One Day, One Resignation

Woo hoo! I’ve barely left the country, and already we’ve got our first sacking: that of Lurita Doan.

Dear Friends and Colleagues at GSA,

Early this evening I was asked to submit my resignation, and I have just done so. It has been a great privilege to serve with all of you and to serve our nation and a great President.

The past twenty-two months have been filled with accomplishments: together, we have regained our clean audit opinion, restored fiscal discipline, re-tooled our ability to respond to emergencies, rekindled entrepreneurial energies, reduced bureaucratic barriers to small companies to get a GSA Schedule, ignited a building boom at our nation’s ports of entries, boldly led the nation in an aggressive telework initiative, and improved employee morale so that we were selected as one of the best places to work in the Federal government.

These accomplishments are made even more enjoyable by the fact that there were lots of people who told us they could never be done.

Best of luck to all of you, it has been a true honor.

The question is, why now?

As you’ll recall, almost a year ago, Scott Bloch recommended that George Bush fire Doan. Bloch had determined that Doan had violated the Hatch Act, but since Doan is was an agency head, only Bush could fire her.

And given the amount of time that has passed since then, it appears Bush didn’t think the wholesale politicization of the GSA was a firing offense (go figure).  

So if violating the Hatch Act doesn’t merit firing, what does?