What do you think about this sentence: "Employees holding excepted service positions have no assignment rights unless their agency, at its discretion, chooses to offer these rights."
Would I not fall under this?
But you're not excepted service for the purposes of tenure, that's the Hybrid part. Since you only get the Title 5 benefits, you get the Title 5 protections. The Hybrid part is that the PSB can override the Title 5 hiring procedure and actually choose the best person for the job without seniority considerations and when it has to do with professional leave for CE and such. The only matter is that the PSB can remove you from the Title 38 part of your job if you're deemed incompetent.
Let me give you two examples:
A pharmacist at Pittsburgh was not only stealing meds, this person was high every so often on them. The PSB actually tried to fire him, turns out that the PSB lacks the statutory authority for termination, it can only grant or revoke professional privileges. They obviously did, but the Title 5 part was trickier. So, they tried to fire the pharmacist under theft grounds, except that OPM ruled years ago that theft to cover a medical problem was illegal grounds for termination (so stealing to maintain the high would not qualify for termination, just a suspension, but stealing to sell would not be ok, that could be an outright termination). The pharmacist was stripped of their GS-12 pharmacist, but now the hospital had a GS-12 person that they had to find a job for, AND thoroughly pissed off because of the attempted termination. This person wouldn't settle, so, the pharmacist is still the most overpaid MAS clerk in the country right now.
Management moral of the story: Knowing that you can't fire for illness, you need to figure out a hostile enough work environment or sweeten the carrot in order to get a "voluntary" resignation. Recommend saying that we won't report it to the Board if they quietly resign. (If you're wondering why the VA never reports NPDB data unless coerced, that's why. Anyone who is reported, should be suspected that there is management retaliation involved, and the Special Counsel supports this after analysis). Tricking a problem employee into signing a resignation agreement is your #1 job.
Second example:
VA Worker Gets Job Back Despite Armed Robbery Charge
Management moral of the story: If your workplace is so *((#$ that you can only hire thieves and felons, you deserve what you get...
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So, the only difference between us and our uniformed colleagues is that our uniformed colleagues have some sense of a honorable backbone, and have their own justice system in UCMJ. They certainly will go after egregious abuses of authority, but if you look up how NCIS came to being, you can subvert the provost marshal if you are interested enough...
For us civilians, OPM protects the worst and destroys the best. If you are a well-intentioned whistleblower, OPM and IG will actually assist your accused in covering it up and retaliating against you. If you're completely the worst scum possible, don't worry, you'll still have a job in the end. No worse than business as usual here.
https://www.stripes.com/polopoly_fs...enu/standard/file/Friendly Fire VA report.pdf
