Toxic Management has lasted 4 years, anything I can do besides leave?
I'm part of a geographically separated unit (GSU), all civilians, and our "Chief" is an incompetent narcissist that has driven virtually all the experienced employees away, and has used predatory recruitment tactics to backfill them or uses the "old boy system" to fill them with people she knew from other assignments who have been sidelined for being idiots. She's been investigated by the IG so many times she laughs them off. She bullies her employees by threatening then with bogus investigations like "inappropriate relationships" or "harassment." She holds grudges against employees who tell her the legal realities of spending funds, like you can't use O&M to refurbished a building slated for demolition. She routinely retaliates against those employees by denying them TDYs, getting brown nosers to file complaints against them to justify write ups so she can give them bad appraisals, getting her brown nosers to stir up rumors so she has ammo for "inappropriate relationship" complaints, we know she's getting access to the Teams chat logs (we just can't prove it), her deputy is a psycho that hides in his office unless she tells him to bring people into his office to threaten them as "career" advice. That advice is usually: don't talk to each other outside work, don't be friends, don't talk to certain people, no group messaging, don't talk about the issues here, no social media following, etc... She stopped all awards except for 2-3 people she wants to stay. She refuses to interact with her people, refuses to listen to issues during briefs insisting on ideas her chief engineer feeds her, which are so illegal there's no way to implement them, she writes NOTHING down so its impossible to hold her accountable.
She took charge of an organization of 95+ people. After two years 2/3 of them were split away as part of a "reorg." On paper she has about 30ish people which is actually closer to 20 people with all the vacancies and people who have given notice they intend to retire or resign. Better still she has 4 NH04s to manage all this and one GS13 supervisor who actually has to do all the work of managing. With all the manpower swaps she made to get all those NHO4s she gave away all of her working positions, so she has to beg the PAQ intern program for help and then ask for new Lts. To act as program managers, very useful.
My entire program is ready to announce we're all seeking to leave to our commander in Boston, as a group, now that the hiring freeze is "over."
Is there anything else we can do?
Posted Feb 22, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC