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) response to the Katrina hurricane disaster he did at least replace FEMA director Michael Brown.

I know that in companies I have worked  in – IBM and Lockheed Martin – executive heads would have rolled in response to such disasters. When Apple’s initial 2012 launch of its own map service on the iPhone was so disastrous, the executive in charge, Scott Forstall, was fired. When the 2011 opening of British Airways Heathrow terminal five was a disaster, Gareth Kirkwood, director of operations at BA, and David Noyes, head of customer relations, were both summarily fired.  In the real world, companies do make mistakes and have disasters, but people get fired as a consequence.

Not so, apparently, in Washington. In the Federal Government, apparently, one can be thoroughly incompetent and there are no consequences so long as one is high enough in the food chain.