Civil Service Overhaul Has History of Bipartisan Support

"You cannot run a farm that way, you cannot run a factory that way and you certainly cannot run a government that way," he said.

Carter's Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 did away with the Civil Service Commission, an entity that critics viewed as a powerful weaver of red tape, and divided its responsibilities chiefly among three agencies: The Merit Systems Protection Board to hear employee appeals; the Federal Labor Relations Authority to deal with labor-management relations; and the Office of Personnel Management to set policies to create a level playing field in hiring and pay for all federal civilian workers.

President Ronald Reagan took his stab at change, too. His Civil Service Simplification Act of 1986 would have consolidated the 15-grade General Schedule into broad pay bands, allowed higher starting salaries for hard-to-recruit jobs and extended merit pay to all federal employees. But the bill went nowhere.

"It recommended essentially what's being recommended" by Bush, said James Colvard, deputy director of OPM at the time. "We had absolutely no political agenda. . . . What's happened over the years is that the balance of power has swung so far over to the employee side, with management not having enough power to do things, that there needs to be some sort of a balance."

Despite the failures, a piecemeal civil service revolution was quietly underway. The 1978 law had authorized "demonstration projects," which freed selected agencies to test new personnel ideas in limited settings. The best known of these is at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at China Lake, Calif., which for 25 years has operated under a pay-for-performance system. Other experiments have taken root at such agencies as the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the Internal Revenue Service.

Sept. 11 Provided Leverage

Bush took office in 2001 and began touting a five-pillar "management agenda" for improving government performance, including "targeted civil service reforms" to help agencies develop talented workers and better achieve their missions. But the idea of overhauling the civil service did not gain traction until after the Sept. 11 attacks.

By linking the changes to fighting terrorism, Bush appeared to gain the political leverage his predecessors lacked, said Robert M. Tobias, former head of the National Treasury Employees Union. "If you look at the language of the DHS regulations, it's all about national security," said Tobias, now director of American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation.

In April 2003, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld went to Capitol Hill to say that the Pentagon needed a more "flexible" workforce to fight terrorism. He got what he asked for. And suddenly overhauling the civil service system government-wide did not look like such a political long shot anymore.

"Some question our motives," said Clay Johnson III, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget and the man charged with implementing the changes. "They just don't trust that we could be trying to do something here that would be good for employees. . . . We want the federal government to work better."

So, who wins and who loses?

Federal employee unions predict a workforce demoralized by uncertainty over pay and boxed in by a system that curtails bargaining rights. "This is going to . . . really make it a second-class civil service," said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees.

The administration forecasts better-functioning agencies. Analysts say managers will have a much stronger hand, and, more significantly, so will political appointees.

"The civil service was invented in the 1880s to put in a balance in government to political corruption," said Frederick Thayer, an emeritus professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. "The civil servants were supposed to ask questions, especially if they had some kind of job security. The point now, as I see it, of wiping out civil service is to create a workforce that is so temporary and so job insecure that they dare not question any decisions made by their political superiors. . . . It's a bipartisan thing."

Bob Stone, director of the "reinventing government" initiative under Clinton, said the changes will make the government more responsive to the public, who elect the president, who brings in the political appointees. "When the American people elect a government, for better or worse, they want the government to work," Stone said.

"I'm sure there are high-ranking people in the administration who are jumping at the chance to [undermine] the union, but that's not the reason that thousands of managers and supervisors all across the government are salivating for these kinds of changes. They are salivating because they want to do a better job of stopping drugs or equipping soldiers, or a better job of protecting the environment or a better job of providing medical care for veterans."