Employees of the federal government: You're not fired. Ever.

Not only do federal employees enjoy higher pay than private sector workers, are eligible for pensions, and don't really have toil that hard, they are impossible to fire.

From James Richardson in National Review Online:

Job security in America’s civil service is so remarkably strong that employees in more than a dozen federal agencies are statistically more likely to die in the course of their work than to lose their jobs for poor performance or misconduct.

These days, even advocating genocide doesn't immediately qualify you for a pink slip.

The current civil-service regime, installed in part in the late 19th century as a response to rampant political patronage, makes the process of removing underachievers from the government’s massive 2.1-million-person payroll so tedious that most federal managers rubber-stamp deadbeat employees rather than pursue a year-long termination process.

Even so, no period in the 35 years since Congress last augmented federal civil-service protections to provide for administrative tribunals has produced as many instances of gross employee misconduct, from lavish employee conferences to the targeting of political groups deemed hostile by tax officials, as the previous twelve months.

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