It's Easy to Remove These Feds

The federal government has a reputation as a place where it's very difficult to remove an employee. But at one agency it's not hard at all. For the Census, every 10 years, hundreds of thousands of jobs come with an expiration date. And that date is fast approaching: Almost all of the temporary workers hired by the agency to serve as enumerators for the decennial count will be gone by the end of August.

This crop of short-timers is a little different than in years past, the New York Times reports today. For starters, the agency "landed more experienced workers with more sophisticated skills than any time in recent memory," for the 2010 census. And many of them are going back out into an uncertain economy.

"Typically, at this point in the process, we're losing a lot of people because they're taking jobs," Kathleen Ludgate, the Census Bureau's regional director in Boston, told the Times. "I wish we had that problem now."