Legislators who don’t make laws, executives who don’t execute

The problem in our country is that we keep on paying outrageous salaries to senators and congressmen who have not passed any decent law. And we tolerate executive officials who do not do their jobs at all, and if they do, they do them with outlandish mediocrity and blunders. The problem is that we have a culture of ineptitude and laziness.

For instance, the taxpayers are spending billions for every senator and congressman, they and their underlings, staff, consultants, and secretaries. For every committee chaired by them, they are also entitled to hire more personnel. These people do not have a performance appraisal system. Whether they perform or not at all, they receive the same emoluments. They do not render a performance report to their districts and to their constituencies. When they speak before public gatherings, they speak in generic terms, and their goals are not specific, their outputs are not measurable, and their endless promises are not time-bound. My God, we keep on electing lazy and incompetent legislators. I have two exceptions, Congressman Eddie Gullas of the 1st District and Willy Caminero of the 2nd District. I do not have knowledge about the others. I think Deputy Speaker PJ Garcia and Duke Frasco are also doing well.

Then, we have executive and administrative officials who are not doing their jobs according to the position descriptions and the mandates of their agencies. They perform their daily task to impress superiors and to submit glowing reports, and the men on top of them do not exercise due diligence in scrutinizing and evaluating the authenticity of the qualitative and quantitative indicators of performance. There is no system of verification with the end-users of the services. There is no systematic and accurate feedback mechanism. The words of regional and provincial officers are taken by the head office hook, line, and sinker. Thus, the heads of agencies do not really know what is actually happening on the ground.