Bickering commissioners, ineffective managers and lousy internal communication rank among the top reasons why the Federal Election Commission staff is one of the federal government’s most bedraggled.
That’s the dispiriting — if unsurprising — conclusion of a new report from the FEC’s Office of Inspector General, which for months had conducted employee surveys and interviews in hopes of answering a nagging question: why, specifically, is agency morale so consistently rotten?
Investigators dump the most blame on the FEC’s six commissioners: three Democratic appointees and three Republican appointees who have regularly criticized one another and frequently (but not exclusively) deadlocked on high-profile political issues before them.
I discussed the low morale problem at the FEC with FEC Commissioners in 2 ELB podcasts: