Thomas Lifson has correctly
observed that reforming the Civil Service System ought to be a high
priority for President-Elect Trump and the new Republican Congress.
We need to understand why the
Civil Service System first created as a reform in how the federal government
operated. "To the victors go the spoils" was the way Andrew
Jackson put it almost 200 years ago. Jackson expressed the view that the
president has the right – legal and moral – to throw out government employees
and replace them with cronies.
The size of the federal
government was proportionately much smaller then than today, and those
political allies rewarded with jobs to deliver the mail or to collect tariffs seemed
innocuous enough, at least until President Garfield was assassinated by a
disgruntled federal office seeker in 1881. The Pendleton Act of 1883
created a system in which those who sought federal jobs, except for a layer of
high-level executives, had to pass an objective hiring system.
The second part of Civil Service System reforms was to create protections
that made it difficult – really, almost impossible – for any Civil Service
System employee ever to lose his job. This is the heart of the problem. Presidents
can fill the upper echelon of federal agencies with whomever they want (except
for the few who require Senate confirmation), and presidents can fire these
people easily enough as well. But no one – not even these high-level
political appointees – can fire anyone.
Ironically, the
problems with the spoils system had nothing to do with firing federal
employees, but only with hiring federal employees. The right reform is
simple enough: allow the
president to fire any federal employee in the Executive Branch at will, but
keep the system in place only for hiring through the Civil Service System.
A president would then have
the power to fire lazy, dishonest, rude, or unnecessary federal employees, but
he could have no power to fill those positions he caused by firing bad federal
employees with his supporters or partisans. So if a federal employee took
the Fifth Amendment in an investigation of federal malfeasance, something that
Thomas Lifson correctly noted was intolerable, the next day, that employee
could be told, "You can either refuse to answer questions or keep your
federal job, but not both."
If President Trump brought in
business experts to analyze federal operations and detect waste and
inefficiency, then President Trump could do what he did so often in his reality
television show and fire those who are unnecessary.
Anyone
familiar with the internal operations of government knows that 30% is a
conservative figure for the number of federal employees who do nothing.
Allowing a tough, business-oriented president like Trump to dramatically reduce
the size of the federal government would also reduce the cost of government –
and all this could be done expeditiously.
Federal employees would
instantly become not only more efficient, but more polite and responsive to the
public (i.e., the folks who pay their salaries). More than that,
coworkers in offices would strongly encourage politeness and civility, because
the more complaints a particular office caused, the more likely that office
would be to get a bad reputation, and people in that office would be fired.
What about the danger of a
president forcing people to support him or lose their jobs? Civil
servants ought to be completely apolitical anyway and ought not to contribute
to any political campaign or to work for any candidate. If that was the
case in practice, then the president could not know who did not support him
and, because all hiring was objective and removed from the president's power,
he could not hire any friends.
If the president could not
reward anyone by firing a federal employee but could only punish the federal
employee by firing him, he would have every incentive to be fair in firing
federal employees. Politicians know that punishing voters loses votes not
only because that voter, who may have supported the president, would be
unhappy, but because every fired employee has family and friends and neighbors
and congregants at his church, and firing an employee causes ill will among all
those close to the fired employee.
This is a reform is easy to understand and would
make sense to the American voter. Best of all, it would work.
Civility, efficiency, and integrity in the administration of the federal
government would improve almost at once.
