The new administration wanted the government to run more like a business.
The president's advisers had plenty of ideas: Get rid of the General Schedule, the 15-grade pay system that links pay to longevity. Free managers from complex personnel rules, and give them more authority to hire, reward and promote talented workers, and to discipline poor performers. Require agencies to develop more meaningful performance evaluations to send a message that promotions and raises depend on them.
The president was Bill Clinton. The recommendations came in a 1993 report on the "reinventing government" initiative led by Vice President Al Gore. But the kind of restructuring that Democratic administration envisioned would not win approval in Congress until more than a decade later -- under President Bush.
While critics charge that the campaign to overhaul the federal civil service is part of a Republican union-busting agenda, it actually reflects a bipartisan desire to wield more control over the bureaucracy's 1.8 million workers. The changes, especially those that aim to more strongly tie pay to performance, have been sought by both Democratic and GOP administrations over the last quarter-century.
"It's kind of like an evolution of something that started a long time ago, and it's moving forward," said John Kamensky, former deputy director of Gore's "reinventing government" initiative.
Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University, said management experts in both parties have long itched to revamp the civil service system. "There's a lot of agreement that you need to . . . get out of the complexified, ossified system that we now have," he said.
Struggle to Revamp System
The modern federal civil service dates to the Pendleton Act of 1883, which replaced with a merit-based system the "spoils system" of doling out jobs through political patronage. Although there have been periodic overhauls, the arcane and complex nature of civil service rules has made changing them a tough sell in Congress and not a high priority for most administrations. In eight years of "reinventing government," the Clinton administration never found a way to get major civil service legislation through Capitol Hill, particularly in the face of resistance from federal employee unions.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and on Washington changed everything. They placed the civil service structure at the heart of the debate over whether the federal government was adequately set up to protect the country against terrorism. Pressured by Democrats to create a Department of Homeland Security, Bush eventually embraced the idea but insisted on freedom from many civil service constraints in merging 22 agencies.
The changes underway are the biggest restructuring since the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Bush officials argue that the current system fails to tie pay to performance, and inhibits managers' ability to deploy people and resources to where they are most needed.
Congress gave Bush authority to rewrite work rules covering more than 800,000 civilian employees at the departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Lawmakers hoped to begin implementing the changes this summer, but a lawsuit by the unions has delayed the process. Meanwhile, the administration has drafted legislation to allow nearly all federal agencies to make similar changes.
The new personnel systems at DHS and DOD will replace the General Schedule with broad salary ranges that will enable managers to tailor pay packages to individual employees. The new systems will curtail the power of labor unions by no longer requiring management to negotiate over such matters as where employees will be deployed, the type of work they will do and the equipment they will use. They also will streamline the process for disciplining employees and hearing their appeals of any punishment.
The Bush administration's rhetoric resembles that of Democrat Jimmy Carter, who entered office in 1977 promising to revamp the federal bureaucracy and make it more responsive. In a speech in 1978, Carter described the system as a "tangled web" of complicated rules that had stifled merit and made it nearly impossible for a federal supervisor to fire someone.
