Many of those political appointees are still in program “leadership” positions. My manager had a 45% attrition rate and they were moved and promoted into another leadership position despite their failure by any reasonable measure.

Commissioners often forced the bureaus to hire their staffers into program leadership positions when they wanted them off their staff. No interviews, high salaries. Often positions were created for those staffers in already budget crunched programs. Really demoralizing for regular CoP staffers.

Definitely due to a giant leadership void at the CoP, too many managers are hired or promoted into senior management positions with no previous people management experience. Also the previous form of government encouraged bureau political solos because of commissioner control.

Also there is no real data-based business intelligence gathering at the program level across the city. The open data initiatives are regularly defunded. Anyone should be able to view program success data via a publicly facing dashboard.

As a former CoP employee I can tell you basic information sharing is often very very political, and employees are punished for talking to council staff without the ok from bureau leadership, one DCA in particular sees that type of sharing as “disloyal” to him.