A Civil Service That Fails Today's Test

The wrong type: An outmoded federal civil service system can no longer meet the challenges that our modern government faces, the author argues. () Underwood & Underwood/corbis)

But bit by bit, a series of crises has allowed some parts of the government to break free. In 1996, recurring problems in hiring air traffic controllers highlighted an impending air traffic control emergency. A year later, congressional hearings revealed widespread problems in the IRS, including accusations that its employees did not focus enough on serving citizens.

Congress subsequently allowed each agency to create its own personnel system. Top officials won the right to create "broadband" pay scales, which provided more flexibility for determining how much to pay employees. They also got more flexibility in hiring, transferring and rewarding workers. Public employee unions fought hard and retained whistleblower protections, veterans' preference, and protection of employee rights by the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The issue of civil service protections was a large part of the debate over creating the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. President Bush at first strongly opposed the idea of a new Cabinet department. But just as Democrats appeared poised to push it through Congress, Bush shifted course. In a remarkably clever play, he became the proposal's biggest champion -- provided that the new agency would be allowed to operate under fundamentally different civil service rules.

Bobby Harnage Sr., national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, one of the government's largest unions, charged that the administration's pursuit of "flexibility" was just "a code word for denial of due process to federal employees," and that existing laws already gave top managers all the flexibility they needed.

But behind the political battles was the very real problem that the 22 existing agencies (including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard and others) being folded into the newly-created department had vastly different cultures and considerably overlapping responsibilities. Even more important, the new department faced challenges for which none of the agencies was fully prepared.

What emerged from the squabble tracked with what former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, who chaired two commissions on civil service reform, had long recommended: a government whose structure matches its missions, with related functions put in the same department, and where managers have more flexibility in recruiting, paying, managing and disciplining employees. But even though those pieces are in place at DHS, the department still lacks a sufficient internal brain, shaped by top career bureaucrats with enough institutional memory to guide the department through transitions like the current one, in which many of the top political positions are vacant.

Reform has to happen, but there are three big problems with the civil service system that's emerging. One is the piecemeal fashion in which current reform is taking place. The FAA and IRS have struggled to make their new system work. Employees are not always being assigned where they're needed, and morale problems have continued. The second problem is that the other half of the government continues to slog along with all the old problems and little hope of resolution. Third and perhaps most important, the fragmentation of the civil service is eating away at the ethos that once defined the company town.

"Right now, what we've got is everyone cutting their own deals," Comptroller General David Walker warned last December. What's missing, he said, is a "core set of values and principles" to define the job of the civil servant, "the glue that binds us together."

In its commitment to employment through merit instead of patronage, the old system once provided this glue. The rapid pace of change and the new challenges facing government have eaten away at it. But in the breathless press for change, the emerging civil service system is galloping ahead without a fresh sense of what the ethos of civil servants ought to be. There's a lot of talk about flexibility. There's a lot less talk about what that flexibility is for.

Still, with billions of taxpayer dollars -- and even lives -- at stake, something will have to give. Neither the company town nor the rest of the country can afford a public service that isn't up to the job.

Author's e-mail: dkettl@sas.upenn.edu

Don Kettl is a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government and the author of "System Under Stress: Homeland Security and American Politics" (CQ Press).