Permanent Government

Over on GetReligion, in an aside on a story about the IRS, we get this:

I wrote a story in 2003 about how federal data indicated that not a single employee at Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs and State had been fired in the previous five years, despite all of the reports of poor performance at each agency. I doubt things have changed much since then. Perhaps they have gotten worse.

No one, in eight behemoth federal agencies, had been fired in five years? Can that be right? Can? That? Be? Right?

I don't know exactly when it happened, but the government has stopped even pretending to care about anything other than entrenched bureaucrats and public employee unions.