Any Washington reporter will tell you that most senior government leaders go out of their way to avoid cracking a joke or saying anything remotely controversial. But not Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, who (I assume) ad-libbed hilariously at IRMCO this morning while discussing some lingering resistance to the government’s new central hiring register program:
I’ve been going around, talking to managers, [saying]“What’s going on?” Sometimes people have long memories in this town, in Washington, and evidently I found out OPM had done registers a long time ago, and they did them kind of half-assed. And the quality of the candidates wasn’t that good, and so everybody remembers, “Oh boy. Oh, I remember these central registers. They weren’t good. You know, all of them were child molesters. I can’t believe how OPM found every child molester in the country. How could we hire off these registers?”
