No possibility of being fired? He's the president, if he can't change that what can he do? Change that, fire these people! If half the Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be ignored and gutted during "wartime", then so can their stinking contracts!
Clean house! If the pres can't fire them, our government has all kinds of slimy ways to lean on citizens when they feel like it, IRS audits, paper violations that result in a 3am SWAT raid, etc... I'm not advocating any of those mind you, I'm just saying if they really wanted to implement this policy they could.
The reason they aren't implementing it is painfully obvious. The President (among others) doesn't want it implemented because he is hostile to gun rights. The public clammored for it, they went through the hollow motions to placate us, then did what they wanted anyway. How very, very Clintonesque! If that's the way the pres is going to be, then we as citizens need to do a little cleaning house of our own:
Voters to President: "You have until November 4 to effectively implement the armed pilots program, and stop blocking its effectiveness. Failure to do so to my satisfaction will result in your immediate removal from office."
Having first worked in private industry, with no government dealings, for many years I used to think the same thing as you. Then I worked closely with government agencies for many years. I know how the agencies operate. Except for outright theft, nobody in the government gets fired. Transfered, maybe. Fired, no. If the low-levels (engineers, paper pushers, secretaries, technicians, accountants, etc.) don't want to do it it won't happen. No matter how much the top people insist that it happen. This is reality. This is government job culture. You can say that it should be different all you want but that doesn't make it different.
Speaking of firing gov't employees, it didn't take Bush very long to fire a retired general working for TSA who objected to the Bush plan of putting armed air marshalls on planes that cabinet members were flying, instead of the planes that posed the biggest threat to national security.