Obama backs incompetent OPM chief
President Obama is giving his full support to the incompetent bureaucrat who left the cyber door open for China to do massive harm to federal employees and our national security.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest says the president believes that Office of Personnel Management director Katherine Archuleta "is the right person for the job."
Despite massive cyber attacks at the Office of Personnel Management, President Obama still has confidence in OPM Director Katherine Archuleta, the White House said Wednesday.
“The president does have confidence that she’s the right person for that job,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
Mr. Earnest said that when she took the job, Ms. Archuleta identified as “one of her first priorities” the upgrading of the office’s computer networks. It was during that upgrade in April that officials discovered a massive breach of sensitive personnel data , allegedly stolen by agents of China.
Since the breach became public, Mr. Earnest said several senior White House officials “have been in touch” with Ms. Archuleta and other top managers at OPM.
Nothing is ever anyone's fault in this administration. The IRS targets conservatives, and Lois Lerner is allowed to retire with full pension. Four Americans killed in Benghazi, and two State Department employees are "re-assigned" only to be rehired later. The VA puts veterans on eternal waiting lists, and no one gets the ax. CMS designs the most spectacularly awful website for Obamacare, and who stepped up to the mic to take responsibility? The list is a long one, as Allahpundit points out:
That’s not even half his list. Why is it, Geraghty concludes, that with a record of failure — unpunished failure, to be clear — as long as this, progressives still want the feds to have an ever greater role in American life? Let me supplement that with another question: Why is it that Obama and his inner circle seem to value loyalty, in declining to punish their hires for gross incompetence, more than they do accountability? Why shouldn’t O call a presser and stand there for 45 minutes shaking his fist that underlings ever could have allowed this to happen? John Schindler says the OPM hack amounts to nothing less than the wrecking of American espionage, a disaster arguably even bigger than Edward Snowden stealing the keys to the castle from the NSA. A rival power now has everything they need to sniff out, blackmail, frame, or spear-phish practically anyone who’s worked for Uncle Sam over the last 30 years. “This isn’t shame on China,” said former CIA chief Michael Hayden. “This is shame on us.” Right, but that’s usually the case; most major government debacles were preventable. Then someone fails to prevent them and . . . nothing happens. Why is that?
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Part of the answer, I think, is that the age of ubiquitous media requires the White House and its deputies to be careful about alienating employees. Who knows what other scandals are known to higher-ups at OPM, or what sort of security breaches they could orchestrate if they got fired and felt disgruntled? Make enemies of them and there’s no shortage of reporters in print media, TV media, or online who’ll be happy to listen to them spill whatever they have. Unaccountability, in other words, is the price of damage control.
The failures are a function of big government – a feature, not a bug. And it will never get any better until our elected and appointed leaders force incompetent bureaucrats to take responsibilty for their massive, public failures.
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