The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 legislatively established the Civil Service Commission. This was the response to the killing of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, apparently a rejected office seeker under the spoils system. President Chester Arthur didn’t want to continue the system of awarding jobs leading to the assassination of his predecessor, so he established the Civil Service system. See Wikipedia,
The Pendleton Act made it unlawful to fill various Federal offices with political supporters. Today, officials in the Federal government ignore the law from time to time. The spoils system is even more prevalent in state and local governments in the United States.
Sandra Borden with the government of the District of Columbia and formerly with the US Coast Guard has seen politicals appointed to Federal jobs nine levels down at the GS 12 level. She saw this happen as early as the Reagan days between 1981 and 1989.
In modern civil service systems, job seekers are usually chosen by examination and promoted on the basis of merit ratings. In democratic nations, governments design recruitment and advancement procedures to protect the civil service from political patronage. See Questia, (http://www.questia.com/library/encyclopedia/civil_service.jsp)
While the Civil Service system in the Federal government, like much of the government, is modeled on the experiences in France and Great Britain, the United States system today is different, it is loaded with political appointees at the top. In Great Britain, there are 200 political appointees. In the United States, the Agriculture department alone has 227 political appointee positions, and there are some 4,000 in the government as a whole.
The main goal of the Civil Service system is to prevent patronage. While it has been relatively successful, the system has been under challenge for some years and now appears to be on its last legs. Half of the civil service workforce is already under alternative personnel systems and the trend appears to be accelerating.
Democrats and Republicans have worked systematically for years to weaken the career civil service system to employ more of their own supporters and to impose greater control over the career government employees. In the post war period, Jimmy Carter began the dismantling. The Democrats and Republicans have followed Carter’s leadership since the American people voted him out of office after one term in 1981.
University professors of public administration emphasize that leadership by career officials is in the public interest. Unfortunately, modern age presidents in their actions do not share the beliefs of current day academic professors.
The Senior Executive Association identifies seven techniques used by recent presidents and their appointees to appoint more of their supporters to jobs and to exercise greater control over senior career executives.
· Each new president routinely increases the number of political appointee positions in the government.
· More and more political appointees are filling positions further down in each agency’s hierarchy, often replacing career officials.
· Recent administrations convert an increasing number of career reserved Senior Executive Service positions to SES general positions allowing the White House to fill them with political appointees.
· Political appointees eliminate career SES positions by reorganizing and consolidating organizations and then filling the new position with a political supporter. In 2006, the General Services Administration, a small agency, converted four of its highest-level career jobs to political status in this manner.
· Political appointees ignore laws and policies and allow their colleagues to burrow down into the career ranks where they will remain for years instead of leaving government when the president and the party leave power.
· Once in office, political appointees increase the number of organizational layers in government effectively isolating career official further from the top political leadership.
· Political appointees establish ever-increasing oversight and clearance procedures over speeches, correspondence, policy, hiring of mid-level personnel, performance appraisals and bonuses, public appearances, and virtually all actions in an agency, thereby stripping senior career officials of their traditional authority to do their jobs.
These actions originating in the White House are seldom in the best interest of the public. They simply reward campaign supporters and place zealots in agencies
See: Bill Bransford, “Legislative Update, A New Year, and a New Congress May Bring More Action on Federal Employee Issues” in their publication “Action,” January 2007.
The system has evolved through the decades and it is not perfect, but it does provide a measure of protection to the government workforce some political ideologues would like to eliminate.
The George W. Bush administration tried to eliminate the federal personnel system and replace it with one more to their liking. On November 2, 2005, I attended a panel session hosted by the Washington Post and organized by the Council for Excellence in Government. Pat McGinnis, president of the Council presided.
Two high level political appointees attended. One was Clay Johnson, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, rumored to be moving to the White House as an aide to President Bush. The other was David Walker, Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office, a congressional organization chartered to conduct investigations into Executive Branch performance. They were there to argue in favor of the personnel changes desired by President Bush.
The unions stood in their way. John Gage president of the American Federation of Government Employees and Colleen Kelly, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, were there to speak in opposition.
Interestingly, no federal employees or managers with experience working inside the federal personnel system were on the panel. Instead, surrogates on the panel represented them.
President Bush, with a history of appointing unqualified loyalists to important federal jobs, proposed scrapping the career service in favor of an unstructured system, which Johnson and Walker and promised would solve problems --problems they repeatedly spoke of but never defined. Gage and Kelly attacked the Bush administration ideas claiming they would bring even more unqualified presidential appointees into federal jobs, because patronage and cronyism would be allowed to resurface, as in the bad old days before the Pendleton Act and Teddy Roosevelt’s vigorous implementation.
Clay Johnson, with an easy southern drawl, spoke as if the Bush administration invented the federal personnel program, ignoring more than 200 years of history and experience in Washington. He offered a lot of vague assurances, as people do when they don't really understand what they're talking about. For example, he said, “We will do it with them rather than to them,” speaking of the federal workforce.
Johnson also said, “A good performance evaluation system between the employees and management is the foundation of all that follows.”
Such promises are meaningless because they have no substance behind them, and often there are obstacles no single government official can overcome. Regarding Johnson's appeal to a performance evaluation system, former NTEU president Bob Tobias – later a professor at American University -- pointed out “Most agencies do not have goals that can be used to develop performance outcomes for employees working on these programs." Without concrete things to measure, there can't be an effective performance evaluation system.
David Walker weighed in saying the nation needs a set of national goals before many other things can proceed
Clay seemed smooth but hollow because there is no accountability at the top. Remember the coveted Medals of Freedom awarded by Clay’s boss George W. Bush to appointees such as FEMA’s Michael Brown. There is one appraisal system for his appointees, another for career officials.
John Gage asked Clay Johnson why the administration did not work with the representatives of federal employees when developing the reform package. Clay argued that the administration had circulated the draft version of the plan allowing anyone to comment.. "This is what drafts are for,” he said.
This old Washington trick has obvious shortcomings. It allows policymakers to avoid receiving uncomfortable ideas and advice early in the process. Those in power simply develop the product to say what they want it to say and then send it to many organizations for comment. This allows them to accept or ignore any of the recommendations for change. I used this maneuver on occasion. Clearly, Clay sent a message to unions confirming they were not players in what he and President Bush wanted to do to the federal employees.
Colleen Kelly introduced the existing pay system including salary ranges set by law, with Congress setting the rates. The Bush administration's proposal would have given the Office of Personnel Management the authority to set the rates, removing the layer of consensus and debate provided by Congress.
The panel discussion continued with growing acrimony between the two sides. The more the administration representatives talked about their proposed changes, the less the union leaders seemed to like them. John Gage described it, as "attempts to strip employees of their rights," while Colleen Kelley said employees understand and trust the system, and there is no need to change it completely.
Gage also discounted Clay Johnson’s claim that reforming the system, 120 years in the making, could happen relatively quickly, or that federal personnel could become familiar with it during 10 hours of training.
By the end of the contentious discussion, it was clear the administration and the employee advocates had radically different ideas of what the system's problems were or what the best solutions would be.
“With the body language among the panelists, there is not a great deal of trust here today,” McGinnis said in closing the session.
Advice to Fernando. I tell you this story to introduce different viewpoints about current problems and possible solutions in the government personnel system. While you are in government you will need to hire qualified good performers to help you run your program and to accomplish your goals. To do this you will need to work within the federal personnel system. This can be difficult. The process can seem endless because there is always another issue, regulation, law, or process to overcome.
In addition, you may run into a president like Bill Clinton who, in his campaign, promised to reduce the size of government and had a similarly motivated vice president While he did not intend to weaken the federal personnel system, Clinton and Gore had the unintended effect of weakening the entire civil service.
To reduce the size of government, which they partly defined as reducing the number of career employees, Clinton restricted hiring during many of his eight years as President. When the upper and mid-levels of career managers left government, replacing them in the Clinton administration was an ordeal. As a result, the government promoted some unqualified people into management positions and was not able to backfill their former positions, vacating an entire layer of managers. This allowed private sector companies to crow that the government lacked the people needed to run the government, but their companies could, and many believed them.
Fernando, here is what you should do to get things done within the personnel system. Find someone on your staff or hire someone in personnel murk, knows the process, and the people in the personnel office. It should be someone the personnel office people like, or at least respect. Your person needs to be easy going yet persistent. A heavy hand, "type A" personality, is not what you want in this assignment.
Your selection should be the only person allowed in your program to transact with your agency’s Human Resource Department. Don't expect the HR office to give your personnel actions any special priority, but they will be more responsive if they know and can work with the one person you appoint to interact with them. If they can do anything to speed up the process, they may be more willing to do so if they have a good relationship with your person.
You need to support your designated contact person. One way you can so this is to create or maintain an impression about your solid connections to the agency leadership and you can, if needed, call on the top bosses to help you out with a personnel action. You, of course, would never go over their heads, but the idea that you could, and might, may help move some personnel actions from time to time.